Karuna's story

I was born in India and my parents worshipped all the Hindu gods. They thought that the more they appeased the numerous gods, the greater their blessings would be. Nagu Pamu, the king cobra, was especially revered in our home. My only brother was named after him. I was called Karuna, a Christian name. It is the custom in India for a respected elder to name a new baby, and the esteemed teacher in the village Christian school was asked to name me.

There is still a strong caste system in Indian villages and my family belonged to the low status, powerless Sudra caste. Like most people in our village, my parents never had an education. They wanted me to do better. There was a Hindu school two miles away, but they sent me to the village Christian school when I was seven years old.

I had never known a Christian or heard Jesus’ name. Every day our teacher led us in worship and told Bible stories. I will never forget the first story I heard – the story of Noah.

Her words worked in my heart. She taught of God the Creator and all things which are created by Him. My parents said all of those things were gods. I felt conflict. On the walls of our two-room home hung pictures of many Hindu deities; all my life I had seen my parents bow their heads in worship before these gods.

The true God was revealed to me through stories from my teacher. I did not take them just as nice stories. I felt that she was teaching the Word of God. As I heard about Isaac and Abraham and Joseph, I felt that my parents were worshipping untrue gods. It was the work of the Holy Spirit. I knew that I must worship the God who created me as He had created the snakes and the trees.

But I was still my parents’ daughter, raised in obedience. So whenever they went to sacrifice to our village gods, I went along. My mother would fold her hands and bow before them several times. I thought this was a festive thing that had no meaning. The worship of Almighty God was entirely different.

In those days there was a pastor who served a congregation in our village and several other villages. He came every month to administer the sacraments. One evening when I was about nine years old I was playing on the dusty street and I saw him in the distance. He was coming to the village; I ran toward him.

I told him, “Pastor, I believe Jesus Christ is my true God and my Savior, and I want to become a Christian. Please baptize me.” He was astonished and said, “I am very happy for you my daughter, God bless you. I would like to baptize you but since you are a little girl, I cannot baptize you without your parent’s permission.”

I understood that unless my parents believed Jesus was God they would not let me be baptized. My teacher had been watching me to see how I was learning and growing. She had developed a good friendship with my parents and sensed that now was the time to ask them to come to church, and invite my mother to the women’s Bible study.

Because my education was important to my parents, they listened to the teacher. My mother went to the Bible study and she encouraged my father to go to church. I also tried to encourage them.

Every night as I lay on my cot with the picture of the snake god hanging on the wall above me, I used to tell my parents all the stories that I had learned at school that day. They listened because they loved me.

My teacher prayed and, in time, my parents, through the Holy Spirit, believed that Jesus Christ was the Holy God. When I was about 11 years old, we were all baptized. Since then, in good times and bad times, they never went back to the idols.

My teacher, using her influence as an old student, helped put me in a Christian boarding school so I could get all of my studies through a Christian school. Attending the Christian boarding school helped to further strengthen my understanding and knowledge of God’s Word.

Now, as a director of a Christian school, I want to give away to other children similar to what I received from the Christian day school of my youth. With much prayer and desire, in conjunction with the Bible Faith Lutheran Church’s church planting and gospel work ministry, my husband and I started the Moriah Children’s Home 25 years ago. Then, 9 years ago, we were able to start the Moriah Christian School.

Karuna Dasari: A woman of India

She looked so familiar to me but where might I have seen her before? As I spoke to the 38 Christian school teachers and school leaders in India, my eyes moved back to her.

During the break I walked to her table and she introduced herself:
My husband came to the U.S.A. to study theology after he was finished with it, he was given a teaching position in a seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

His teaching job brought my family to the U.S.A. and we made that our home for 20 years. At the end of that time we left our adult children in Minneapolis and my husband and I moved back to India. I have 3 children – 2 boys and 1 girl and they are all married. I have 5 grand children from ages 2 to 6. I love my grand children and I pray for them everyday and I visit them at least once a year.

It was difficult for me to imagine living so far from my children and grandchild and when I asked her whether she wouldn’t rather return to Minnesota to be with her family, she said, “Oh yes, but then who would care for my orphans?” Karuna’s story continues:

With God’s help and strength my husband and I continued to develop gospel missions which my husband started in 1979. Along with church planting an orphan home has been running since 1986. We started a Christian day school in 1998 and it continues to this day.

After my husband passed away in the year 2000 I have remained in India to work with my own people. I love the children and I want to help Moriah Orphan Children and the Moriah School as long as the Lord permits me to do this ministry.

• There are 360 children in the school from L.K.G. to X class (lower kindergarten through grade 10). 95% of them are non-Christians. They are taught God’s Word and we sing songs and choruses every day. I pray that Moriah School will grow to be large in order to educate more non-Christian children to be the future church of God.

• There are 50 children in the orphan home and some of them are semi-orphans, meaning that one parent is dead.

• My heart’s desire in the Lord is to bring more orphan children into the home and raise them for Christ. I want to give them basic education and train them in some Vo-Tech courses so that they can work and live comfortably in their adulthood. There are some former children of Moriah Orphanage who are now graduates and postgraduates, police people, small business owners and hotel managers. I thank and praise God for this.

Many Christian teachers in India have orphanages in order to care for children who have been abandoned. As Karuna spoke I realized that I hadn’t met her before but it was the expression in her eyes that I recognized. It was the expression I have seen before in the eyes of those who give their lives in service to others. They know that serving those in need is that point in the cosmos where God’s marvelous grace is met with our humble gratitude.

