Next month a multi-congregational team from Chicago will travel almost 8,300 miles to visit Rosie & Anand Thandu, and the 120 children at the Children of Faith Home in Visakhapatnam, India! Included in the team are two of our board members, each of whom have visited the school in the past and are excited to bring more people to experience the joy on our campus and to contribute to our mission.
The team’s primary goals are to rejuvenate the school’s library and to restore the campus’s solar electric plant. Both of our board members specialize in each of these areas will be leading the team in completing these projects.
The school’s library was created in 2014 by Jenny Gonser, who, for a Girls Scout Gold Award project, brought and organized over a thousand books for the students and teachers to use. In 2021, board member and elementary educator Emma Passaglia cleaned and reorganized the collection in an attempt to fashion it after an American elementary school library.
Now, Emma Passaglia is returning with this team to further rejuvenate the library in the hopes that it will be a more inclusive space for all learning styles. In India, students lean heavily on rote memorization to retain information, while in America, most schools are turning to hands-on, interactive learning. Part of COF’s success has been attributed to their unique style of teaching, which includes a mix of Indian and American techniques.
The Chicago team hopes to bring hands-on and socioemotional learning tools to ensure that the teachers at the school have the supplies they need to experiment with different types of teaching styles. In addition, the team hopes to refresh the library to make it a more engaging space for the kids to study, learn, and play. Donated funds will be used to buy more Telugu and Hindi books for the collection, as well as other Indian-style education tools.
The solar electric plant was installed on the girl’s dormitory in early 2020 in the hopes that solar energy would reduce the campus’s reliance on the village’s very unreliable electric grid. Power in the village goes out regularly and at all times of the day, and electricity is pivotal to keep the lights, ovens, and laptops on. Unfortunately, the solar plant stopped working efficiently in 2022. A combination of India’s harsh weather and a lack of local experienced technicians made our campus rely once again on the village’s power grid. Tony Passaglia, one of our board members and a long time supporter of the school, has extensive experience in mechanical electrical systems, including the design and repair of solar electric generating equipment. With his expertise, the team will be able to fix and solar plant and train some of our on-campus employees in the proper care and maintenance of the system.
Be Part of this Trip to India by Sending Supplies with the Team!
You can contribute to the Chicago team’s efforts! Visit their Amazon wish list to see some of the American-style supplies they are looking to bring with them and contribute to the updated COF library! You can order supplies for the team to take with them to the Children’s Home.
