Julie Foster is a Trustee of Children United! a charity which works with a congregation of Sisters based in the country to help them to build and run schools, orphanages, children's hostels and creches.
The organisation was formed in the late 1980's after Reverand Philip Jepps, from St Andrew's Church in Kettering, visited a 'Boys' Town' project in India. While there, he was taken ill and admitted to a hospital run by a congregation of Sisters - members of the Catholic Cross of Chavanod, originally from France - who looked after him until he was well enough to return home.
In return the St. Andrews' congregation decided to raise some money to assist the Sisters in their work.
Rev. Jepps' daughter Helen, together with another Trustee Stephanie Fretter visited in 1990 and the charity grew from there.
Julie has been working for Children United! for 13 years and recently began another trip to see how the charity's numerous projects are progressing.
Many of them are funded by the efforts of school children in the South Northamptonshire region, including those from Blisworth School, Caroline Chisholm School, Hunsbury Park School and Milton Malsor School.
Even the Sisters know Julie as 'Auntie' and her trips around India - and work at home - make fascinating reading.
The Hunsbury Herald will be publishing all the latest news from Julie's efforts with Children United!, starting today with this insight into life in India:
Thursday, February 3:
Food
I am now on week five of my trip in India and have already hit the ‘I hate boiled rice’ stage.
Mumblings as I walk over to the refectory for breakfast, consist of ‘I really don’t want curry for breakfast,‘I really DON’T want curry for breakfast, ‘I REALLY don’t want curry for breakfast...'
Don’t get me wrong, whatever I have for lunch is lovely, but the portions of rice are getting smaller and smaller, and the portions of curry are getting larger. Supper is always lovely as I have chapattis or some kind of rice pancake with the curry. There are always bananas and other fruit.
It’s just curry for breakfast... So, I mentioned that Pat had never tried puttu or bull’s-eye (no, not that bull’s-eye!) before. Next day bull’s-eye, which is a rice pancake with an egg in the middle and you can tear off the edges and dip it in your egg yolk.
Served with curry of course, but we have ours without. Today puttu which is rice flour put into a cylindrical tube and steamed. You crumble it with your fingers and it looks like desiccated coconut. It is served with curry (of course!) but I mash up a banana and mix it in with that.
On Sunday, we are going to Kodai Kanal and when discussing Pat’s food requirements (she is allergic to wheat,) I will mention that she particularly likes bulls-eye and puttu for breakfast, to ensure at least two curry-free breakfasts.
Apart from bulls-eye and puttu, there might by idli (steamed rice cakes, a bit like very moist sponge cake, but no taste), dulsi (a very thin rice pancake) or apomb, which is a thicker rice pancake, something like a very thin crumpet.
These are all made by grinding rice and a white dhal (lentil) together until they are a powder. They are then mixed with water to form a batter and left overnight to ferment.
Then cooked in a variety of ways but always served with curry. There are also different types of porridge made with different grains - jola or ragi.
Friday, February 4:
Yesterday I managed a completely pungent-free (anything with chilli is pungent) day.
For breakfast today it was bulls-eye again - rice pancake with egg, followed by plantain (banana) and coffee. Made with all (full-fat) milk and coffee powder.
Most Indians seem to have huge amounts of sugar in it as well, but ours is specially made without.
You may be interested in their tea making method. Take one saucepan and pour in milk (this is going to be an all-milk tea, no water is used.) Add sugar and tea-bags to taste. Bring to the boil and simmer. Remove tea bags, pour into jug and serve.
Cravings
So... I was just about keeping my food cravings under control until I went to check my emails. Nice email from Gervais saying that he has posted essential supplies to me!
Followed by several nice photos - Braybrooke Church (he went on a ramble there yesterday with Kettering Rambling Club), the first snowdrops, and then a plate with lots of (frozen) chips, two eggs, a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup and THREE Fry's chocolate creams. I'm now desperately hoping that he bought a four-pack and one of them is in my parcel of essential supplies!
At the moment I need Gervais to bring marmite sandwiches and a Fry’s chocolate cream to the airport when he picks me up. This may change the longer I am here!
Monday, February 7:
I had been to Karisalpatti before to visit friends.
It was just a small convent with a women's sewing project. My friend Hilaria was recently transferred here and as Karisalpatti is only a short distance from Batlagundu, I asked my nice taxi-man to take me there.
I expected a quiet restful day, drinking tea and eating too many biscuits. When I got there I did not recognise the place!
