This is the July 2010 newsletter to all our MSF School sponsors and supporters to thank you for your help. Please write back to us and tell us what you think.

What a wonderful idea!

U3A members Anne and Michael decided to sponsor one of the children we have on our waiting list, but then thought that their grand-daughter might also like to be involved.

"She is twelve and we and her mother think she is quite old enough to understand the responsibility" said Anne. "When we asked her if she would like it as a sort of present she was very enthusiastic.

I expect they will exchange photographs, since the child in India is only six and has no English, and we don't expect our dearest will be learning Telugu. She can use a digital camera though, and Tom tells me the school has one too so I'm sure she'll be able to communicate that way".

Do you use safety pins? Asma makes them. She is one of about 10 workers in this factory who are under 14.

Sitting on a bench alongside her co-workers, Asma operates a powerful cutting device in the poorly-lit premises for up to 12 hours a day.

The safety pins are thinly cut and the machine she operates is cumbersome, heavy and dangerous. Despite being blessed with nimble fingers if Asma makes one mistake she could easily lose a finger to the gigantic metal puncher she handles so professionally.

Like many other child workers in Bangladesh, she does not complain of her plight, remaining resolutely cheerful throughout the morning I spent with her.

Asma usually arrives at work at eight in the morning and leaves at eight in the evening. She often works six days a week and is paid about $2 a day.

Asma explains that as one of six children in her family she and her siblings have no choice but to work. Her father is a bicycle rickshaw puller and does not earn enough money to feed his family. Her mother runs the family's home.
(Picture and text http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8570692.stm )

They walked 52 miles in a day to raise money for the MS Foundation school. Here are the five fabulous friends who walked 52 miles around Oxford on the 19th June to raise money for MS Foundation School. From Left to right they are Russell, Rich, Andy, James and Carol. Congratulations and thank you; we are so lucky to have such good friends.

The money collected by our friends enables us to supply the school with educational equipment, such as the globe left and 2 sets of charts for learning about nature and science. But even more important is the fact that we can pay for more teachers and so reduce the size of our classes to no more than 20 or 25.

Government schools have a problem with the quality of the education because often the teachers get the job and then send in their cousins to stand in front of the class and sometimes there are as many as 50 in a class and not much learning is done. If you want to know more about that, click here for a 3-page document.

School started on 10th June, but what did they do in the holidays?

Here are a couple of pictures taken by our friend Shrawan.

On the left is Teja who is sponsored by John West, who lives in London. During the hot weather it goes up to 45 degrees Celsius (110 degrees Fahrenheit), and dust gets everywhere.

Sailaja will be seven in July; here she is on the right playing with her little sister outside the hut where she lives. She is sponsored by Hilary Blandy in London.

Introducing Miss N Lavanya, our Principal.
I was born & brought up in Kukatpally, Hyderabad, into a middle class family of five members along with my parents. My father has a tailoring shop in Kukatpally, and I finished my degree at university (B.Com, computers) but due to financial problem I discontinued my studies.

I have thought much about the people who live in slum areas or who are very poor; how they face the problem to have good education for their children when they have 3 to 4 kids in one house.

In 2007 me and my friend Kareem started survey, to search the people in a very poor area that's very near to Kukatpally, called Yellammabanda. In this area we found 99.5% of people are illiterate, even people cannot write their own signature. Also we found that in a house there are 6 to 10 people but they are all un-educated. No one studies; no young woman is having any education.

When we were teaching computers at Sivananda Leprosy Home we met Tom Holloway an IBM computer consultant and he agreed to help us. So we started the school with some old computers to teach unemployed and uneducated word processing and spoken English, and now I have almost finished my 10th batch - about 320 students in all.

In this community are so many school that are taking money from parents but they are not providing good education to the children. So I started a school for young ones from nursery to 5th class (kindergarden). Even I started class to the parents also to have minimum of their signature and they should able to read the newspaper.

My life ambition? It is to make a home for orphans. We have so many here, and especially girls, and they are not treated well.