Local Woman Takes Up A Far-Off Fight For Education In India

By Nancy K. Crevier

What comes out of loss can be a gain.

Debbie Holmes of Newtown lost two of her grandparents last year. She had been very close to both of them. The sad feelings lingered and in doing some soul searching, she realized she needed to reach out to others and get outside of herself in order to heal.

“I decided to take a trip, and I knew I wanted to do something to help others, but I wasn’t sure just what. I had always wanted to go to India because for some reason I thought it would be healing, and I just knew I wanted to go ‘off the map’ somehow. But I wasn’t sure how to go about it. It was just a kind of a thought I had,” said Ms Holmes.

While she was formulating what she needed to do, one night she and her husband, Dan, went out to dinner with friends who mentioned that their church, Greenfield Hills in Fairfield, was taking a group to India in January.

“It just seemed to work out perfectly,” Ms Holmes recalled, and she began to plan for the trip, what she called a “mission of compassion.”

The pastor of Greenfield Hills Church is the Reverend David Rowe. Rev Rowe founded Friends of Christ in India (FOCI) in 1983 to provide support for children in orphanages, to support education in some of the poorest segments of India, to support elderly housing, health care, and provide micro-loan programs. The January 2007 mission was to visit the Astrid Rowe Memorial High School (named after his mother) in Hyderabad, India’s third largest city, on the 25th anniversary of its founding, as well as to visit orphanages and other schools that are aided by FOCI.

As a former kindergarten teacher at Wooster School in Danbury, the education component of the mission made the trip even more appealing to Ms Holmes. “I was really excited to find out they were working with children,” she said.

“The Astrid Rowe High School started out as just a simple, wooden structure,” explained Ms Holmes, “and now is a brick building serving over 1,200 children. Before this school existed, the children in that area had never gone to school before.”

She left with seven other people from Fairfield County on January 7 on the journey that she feels brought her full circle again. But the trip was nearly aborted when a few weeks before the scheduled date of departure a routine breast exam came back suspicious. “I had to have a biopsy to determine if I had breast cancer. I wasn’t sure if I would make it to India,” said Ms Holmes.

As she was wheeled down the hospital hallway for the biopsy, breast cancer symbols painted on the floor spun past the wheels of the gurney. “I decided that if it turned out that I didn’t have to fight breast cancer, I would use that energy to fight for something else.”

The biopsy came back negative, but four days later, her husband’s father died unexpectedly. “I just wasn’t sure if I should go. So much had happened, but Dan was so supportive and encouraged me to just go. I’m so glad I did.”

In India, said Ms Holmes, nearly one-third of the population is migrant or day laborers. “These people live on the sidewalks and their children are rag-pickers, who go through garbage to find things to sell. They are the poorest of the poor.”

It is these poorest of the population that FOCI is reaching out to, said Ms Holmes, through a program started by an Indian man named T.L. Reddy. Creative Learning At Pavement, or CLAP, operates mobile schools for the children of the laborers. The structures, barely more than tents on sticks, said Ms Holmes, can easily be dismantled and moved when the migrants leave an area, or when the government bulldozes a site where the squatters are living.

“At first T.L. had a hard time convincing parents to let their children go to the school,” Ms Holmes said. “They need the children to do the rag-picking to support the family. It’s all they have.”

Disembarking the bus at one of the two CLAP schools operated by Mr Reddy in Hyderabad was an unsettling experience, said Ms Holmes. “First of all, you stick out because you are white. I didn’t think about how different we appeared. It’s a very surreal feeling to step from one world into another.”

The world she stepped into was one of abandoned children, children barely surviving, and adults who cannot provide for their families. They live at the edge of the street in rows of tents so sparsely constructed they can barely be called shelters. They are the bottom of the social system, uneducated, jobless, and forgotten by the government. “Most the time, in their society, they are ignored,” said Ms Holmes. Outside of a suitcase of picture books she had collected from friends and paper and crayons, the group had little to offer the families, yet, she said, “You could see how happy they were to have us there.”