From a tiny convent to a huge one and two other large buildings each side of metal gates. The building to the left had a Leonard Hospital sign on the front so that was self-explanatory.
The building to the right was still being constructed.
So after meeting some of the Sisters and having a cup of coffee I went on a tour of the campus.
The only thing I could recognise was the view of the mountains from the roof. Before, the convent seemed to be just in the middle of a field, but they had planted lots of trees - supportas and limes (which were fruiting) and coconut, plantain (banana), mango and papaya which were quite small so not fruiting yet.
The trees were watered by a system of little channels and dams and they had a new well, which was full due to recent rain.
Beautiful
It was just so beautiful and peaceful there. Lots of birds and butterflies and no lorries thundering past sounding their horns as they do in Batlagundu. The hospital turned out to be a dispensary, so like a little hospital but run by a nurse, rather than by a doctor.
The building being constructed turned out to be an orphanage/boarding. I had never heard of it before, although we already help several boardings, orphanages and children's hostels as they tend to have very little income. Most of our children in these establishments have been abandoned. Some are true orphans or may have family problems. Whatever their circumstances, usually they are unable to give any money towards their keep - food, clothing, school fees and uniforms, medical care, toiletries etc. etc.
This boarding started three years ago with just ten children. Now they have 62, aged from five to ten, and a waiting list.
Only two of them pay a contribution so I should not have been so horrified to hear of what they have to eat. However, first some good news.
The ground floor of the building was the original boarding hall - just one large room and two small rooms at the end - one the kitchen and the other the warden.
Outside there was a little building which housed the toilets and a large sink. Some people who had worked with Sr. Hilaria on a previous project went to visit her as they were nearby. On seeing 60 children all squashed in one room trying to sleep, they offered the money to build another room above.
Now the older children will be upstairs so they can study without the disturbance of the younger children running around and playing. Of course, they will all have more space to sleep as well.
There are big concrete shelves at one end of the room, so the children can keep their trunks (big metal boxes) with any spare clothing, toothbrush and paste etc. in.
There is a blackboard on the wall, but that's about all. On the outside of the building along one side there is a step about 20cm high and deep, that they sit on to eat their meals. Now they are building a wall about 2m from the building with pillars to support a tin roof, so the children can still eat here when it is raining and also gives them more undercover space to play in.
So that's the good news. Now the bad. Their food.
No protein, meat, fish, eggs, cheese etc. No milk or yogurt. No fat, no sugar
If you feel brave enough, why not try it just for one day. Then try to imagine it for seven days a week, every week of the year, if you can. Let me tell you their daily routine.
They wake at 6am and do some housework - picking up any litter, sweeping up the leaves and generally keeping the campus clean and tidy.
After cleaning their teeth and washing, they get dressed and have prayers, including 15 minutes meditation. Breakfast is at 7.30am - boiled rice. Never anything else, served plain or sometimes with some spice in the water. Water to drink - again never anything else.
They then get ready for school, finish any homework or study. They leave for school at 8.30am and it is only a short walk away on the same road.
At school the lessons are much the same as we have, apart from learning English as well as their own native language which is Tamil.
They have school dinners which is boiled rice with a thin gravy called sambal made of water, spice and dhal. Very occasionally there is some chopped egg in it, but no vegetables, meat or fish.
They finish school and come home at 4.30pm.
On Sundays, a few of the children may have a relative or friend visit them who may bring some biscuits or sweets.
So on Monday, if you have had a visitor you can have a snack after school. After school chores include doing your own washing, unless you are in the first standard (aged 5) when the fifth standard children (10 year-olds) will help you.
You fetch water in a jug or bucket, wet your clothes, rub them with soap on a stone bench, rinse them and hang them to dry. Most of the clothes they were wearing were too small and torn/all buttons missing/held together with safety pins.
Most of the children love gardening - pulling up the weeds and grass that grow in the orchard and looking after the greens that they cultivate.
During February to April, the supporta trees fruit and the children are allowed to eat as many as they want. Supportas look like our kiwi fruit, but inside they are brown instead of green and have several large black pips.
Hopefully the guava trees will soon start fruiting but it will be many years before the plantain (banana) and mango trees do. They get about 15 limes a week from the lime trees and these are made into a pickle to flavour the rice, but there is never enough.
They play until 6pm, study until 7pm and come into the convent to watch the national and international news until 7.30pm. Then the evening meal - boiled rice with either a little dhal or vegetable, but never both.
