The Beloved Community Returns to Kolkata
By Caleb J.C. Larnerd
This past January, members of The Beloved Community (TBC) revisited the Chitragunj village located just outside of Kolkata, India. Families living within the village greeted the team with lots of excitement and hugs, considering a year had passed since the last visit!
The primary goal of this visit was to distribute donated clothing to village youth who attend their local government’s school under the sponsorship of the Kolkata Children’s Project (KCP), which subsidizes education fees. We also hoped to continue the cherished relationships we’ve made with these youth and their families.
Sumit, KCP’s Project Coordinator, had the children line up and asked for their signatures and thumbprints before accepting their gifts. Each student received a shirt and pants, and mothers had the option of substituting a hat or pair of socks. One pleasant surprise was that a village teen named Jagannath (who was just a boy at the beginning of the project) took responsibility in helping facilitate this process. The kids were excited to wear their new clothing!
The trip to the Chitragunj village was certainly full of fun too. We played suspenseful rounds of “duck duck goose,” sang “head shoulders knees & toes,” and had intense “tug of war” battles using makeshift teams. The first rope snapped almost immediately, but after the second rope snapped and left everyone crashing to the ground in a ball of laughter, we decided to cross the shallow river to play in the fields. There, we had a pickup game of football, shared dance, and watched kids expertly fly their handcrafted kites at sunset.
Looking back on another productive and fun visit to the village, The Beloved Community has a vision to expand the project to subsidize the education for children of more impoverished families. There is also potential for the KCP to develop infrastructure that would provide the community with clean drinking water year-round. Potable water can be in short supply sometimes, like during monsoon season, therefore a man-powered filtration system would meet this particular public need.
We look forward to future trips to the village and all the memories they harbor, and with the help of increased donations, we can similarly look forward to aiding the community in other ways.
Interested in sponsoring one of the children of Chitragunj? Check out TBC’s GoFundMe page!
