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A teacher celebrates ‘Salad Day’

Children with their teacher Ms Nargis Banoo

Ms Nargis Banoo is a very innovative and enthusiastic teacher of the TOS Pakistan’s Qandeel Home School project supported by TOS Australia. She wanted to familiarise children in her Home School with the different names and benefits of locally available vegetables, and thought of a novel way to turn that into a fun activity.

She decided to celebrate ‘Salad Day’. The vegetables were collected, cut and beautifully displayed on platters that gave a feast of culinary delight to the eyes. The four well-presented platters shown here would make any caterer proud.

The children learned the names of vegetables like carrots, onions and tomatoes. They had fun drawing pictures of the vegetables and presenting them to their teacher. What did they do with all that food? Why, they ate lunch of course!

The children were served a sumptuous lunch of salad with the traditional dish of rice and meat called ‘Biryani’.

The TOS in Pakistan runs a network of Qandeel Home Schools that provide an education to children living in economically depressed areas. Especially important to the TOS is the education of girls who might otherwise be denied this opportunity that is so basic in many parts of the world.

The schools’ curriculum imparts basic educational skills: reading, writing and arithmetic that allow the children to merge with mainstream schools when they are ready for further education. In addition, teachers are encouraged to help the children develop compassion, cooperation, generosity, humility, confidence, foresight and leadership. ‘Qandeel’ means a lantern and it traditionally signifies ‘spreading light’. Our schools spread the light of learning…

Qandeel Home Schools are funded by the generous donations of their sponsors. The TOS in Australia, New Zealand and Italy all sponsor Qandeel Home Schools. Each sponsor supports a school of 25 to 30 children. Some sponsor more than one home school. The cost of supporting a group of children per year is about US$1,000. Besides management and teaching skills, it takes courage to maintain the schools especially in light of the fatal attacks against teachers and school children in Peshawar last December.

The TOS Pakistan wishes to express its deep gratitude to the TOS in Australia, New Zealand and Italy and to the other supporters within and outside Pakistan for the generosity that has made it possible to provide an education to the children of our Qandeel Home Schools. The children can now look forward to a bright future. Without this opportunity they would have been consigned to illiteracy for life, poverty and ignorance.

For more information about the TOS Pakistan’s Qandeel Home Schools, please contact the TOS International Secretary at nancy.tosinternational@gmail.com.

Empowering a Generation in India

The Companies Act, 2013, whose rules came into effect on April 1 2014, now requires the largest companies in India to spend a certain percentage of their profit on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. A positive step for sure.

Arni Narendran, a TOS member in Mumbai, is participating right now in a CSR project known as ‘Teach India’ undertaken by the world’s largest English language newspaper, the Times of India, to equip marginalised urban youth with skills that give them access to employment.

Arni writes:

After four decades of serving in the banking industry, with a memorable milestone of setting up a ‘Financial Inclusion Incubator’* and initiating the bank’s first Corporate Social Responsibility activity, I decided to continue such work after retirement. The opportunity came in executing a CSR project for the Times of India.

The project, known as ‘Teach India’ and currently up and running in Delhi and Mumbai, is all about skilling India’s marginalised urban youth. The British Council is a dynamic partner in the project and trains volunteers, such as me, to be a teacher, or more precisely a skill facilitator.  The approach is student-centred rather than the conventional teacher-centred one. Along with a friend, Ms Namrata, we were given responsibility for

training  around 25 youngsters from a needy neighbourhood. Initially the students were shy and uncommunicative but as we journeyed through a series of workshops together, we were amazed at the transformation in them. The idea was to teach them the rudiments of English as well as other basic skills for employability in the burgeoning multinational corporations that are putting down roots in Mumbai.

Over a period of five years the ‘Teach India’ initiative has touched 35,000 lives and involved close to 2,000 volunteers. I feel that this opportunity has helped me evolve to the next level as a Theosophist in action and enabled me to experience the joy of sharing with our needy brethren. Now that the Indian Government has made CSR mandatory for large corporations, we shall be building a more equitable society than we ever envisaged. Here is surely an opportunity for Theosophists to translate the Divine Wisdom into practice.

Footnote: *The object of financial inclusion is to provide banking services at low cost in areas where there are still no banks, especially for the rural and semi-rural poor.

Prostheses for Haitian children

The TOS in Puerto Rico collects, cleans, repairs and sells used goods of all types in a sort of flea market. The proceeds of their sales are used to buy prostheses or implants for children in Haiti.

Even before the earthquake on 12 January 2010, prostheses, leg braces and other rehabilitation services were much needed in Haiti as an estimated 40,000 to 64,000 Haitians suffered from disabilities due to trauma or disease. (NBC News 21/3/2010).

Haiti’s devastating earthquake collapsed many cement block buildings there. Falling roofs, walls and blocks trapped people beneath them, crushing limbs and causing severe injuries that required amputations. The results of the earthquake added another 4,000 to 6,000 amputees to the already staggering toll of amputees in the country; over 1,000 of these were children, according to the Haitian government.