So no protein, meat, fish, eggs, cheese etc. No milk or yogurt. No fat, no sugar, which growing children need. A completely unbalanced diet with insufficient vitamins, minerals etc. And nothing nice to eat!
8.15pm is story time and bed.
The children here only go to school on Saturdays if they need to catch up with any work. On the day I visited, they were all at school as there had been two holidays in January, Pongal, their harvest festival and Republic Day.
At the weekends they have more free time although they still have some jobs to do and they have to do their homework.
Most children sleep for much of the weekends, probably because they are all anaemic - a blood disorder due to their poor diet. The nurse treats about 25 of them each day for infections, coughs, colds etc. for the same reason.
The children at the orphanage at Thangachimadam are very rarely ill - because the children at St. Loy’s School pay for them to have such a good diet.
So, the cost of a better diet.
1 litre of milk would give 10 tumblers full. So they would need six litres of milk for all the children to have one tumbler of milk. This would cost £1.71. Ideally we would like them to have three tumblers a week - we are looking into supplying calcium powder at Kodai Kanal Boarding as they also do not have any milk, but whole milk also has protein, fat and essential vitamins so is much better for them.
Eggs cost 3.5 rupees each. So 62 eggs would cost 217 rupees which is £3.10. One egg a week would be sufficient as they could have half an egg twice a week.
Vegetables - depends on the time of the year and the type of vegetable, but between 15 and 50 rupees (between 21p and 71p) would buy enough vegetables for all of the children for one meal.
Dhal (lentils). They would need 2kg for all of the children for one meal to make a healthy and nutritious sauce for the rice. Dhal costs about 90 rupees/kg, so this would cost 180 rupees = £2.57.
Biscuits for a snack after school. Three rupees for a packet of 11 biscuits and each child would eat three biscuits. So 186 biscuits needed = 17 packets = 51 rupees = 73p. Other after-school snacks could be tiffin, rather like our Bombay mix with dried peas, peanuts and different grains. Or green dhal - boiled mung beans, or chickpeas. Grown locally so reasonably 'cheap'
Sweets as an occasional treat. 45 rupees for 100 sweets. So each sweet is 0.45 rupee each x 62 = 28 rupees = 40p.
Fish and meat are out of the question, but protein powder is made from nuts and different kinds of grain. This costs 35 rupees/kg = 50p; they would need 3kg a week (£1.50) and this could be mixed into the sambal and would also thicken it.
As a change from boiled rice for breakfast every morning they would like to occasionally give idli - a kind of steamed rice cake, or uppama - a grain like wheat that can be made into a kind of porridge. Uppama flour costs 42r/kg = 60p, Aashirvaad flour is 36r/kg = 51p and there is also roasted rava, which is like semolina. The most nutritious grains such as ragi and jola are too expensive.
For the evening rice they just want something to give it taste or variety -such as pickle or dried vegetables, although fresh would obviously do them more good. I did suggest frying some onions, garlic, chillis and/or spice in oil which would give a very strong flavour to stir into the rice, but oil is 139 rupees / litre = £1.99, so far too expensive to use.
They receive 10,000 rupees from the Diocese each month (£142.86) which is spent mainly on rice. It also has to pay for water in the dry season, electricity and bottled gas for cooking, repairs, the septic tank to be emptied, the cooks and the girl who looks after the children's wages etc.
These children are getting the best education and children at our Boardings are always top of their classes and can go onto college etc. The Sisters also run nursing/teaching colleges. When they qualify, to ‘pay back’ the cost of their education, teachers have to work for us for three years and nurses four. This they are happy to do as it also gives them ‘work experience’ enabling them to get much better jobs.
Other costs
We would really like the children to have school uniforms. Not as vital as a good diet you may think, but the children are very conscious that they are not the same as the other children in the school. Cost for two sets of uniform (they have one plain and one checked) for each child is 300 rupees = £4.28.
Play equipment - just a cricket set, some balls, skipping ropes, Frisbees and such like.
Medical costs - Sr. Stella treats at least 25 children each day, mainly for various infections as well as the normal cuts and grazes. This will decrease rapidly once the children's diet improves.
Toiletries - toothbrushes are 10 rupees each =14p. Toothpaste 50r (71p) for a very big 200g tube. Soap 18 rupees (2.5p) per bar.
