The need to help others

_________ Nadish Ladha_________ You know sometimes we can get really um self-centered and were thinking about me, me, me all the time and I find that it's so important for us to be able to uh, see who we can help. you go through many different experiences through life that create um you know it's a rollercoaster ride (laughs). and say okay this is a ride were going to have some high moments and I'm going to have some low moments and uh I'm going to take this ride and I'm going to get off with a smile on my face. And um it was really was about mind set. a challenge would come up and I would get frustrated or stressed out about it and I really had to sit back and think you know this is not right. This is not how life is really meant to be. This is not what uh, who I am, who I'm supposed to be. I went through a lot of different things of finding my purpose. What is my purpose? And I realized that it was really about connecting and helping people. One of the things that I think that really struck to me is that number of years ago we had um a 16 year old boy that came and stayed with us. And you know his parents were new to Canada they had a lot of challenges with him um, wasn't doing too well in school and we were asked if we would take this young boy into our home and see if we could do something with him. And my initial um reaction was omg no because at that time I had you know a year and a half old and a four year old and I had a nine year old then so I'm like well maybe this is not a good thing to be having a sixteen year old whose got these challenges and sat back and said you know let's think about this because we could really be helping and making a difference. And so anyways to make a long story short, we had this boy stay with us for about eighteen months and uh his whole life turned around. We saw him from being where he was to being an A student in school. He was excelling um you know he just had a different attitude, he was happier. It was just because he had someone who really cared, that spoke his language that communicated in his way. So the connection was there which is really important to do. And so today after all these years he's um in his twenties and he owns his own gas station in the US. He's got a couple of them and so he's a businessman now so it's very exciting and its very thrilling to see that um just having a simple thing just as being there for somebody really turn somebody's life around.