Many years ago, Dr K.P. Yohannan, Metropolitan of Believers Church, came across a news report in one of the leading national dailies which made him numb with shock. On the front page was the photo of a little boy, half-naked, lying on the sidewalk of a busy street.
Next to the boy was a stray dog. Upon closer examination, Dr Yohannan saw that it was a female dog and the little boy was actually suckling her milk. The caption below read: “The dog is his mother”. The three-column article went on to describe the agony that homeless children face as they try to survive on their own. “Many years have passed since that article came out, and I wish I could say things have got better. But I can’t, because the media keeps telling me otherwise,” says Dr Yohannan.
This incident, however, only firmed up his resolve to help the less privileged children, which resulted in Bridge of Hope, a landmark project of Believers Church. What started as relief centres in Tamil Nadu after the 2004 tsunami were established as Bridge of Hope centres by April 2005.
With 525 centres across the country, it provides education and free meals to approximately 64,000 children. The mammoth programme has over 1,000 project coordinators and social workers, more than 1,500 teachers and 900 cooking and non-teaching staff. NCR and New Delhi alone have seven centres each.
Dr Yohannan believes, “Education enables children to become leaders, and strong and upright citizens of tomorrow. Through education, liberty won’t be limited to the hands of a few.”
Although the main emphasis is on education and nutrition, Bridge of Hope aims at holistic development of the community and undertakes other developmental activities to bring about the physical, intellectual and social growth of a child. These include awareness programmes on topics like HIV/AIDS, smoking, drinking, importance of hygiene, educational trips to factories, police stations, post offices, vocational training for women, medical camps, observing a Community Day, and distribution of self-sustainable gifts like cattle, carpentry tools, sewing machines and push trolleys for street-vending. Staff members also hold counselling sessions for parents and give them parenting tips to develop a healthy relationship with their children.
Pohor is one of the thousands of kids to have benefited from these programmes. Coming from a poor family, he had to drop out of school after his parents passed away and start begging to manage a meal for himself and his aged grandfather. But his life took a turn when he was spotted by Bridge of Hope volunteers who enrolled him in the project.
Today, Pohor is in the sixth standard and enjoys singing and playing with his school friends. “I am very grateful to the Bridge of Hope centre for the difference it has made in my grandchild’s life,” beams Pohor’s grandfather.
Establishing centres in the remotest areas is a daunting task, says Fr. Sijo Pandapallil, one of the national directors of Bridge of Hope, who has been involved in this project for the last nine years. “Many of our projects are in villages where it is impossible to reach. Often zigzagging through rain-soaked grass, we take off our shoes to wade through flooded areas. With no roads or vehicles in many of these areas, the only sounds we hear are of wild animals and our feet sloshing through the water,” he says.
In the end, Dr Yohannan says that what they have started is a drop in the ocean. He wants to reach out to five lakh children in the near future, rescuing them from the clutches of poverty and giving them hope for a better future.