Children's backgrounds
Most are abandoned. It is very common for children to be abandoned due to poverty or when a woman remarries. If your husband dies or leaves you, there is no council housing, social security etc. So many remarry and it is very unusual for the husband to take on her children as well.
Such is the case with Raja and his two brothers. His two brothers are younger than him and so are at Paravai. This is a refuge that the Sisters run near Madurai.
It takes in abandoned/widowed/disabled/destitute women and gives them a small home. They look after four or five orphaned or abandoned babies and young children. When the children are five, they then come to one of the orphanages/boardings.
One little girl here, Maragatha, was at nearby Dindigal bus stand with her mother. Her mother told her to go to sleep and when she woke her mother had gone. She is still frightened to go to sleep as she doesn’t know what will have happened when she wakes.
Death of the mother in childbirth is also common, so some of the children here have a father who is unable to look after them and work. Such is the case with Kaunal, who has a little sister at Paravai.
The day that I visited, whilst we were sitting around the table trying to work out how much it would cost to give all the children an egg a week etc. a lady came to the door. She had come to fetch Kaunal as his father had been killed the previous evening. He had been working in the forests and when travelling home in the back of a lorry, a bolt had come undone and he fell out, landing on his head. Being the only son, Kaunal will have to carry out the funeral which will include having his head shaved and staying with the pyre for ten days afterwards. He is only seven.
We help the women's refuge at Malur and four orphanages/boardings - Kodai Kanal, Munnar, Maski and Thangachimadam. Bellary is now supported by the huge number of children who pay to go to the school there. Thangachimadam has been very generously supported by St. Loy's School for many many years, but we now need to add Karisalpatti to the list.
All of the children at all of these places are there for very good reasons. Even the children at Karisalpatti are so lucky because there are so many who have been turned away due to lack of space and finance.
So how to raise the money?
Penny pots. These have been very successful in the past. Just asking people to collect all their pennies for us. In a school with even just a couple of hundred children, it mounts up to a large amount. We need to get more schools, organisations, even businesses as well as individuals to collect for us.
Direct debits? In the twenty years I have been working for the children in India I have never directly asked for money. I ask the children to collect pennies if they would like to and when I give talks I ask for a donation to the charity rather than for a speaker's fee.
I don't like these 'Please give us £3 a month adverts' as by the time they have paid for the advertisement, staff, offices, overheads and other costs etc. etc. etc. how much money actually gets to where it is supposed to go to?
We are different in that we promise that every single penny given goes to the children - there are no overheads either in the UK or in India. All volunteers pay their own expenses and we also cover the cost of bank transfers, accountancy fees etc.
So if someone is willing to give £2.57 a month, that pays for 2kg of lentils. Or £3.10 a month would give all the children at Karisalpatti an egg. We encourage people to give to a specific project so that they have their 'own children' and can receive updates and newsletters.
Similarly if they wanted to pay for school uniforms for example, the money could easily be allocated thus. By having a direct debit they would only have to authorise their bank once and the projects could have a regular income.
By signing a Gift Aid form we can also claim another 25p for each £1 given, back from the tax-man!
Visit our website for more information and to see lots of photos of the various projects: www.childrenunited.btck.co.uk
If you have any suggestions to help us we would love to hear from you!
Please write to:-
Children United!
35, Derwent Crescent
Kettering
Northants
NN16 8UH
Or email: indiacu@talk21.com
Our registered charity number is:
1098864
Our bank details are:
Barclays Bank Kettering
Acc. name: Children United
Acc. no: 10941735
Sort code: 20-45-81
 |
| Children United! work with the Sisters |
Apart from bulls-eye and puttu, there might by idli (steamed rice cakes, a bit like very moist sponge cake, but no taste), dulsi (a very thin rice pancake) or apomb, which is a thicker rice pancake, something like a very thin crumpet.
These are all made by grinding rice and a white dhal (lentil) together until they are a powder. They are then mixed with water to form a batter and left overnight to ferment.
Then cooked in a variety of ways but always served with curry. There are also different types of porridge made with different grains - jola or ragi.
Friday, February 4:
Yesterday I managed a completely pungent-free (anything with chilli is pungent) day.
For breakfast today it was bulls-eye again - rice pancake with egg, followed by plantain (banana) and coffee. Made with all (full-fat) milk and coffee powder.
Most Indians seem to have huge amounts of sugar in it as well, but ours is specially made without.
