Jeypore school children are experiencing something they didn’t have before: a chance at life. [Photo: Thomas Lloyd/Maranatha Volunteers International/ANN]
School children in the mountains of Orissa sat on the ground and ate with their hands. They now enjoy a cafeteria, complete with tables, chairs and utensils. [Photo: Thomas Lloyd/Maranatha Volunteers International/ANN]
You’ve got to really want to get there if you’re going to make the trip. It’s a long, winding road to get to the Jeypore Seventh-day Adventist school in Orissa, India, but once you arrive in the mountains of the Koraput District, you’ll find a region steeped in tribal customs.
Here, girls between the ages of 10 and 12 are typically married off, and some tribes in the more remote areas still sacrifice boys between ages 6 and 11, a ritual to appease the spirits. In these tribal villages, thousands of children have no hope for their futures. They are resigned to a life of malnutrition, poverty and neglect. Yet a Christian school is working to change this.
Building the Adventist school here was the brainchild of Helen Eager, director of Asian Aid, an organization that helps disadvantaged communities and sponsors children in Asia. But soon after the school opened in 1998, it was clear that the facilities weren’t adequate for the numbers of children who would attend. The school became overcrowded and conditions deteriorated.
“The children would come to us with their bellies swollen with malnutrition and worms, their hair full of lice, and many other skin problems,” says Nilmani Podal, nurse and girls’ dean. “We would treat them and they would get well for a time. But with all of them sleeping together crushed into the places where we’d try to teach them, as soon as one child got sick again, it would spread quickly through the others.”
In 2005, Garwin McNeilus, a Seventh-day Adventist businessman, and his wife, Marilee, contacted Asian Aid to offer help. “Garwin asked to see our top three or four most needy projects, and Jeypore was at the top of my list,” Eager explains. Asian Aid and the McNeilus family worked with Maranatha Volunteers International, an organization that builds needed churches and schools worldwide, to construct 11 new buildings and revamp two of the campus’s current buildings. Within 10 months, the new school was dedicated. Additional construction is already in the planning stages so the school can operate through grade 12.
“We had 370 boys and girls and all the teachers volunteer to carry rocks, carry the steel, pass the pans of concrete, dig ditches [and] lay sewer pipes,” says McNeilus. “You couldn’t stop them [from] helping.”
Before the new buildings were added, students and staff cooked and ate their meals outside. “The kids were squatting on the ground, eating just with their hands,” McNeilus explains. Now they have a nice, clean place to prepare their food. They have tables, plates. They didn’t have plates before.”
Students now enjoy a cafeteria, nice dorm rooms, and restroom and shower facilities. The children have mattresses to sleep on—something many of them had never seen before. The school offers computer classes, sewing, mechanics, carpentry, secretarial classes and more.
Each student’s tuition and boarding fees are funded by individual sponsorships through Asian Aid. “[You can have] a school, you can have the design, the building, [and] Maranatha builds it, but that ongoing, continued support until that child goes out that gate, that is the critical element,” says McNeilus.
The more than 550 students learn not only typical school subjects, but practical skills as well. “It’s extremely important that an institution be self-supporting,” says McNeilus. To that end, they also grow much of their own food. The trees that were planted produce food, and the school also maintains vegetable gardens and greenhouses.
The school’s primary goal is to teach children about God, but it also prepares children to be good citizens in their communities. McNeilus says that when children leave the school, he hopes they will support the Seventh-day Adventist Church. With nearly 1.2 million Adventist church members in India, education is crucial for the church in this country to become self-sustaining.
“Thirty years from now many of ... these children will become the leaders,” explains McNeilus. “They will be the [local church] president. They will be the pastor. They will be the lay leaders in their church. [They] will be trained to function in the various areas of the church. I see a complete change. The work will grow and this is how to really establish the church.”