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A Glimpse of the Niranjana Public Welfare School and Orphanage
by Tim Grubbs
The Niranjana Public Welfare School and Orphanage is located in Bodh Gaya, India, the town where the Buddha attained Enlightenment nearly 2500 years ago. The school educates more than 300 children, with more satellite schools being built in surrounding areas. Bodh Gaya is a bit of an oasis in India's most backward state, Bihar, and yet even as an oasis Bodh Gaya is a town with a significant portion of its population teetering on the edge of poverty. Siddhartha Kumar, the founder and director of Niranjana, grew up in Bodh Gaya and in his late teens moved to Calcutta to work. In Calcutta he volunteered with the Sisters of Mercy and met Mother Theresa, who suggested that he move back to Bihar to help children there. Siddhartha has done so, and with very little money and a lot of devotion and hard work, he has done remarkably well.
To give people who have never been to India an impression of Bihar is difficult. India alone can indeed seem brutal and bracing, yet when you visit really backward regions of the country the shock to your heart is all the more reverberating. Bihar to many forecasters is a land of hopelessness, a land where investment is rapidly leaving, a land in which all the tell-tale signs show but one thing, further decline. Yet we can help the children of Bihar see and feel hope. When I compare Niranjana to the nearby Gaya train station, a station that truly seems like a refugee camp, with hundreds of people living on platforms, using cardboard and newspaper for blankets, I feel like I am comparing different worlds, one a world of hardened despair, the other a world of hope.
Jill Hacker and I had the privilege of visiting Niranjana in the winter of 2005. We visited several of the surrounding villages and saw the great fruits of Siddhartha's tireless labors. He had just that month drilled a well that provided the locals access to clean water while also just completing the satellite school that would educate children too young for the 10 kilometer walk each way to Niranjana. Siddhartha showed such instinctive care and grace for the locals. These villages seemed to us like a step back in time. We saw many houses that were extremely basic, yet the children here seemed very proud and happy to have a school, to have a sense of hope and the possibility of change. The older children, ages 8 and up, walk for three or more hours a day simply to go to school.
The money that the DLRC raised for Niranjana was enough for Siddhartha to build an orphanage for eight to twelve children. In reality this orphanage is a simple brick room added to the roof, but to these children, many from the streets, this is a wonderful reprieve from lives we can but imagine. Now, with another $2,000 that the DLRC has manage to raise, Siddhartha has begun construction on a new orphanage that will take in more than sixty children. Siddhartha is busy at work and is sending us photos of his project.
I truly find it a blessing to be involved in such a worthy project. When I visit India I often experience a weighty necessity to do what I can to make the world a better place. Sometimes the problems seem so overwhelming, the needs utterly unquenchable. Yet over and over I have experienced seeing joy in the face of all adversity, human spirit strengthened and somehow triumphant against all odds. I believe Siddhartha is a Godsend, doing all he can in a place so desperately in need of many more like him. I pray that we can join together and, along with Siddhartha, make Bihar a bit more humane, a bit more like the world we dream to see--a world of hope, a world where dreams come true. Our help, however modest, can monumentally help many children's dreams come true. I am happy to say we are making a dramatic difference.
About Niranjana View Photos of the Niranjana School. A Letter Requesting Support
