#TentToAirport – Celebrating Daan Utsav With Our Tiny Tots!
Last Friday was a crazy day for the Mentor India brigade! Thanks to the amazing folks at Daan Utsav, we got a chance to celebrate the Joy Of Giving Week by taking our tent school kids on a field trip. Where to? A place where even the grownups get an intense desire to grow wings and fly… the AIRPORT!
If you’ve taken a flight, you would remember that feeling of awe when you saw an actual plane in real life and be stumped by the enormity of flying above the clouds, up above the sky so high! We have all dreamed of sitting in an aeroplane and flying off to a faraway land, but our tent school kids have been dreaming of sitting in a car or even a big bus. One step at a time you know? So when we told them we are taking them to the airport, their joy knew no bounds. Last Friday, all kids were dressed in their cleanest uniform, tied their hair into a stylish and neat hairdo, had their school bags ready with a water bottle, hand kerchief and a plastic bag (precautions in case they suffer motion sickness)!
Boarding The Big White Bus
When they saw the big white bus we had waiting for them outside their tent school, they just went crazy!!! I mean that was the reaction we were expecting when they saw a real aeroplane, but they were so excited about getting into this bus, we were bracing ourselves for the trip already.
They spent a good 15-20 minutes admiring the insides of the bus and deciding where they wanted to sit. Once they settled in, they found out the seats were push-back, and we realised this was the first time they are experiencing seats that recline. So now everyone had to have their seats pushed back of course!!! Once that was done, and our princes and princesses were settled in, again, they started looking out of the window of course. And suddenly the bus wasn’t interesting anymore, they started pointing out at things like flyovers (which they called bridge!), big apartments, big buildings, lakes, flower gardens and absolutely every other thing which we have learned to ignore over the years!
Watching their excitement about seeing things that we are so accustomed to gave us a new perspective into these aspects! We’ve lost count as to how many times these little kids continue teaching us life lessons and keep reminding us how to relish the joy found in the smallest of things.
How Big Is The Aeroplane?
As we headed towards the airport, the kids were having a discussion on how big an aeroplane must be. They have all seen it only in the sky, where it’s pretty much as small as your fingertip. But our kids are smart! They knew it had to be bigger than that, but how big, they had no idea. We asked them to guess, and they spent a long time imagining how big it must be. While someone said it was as big as the bus, someone said it must be as big as a tempo, and someone said it’s as big as a train! While all this was happening, we reached our destination. The children got off the bus, arranged themselves in a nice long queue, and followed the teacher engines in their student bogeys!
We were greeted very warmly by the Daan Utsav folks and the Airport CSR Team. With registrations done and dusted, the airport exploration had officially begun! The first stop was the security check at the main entrance, where the kids were at their disciplined best when they saw army men with guns. (Made our job easy! 😉 ) Shruthi from the Daan Utsav Team was our airport guide for the day, and she did such a fantastic job explaining everything to the kids along the way. We took the kids along the check-in counters, the security clearance counters, the money exchange booths, the baggage collection belts and everything else along the way.
When we finally took them to the take-off/landing area, and when the kids first spotted their first-ever aeroplane, they were just transfixed! They wouldn’t move away from the glass that separated them from the planes on the other side, trying to touch them over the glass. Their reactions were just heartwarming to watch.
As we looked at them, we knew we had planted among these tiny tots a small seed of bigger dreams! After watching way too many aeroplanes landing and taking off (thanks to Bangalore air traffic rate!), they were finally ready to move away and head out. Later when we asked them what they wanted to be when they grow up, there were a lot of pilots, air hosts, and air hostesses in the responses!
Can We Have Another Gulab Jamun?
After a whole lot of walking, running and screaming, we could see the energy sucked out of these kids, when they started sitting down on the floor, whenever we stopped for a while! The airport team had a sumptuous meal waiting for us in the Haj Terminal, where the kids were treated to yummy food, gulab jamuns, and ice creams of course. It was heartening to watch the kids go for seconds, and thirds, and eating to their heart’s content. We thank the airport team for the generous buffet! That was not the end of it, before saying goodbye, every kid got an airport souvenir in the form of colorful mugs, to drink milk in every morning! Of course this was followed by a color-war in the bus, where every kid wanted a mug that was a different color than what they received. But then they were way too full to fight for long, and before we knew it, our little pilots had dozed off on their push-back seats, looking at their innocent best!
What an emotional journey this was for our team at KnowYourStar. #TentToAirport is a dream come true not just for the kids, but for us as well. We never thought we would be able to expose our tiny tots to such places so soon, and we are so very grateful for this opportunity. The kids indeed have grown wings and are now learning to fly, while we continue to fuel our dreams of enabling them to fly higher than the sky! 🙂
