Around 900 children live in Paravour village near Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu, southern India. These children live in houses without running water or toilets, some built of mud. Their kitchens are open fires outside. Without a good education many are destined to continue living this way. 

In 2014 we agreed to raise £55,000 for the Lotus Flower Trust to build a nursery and primary school to give these children a better start. Just £55k is enough to build a 6 room school large enough to educate 120 children in the first year and growing to 300 in future.  The school will teach in English to help the children get into better further education and improve their future job prospects. We hope to raise enough money to buy computers to help them even more.

Now, in October 2015 a group of 12 of us from the UK are lucky enough to have come to India to help decorate the school and see what the donations so far have achieved. 

Words or pictures cannot adequately describe our experience. The children are bright and keen to learn; they deserve so much better than they have.

Some of our group arranged to bring 150 pairs of shoes; the look on the children's faces when they tried them on was magical. Every day more and more children and their mothers have come to the school site to see us and thank us.

The K.M. Johnny Memorial School will open to its first students in June 2016. At the moment it is one storey but it has been built to allow another floor to be added later, allowing more children to join the school. The cost for that second floor is only £25,000, a relatively small sum to give another 150 children a better start.

The long term dream is to also build a middle school and high school to allow the children of Paravour and nearby villages to get the sort of education we take for granted in Europe. If our posts and wittering has touched you please donate. As we've hopefully shown, even small amounts make a big difference.

www.lotusflowertrust.org

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