Unlike many missions that take on physical labor erecting buildings or building water sources, the Greenfield Hills mission was more of an opportunity to raise awareness, said Ms Holmes. “A lot of what we were doing was giving people hope. These people don’t get any attention. People don’t walk into orphanages there and play with the kids, or hold their hands, or listen to them.”

In one of the CLAP tents, a structure no bigger than 10 by 10 feet sheltering at least 20 children of all ages, the students, who had hung their work around the room to show them, greeted the visitors excitedly. “When we arrived, they gave us flowers leis that they had made and threw flowers in our hair,” an experience that filled her heart, she said.

“My mother had asked me why I had to go so far away to fight for something, when there is so much right here in Newtown to fight for. And it’s true, I could fight for things here, but it doesn’t matter what you fight for, I thought, it matters that you put yourself out there.”

Because the children for the most part did not speak any English, Ms Holmes relied on a translator as she presented a small lesson on English to the classroom. Mostly, she said, it was more the holding of hands and the attention she paid to a child that held its own reward.

The group traveled to outlying rural communities, as well, where they visited other schools, orphanages, and elderly housing. “We visited a leprosy colony, where Habitat for Humanity, which Rev Rowe had been involved with, had built homes. Sometimes only one or two people in a family had leprosy, but because a leper is shunned and cannot live in the village, the whole family goes, too. I saw again how this was a mission of compassion. They get so few people who visit them or care.”

They also spent time at a hospital with a medical team that had traveled to India with FOCI to provide free operations. “I saw huge lines of people waiting at the hospital for help. Not everyone could be helped, though. Some of the medical problems were just beyond the scope of what the team could do. I felt so bad for them.”

Complicated Feelings

As the mother of 6-year-old twins, Hanna and Eli, and 10-year-old Lily, Ms Holmes could not help but compare the levels of appreciation between her own children and the children she met in India, and her lifestyle in America to the poverty she saw in Hyderabad. The experience was at times difficult to process.

“The flies, the smells, the heat, the poverty, the garbage, the animals in the streets — it all starts getting to you. I had to physically take a step back from the whole situation when we were at the CLAP school. I was feeling these really complicated feelings.”

While she “regrouped” she took pictures and sorted out her discomfort. “I turned around and saw a little boy with a package of papers and pencils and stickers we had handed out and he had the hugest smile on his face. All of a sudden it was clear why I was there. There are these moments we can give to people that can be hugely hopeful and give them something to cling to for a long time,” said Ms Holmes.

Another disconcerting moment came when visiting a girls’ hostel sponsored by FOCI. “I walked in with paper and crayons and we were swarmed. I mean we were absolutely mauled by the girls. I really was a little scared. I couldn’t believe the desperation for paper and a marker,” she recalled.

Ms Holmes returned to Newtown on January 19. “The stories to my family and friends come slowly,” she said. “There is so much to think about. It was harder to reacclimate than I expected. I mean, I don’t want to be one of those moms who harps at my kids to finish their meals, don’t waste paper, but sometimes it is hard when I know how little people in the world have. It is just too hard to comprehend if you haven’t actually seen it,” she said.

Her goal now is to raise funds to build another portable school for T.L. “He really inspired me. He’s stepping in where the government can’t. I had the feeling that T.L. is trying to plant a seed and even if it doesn’t take off with this generation, maybe these kids will understand the importance of education for their kids.”

Each portable school costs approximately $1,500 and Ms Holmes is presently trying to determine what kind of fundraiser she will sponsor to raise the money.

“I heard it over and over when I was with the FOCI group in India: ‘See a need, meet a need.’ I strongly feel, too, that if I don’t challenge myself to be braver and compassionate, I won’t raise children who are brave and compassionate.”

She has found the fight she wants to fight. Her losses have turned to gains, not only for herself, she hopes, but for others who are far less fortunate than she.