Our two volunteers, Amber and Anna, getting lessons in eating with the right hand
at a special lunch given in honour of the birthday of Venja - a German visitor.

  This is the October 2011 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.
Dear Fantastic donors -- thank you for your continued support of the MS Foundation school.
     In just under a month Rachel Evans and Matthew Morrison are going to be running the New York marathon to try and raise £5k for the school and for Lively Minds, a charity which sets up community run education projects in Uganda and Ghana. It would be amazing if you felt able to support them in this venture by making a donation online at www.justgiving.com/matthew-rachel
     Rachel and Matthew have paid for their places, flights, accommodation etc. themselves so all of your donation will go straight to improving the lives of the students at the school and equally deserving children in Africa. Please do consider making a donation: 26.2 miles of running is no mean feet (if you excuse the pun!) and your money will make a huge difference.
     We also want to take this opportunity to let you know that Tom Holloway, Jenny Khan, Rachel and Matthew have recently set up a new charity called 'Hyderapals' to support the work of the school. The reason for doing so was primarily to register for gift aid with HMRC
and thereby get 20% more for every £1 that you so generously donate. We'd thought we'd let you know now as you'll see a reference to Hyderapals on the justgiving page for Rachel and Matthew's marathon effort. We will tell you more about this in due course, including details of what to do about existing standing orders and how to donate to Hyderapals and claim gift aid. For the time being you need do nothing.

Thank you for your support!

Tom, Rachel, Jenny and Matthew.

Here is the school dance group, rehearsing for a concert performance on October 15th. They are in civil dress because schools and colleges have been closed due to agitation in Hyderabad for a separate Telangana State. The school is also our community centre however, so they like to come here anyway.

We also had to cancel a visit to the Hyderabad Ravindra Bharati Theatre to celebrate Mahatma Gandhi's birthday because no buses will run due to so many being stopped and burnt.

Introducing Jaya: I am a house wife, I have a son aged 1½. I live in yellammabanda only, and I am happy working at MSF as a Hindi teacher.

MS foundation helped me in a critical position when my husband got accident in village, his right leg got fracture and could not heal so he lost his work.

Here is where I can share any of my problems with any one because now I am sole income to all my family.

MY AIM: - I want to be a good teacher forever…

When the lights go out and fans stop working our classrooms become quite unbearable, especially in the windowless nursery building. Now however, thanks to our two UPS/Inverters we are able to work on during the hours of power cuts (usually about 3 hours each day). Our thanks go to John Abbott, who paid the lion's share of the installations.

These work by charging the battery when current is available, but when it is not they instantly switch to produce 200 volts for up to an hour and a half.

Sabiya was born with a useless right hand but her arm is mobile and has full feeling. She is of 'average intelligence' says Lavanya, but is in danger of falling behind as she moves to older classes, so we will arrange a full examination by a specialist neuro-surgeon to see what can be done.

Our health advisor, Dr Pat Bidinger, says we shouldn't assume that the damage is irreversible - a course of physiotherapy can achieve a lot in many circumstances.

We attempted to reopen school this week, but a gang of telangana agitators ordered Lavanya to send the children home. She complied, very rightly, but many of the children enjoy the school and come back in plain dress to dance and chat and play games.

Two of the students, Prashanthi and Mahalaxmi, took me to the neighbouring busthee (slum colony) where they live. Here they are with a bust of Dr Ambedkar, who was the first 'dalit' (untouchable) to achieve a college education and went on to become a highly influential politician and helped to frame the Indian Constitution of 1947.

This busthee - official name is Shivamma Colony - is far more run down than our Janmabhoomi Colony. No water pipes, scanty rubbish collection, immensely poor. During my visit I noticed that all children and many of their mothers went barefoot. That 'rubble' you see on the far left is actually the edge of a huge mound of rotting rubbish being picked over by feral dogs.

For the fourth year running we thank our good friends of St Martins-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square London for their very handsome donation to our community and school. They are our most generous donors. Thanks also to our own Rachel and Matthew who sing in the church choir and have made this gift possible.

St Martins is no ordinary church. The work it does reaches out to the world through its International Committee, which has been active for over 25 years in developing and implementing St Martin's international focus on behalf of the church community. It has contacts with communities in Ghana, Malawi, Solomon Islands, Hong Kong, South Africa and Jamaica, and we are deeply grateful for our community here in India to be included in their thoughts and generosity.

Have you got a colour printer? Why not print a couple of copies of this newsletter (just hit Control-P) and pass them to your friends and relatives? Even if they don't wish to help the school directly, they will surely be interested to know what you do.