My Story 

As a child born in the US, my parents wanted me to stay connected to our culture and religion. To achieve this, we embarked on a journey to India every year. It was during these trips that I experienced the warmth of love and affection from my grandparents, cousins, and other relatives. I also made a lot of friends in the neighborhood where my grandparents lived. This soon became the reason as to why I eagerly anticipated every visit to India.

When I was four, at a yearly eye checkup, I found out that I had a cataract in one of my eyes. The doctor told me that if I started patching my right eye my vision could improve. It did improve but the improvement wasn't that significant. There was still a chance that I would have to do surgery in the future. 

As I grew older, my family began going to the temple every Sunday. During these gatherings, from 4pm-6pm, the volunteers arranged special spiritual classes for all age groups which were both fun and educational.

In those sessions, we learned about important life values and listened to inspiring stories about our gurus. My guru HH Pramukh Swami Maharaj was the fifth spiritual successor of Bhagwan Swaminarayan. He dedicated his life to the well-being of others and lived by the motto "In the joy of others, lies our own" 

I made friends in those classes really quickly, and soon, going to the temple on Sundays became something I eagerly looked forward to. I would even decline invitations to my friends birthday partys if timings overlapped. Soon, a new project called "Small Hands Big Hearts" was introduced to us. It involved saving up as much money as we could and donating it to help build a Mandir (place of worship). At the time, I would ask my parents if we can go for ice cream and when they would say let's go, I would say how about we save the money instead for "Small Hands Big Hearts". It was a lot of fun.

After the pandemic, during one of our trips to India, my parents heard about a distant relative who could not afford a cataract surgery. Of course, my parents decided to help out and I began to wonder about other such people who could not access these surgeries due to financial constraints. My journey towards Sight4Eyes was triggered in June 2022 and I continued to save money after our trip so I could help people in need of cataract surgeries.

For my first Eye-Camp in July 2023, I contributed $750. These were funds I had saved from doing chores and I also cashed all my gift cards from my 13th birthday. My parents matched my funds to bring the total to $1500.