Embracing the World’s youth movement, AYUDH, organized its annual European youth empowerment gathering at Embracing the World’s center in Germany from 15 – 21 July 2012. This year’s gather was themed, “The Joy of Giving.” Each national AYUDH group represented at the gathering had made a pledge to implement at least one small “joy of giving” project in their country. As the hosts of the gathering, the German group wanted to be one of the first ones to fulfill their pledge and contribute something to their community.
Youth from all over Germany met in Berlin from 10 – 12 August 2012 to continue the spirit of giving. On the first day, the youth set up a stall at a charity-flea-market and sold items that friends and relatives had given to them, thereby raising funds to support the educational initiatives of Embracing the World in India.
On the second day, inspired by Amma’s Amala Bharatam Campaign to clean public spaces in India, the youth undertook a clean-up drive in one of Berlin’s biggest public parks. Armed with brooms, gloves, trash bags and gripping tongs the youth split up into several groups to pick up thousands of cigarette buds, plastic items and broken pieces of glass from the grounds of the park. One of the participants remarked: “The reactions of the people in the park were really different. Some people thanked us for our work, one little girl even took a gripping tong and helped us for one hour. When we were done, she wanted to take home some cleaning supplies in order to keep the park clean in the future. Others were really skeptical because they had never seen youngsters doing this kind of work on a voluntary basis – one elderly lady thought we were searching for something really valuable on the ground and when we told her that we were here to collect the trash, she said that we must be criminals, who do this kind of work as a punishment. Learning that we were doing the cleaning out of our free will, she obviously got a shock…”
Though the youth were not able to clean up the entire park during this one day, they were happy to at least having cleaned up one part of it, thereby setting an example of selfless service and care for Nature.