US students lend helping hand

Bhubaneswar: Seventeen American students studying in US Embassy School in New Delhi have shown noble ways of how time and energy can be best utilised for the service of the poor.

These students went to a remote village in Orissa’s Nayagarh district to build houses for poor people.

In the remote Puania village in Nayagarh district of Orissa, the villagers are amazed to see these foreign children sweating hard their labour. These school children are putting in their hard work to build a house for someone they never knew before.

For 50-year-old daily labourer Baidyanath Mohanty, these children are putting in their effort to build a 300 sq feet concrete house.

Fifteen-year-old Maggie, a class tenth student is part of the noble team. Maggie’s parents work in the US Embassy and she had never been to a rural village before, but she gave her best effort to build the house for Baidyanath.

Maggie says, “When we were told in our school about the poverty of these people, we felt the desire to do something for them and so we are here.”

The students, studying in the American Embassy School, are from America, Korea, Sweden and Ethiopia nationalities.

The students also raised funds to provide Rs 30,000 each to the person for whom they built this house apart from contributing their labour.

In three days these children built two houses in the same village.

Mohanty says, “Concrete house for us was a distant dream. We are so happy that these children although being foreigners helped us so much.”

The children got information about these needy people from a voluntary organization – Habitat for Humanity. In five years the beneficiaries would have to return the money provided to them in easy installments and without interest, so that this money can be rotated to some other needy beneficiary.

In this manner the children would form a sort of a bigger chain to help large number of beneficiaries every year.

Habitat for Humanity Secretary Prasanna Nanda, says, “This project gives respect to labour and shows how urban youths and that too foreigners can contribute in a big way for the development of rural India.”

Maggie and Baidyanath had never met before and perhaps after today they would never meet again. But the feelings and the experience they shared here would go a long way in cherishing the cause of humanity.