This is an attempt to tell the story of a
class of fifteen and sixteen year old Irish transition year students
who raise funds to travel to India and help develop a village school in
a remote area which is situated on the vast delta on the Bay of Bengal
formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna rivers,
called The Sunderbans.
Their
story is part of a wider one in which involves ten years of work by
their TY predecessors, who since the start in 2002, have helped local
rural communities all over West Bengal build strong brick schools where
none existed before, thus helping to create well over 10,000 school
places in the process. This has been done with the close cooperation
of an Irish Loreto order nun in Kolkata called Sr Cyril who retired in
2012 at the age of 75.
In
cooperation with Loreto Sealdah in Kolkata and the school community in
Jharkhali on the island of Basanti in the Sunderbans a new monsoon-proof
four classroom school was completed in 2012. The 2013 project seeks
to build on this ten years of hard work by beginning a new programme of
strengthening the school communities we have helped through building
projects and continuing to work with Loreto Kolkata in improving health
and education in these educationally disadvantaged school areas.
This
will be a good example of best practice in modern Development
Education, a departure from the more charity based approach, which
involved much fund raising in Ireland. It will embrace the principles
of reciprocity and equality in seeking to combine the joint strengths of
three school communities for the mutual educational benefit of all.
It has the extra dimension of employing urban - rural and international
cooperation
In
practical terms eighteen John Scottus School Dublin students along with
ten Loreto Day School Kolkata pupils and the school community of
Jharkhali will work together on an English language programme, in the
beautiful surroundings of the Sunderbans forests, seeking to improve
skills all round. This will be a highly organised programme involving
daily lessons over a two week period beginning on 23rd January 2013.
The
film documentary will seek to demonstrate the huge benefit such
cooperative skills can have for the minds and hearts of young Irish and
Indian students from vastly different social and cultural backgrounds
living and working together in close proximity for a two week period.
It hopes to communicate in vivid and entertaining manner a very
practical, sustainable mutual development education project and tell
some unique stories in the process.
John Alexander
John Alexander
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