In April, Rajan traveled with her family to San Francisco to receive the Unsung Heroes of Compassion award from Wisdom in Action, a California-based nonprofit. HH Dalai Lama was the honored guest at a reception of 500 people who came to pay respect to the 49 awardees.

As supporters and friends, we all know how incredible Rajan is. And now HH Dalai Lama has also acknowledged her—not in Sarnath where he sometimes passes right in front of BSS—but all the way in California!

In April, Rajan traveled with her family to San Francisco to receive the Unsung Heroes of Compassion award from Wisdom in Action, a California-based nonprofit. HH Dalai Lama was the honored guest at a reception of 500 people who came to pay respect to the 49 awardees. These amazing people were selected because “they have set the course of their hearts toward truth and love. In doing so, they have become beacons, lanterns, mentors, inspirations and exemplars for us all. “

HH Dalai Lama reminded the audience that just as these 49 people were doing extraordinary work, we can all do something, and we can start right now. We may not reap the fruits in our lifetimes, but we can choose to work from the heart and contribute to making and being the change we all know the world needs.

Since returning from the ceremony, Rajan says that she has never felt more peaceful. She feels that she has even more strength and energy to teach and inspire her BSS children. With the size of the task she has taken on, we know she will use this fresh vigor well.

Our deepest congratulations to you, Rajan!

The Buddha’s Smile School was founded by Rajan Kaur Saini and her husband Sukhdev Singh Saini. Rajan was from Calcutta, and Sukhdev was from Mumbai. They met and fell in love while Sukhdev was studying in Calcutta. After they finished college, they got married against their parent’s wishes — which in most of Indian society means a lifetime of exile from the family. They moved to Varanasi, a place where neither of them knew anybody, and began their new life. Rajan found a job teaching in a local private school, but they were poor, and lived in one of Varanasi’s poorer neighborhoods. When Rajan came home in the evening, she found many poor street children who had no access to education, and she began teaching them in her front yard. Eventually, they reconciled themselves with Sukhdev’s parents, who helped them buy a small home across the street from the Tibetan Institute in Sarnath. Sukhdev started a chai stall, which grew into a small cafe, serving a diverse menu and geared towards the tastes of the Tibetans and foreigners who are studying at the Institute. Rajan left her job, and began teaching impoverished children on the ground floor of her home full time, supported by Sukhdev’s cafe. She hired a rickshaw driver to pick up the beggar children, and bring them to her home (it is amazing how many children can fit into an Indian rickshaw), but after a few months, she was running out of money to pay the rickshaw man. At that time, a young Fulbright scholar who was studying in Varanasi walked into their cafe. She was sick, exhausted and homesick, and like us, soon found herself adopted into Rajan and Sukhdev’s family. With the help of one of her professors, she found additional funding from the USA to support the school. Today the school has increased in size — serving over 200 children every day, all in ground floor of Rajan & Sukhdev’s very modest home.

I am not a school teacher, and I happened to be down with a cold the day my friend visited the school, so I can’t report my own impressions too far — except to say that the children are well dressed (thanks to a donation of winter clothes from a visiting philosophy professor from Iowa who, by some strange coincidence, I believe I met a few weeks earlier in Delhi), well behaved (even when they are sitting 50 children in a classroom not much bigger than an American classroom’s closet), and seem genuinely excited about learning. Imagine coming from a place where your highest aspiration might be to be a beggar or a day laborer earning starvation wages — and coming to a school where you are fed, clothed, and given access to knowledge and education. Rajan fights to keep these children in school. She walks in their slums and convinces their parents that the sacrifice of a few hours of their children’s time will pay off for them. She teaches the children not to beg, but to give. She is doing what I don’t yet know how to do — giving all of herself to serve others. I don’t know how much of her teaching works, but I do know that her two beautiful little daughters tore apart their home to find gifts to give us. Of course, when I have some money (which I don’t have right now, but that is a story for another day) I will give as much of it as I can to support Rajan’s school. I guess I hope that a few of my brave friends who have read this far into this blog will consider doing the same. I know that in Varanasi, even a small amount of money will go a long way. Rajan is the Ghandi or MLK that her little neighborhood in Varanasi needs to stand itself up. I am not convinced that a foreigner can really make such a difference on their own — but by supporting the genuine jewels like Rajan, I do believe we can began to make a dent.

There is one last piece of this story that I’ve been saving, in part because I do not know how to write about it, because it is too horrible. Rajan had a young woman working as a teacher at her school named Sangita. Last year, Sangita had an arranged marriage, and left the school. She gave birth to a baby. Four months later, she caught fire in the kitchen, and she must have burned, according to the doctors, for half an hour. All of her in-laws were home, but none of them helped her — until at last she called her brother to come help her. She was taken to a public hospital, where her sister attended to her day and night, since there was no nurse to change her bandages. Her entire body was covered with 3rd degree burns. Her in-laws refused to help with her hospital bills or give blood, but her family and Rajan gave blood, and visited Sangita in the hospital every day. Her Australian volunteer friend raised money back home, and was able to move her from the public hospital to a private hospital, where there were nurses, and antibiotics to keep her infections down. She suffered for almost a month. Again, I was not able to go see her, in part due to my own fear, in part due to a miscommunication with my friend, and in part due to my cold, but I will quote my friend’s description. It is worth adding that my friend worked as an EMT on an ambulance for 10 years before returning to school to become a teacher, and has seen all manner of medical emergencies — and should not be someone who has to worry about fainting. She came back from the hospital cold, and told me that she had never seen anything like this. She wrote:

22 days after she was burned, her face was black with 22-day-old, 3rd degree burns. Her lips and nose no longer resembled lips and nose, and her face appeared to be covered by a halloween mask. Her eyes were the only thing that let me know she was human. Two of her fingers on her left hand were burned so badly that all that remained was blackened bone. She was shivering uncontrollably, and looked to be in horrible pain. I am ashamed to say that when I walked into her hospital room and looked at her face I immediately felt nauseous and dizzy. I had to go into the next room and sit down to stop myself from fainting.

