United churches of Kakinada
“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! Psalms 133:1”
Kakinada has a large Christian association which was immediately offended when one of their properties was suffering damages without proper work. They took to the streets and protested the unfair land grabbing or land selling of their school property. PIL was filed in the high court against the conveynor of the Canadian Baptist mission, who sold the land and against the man who demolished a construction. The Alumni association filed the complaint, along with my mother, who advanced the whole procedure.
The court ruled in favor of the alumni association, the conveynor and the man who demolished the building were arrested and charged to pay for the damages doen to the property. The school and the land attached to it are to be taken over by the alumni association. The alumni association, has requested my mother to take over the Governance of the school. This suddenly turned in favor of my dream. If my mother was going to run a school, a school for girls, this was the perfect opportunity for me to start an inclusive education practice here.
Inclusive education was, as I realized, the lack in most easily accessible schools. Children that were trained Nambikkai Nilayam, were able to pick up simple arithematics, understand concepts and even speak a few meaningful words. Indian schools have two streams, one mainstream education where you have a choice of state syllabus, central board of secondary education, Council of Indian school certificate, along with, International syllabus. But when it came to special education, the children only had access to divyangjan schemes, and sarva siksha abhiyan schools, apart from a few private NGOs that provide affordable services. This has been a burden for me. What happens after the parents are trained, and the children are ready to learn in a wider group setting? Who is going to train these children? The school take over came at a good time in life or so I thought.
Another concern was, empowering women, single women, single mothers, and marginalized women in the urban poor sector. I thought the best way to provide integration was to provide shadow teachers for every child that needs special care. These shadow teachers need not be highly qualified, as long as they are fast learner and are willing to spend time with the child they have to take care of. Initially the burden would be high to pay for all the staff, but that will be taken care of by fundraising and from the school fees from the rest of the children.
I wondering if was doing any justice if I was thinking of empowering women without talking about the future men of our society, or the most overlooked population in the feminist trend of that time. The little boys! The goal was to allow leadership skills in environment where these boys have strong, empathetic role models. The role models apart from helping them learn a sport or an art would also teach them to behave in a way that will challenge their way of breaking down traits of toxic masculinity. Dr Urvashi Sahni had already been doing wonderful work with this group in Lucknow, UP.
After I had contacted her, I knew I had o start something soon, but the Covid pandemic at that time postponed the acquisition on the school and the damages that were to be repaired by the defaulters was also postponed.
I had already shared all that was happening with my church and my friends. With their help I was still able to hold on to my dreams. I had written down what my motto was going to be. What my three main goals were to be. I had written them down, rewritten them and the spoken about them to various people and gotten inputs. I was ready to start my journey.