Remember the five girls from Sri Sarada Vidyavanam Matriculation Girls Higher Secondary School in Madurai who did their teachers, parents and city proud with their >prize winning work of fiction in the NASA Ames Space Settlement Design contest-2014? They are now back from Los Angeles award ceremony and convention, rich in experience and brimming with memories of a “wonderful and useful trip”.
They met and befriended many people during their 10 days stay in the U.S but one person has earned a special place in their hearts forever.
She is Ms.Theresa Boyle Subburathinam, a resident of California and a total stranger to the girls. But for her help and hospitality, the girls would have been lost.
The run-up to the trip was quite a struggle for the girls as they along with their parents and teachers ran from pillar to post trying to raise funds that would take care of their visa, tickets, accommodation, food, transport, convention registration fee, dress and other miscellaneous expenses. Several kind-hearted people came forward with donations but it did not add up to meet the requirements of the team.
And out of nowhere Ms. Theresa showed up with her spirit of service! She got to know of the girls’ plight through friends of friends and volunteered to take on the responsibility. While another good samaritan, Atheetha Sowmya Venkatesh, daughter of Mr.S.V.S.Sundaramurti of SVS Flours in Madurai, who lives in the US collected funds in Ohio to pay for the team’s conference registration, Ms.Theresa took care of all the other key areas.
“She treated us like her own daughters,” says S.B. Vishakanandhini. “So far we had only heard and read, now we saw the real face of America, people were so kind and courteous to us,” she adds.
Ms.Theresa hosted the five girls and their two chaperones in her house, giving them food -- including tasty South Indian meals, driving them around wherever they needed to go, dropping them and picking them up daily from the conference venue, which was more than an hour’s drive from her house and even attending and cheering them during the entertainment programmes. She also treated them to Front-of-the line tickets to the Universal Studios in Hollywood, took them to the California Science Center meeting every expense, helped them shop and showered them with gifts. She gave all her time to the girls and went out of the way to make their days beautiful in the U.S.
Vishakanandhini and her four friends -- M. Shenbagam, S.G. Yogalakshmi, K. Kamali and P. Dhivya Priya -- found the hospitality “unbelievably warm and comfortable”.
In an e-mail to MetroPlus Madurai, Sowmya Venkatesh says that Ms.Theresa’s willingness to single-handedly help the Indian girls can be compared to the hospitality of American families and especially Ms.George Hale of Chicago who had welcomed Swami Vivekananda into her home just before the Parliament of Religions was convened in Chicago in 1893.
Swami Vivekananda’s work and mission to represent Hinduism in the United States would not have been accomplished without the help and support of the Hale family at the very beginning. When Mrs.Hale found Swamiji weary and exhausted on the street side in Chicago, she at once offered him food and accommodation, saw to it that his every need was attended to and herself took him to the offices of the Parliament. The Hale family was to become more dear to him than any other he would know in the West.
'I scarcely find a family so highly pure and kind. Or why should God shower blessings on them in such abundance? Oh, how wonderfully kind they are!' he wrote to his brother disciples in 1894. From November 1893, the Hales' home on Dearborn Ave served as Swamiji's headquarters. Swami Vivekananda wrote to Mrs. Hale from India in 1898, "I must have belonged to you in the past as we Hindus say." (Source: Vivekanada Vedanta Society of Chicago).
The five Indian girls must have had a past with Ms. Theresa as she called them “additions to my family”. She is certainly one of those lesser known large-hearted human being who finds happiness in helping those in need.
Here is the >earlier story on the NASA prize winners of Sri Sarada Vidyavanam Matriculation Girls Higher Secondary School.