You may be interested in their tea making method. Take one saucepan and pour in milk (this is going to be an all-milk tea, no water is used.) Add sugar and tea-bags to taste. Bring to the boil and simmer. Remove tea bags, pour into jug and serve.
Cravings
So... I was just about keeping my food cravings under control until I went to check my emails. Nice email from Gervais saying that he has posted essential supplies to me!
Followed by several nice photos - Braybrooke Church (he went on a ramble there yesterday with Kettering Rambling Club), the first snowdrops, and then a plate with lots of (frozen) chips, two eggs, a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup and THREE Fry's chocolate creams. I'm now desperately hoping that he bought a four-pack and one of them is in my parcel of essential supplies!
At the moment I need Gervais to bring marmite sandwiches and a Fry’s chocolate cream to the airport when he picks me up. This may change the longer I am here!
Monday, February 7:
I had been to Karisalpatti before to visit friends.
It was just a small convent with a women's sewing project. My friend Hilaria was recently transferred here and as Karisalpatti is only a short distance from Batlagundu, I asked my nice taxi-man to take me there.
I expected a quiet restful day, drinking tea and eating too many biscuits. When I got there I did not recognise the place!
From a tiny convent to a huge one and two other large buildings each side of metal gates. The building to the left had a Leonard Hospital sign on the front so that was self-explanatory.
The building to the right was still being constructed.
So after meeting some of the Sisters and having a cup of coffee I went on a tour of the campus.
The only thing I could recognise was the view of the mountains from the roof. Before, the convent seemed to be just in the middle of a field, but they had planted lots of trees - supportas and limes (which were fruiting) and coconut, plantain (banana), mango and papaya which were quite small so not fruiting yet.
The trees were watered by a system of little channels and dams and they had a new well, which was full due to recent rain.
Beautiful
It was just so beautiful and peaceful there. Lots of birds and butterflies and no lorries thundering past sounding their horns as they do in Batlagundu. The hospital turned out to be a dispensary, so like a little hospital but run by a nurse, rather than by a doctor.
The building being constructed turned out to be an orphanage/boarding. I had never heard of it before, although we already help several boardings, orphanages and children's hostels as they tend to have very little income. Most of our children in these establishments have been abandoned. Some are true orphans or may have family problems. Whatever their circumstances, usually they are unable to give any money towards their keep - food, clothing, school fees and uniforms, medical care, toiletries etc. etc.
This boarding started three years ago with just ten children. Now they have 62, aged from five to ten, and a waiting list.
The ground floor of the building was the original boarding hall - just one large room and two small rooms at the end - one the kitchen and the other the warden.
Outside there was a little building which housed the toilets and a large sink. Some people who had worked with Sr. Hilaria on a previous project went to visit her as they were nearby. On seeing 60 children all squashed in one room trying to sleep, they offered the money to build another room above.
Now the older children will be upstairs so they can study without the disturbance of the younger children running around and playing. Of course, they will all have more space to sleep as well.
There are big concrete shelves at one end of the room, so the children can keep their trunks (big metal boxes) with any spare clothing, toothbrush and paste etc. in.
There is a blackboard on the wall, but that's about all. On the outside of the building along one side there is a step about 20cm high and deep, that they sit on to eat their meals. Now they are building a wall about 2m from the building with pillars to support a tin roof, so the children can still eat here when it is raining and also gives them more undercover space to play in.
So that's the good news. Now the bad. Their food.
No protein, meat, fish, eggs, cheese etc. No milk or yogurt. No fat, no sugar
If you feel brave enough, why not try it just for one day. Then try to imagine it for seven days a week, every week of the year, if you can. Let me tell you their daily routine.
They wake at 6am and do some housework - picking up any litter, sweeping up the leaves and generally keeping the campus clean and tidy.
After cleaning their teeth and washing, they get dressed and have prayers, including 15 minutes meditation. Breakfast is at 7.30am - boiled rice. Never anything else, served plain or sometimes with some spice in the water. Water to drink - again never anything else.
They then get ready for school, finish any homework or study. They leave for school at 8.30am and it is only a short walk away on the same road.
At school the lessons are much the same as we have, apart from learning English as well as their own native language which is Tamil.
They have school dinners which is boiled rice with a thin gravy called sambal made of water, spice and dhal. Very occasionally there is some chopped egg in it, but no vegetables, meat or fish.
They finish school and come home at 4.30pm.
On Sundays, a few of the children may have a relative or friend visit them who may bring some biscuits or sweets.
