Challenges help us develop. they allow us to transform ourselves into someone better. They inspire learning even if a person does not manage to succeed in the task at hand. A seemingly impossible task that I had once undertaken was to educate and help the son of the maid who worked at our home to pass an exam.
Now a little background, this incident is from the time when I had finished the second year of my engineering. I was at my home in for the summer holiday when i got to know that the son of our maid had just passed his class 10 exams and is now planning to go out for a job. Being a poor family, I knew that they needed a few more helping hands. when I talked to that kid, he told me that he wishes to continue his studies and has also applied for polytechnic entrance exams. I tried talking to his mother but she was not willing to let him study further and wanted him to go out and start earning. First thing i did was to convince my parents to convince the maid to let him study. A few days of regular persuasion did it for me. Now, the entrance exams were the biggest challenge. The exams were scheduled in less than 2 weeks and upon examining, i got to know that he is unsurprisingly poor with the basics. I decided to help him out by teaching him for as long as I need in order to help him succeed. Even though we were not able to pull off any kind of miracle in the exam as we only had 15 days to prepare, I was happy that we undertook a challenge and did our best to get things done.
The outcome was not great, but the sense of satisfaction from having tried our best was unmatched. I learnt that putting in the effort is more important than achieving the target. I also learnt that education is probably the only way through which we can bring about a change in the lives of the underprivileged. We worked together and the kid managed to make it through, the next year. However, teaching the kid was not the challenging part, convincing the parents that education is the only way through was.
