The Awareness Ambassador Program was attended by 180 students at Bison Valley School in Komalikkudi, Idukki on Tuesday, August 11, 2015. The Awareness Ambassador Program, inspired and guided by Chancellor Amma, is a step taken byAmritaCREATE to fight against the evils of alcoholism and other addictive substances by bringing awareness education to children and youth in villages

As part of Amrita Center for International Programs ACIP’s Live-in-Labs program, students from the department of Social Work, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus and Ryerson University from Toronto, Canada were trained by AmritaCREATE and sent to the village of Komalikkudy, Idukki, Kerala.

Tobacco chewing and spitting red streams of chewed betel is also very common here. While playing games such as Kabbadi and football with the local youth, the interns encouraged them to stop chewing betel and tobacco, giving them hard candies to suck on instead, to give them quick energy and act as a placebo for the muscle memory.

AmritaCREATE will continue to train and work with the local student ambassadors in the Amrita SeRVe village, to create peer interventions with the village school to combat alcoholism and other substance abuse among the student community, as well as reaching out to their parents and the extended community.