So on Monday, if you have had a visitor you can have a snack after school. After school chores include doing your own washing, unless you are in the first standard (aged 5) when the fifth standard children (10 year-olds) will help you.
You fetch water in a jug or bucket, wet your clothes, rub them with soap on a stone bench, rinse them and hang them to dry. Most of the clothes they were wearing were too small and torn/all buttons missing/held together with safety pins.
Most of the children love gardening - pulling up the weeds and grass that grow in the orchard and looking after the greens that they cultivate.
During February to April, the supporta trees fruit and the children are allowed to eat as many as they want. Supportas look like our kiwi fruit, but inside they are brown instead of green and have several large black pips.
Hopefully the guava trees will soon start fruiting but it will be many years before the plantain (banana) and mango trees do. They get about 15 limes a week from the lime trees and these are made into a pickle to flavour the rice, but there is never enough.
They play until 6pm, study until 7pm and come into the convent to watch the national and international news until 7.30pm. Then the evening meal - boiled rice with either a little dhal or vegetable, but never both.
So no protein, meat, fish, eggs, cheese etc. No milk or yogurt. No fat, no sugar, which growing children need. A completely unbalanced diet with insufficient vitamins, minerals etc. And nothing nice to eat!
8.15pm is story time and bed.
The children here only go to school on Saturdays if they need to catch up with any work. On the day I visited, they were all at school as there had been two holidays in January, Pongal, their harvest festival and Republic Day.
At the weekends they have more free time although they still have some jobs to do and they have to do their homework.
Most children sleep for much of the weekends, probably because they are all anaemic - a blood disorder due to their poor diet. The nurse treats about 25 of them each day for infections, coughs, colds etc. for the same reason.
The children at the orphanage at Thangachimadam are very rarely ill - because the children at St. Loy’s School pay for them to have such a good diet.
So, the cost of a better diet.
1 litre of milk would give 10 tumblers full. So they would need six litres of milk for all the children to have one tumbler of milk. This would cost £1.71. Ideally we would like them to have three tumblers a week - we are looking into supplying calcium powder at Kodai Kanal Boarding as they also do not have any milk, but whole milk also has protein, fat and essential vitamins so is much better for them.
Eggs cost 3.5 rupees each. So 62 eggs would cost 217 rupees which is £3.10. One egg a week would be sufficient as they could have half an egg twice a week.
Vegetables - depends on the time of the year and the type of vegetable, but between 15 and 50 rupees (between 21p and 71p) would buy enough vegetables for all of the children for one meal.
Dhal (lentils). They would need 2kg for all of the children for one meal to make a healthy and nutritious sauce for the rice. Dhal costs about 90 rupees/kg, so this would cost 180 rupees = £2.57.
Biscuits for a snack after school. Three rupees for a packet of 11 biscuits and each child would eat three biscuits. So 186 biscuits needed = 17 packets = 51 rupees = 73p. Other after-school snacks could be tiffin, rather like our Bombay mix with dried peas, peanuts and different grains. Or green dhal - boiled mung beans, or chickpeas. Grown locally so reasonably 'cheap'
Sweets as an occasional treat. 45 rupees for 100 sweets. So each sweet is 0.45 rupee each x 62 = 28 rupees = 40p.
Fish and meat are out of the question, but protein powder is made from nuts and different kinds of grain. This costs 35 rupees/kg = 50p; they would need 3kg a week (£1.50) and this could be mixed into the sambal and would also thicken it.
As a change from boiled rice for breakfast every morning they would like to occasionally give idli - a kind of steamed rice cake, or uppama - a grain like wheat that can be made into a kind of porridge. Uppama flour costs 42r/kg = 60p, Aashirvaad flour is 36r/kg = 51p and there is also roasted rava, which is like semolina. The most nutritious grains such as ragi and jola are too expensive.
For the evening rice they just want something to give it taste or variety -such as pickle or dried vegetables, although fresh would obviously do them more good. I did suggest frying some onions, garlic, chillis and/or spice in oil which would give a very strong flavour to stir into the rice, but oil is 139 rupees / litre = £1.99, so far too expensive to use.
They receive 10,000 rupees from the Diocese each month (£142.86) which is spent mainly on rice. It also has to pay for water in the dry season, electricity and bottled gas for cooking, repairs, the septic tank to be emptied, the cooks and the girl who looks after the children's wages etc.
