There’s just three weeks here in Australia until the end of the 2019-20 tax year, and I am writing to ask you to consider making a tax-deductible donation to ‘Project Help India’.
Our cause is simple and powerful. It is love in action.
The mission of ‘Project Help India’ is to bring love, hope, dignity and purpose to the poor. Our vision is to focus on education, nutrition, health and ultimately human rights, so that individual lives are impacted, empowered and restored. ‘Project Help India’ seeks to bring about community change and generational transformation. ‘Project Help India’ seeks to grow in its impact and influence in the lives of people and communities, with a goal to ultimately expand into other towns and places of need.
#blacklivesmatter
We stand alongside others as members of one global family demanding equality, justice and dignity. A demand for change has always been at the heart of ‘Project help India’ and this is the reason, back in 2010, our Project Directors, Amit and Daisy Samuel started reaching out to just a small number of children and their parents in a slum in Kotdwara. Many of the children were on drugs, particularly addicted to lighter fluid. Someone had to fight for these people’s rights. They were uneducated and powerless, not even knowing that they had rights!
The slum people are persecuted and discriminated because they are the ‘untouchable’ Dalits. Both their caste and racial background meant that they are regarded as the lowest of the lowest, not worthy of being educated, allowed to have most jobs, or given any status or recognition in any shape or form. They are frequently affected by anti-dalit violence. They perform the work that nobody else wants to do, such as preparing bodies for funerals, tanning animal hides, collecting rubbish, recycling plastic and killing rats, vermin and other pests. Doing anything with dead cattle or cow hides is regarded particularly unclean in Hinduism. Under both the local Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, a job that involves death corrupts the worker’s souls, making them unfit to mingle with other people in the community. On top of this, many are displaced, living in the slum because they moved from mountain towns and villages due to natural disasters and poverty.
In Kotdwara there was no one who loved them or cared for them, until the message and actions of ‘Project Help India’ intersected with their lives.
It has been an incredible journey since then, with our work growing in size and impact. Thanks to Amit and Daisy, the original slum community is now recognised by the local municipality and the people have a sense of dignity. Thanks to our SHINE Conference and other women’s empowerment programs, a message of worth and purpose has impacted the women. The women share this message with each other. Education is now accessible and valued by parents and their children are growing up with dreams for a future that is way bigger than the dirty rubbish ‘reg’ picking jobs that they were otherwise destined for, starting from the time they begin to walk. Words cannot express how relieved and thankful we are, that through our programs and the consistency of message we have delivered over these years, a community is being transformed and children are no longer sacrificed and brutally harmed in religious ceremonies.
This is because of a powerful message which says;
you are loved
you matter
you have value
you have purpose, and;
you can have a future
There are now thousands of children, and their parents, who are hearing this message because of the authenticity of the ‘Project Help India’ story – God’s love in action.
We are humbled and ‘blown away’ by the fact that the influence of ‘Project Help India’ has expanded beyond Kotdwara. We now have an Education Centre 50km away in Bijnor and up in mountain jungle villages. Over this past year we have partnered with the Uttrakhand State and local police to get kids off the streets from begging and into schools and we are rescuing stolen and trafficked children from across the state and getting them back to their families and homes.
You have helped us to make all of this possible.
Please help us this tax time by making a donation. Simply click the pink donate button at the top right corner of this page.
Thank you.