It all started when I accepted an invitation to hike to a village in the Himalayan foothills last summer. I was doing an internship with Engineering Ministries International (EMI) last summer and I had the chance to spend one and a half glorious weeks in Mussoorie, the town where EMI's office was located.
One Saturday, my fellow intern Matt invited me to visit a remote village called Jordi, where his roomate Satbir, a local missionary, was teaching English at a school. Delighted at the prospect of meeting and playing with kids, I enthusiastically agreed. What I imagined to be a leisurely stroll turned into a 3 mile hike on a steep forest trail my sandals were completely unprepared for. (That was, and still is Satbir's daily commute from Mussoorie, where he lives). We arrived just in time to share a brief but precious time of prayer with the school teachers, before kids started arriving from 4-5 neighboring villages to begin 'classes'.
You might ask, why are village kids subjected to 'classes' on Saturday? Well, Saturday classes weren't quite like the math, science or English language curriculum taught during the week. Saturday was a morning devoted to teaching the Bible. I got to share with the students and teachers about God's greatness through song and testimony. We sang and danced about the stars in the sky, and the great animals that God created. I'd love to imagine that they paid as much attention to all their other classes, as they did that day! I remember their hysterical giggles as we played "Big Wind Blows" (sort of like musical chairs) and as I grabbed the hands of little schoolgirls and danced their Gharwalli folk dance together (them leading, of course). It was absolutely enchanting.
Looking into the fullness of their twinkling eyes and wide grins, I forgot their lives were devoid of electricity, running water, basic health care, and education (before the school). Most of their families rely on manual labor in the fields and buffalo milk to earn a meager livelihood. As much as they yearned for a better future for their childre, they were absolutely unable to send their children to schools in nearby towns to get a good education, much less pool resources together to build a school. However, in 2007, having recently graduated from seminary, Satbir teamed up with a friend from the Himalayan Education Literacy Project (HELP) to start a school in Jordi Village. Together, they gathered enough support to build the first level of the school building, which dwarfs all the other dwellings in the village. However, construction stopped abruptly as they ran out of funds. Today, the second level of the building remains incomplete, causing rain water to leak through to the first level and classes to be cancelled whenever it rained. And it rains a lot there. A lot.
That got me thinking, is there anything I can do? ....