These children are getting the best education and children at our Boardings are always top of their classes and can go onto college etc. The Sisters also run nursing/teaching colleges. When they qualify, to ‘pay back’ the cost of their education, teachers have to work for us for three years and nurses four. This they are happy to do as it also gives them ‘work experience’ enabling them to get much better jobs.
Other costs
We would really like the children to have school uniforms. Not as vital as a good diet you may think, but the children are very conscious that they are not the same as the other children in the school. Cost for two sets of uniform (they have one plain and one checked) for each child is 300 rupees = £4.28.
Play equipment - just a cricket set, some balls, skipping ropes, Frisbees and such like.
Medical costs - Sr. Stella treats at least 25 children each day, mainly for various infections as well as the normal cuts and grazes. This will decrease rapidly once the children's diet improves.
Toiletries - toothbrushes are 10 rupees each =14p. Toothpaste 50r (71p) for a very big 200g tube. Soap 18 rupees (2.5p) per bar.
Children's backgrounds
Most are abandoned. It is very common for children to be abandoned due to poverty or when a woman remarries. If your husband dies or leaves you, there is no council housing, social security etc. So many remarry and it is very unusual for the husband to take on her children as well.
Such is the case with Raja and his two brothers. His two brothers are younger than him and so are at Paravai. This is a refuge that the Sisters run near Madurai.
It takes in abandoned/widowed/disabled/destitute women and gives them a small home. They look after four or five orphaned or abandoned babies and young children. When the children are five, they then come to one of the orphanages/boardings.
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| Meena and Asha were found living at a local train station and begging for food. A child sponsorship scheme has been set up at Karisalpatti to feed the children and pay for their schooling. |
Death of the mother in childbirth is also common, so some of the children here have a father who is unable to look after them and work. Such is the case with Kaunal, who has a little sister at Paravai.
The day that I visited, whilst we were sitting around the table trying to work out how much it would cost to give all the children an egg a week etc. a lady came to the door. She had come to fetch Kaunal as his father had been killed the previous evening. He had been working in the forests and when travelling home in the back of a lorry, a bolt had come undone and he fell out, landing on his head. Being the only son, Kaunal will have to carry out the funeral which will include having his head shaved and staying with the pyre for ten days afterwards. He is only seven.
We help the women's refuge at Malur and four orphanages/boardings - Kodai Kanal, Munnar, Maski and Thangachimadam. Bellary is now supported by the huge number of children who pay to go to the school there. Thangachimadam has been very generously supported by St. Loy's School for many many years, but we now need to add Karisalpatti to the list.
All of the children at all of these places are there for very good reasons. Even the children at Karisalpatti are so lucky because there are so many who have been turned away due to lack of space and finance.
So how to raise the money?
Penny pots. These have been very successful in the past. Just asking people to collect all their pennies for us. In a school with even just a couple of hundred children, it mounts up to a large amount. We need to get more schools, organisations, even businesses as well as individuals to collect for us.
Direct debits? In the twenty years I have been working for the children in India I have never directly asked for money. I ask the children to collect pennies if they would like to and when I give talks I ask for a donation to the charity rather than for a speaker's fee.
I don't like these 'Please give us £3 a month adverts' as by the time they have paid for the advertisement, staff, offices, overheads and other costs etc. etc. etc. how much money actually gets to where it is supposed to go to?
We are different in that we promise that every single penny given goes to the children - there are no overheads either in the UK or in India. All volunteers pay their own expenses and we also cover the cost of bank transfers, accountancy fees etc.
So if someone is willing to give £2.57 a month, that pays for 2kg of lentils. Or £3.10 a month would give all the children at Karisalpatti an egg. We encourage people to give to a specific project so that they have their 'own children' and can receive updates and newsletters.
Similarly if they wanted to pay for school uniforms for example, the money could easily be allocated thus. By having a direct debit they would only have to authorise their bank once and the projects could have a regular income.
By signing a Gift Aid form we can also claim another 25p for each £1 given, back from the tax-man!
Visit our website for more information and to see lots of photos of the various projects: www.childrenunited.btck.co.uk
If you have any suggestions to help us we would love to hear from you!
Please write to:-
Children United!
35, Derwent Crescent
Kettering
Northants
NN16 8UH
Or email: indiacu@talk21.com
Our registered charity number is:
1098864
Our bank details are:
Barclays Bank Kettering
Acc. name: Children United
Acc. no: 10941735
Sort code: 20-45-81
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