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APPEALS
Buddha's Smile School
An open letter from a student of B. Alan Wallace
Dear friends,
Thank you so much for your active involvement in garnering the funds
necessary to support and expand Rajan's school for underprivileged children in
Sarnath, India. Alan suggested that I give you some information on this charity
as well as the logistics, history, etc.
First, let me begin by saying that until I saw it with my own eyes, I had no
conception of the intensity of the poverty, destitution, and sheer starvation
that many of the local poor in this area of Ashapur, Sarnath, and the larger
city of Varanasi are beleaguered with. The suffering here is so prevalent it is
almost nightmarish. I have seen far too many beggars' children, age five and
below, walking barefoot and nude under the scorching Indian sun, their bodies so
emaciated and ruined by hunger andmalnutrition that you can see the cracks in
their bones and the outline of the skeleton frame against their dry and pallid
skin. Many of them have the swollen stomach, a sign of severe malnutrition, and
these sights have become so mundane and banal to the local affluent (upper
caste) people of this area as to become inconsequential to those who are not
affected by such poverty. The lack of attention and sheer humanity to this
epidemic of childhood poverty and mortality among the shudra, or untouchable
caste of Uttar Pradesh (the larger state within which Sarnath and Varanasi are
couched) is truly astounding to me, for I cannot understand how any human being
could bear to walk past a starving young child and not even feel a minor pang of
sympathy and an almost innate impulse to pick them up and carry them to a
restaraunt and feed them for the mere forty rupees (one US dollar) it takes.
Now the situation of the shudra castes in this district is much more severe
than many other areas in India. The caste system, though ostensibly outlawed by
the Indian government years ago, is acceded to religiously by the locals of
Uttar Pradeshian society, and their glaring lack of concern for the increasing
number of starving, dying children in the poorer areas of Varanasi is simply
tragic.
I became involved in Buddha's Smile School for Underprivileged Children after
meeting Rajan only a month into my stay in Sarnath. I am here on a Fulbright
scholarship to study Tibetan and Sanskrit and Buddhism, as encouraged by my
Lamas and other teachers, including Alan Wallace and his inspirational wife and
my Sanskrit teacher, Vesna. Meeting Raj and her family was like finding a
diamond cluster of jewels amidst the rubbish of a narrow-minded society of
self-involved people. I was immediately taken by her warmth and open-mindedness,
her gentleness and her kindness to me. I was also homesick and confused, and she
and her family immediately accepted me as a part of their family and insisted I
take my every meal with them and their family of husband, wife, and two very
young adorable daughters, ages 7 and 2. Our karmic bond and the uncanny feeling
of familiarity that we shared led me to believe that it was no accident that I
had become so instantly close with this exceptional Indian family, the kind of
people who always invited the Rickshaw walas and other beggars and poor locals
to their home for chai and food, who would not kill even the smallest insect if
it crawled on their floor, who kept a hidden shrine with a statue of Vajrasattva
and a picture of Manjushri and HH the Dalai Lama. I felt that I had met a
bonafide family of Bodhisattvas.
Getting to know Raj even better, I soon became aware of her great mission and
current project, a recently-started free school for underprivileged beggar
children in the surrounding area that would provide a comprehensive education
covering Nursery school to Grade Five, giving them hope and encouragement for a
brighter future, opening their young minds and stimulating their innate
creativity, teaching them to think critically and to always question everything,
to learn the ways of the previous great thinkers of India's past, such as Gandhi
and Mother Theresa. The children born in these unfortunate positions grow up
with the unquestioned assumption that they are worthless, that they will never
rise up from their dejected states of poverty and constant hunger, that they too
would be consigned to a life of carrying bricks for thirteen hours a day at two
rupees a day, a life of begging or prostitution, or a life of fear and constant
distress. Rajan made the comittment to herself to begin this school after she
moved from the more modern and thriving city of Calcutta to the small district
of Varanasi with her newly-wed husband, Sukhdev. At that time she was working as
a teacher in a local public school (by the way, Indian public schools are all
tution based and are a privilege afforded only the affluent and wealthier
families of India who can afford the often exhorbitant tuition costs demanded by
these money-making institutions. Thus, education becomes a commodity for the
wealthy, rather than a universal right for all, as it is in the United States.).
