Hi! I’m Pallavi Rajan, and I am 16 years old. I will be a junior this fall at Cupertino High School. Four years ago, I became One Million Lights’s youngest Global Ambassador, and I had an amazing experience. I wanted to raise money to buy solar lanterns for students in the village of Agara. The OML team was extremely helpful to work with. In fact, they offered to match my fundraising 1-to-1 instead of the usual 15% that they match ambassadors. As a result, I only had to raise enough money for 50 solar lanterns, and they sponsored the rest. Now, four years later, I’ve recruited my sister, my cousins, and my best friend to continue this task with me. We call ourselves Project LINC.
        We didn’t decide to donate lights to Agara randomly: my sister and I have very strong ties to the village. It is our mother’s birthplace, and our grandmother’s family has lived there for generations. Every year, we visit the house where my grandmother grew up and where my mother was born. We walk through the dusty streets and visit people, bringing bananas to feed their cows and calfs. We try to keep our balance as we stumble through the sugarcane fields, then eventually give up and run through the rain, mud splashing wildly everywhere. We make bracelets out of strips of banana leaf and eat enormous, four-course meals made by my great aunt. These trips are usually short, and we never stay overnight. But my experience of Agara has always been fun-filled, delicious, and exhausting.
        Unfortunately, for many kids my age who live in and around Agara, their experience only involves the “exhausting” aspect. They work so hard in the fields or running errands that they can’t study while the sun is still up. Agara itself is a fairly well-off village with 3 or 4 schools, but the surrounding villages are so poor that they don’t even have basic electricity. Most children from these villages come to Agara for school, and it is they who have to use candles or kerosene lamps to study at night. When I talked to some of these students back in 2012, I was amazed by their dedication and perseverance to get an education. I will never forget Chandana or Bhoomika, two girls who specifically approached me and requested that I consider their schools for light donations. I specifically remember one girl’s face as she begged me to come back soon and bring more lights. The main reason that I wanted to revisit these schools is because of bright, eager students like them. I'm so excited to see them again, and I really hope the lights have been helpful.