Beginning with the slums inside AMU, the newly-formed team found there were around 40 children who badly needed care and attention. And that meant funds. For Faraz, with his upper-middle class background, it was perhaps the first encounter with financial difficulty. The team started with a poster campaign to generate awareness about the abysmal living conditions of the slum-dwellers. Reminisces Faraz, now in his early twenties: "At that time we'd all run out of pocket money", so the team made newspapers their canvas and the AMU hostel rooms their studio. About 85 posters were painted overnight and pasted all over. "Next day it created a sensation," says Ghazal, who was the first to join Faraz. Soon after, the team began collecting funds—anything from a rupee to a hundred. Some senior doctors also helped when they heard TEARS was planning a medical camp for slum children. With the medicines supplied by medical practitioners and the Rs 4,500 they'd collected, TEARS was able to provide a thorough medical check-up—and in some cases extended medical advice—to all 40 children. Within a fortnight, a counselling programme too was set up, they also collected old clothes and gave them to 175 families in the AMU slum. Then they identified children working in lock factories, and about fifty children, from lock factories and dhabas, today attend a play-school in a helping professor's residence.