continued to well up in my mind until I came home to Wilmington in early 2006,
where I taught at UNCW. I was a reasonably accomplished writer and journalist, and
I had no background that would qualify me to help.
I stumbled along at first. Reena and the girls were sleeping on the floor. I could
help there. That Christmas I reached out to friends with an appeal I called, “Bed for
Reena.”
I raised a few thousand dollars and returned to India, bought the mattresses and
mattress covers, and promptly found out this was perhaps the worst idea I could
have come up with. What happens to mattresses and mattress covers on dirty floors?
Exactly. The mattresses went into storage.
Forget about mattresses; the girls needed a proper home, not the concrete floor of
the school, where each morning they quickly rolled up their mats before the other
students arrived.
began to speak in churches, to civic clubs, in schools, to just about any-one
who would listen, and Home of Hope — soon to be Homes of Hope
— was born.
To be honest, I don’t know exactly how this happened, but Home of
Hope seemed to have a life of its own. People responded, and responded
I
generously, when I told them about Reena. A homeless man in Seattle put 73 cents
in a church envelope, which was all he had, and told me to “help those kids.” Other
people wrote checks for amounts I couldn’t quite believe, and soon there was enough
money to build a new orphanage in Kochi.
When Tracy and I were preparing to go to the dedication of the orphan-age,
I received a call from Stuart Padley, a Microsoft executive I had met at one
of my talks. He was at another orphanage run by the Salesian sisters, this one in
Secunderabad, Hyderabad’s twin city.
“It’s worse than Kochi, Paul. Horrible. Kids are sleeping four and five under a
blanket in a tiny rented building,” Padley said.
Our work wasn’t finished; it had just begun.
Today, through the incredible generosity of people all over the globe, we have two
more orphanages under construction and by year’s end, more than 400 orphaned,
abandoned and neglected girls will be safe and going to school in our Homes of Hope.
We have just started raising awareness for two more orphanages, one for HIV orphan
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girls near Chennai,
and another in Assam
for Adivasi (tribal)
children, one of
India’s lowest and
poorest castes.
I often say about
my role in Homes of
Hope: I am hollow
like a pipe. I don’t
have the resources,
but they can flow
through this small
nonprofit from those
who do have the
resources to these
children who need
help.
That help has
come in many forms
Homes of Hope supports 32 locations in southern India,
orphanages, schools, hostels, and women’s empowerment
centers.
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