What distinguishes the John Scottus School fundraising programme from other charitable collections is that the JSS students not only involve themselves in getting the money together for school construction projects but they also go out there and actively assist in the work.
The formula is as follows:
The annual target of our collections is approximately € 50,000. This is sent to Sr. Cyril in Calcutta. She prioritises the neediest schools in cooperation with her right-hand-man Avajit. These jobs always concern existing establishments requiring additional classrooms, toilets, playgrounds, refurbishment programmes etc. and the work is then started with local skilled labour called ‘mistry’s’.
Then we come along with a very eager beavers body of students and accompanying adults and at this point the undersigned is appointed as the foreman of the work, at times also nicknamed ‘Bob the builder’.
Over the past few years we have established a pattern during our three week stay in India whereby we carry out one job in the Diamond Harbour Road area, which is about one hour’s drive from Sr. Cyril’s Loreto Day School, the place where we travel to back and forth each day in the centre of Calcutta. The second part of our stay is a project in the countryside, away from the noise and pollution of the city. Of course a lot of logistics have to go into organising this as not every location can accommodate and cater for a group of nearly 40 Westerners!!
This year we started during our first week with the first floor extension of 4 classrooms on top of an existing building at the Aikatan boys’ school, close to a site where we had already worked 4 years ago at our very first project. Suddenly our students become very ambidextrous in the development of their bricklaying skills and everyone who wants to gets a go! But also the sand, water and brick carriers are an essential ingredient in making the building into a success. We always try to get the pupils of the schools where we work involved by first setting the right example. For the first couple of hours they watch in amazement how we work and then we encourage them to stand in the chain gang line and this usually works. So they become involved in building their own school…
The second part and ‘country’ project this year was a combined toilet block for the junior and senior school at Marigachi an outpost some 15 kms from Diamond Harbour in the middle of the paddi-fields. Here we were faced with a very eager local school population of well over 1,000 (and no toilets!!!) who nearly drowned us with their curiosity and helpfulness and as a result we got a great deal of work shifted during a very short but memorable stay.
Robert Kortenhorst
(a JSS teacher)
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