Rajan and her husband began their new life in a very humble way, living in a
small one-roomed flat in the poor village of Ashapur, the well-known abode of
the beggars' colonies where many of the poorest people live in shacks or huts
and where the constant threat of starvation is as common as the mosquito in
humid summers. Seeing the light and joy in the eyes of the young children in the
small community, Rajan began dedicating every afternoon to teaching the local
children in the front yard of her flat, tutoring them and teaching them how to
read and write Hindi and English. Pretty soon, word of Rajan's selfless deed
spread and within a few weeks, she was literally flooded with children and their
thin young mothers begging Rajan to tutor their children as well so that they
would have the opportunity to escape the trap of their own predicament in the
future. Unable to bear their requests, Rajan acceded, until she had one hundred
small beggar children in her front lawn and was unable to atend to them all, nor
even afford to sponsor them to get the essentials such as notebooks and pencils,
or even to feed them when they began to cry out in hunger during class. At that
point Rajan and her husband made a plan to move to the nearby city of Sarnath
and open up a small restaurant there, for which Rajan' s husband would have to
take out a huge loan from the bank. They struggled for two years to make ends
meet, and Rajan even opened up a small public school that took fees in order to
support their family in the new town. But Rajan had already become quite famous
in the beggars' colonies throughout Varanasi, a kind of saint for the children.
She was soon flooded with beggars camping out on her new doorstep and pleading
with her to reinstate her unofficial tutoring for their children. It was then
that Rajan enlisted the help of her husband and some local friends and actually
opened a Government of India accredited "free school" for the underprivileged
children of the local area. It was small at first, and held in her gated front
yard adjacent to the family's small restaurant. There were thirty students and
over three hundred on the waiting list. To expand the school required money for
bus transportation to pick up and drop off the children from and to their
village of Ashapur, the poorest village in all of Varanasi. Also, many of the
children would come to school famished and weakened by prolonged hunger and lack
of proper hygeine, and had difficulty concentrating on the class. So Rajan had
to raise enough money to pay for daily free lunches for the children in order to
revitalize and replenish their young bodies. In addition, there was money needed
for textbooks, pencils, notebooks, and school uniforms. Once I came, we put our
heads together and emailed a bunch of organizations. Thanks to the help of Vesna
and Alan Wallace, we were able to enlist the support of Amistad International,
and this enabled us to provide all of those things and to increase the school to
a number of 130 children, ranging in ages from 3 to 12 years old. Two more
teachers were hired and the donations from Amistad provided enough for small but
healthy daily meals, transportation (that is, three small vans), two teachers'
salaries, text books, uniforms, and other necessities. I watched in awe as the
children blossomed before my eyes. These children, once withered and emaciated
by hunger and despair, their young faces already evidencing the signs of worry
and aging, their small frail bodies with cracked skin and wrinkles around their
brows, now glowed again with renewed joy and began to resemble ordinary
children, rather than serious little adults. They say that there is no sweeter
sound than that of a child's innocent laughter. Rajan gave them so much
nurturing and love, and began to excite and stimulate their young minds in ways
that no one had ever done before. She teaches a compendium of subjects including
English, Hindi, Math, Science,General Education, Art, Dance, Creative Writing,
Social Studies, even Sanskrit!. Later she wants to also include music courses
for the children as well.
But the reason things have become so exigent is that we recently received a
sudden email from the Amistad International president, who sadly informed us
that their primary sponsor who had been our main source of monthly income had
recently been wiped out of funds and that after September (this present month),
all monthly support would come to an end. This left Rajan and thus myself
frantic and I have had to ditch some of my classes at school to do work on the
internet and appeal to organizations, and to no avail. At last we were both so
worried that we would have to suddenly close down Rajan's school that I sent a
last desperate email to Alan Walace, begging him to "do something" in order to
save Rajan's school from destruction. Rajan had also quit her own job and closed
her other public school in order to work full-time for Buddha's Smile
School.
I have seen miracles in action here and so I think that through the blessings
of the Buddhas our dreams will come true. I myself never imagined that I would
have become so centrally engrossed in such a cause. It was not under my control.
It was my karma. I have a karmic responsibility to help Rajan and her school and
I feel that it is a mission of fate. I hope that this letter has not been too
long and gruelling for you. There is much more information and I will have Rajan
email you herself with some photographs of her school and her children, both
before and after shots, as well as her school brochure.
Thank you for taking interest in helping Rajan's dream. My gut feeling is
that this is no ordinary dream. I see Rajan as the modern heroine of Uttar
Pradesh, a future Mother Theresa of sorts, to help extricate the children of the
poorest castes here from the seemingly inextricable trap of economic and social
suffrage.
Thank you,
Vanessa Turner
Fulbright student
University
California Santa Barbara
Student of B. Alan Wallace
You can send a tax-deductible checks made out to "Clear Light Sangha",
designating the donation for the Buddha's Smile School, via the Clear Light
Sangha treasurer:
Carol Levy
Clear Light
Sangha Treasurer
7275 SW Leslie St.
Portland OR 97223
She will then send moneygrams to Sarnath to support the school.
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