In November 2022, with holidays around the corner, Rayaan's parents got a call from his school teacher Mrs. G asking if it was alright to share Neev's story with other parents and if it was alright for them to send toys for the toy drive. Not having heard of anything about it, we were really surprised. When we enquired Mrs G told us that it was Rayaan who came up with the idea to have a toy drive to collect toys for the kids who are in the fight. When we checked with him, he said he saw a toy drive sign somewhere and thought that he would want to collect toys for pediatric patients.

Having received Neev's Medical treatment at UCSF, we are in touch with the staff there so arranging which kids would receive the toys was the easy part. We thought he might get a few toys from the parents of his friends and that would be it. To our surprise, every day after that when Sandeep would go to pick him up from the school a lot of children would walk in a line behind Rayaan, each one carrying bags of toys. They would put all of those in our car's trunk and go their way. This continued for a few days when we realized that not only the kids from his class were donating but kids across almost all classes in the school participated. Mrs G and Principal Deeringhoff had included a little paragraph about Rayaan's efforts in the monthly newsletter and that spread across the community. In the end, we ended up with a whooping 261 toys that were gifted to UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital at Mission Bay. The local news media picked up on the story and reported it in their weekly edition (click here)

Rayaan plans to continue this tradition every year. If you or your child would like to participate or set up a similar effort, please let us know here. We would be happy to receive such support and help families fight dreadful diseases.