He tirelessly visits school classes in his town and talks to the students and teachers about India, Sarnath and BSS. Obviously, he does so with a lot of heart and conviction, because it has resulted in amazing funds being raised in Etne.

Last year, they raised enough money to buy BSS a school bus and this year they will contribute half the cost of the daily meals BSS provides to its 220 students.

Geir makes sure the school children in Etne understand the huge impact their support is having on the Indian students’ lives. He will visit BSS again in March to report back on the progress being made and how his community can continue to help.

BSS sends the teachers, school children and other supporters in Etne a very big and heartfelt Thank You.

The children who are in age group of 6-14 years must not roam on roads and streets but they must be seen in the school premises. A school going child should not work as porter on railway stations, as domestic servants in houses, as servants in hotels and shops, the girl child should not remain in houses to look after the siblings, helping parents in house chores and lending help in agriculture fields. In fact, a school going age child should remain in the school with cheerful mind and should study and play.

The children of disadvantaged groups and disabled children must be given special care in sending them to schools. Various studies have revealed that poverty can be reduced by sending the children to schools instead of sending them to work on wages. If a child is in the school then certainly, adults of his/her family will get work from where the child used to work. Thus adults will get employment and comparatively more wages than the children. It is also found that when the child of family goes for work then, adults of that family generally sit idle and the wages earned by the children are ill spent by their family. The employers prefer to engage children on work rather than adults so that they have to pay less wages to children. In this way, the children are exploited by the employers.

So, it becomes the duty of parents, teachers, educational administrators and society at large that school going age child should not remain at work site or out of school for any other reason but in neat and clean atmosphere of the schools. The Child herself/himself cannot ensure this environment. It needs to be watched by parents, teachers, community and educational administrators that child should not leave the school in between due to any reason. The child once admitted in school should remain, there till he/she completes the schooling. Thereafter, quality education becomes right of the child. To ensure this, every stakeholder should participate in the mission as detailed below :

Teacher should ensure enrolment and retention of the child in the school through quality education and enriched environment.

Community /Parents should cooperate at each stage in learning processes of the child.

Educational Administrators should develop, design and ensure implementation of the strategies specifically: teacher availability, teacher competence and teacher motivation shall be ensured so that they impart quality education to children.

Local leaders have sought an inquiry into the incident as the police appear to be siding with the upper caste girl’s family and the teacher.

MeriNews | Read the Full Story

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

I met Rajan and Sukhdev 2 year ago after a small crisis in my own life. Through my dear friend Mattia I was introduced to the family, and hardly knew them, yet, I was instantly treated like one of them, they took me into their home into their life and into their hearts. I remember Sukhdev telling me never to say thank you as it was an insult, thank you is for strangers….family needs no thank you. I recall endless stories of struggle and that the couple endured in order to be together, in order to live their dreams, and in order to help others. There’s is a marvellous tale of the potential to be generous and the ability to change the lives of others.

Sometimes when I tell the story of their lives I feel like I’m exaggerating because there is such inherent beauty in it that it sounds to good to be true and yet it is all fact.

Risking a love marriage in a part of India that still extols arranged marriage Rajan was disowned by her family and friends. Alone in the world left only only with her precious Sukhdev she never looked back and stood in the shadows of her own sorrow, but rather rejoiced in her great love and dedicated her time and energy to helping others, rather than worrying for herself. A teacher by training Rajan once a resident of the booming Calcutta upper middle class came to one of the poorest regions in the country known as Uttar Pradesh in a town called Sarnath. There she began teaching the poorest of the local children for free. What started as a simple act of generosity soon burgeoned into a life long project. Through word of mouth…something that moves faster then the speed of light in the beggar towns of India, Rajan teachings became heralded throughout the village. Shortly thereafter she was teaching children on her front lawn……and letter moved into a small flat where she began an official free school for untouchable children, while Sukhdev opened a small local restaurant to support the family.

As time has passed the school became more then a place of simple education for a few children and transformed into a house of learning for over 100 hundred needy students. A place were paucity turned into opportunity and starvation satisfied by the school’s healthy meals metamorphosed into a thirst for knowledge that Rajan continued to nurture. In living amongst Rajan and her school for over two months, I can honestly say she is the closest thing I know to a living saint. She is humble, kind, and full of life. She gives as though she has an endless receptacle of energy and yet accepts hardly anything in return. I remember how completely she would insist I buy her nothing not even simple commodities like shampoo and soup if I used them, the only thing she would readily receive would be joy. She simply gives and gives and loves.

I am sure the Buddha is smiling at her and upon her hundreds of children. I am honoured to know Rajan and her family.

Heather Mason