Familia de Hetauda visits Mumbai Smiles

The forces of nature created a beautiful world billions of years ago, in which everything was equal. All animals, in different shapes and sizes, have similar sensory organs – eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, lags etc. Plants provide oxygen and food. Rivers providing water for survival. Hence nature created this world, interdependent, with each element having an equally important role to play in their respective survivals. But we humans, with our greed and false sense of superiority over nature created differences. These are the differences we see in our daily lives around us in form of social and economic disparities in our societies across the world, where some groups are leading lives of comfort and luxury, some groups are just about surviving and the rest are struggling to earn even one meal a day.

But nature always tries to create balance in this world and hence we find many people in this world doing good for others. A lot of anonymous peaceful strugglers, trying to bring peace, justice and love in the lives of others who deserve it very much, but are devoid of it because of some or other form of social exclusion. Recently, we met with one such beautiful soul called Aina Barca, a Spanish national, who visited us and our projects with her father Franscesc, on their trip to India. Aina’s life took a turn when she visited Nepal (Hetauda region) in 2012 at the age of 21 to volunteer in a shelter home of 45 children with disabilities, at high risk of social exclusion. Seeing the daily lives of these children, the lack of resources for their growth and development and poor living conditions, Aina founded an NGO for these children called Familia de Hetauda (which translates to Hetauda’s Family in English) and now this organization has been working since January 2013 for children with intellectual disabilities and cerebral palsy by way of a shelter home as well as a special school.

On their visit to Mumbai Smiles, Aina and Franscesc spent time with our Preschool students, followed by the girls of Life Skills Empowerment project. Post their visit they also spent some time with the entire team of Mumbai Smiles, including our Founder and General Director, Jaume Sanllorente. Belonging to the same line of work, they had a good chat on our respective projects. And before the visit ended, Aina and Franscesc also became donors of Mumbai Smiles and left us this beautiful comment.

Thank you Aina and Franscesc for your support and love to us and our citizens and congratulations & all the very best on the lovely work you are doing in Nepal!