Why are Christian schools important for mission work?

With Christians in so many countries supporting missionaries, why should we help Christian schools? A teacher in India answered that question for us:

When I was a child my parents wanted me to get a good education. The best schools in our area were Christian schools. My parents were of a different faith but they saw that the Christian school taught the morals and good conduct that my parents wanted me to learn. In that school I learned about Jesus and became a Christian. Now I have started my own Christian school. It has an excellent reputation and we have many children of parents who are not Christians. When you teach a child about our gracious God and about the saving faith of Jesus Christ, you teach future generations.

"This Christian school has changed our lives!"

Each year over 100 million school-age children are unable to attend school. This is true for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the work of children, even as young as age 7, is needed for the survival of the family. These children can bring home a small amount of money and every little bit is needed for food. Other children live in regions that are so isolated or impoverished that there is no school available for them.

Of the 100 million children who can’t attend school, 61% are girls. It is thought in some regions of the world that educating a girl is like “watering my neighbor’s garden.” By that they mean that boys will grow up and marry and after that the young couple will look after the parents. Girls, on the other hand, will grow up to take care of their husband’s family.

Think about the following statistics:
• An estimated 875 million adults are illiterate worldwide and nearly two-thirds of them are women.
• Each year over 100 million primary-age children are not able to attend school.
• South Asia is home to one-fifth of the world's population and 40% of the world's absolute poor.
• In India, one-third of all children aged 6 to 14 do not attend school. This is equal to 23 million boys and 36 million girls -- double the entire population of Canada.
• Africa as a continent has a literacy rate of less than 60 percent. In Sub-Saharan Africa since 1980, primary school enrollment has declined, going from 58 percent to 50 percent.

When Christians in these regions tell Worldwide Christian Schools that they have a Christian school that meets under a tree or in a building without a roof, WCS finds ways to provide for their needs. Small wonder, then, that the people in those regions tell us, “This Christian school has changed our lives.”

Who am I?

Someone asked about my role with WCS. I am the Director of Continuing Education for Teachers. For many years I was a classroom teacher and then a reading specialist in Christian schools in the United States. Then, for the last 22 years of my career I was a professor of education at Dordt College and at Calvin College in the U.S. During those years I made a great many presentations at conferences for Christian teachers in the U.S., Canada and also in many other countries. When I retired from that work I was delighted to join Worldwide Christian Schools in my present position. If you want to know more about me, my web page is: http://www.calvin.edu/academic/education/faculty/stronks/home.htm

Many teachers in our partner schools are devout Christians and they see the Christian school as a place where teachers pray and talk about the Bible. That is important, of course, but these teachers also would like to understand how biblical teachings are part of every subject that is studied in school. They would like to know new methods of teaching that flow from a biblical world-and-life view. Sometimes they have a meager background in biblical knowledge and don’t even know the stories from the Bible.

My job is to find people who can help with these concerns. Sometimes these people live within the same country as the partner school and then the role of WCS is to help with bringing teachers together for such instruction. At other times we look for speakers and seminar leaders from other countries who especially understand about integration of faith and learning and also about teaching and learning in different cultures. It works best when we can identify teacher leaders, have them attend seminars, and then we provide materials so that they in turn can go back to their own schools and teach the teachers. Soon the WCS website will have a list of the topics that speakers have presented and the speaker’s names so that you will know the kinds of things we do.

One of the greatest blessings of my life has been to meet the teachers who have given their lives to teaching children who live in some of the most needy regions of the world. I will be telling you the stories of these teachers and the children who are blessed by their teaching.

Worldwide Christian Schools

Can you imagine what it would be like to be a boy in a grade 4 classroom in which each child had one carefully guarded piece of lead with which to write? Or to be a student in a grade 7 classroom that was so crowded that students were sitting on the window ledge and in the aisles?

It is children in schools like these that Worldwide Christian Schools is helping. So what is Worldwide Christian Schools (WCS)? It is a non-denominational ministry that develops partnerships with organizations that operate their own schools in their own nations. WCS does not own or operate schools. Rather, we work through indigenous leadership to establish, maintain or expand Christian schools wherever they are needed most. Our job is simply to provide them with the critical resources they need to do their jobs.

Where is WCS located? The U.S. office is located in Grand Rapids, MI and Scott Vander Kooy is the Executive Director. The Canadian office is in Burlington, Ontario with Hank De Jong as Executive Director. There is also a WCS office in India and Ezekiel Selvaraj is Executive Director. Information concerning activities at these offices can be found at the same website, www.wwcs.org and then clicking on the country you choose.

My first attempt at blogging

So now I am a blogger! That’s pretty amazing to me because I don’t really know what a blog is. Perhaps it is something like a journal.

My mother kept a journal during her years on a farm in Minnesota. Her entries were usually something like the following:

Hot and dry today. Canned 30 quarts of beans. Men finished
harvesting the oats. Fried chicken for dinner.

When I was a child I thought her entries were very boring. Now I realize the incredible amount of work that went into such a day. Not only is the idea of canning 30 quarts of beans daunting. I now realize that serving fried chicken to the men who came to help with the harvest meant that she caught and killed two chickens, removed their feathers, cleaned the insides, and then cut them up for frying. And after that she found time and energy to write about it in her journal. My mother should have had a gold crown for the work that filled her days.

These entries will be about neither my mother nor me. Instead, they will tell the stories of children throughout the world and the men and women who teach them, at times under the most difficult of conditions. These children and teachers are part of an organization known as Worldwide Christian Schools. (www.wwcs.org)