Main Page

Revision as of 16:01, 2 July 2008

Mr.Jegan Tharmaraj
local representative for HELP Trust

Evening School in Koliyonkulam, Tamil Nadu, India (supported by Nabuur)

Welcome! We are very excited to tell you more about our project to help underprivileged children in a small community in South India. HELP Trust started the Evening School in Koliyonkulam in the fall of 2007 and today we have 42 students in the program. It was not easy to achieve this level of attendance! We met a lot of resistance from the guardians of the children. Most of the guardians were not interested in sending their children to school and instead wanted them to help with domestic work and to bring more income to the family. But after persevering we began to see results. Slowly almost half of the guardians became interested in educating their children. They showed their support by actively participating in the parents' meetings. Visits to people's houses showed that they were happy with what we are doing. Community involvement is critical to the success of our project. We are now starting to see this involvement increase and the positive impact it has on the project. The children love the activity-based training, games and life skills we offer at the school. We are trying to further develop our curriculum to expand on the possibilities available with this type of education. We measure our success by the new-found confidence and hope we see in the children faces. The children understand the importance of education and can see its lasting and positive impact through roll play and other experiential learning activities we offer. Please see additional information at HELP Trust website and our fundraising effort at GiveMeaning.

About Koliyonkulam

Location

The evening school is located at Koliyankulam near Vadakkanlulam which is 22 km from Nagercoil, 30 km from Kanyakumari (tourist place), 80 km from Madurai.

People

The people from the community belong to a neglected cast and struggle for their livelihood, live in small one room thatched roof houses and often force their children to work to support the family. Only education and vocational training for the children will break the vicious cycle of underemployment and poverty in this community. We decided to help the future of the community by providing educational and other support.

About Nabuur.com

An international team of volunteers from Nabuur- the global neighbor network- is working to improve our project. You can join the team at Nabuur.com, look for the village of Koliyounkulam.