Sangita died a few days after I left Varanasi. She told the police that she did know what happened — that she had caught fire accidentally — but human bodies don’t burn for half an hour without some very strong additions of fuel. The fact that her in-laws & husband were at home when she caught fire, and that they never came to visit or offered to help her in the hospital, strongly implies that Sangita was the victim of the all too common practice of dowry burning. Her in-laws almost certainly doused her with kerosene, and then lit her on fire, in hopes of killing her so that her husband could remarry — and perhaps receive another dowry. Her refusal to implicate them in her death may have something to do with the fact that they sill have her four month old son. According to my Sen & Dreze book, there are thousands of these burnings every year in India — the vast majority go unreported. Sen & Dreze also argue that the attention paid to burnings — and the rare practice of sati (throwing a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre) — distract somewhat from the larger problem of pervasive oppression of women in north Indian society. Certainly the violence that can be directed at women, as in the case of Sangita, helps enforce their bondage. Again, I am left feeling helpless, and wondering what to do. Again, I feel that Rajan shows a path, albeit a small one, out of this darkness. I will do what I can to support her on her mission. I hope some of you will too.

Forrest Fleischman

Here is a excerpt:

Dream in Sarnath: Buddha’s Smile School

by Vanessa Turner

I have seen miracles in action here and hope our dreams will come true.

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 beset many of the local poor in the area of Ashapur, Sarnath, and the larger city of Varanasi. 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 and malnutrition that you can see the cracks in their bones and the outline of the skeleton frame against their dry and pallid skin. Many have swollen stomachs, 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 restaurant 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, as encouraged by my 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 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 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.

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.

You can download and read the rest of the article here.

Mattia Silvani

My name is Mattia and I have recently spent time teaching Sanskrit at Buddha’s Smile School. Despite my broken Hindi, the small students actually listened to the lessons with interest. The children memorized Sanskrit verses and made an effort to learn the first steps in the language.

Rajan is providing a rare opportunity for these children, to acquire an education that their background would normally not afford them.

At the time when I was teaching, the facilities were limited. I used to teach Sanskrit to about fourteen children, but in the classes there were at least another ten, since they had no other place to stay during pauses. To my surprise, even some of the children who were sitting there in ‘stand-by’ mode, had been attentive enough to memorize a few verses. They were also quite eager to repeat them aloud.

Sanskrit and Hindi are quite close, and the students had no great difficulty in picking up a very precise pronunciation. Of all the activities, they seemed to enjoy memorization and chanting, and Rajan included some of the salutations to Ganesa (the god that removes obstacles) to their morning prayer.

Knowing some Sanskrit opens up an immense storehouse of traditional knowledge, which is often far from the reach of even many Indians. More immediately, chanting the verses puts the children, and whomsoever can hear their enthusiastic renditions, in touch with a sense of very enjoyable, cheerful sacredness. I often wondered who else will have a chance to hear these Sanskrit verses: probably their parents and relatives will be amused to hear their small kids bring home what usually only trained professional priests can.

I am not sure as to whether any of the children will go much further with the Sanskrit, but who knows? Anyhow, they seem to enjoy it. This rich language has been one of the favoured idioms of culture in India for millennia: they should access and carry some Sanskrit to their lives, if they so wish.

Mattia Salvini
Ph.D.candidate and Part Time Lecturer
Dept. Of Study of Religions
SOAS University of London

Sukhdev was a pure and honest man, but his family’s religious background differed slightly from Rajan’s, so both sets of parents ardently forbade the relationship. Nonetheless, Rajan chose her true love for Sukhdev over the economic and social pressures inflicted upon her by her family.

After completing her B.A. in Education and English from Calcutta University in 1993, she and Sukhdev married and moved to Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. Rajan immediately got a job teaching at a prestigious public school in Varanasi. But after her teaching day ended she would return to their small flat in Ashapur, the poorest and most troubled part of Varanasi. There Rajan would open up her front yard to the nearby beggars’ children, who were not attending school, and teach them reading, writing, and mathematics.

Thanks to donors like Amistad International, Rajan has been able to increase the size of her free school for underprivileged children. Two hundred children are now receiving their education in a warm, loving, and nurturing environment. Rajan is also able to provide snacks and occasional meals for the hungry children. Thanks to Amistad some of the students even have uniforms so that they do not have to attend school in rags and bare feet, giving them pride in themselves and their education.

The students’ parents are rickshaw drivers, sweepers, cow dung collectors, or weavers who are paid well below the minimum daily requirement to live and survive. Many children still beg at the brutal command of their desperate parents, who threaten to beat and even kill them if they do not return with money for dinner.

Many students have come to school with horror stories of dead relatives, brothers, sisters, mothers, who either fell sick from hunger and disease or simply died from cold in the winter or from heat in the sweltering summers. The poorest children have learned to catch rats and snakes and cook them in a fire without even spices or other flavouring, just so that they do not die of starvation.

Vanessa Turner