A school, a flood and an 84-yr-old nun who is always on the move ……Anahita Mukherji I TNN
Mangaon (Raigad): Its a sturdy pink-and white building with a computer lab, volleyball courts and classrooms painted with birds and animals. Not so long ago, this little school with a long name, Zainab Tobaccowala Secular High School, was a rickety shed that was almost washed away in the flood that pounded Goregaon village in Raigads Mangaon taluka.
The woman who turned it around is an 84-year-old nun. Sister Karuna Mary Braganza, who was awarded the Padma Shri this year after a lifetime spent in education and social work, still has an energy-packed schedule that makes even her young students dizzy. Apart from being the first Indian principal of Mumbais Sophia Colleg, it was she who founded the Sophia Polytechnic and the Sadhna School for the mentally-challenged. She has been twice-christened: Mary at birth, and Karuna (compassion) by the tribals in Jharkhand with whom she lived and worked for a decade.
Set up in 1985, the school is run by Uday Adhikari, 54, the chairman of the Secular Education Trust. The trust had been set up by his advocate father Chandrakant, whose dream it was to run an Englishmedium school for the children of the local farmers. Goregaon, like most of the villages huddled around it, is dirt poor, cultivates paddy and lives below the poverty line. Increasingly, the villagers are abandoning their tills for jobs in Mumbai. Girls as young as eight are sent to the city for housework.
By 2005, advocate Chandrakant Adhikaris efforts at grassroots education were in danger of crumbling. During the stormy monsoon, the school was submerged under nine ft of water. It was the same story for the next two years as well. We suffered losses of Rs 12.5 lakh, says Uday. And though the government drew up a panchnama, we were not given a paisa in compensation.
Help came from an unexpected quartera diminutive, dynamo nun who was working on a water-harvesting project in Mangaon. Uday calls her an angel who helped us cross the floods.
With her contacts, money poured into the school from corporates and individuals. One of the most generous was Volkart director A H Tobaccowala, after whose mother Zainab, the school was named. Efforts to rebuild the school began on two fronts: structural and educational.
Snehal Marathe, who has been teaching Hindi, Marathi and Sanskrit here for over a decade, saw it grow from a cramped shed where children from three different standards were taught in one room to a bright building, which houses two schools, an English-medium and a Marathi-medium school for Dalits and adivasis. | CM DELHIThe Marathi school is free and subsidised by the fee (approximately Rs 5,000 per year) collected from students of the English-medium.
On the educational front, Sister Braganza began by hiring a number of very good teachers. She adds that the school does not compromise when it comes to paying its staff even though the fees bring in Rs 35,000 a month and salaries cost 84,000. And what about the yawning deficit? Donations come in from across the country, she says, unperturbed. I strongly believe that when you do good work, the money follows.
The school, which teaches about 300 children from Goregaon as well as 32 villages around it, encourages its students to dream big and provides them with an education to get there.
Many of the students, like Faij Farukh Sange, a teenager from Majrana village, walk for up to 12 km to reach the school, roughly the distance from Panjim to Old Goa. While most of his classmates want to be doctors and engineers, this Std VIII student hopes to be an artist. Another student, Aakash Daribkar, wants to be an aeronautical engineer, while yet another, Sajid Isane, wants to be a pilot.
The teachers say that Sister Braganza has been a source of inspiration. Sister holds regular meetings where she discusses our problems and suggestions in detail.
She also watches us teaching in the classroom, personally goes through students exam papers and holds workshops on how to teach in more interesting ways, says Yashashree Kulkarni, who teaches Social Studies and English.
A Goan from Mapuca who grew up in a comfortable bungalow at Bandra, Sister Braganza was one of 10 children. She recalls spending her holidays on Goas sandy beaches.
Wed even spend the night on Calangute beach and wake up to fresh fish that the fishermen would haul in in the morning, she smiles. But not all vacations were spent on the sands of Goa. Ever so often, her mother would pack the children off to different rural hamlets in Maharashtra to learn about the other India.
And one night, while dancing in the moonlight at a party in a village in Talasari, at the age of 21, I felt Gods call to dedicate my life to him, India and its poor, she says.
And so she chose to become a nun who wore a sari when most others opted for the habit. To borrow from Kipling, she believes in filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run. All her life, she has been on the go. From a world tour with the Vatican nuns to educating affluent young women in Mumbai to the 10 years in Jharkhands tribal villages.
Villages so far outside the tinsel arc of Shining India that in one of them, Torpa, the villagers had never seen money and still used the barter system. She taught them about money by starting a micro-finance scheme where every woman was asked to contribute one rupee. As they didnt have any money, they gave her rice which she sold in the market for them.
Today, the Torpa tribals operate their own bank accounts with Nabar. A nun makes for a strange economist, but sometimes, only nuns rush in where economists fear to tread.
LEADING INDIA: Sister Karuna Mary Braganza, who was awarded the Padma Shri this year after a lifetime spent in education and social work