Recently I came to know about "The New Life School" in the state of Orissa. Orissa was in the news last August, when extremists murdered many Christians and burned their homes. New Life staff and students had to flee into the woods and live like wild animals for several weeks. Their crime being that they are Christians. They have now returned, but it would not surprise me if they are still nervous. If their homes are small by our standards, schools are functional but much smaller. Classrooms half the size of ours here accomodate twice the number of children there.

Fortunately the needs of the people are much smaller too. A teacher makes the equivalent of $62.50 per month. The principal makes $125.00.
Total cost to run a school with 8 teachers, 2 teacher assistants and the principal is $1050.00 per month. This includes rent, utilities, phone and maintenance.

The school is presently in a rental facility but New Life is in the process of building a new school. It is up to the roof. The cost of the roof is estimated at $11000.00.
New Life School is trusting God to provide for their needs.
George Couperus.

Slumschools, continued

One of the things we would like to do with our organization is this:

Teachers in elementary and secondary public and private schools of North American and Asian countries will learn about the social, moral, and religious beliefs and practices of people in countries other than their own. The teachers will, in turn, work to educate the students in their schools as well as the citizens of their localities about these matters in order to promote the understanding and social and religious tolerance that are important parts of a just and civil society.

Among my favorite memories are the years I spent in a one-room rural school in Minnesota. School was always a wonderful place for me, even though the teacher could give only a small amount of time to each of us. The library was the size of a kitchen cupboard and it was full of wonderful books. I think I read every one of them.

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.

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.

Examining my own worldview

We need to ask ourselves what we, personally, do believe. Answering the following questions will help with that:

What things do I truly believe are worth caring about?

Which things matter the most to me?

What do I believe is wrong with the world?

What could I do to repair what is wrong?

Is it true that what I believe can be seen in how I live?

Examples of ways in which my beliefs are revealed in actions that I
refrain from doing are these:

Examples of ways in which my beliefs are revealed in actions that I do
are these:

What decisions have we made in our family that nourish the
connectedness I want to have with my children?

What decisions or lack of decision are in danger of breaking that
connectedness?

What tendencies have been developing in my own life?

What tendencies do I see developing in my children?

Young adult: No event in my life has been more significant in shaping my current worldview than the sudden, unexpected death of my father and its lasting effects on my family. I had been in college for a day when my dad suddenly died. My mother, a secondary wage earner whose focus had been childrearing, suddenly became the breadwinner of the family. I saw how she had been ill-equipped educationally for that role. I also began to see that the system itself had handicapped her. My father’s high school education could get him a good union job in an aluminum plant. My mom’s high school education qualified her to be a para-educator in a school, a receptionist, or a retail clerk. None of these jobs could begin to compare in terms of earning power or benefits. Moreover, I saw how others assumed that she wasn’t quite as qualified or capable as my dad, simply because of her gender. The real world isn’t a friendly place for a single, high school-educated woman in middle age.

I saw all this at 18 years old and started to wonder why this was. I quickly realized that my mom wasn’t the only one, either. I began to see the injustice of it all – my mom had played by society’s rules, stayed at home, raised her kids, done everything those prophets of “family values” had told her to, and had gotten kicked in the teeth for it. I decided then that I wanted my work, and the way I lived my life, to be about empowering women. I wanted every woman to have access to education, to better jobs, and to the tools necessary to provide for their basic needs without living on the margins. And the more I learned, the more I became convinced that such a future would require widespread systemic change on a variety of levels. That event, and its after-affects, are the wellspring for my subsequent life journey to this point. What does my worldview have to do with raising my children in the fabric of faithfulness?

From: Families Living in the Fabric of Faithfulness, Gloria Goris Stronks and Julia K. Stronks

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.

Why do we have Christian schools?

When doctors first learned how to perform safe cataract operations they went all over Europe and America operating on people who had been blinded from birth by cataracts. When they first learned to see, the vast majority of patients of all ages had a very confused idea of space.

Before the operation, the doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a square. The patient would feel it, maybe touch it with the tongue, maybe bite on it, and name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would step back and show the same objects to the patient. The patient would have no idea what she or he was seeing. You see, the patients could not come to know about something by looking at it. They had to touch it to know because they had only one way of knowing...by touching.

Upon looking at a person, they seemed to have no idea of the size of the person without touching. When asked how large the person was, the newly sighted patient would hold the thumb and index finger out and measure that way.

When a newly sighted woman was shown a painting, she asked, "Why do they put all those dark marks on it?" "Those things are to show where the shadows are in real life," said her mother. "We need the dark shadows in order to understand what we are seeing. Without the dark shadows everything would look flat to us." "But everything does look flat," said the newly sighted woman. She could not look at an object and understand depth.

What those newly sighted people needed was to have opened to them a way to see...a way to interpret what they were seeing...a way to come to know by seeing. Someone needed to help them make a space for seeing.

That, I think, is what all teaching in Christian schools is about. Teachers at every level need to find ways to help students make a way for their own understanding of God’s truths. Teachers need to help students make a way for their own seeing, a way for their own hearing, a way for their own knowing, a way for their own learning to understand the truths of God’s creation can happen.

The task of a Christian school is to open up the joys and delights and satisfactions of knowing God’s world. The task of the Christian school is to invite students to live as disciples of Jesus Christ, responding to His call and invitation. It means inviting them to come to know as His people know.