There is a great need for continued prosthetic care for children as they grow. It takes about a day and costs approximately $500 to make each prosthetic limb. The TOS in Puerto Rico has found a unique and creative way to address this need and give loving service to Haitian children.

The TOS in Puerto Rico is also one of many TOS groups who are collecting money to help relieve the suffering in Nepal due to the recent earthquake there.

Lakota Waldorf School: a light in the heart of Pine Ridge

The TOS-USA has awarded a grant to the Lakota Waldorf School located on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the state of South Dakota in the United States.  It is the home of the Lakota Sioux people.

For those unfamiliar with American history, the Lakota Sioux is one of the more than 500 tribes of the indigenous peoples of North America, called Native Americans in the US and First Nations in Canada. Like many other indigenous peoples, Native Americans in the United States suffered greatly at the hands of those who came to settle their lands. Very early settlers brought diseases such as smallpox, to which the indigenous peoples had no immunity. The aftermath of the US’s war of independence from Great Britain brought a policy of assimilation that coerced Native Americans to leave behind their traditional cultural values, spiritual beliefs and languages in favour of a more European/American way of doing things. In later years, reservations were set

up, often on undesirable land, and whole tribes transported from their traditional lands. Treaties ceding land to the US government in exchange for other considerations were made and very often broken by the government, resulting in battles. On 29 December 1890 one such dispute resulted in the massacre of 300 Sioux, two thirds of them women and children, at Wounded Knee Creek on what is now the Pine Ridge Reservation. Today Native Americans have a unique relationship with the US federal government as they are American citizens, yet their tribes are considered sovereign nations with treaty rights. Native Americans are now working hard to preserve their cultures and languages against great odds as most people living on reservations are among the poorest in the country.

At 11,000+ square miles, Pine Ridge is as large as some countries! The Lakota people live within a rich spiritual and cultural heritage anchored by the four Lakota values: Generosity, Courage, Respect and Wisdom. Lakota tradition places an emphasis on home and an extended concept of family, and spirituality plays a role in every action. It is these values and the traditional Lakota world view combined with the Waldorf model of education that appealed to the TOS in the United States.

Conditions on Pine Ridge are harsh: it is home to the second lowest per capita income in the country and a staggering 80% unemployment rate. Residents of Pine Ridge suffer serious chronic illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease at a rate vastly disproportionate to the rest of the nation. The life expectancy for men is 48 years; women on Pine Ridge can expect to live to 52. The school drop-out rate is 50%, and the teen suicide rate is 150% that of the national average.

In the midst of the suffering at Pine Ridge is a brilliant light: the Lakota Waldorf School. Waldorf is a humanistic model of education founded by theosophist/anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner in 1919. Broadly speaking, the Waldorf model seeks to develop free, morally responsible and integrated individuals equipped with a high degree of social competence. Early years in a Waldorf school focus on practical, hands-on activities that encourage creative play and social skills. Individual schools have a great deal of autonomy, and the Lakota Waldorf educators use this freedom in a unique way. Tribal elders worry that knowledge of traditional Lakota ways is gradually disappearing. There are very few speakers of traditional Lakota language left in the world. Therefore, classes are held in the traditional Lakota language so that children are fully immersed in their traditional language and culture. At present the school offers kindergarten and first grade.

“We are a team here at the Lakota Waldorf School and we are also very blessed to be around such spiritual power that the children bring with them every day.” – Tabor White Buffalo, teacher.

Pine Ridge families are not asked to pay tuition. The Lakota Waldorf School operates entirely on donations and receives no governmental or tribal funding. TOS groups in the United States are encouraged to help ensure a solid future for the school and a brighter future for the Lakota people by sending items from the school’s wish list or by donating books to the school.

TOS service in Uruguay

Some TOS groups focus on education or social services, others on helping animals. Still others devote their attentions to health and healing, or to the arts. The TOS in Uruguay does it all!

Members of the TOS in Uruguay teach English, Portuguese and other languages to students eager to learn foreign tongues. For adults this can be helpful in their business endeavours as well as their own self enhancement. Children and youth benefit immensely as the ability to communicate in multiple languages will only improve their lives by getting them ready to live in an ever more internationally focused world. Being multilingual gives our young people skills that can expand their possibilities for future educational and career choices.

Uruguayan TOS members also help needy families by providing food, shoes, school supplies and even financial assistance, if needed. In cases where there is violence in the home, use of narcotics or other instances where relationships are threatened, TOS members offer a programme called “You question and psychology replies.”

The TOS in Uruguay is also working cooperatively with the Lions Club to perform free analysis to detect diabetes. The Lions’ work supports diabetes awareness, education, control, prevention and research. The TOS works with several other institutions as well to donate wheelchairs to those who need, but cannot afford them.

In Uruguay as in many TOS groups, emotional, social and physical service is balanced out by creative and spiritual endeavours. Plans are underway to offer a course on the painting of religious icons based on meditations conducted by one of their members.

Our animal friends are not forgotten in Uruguay either as food is purchased for a local animal shelter.