One dollar raised will purchase two bricks for the Living Hope School and so far our official total is $68,906.27, which is quite a number of bricks. We are so close, with two more major funding events to come, the target goal of $100,000 will be reached by the end of 2011!
It was eight months ago that we began our campaign to raise funds to build a school for the Dalit children in India. Just three months prior to this eighth month mark was when the mission team went to India, in which the team members had their hearts broken everyday due to witnessing firsthand the poverty and human rights violations that the Dalits endured. Upon our return to Vancouver, we pondered what could we do to participate in the freeing of the Dalits. We had prior ambitions to adopt an entire Dalit village before even arriving at India but that never came into fruition since we discovered that at that moment in time the task was to big for us, since for it to be fruitful would involve multiple projects going all at once. So instead we focused ourselves into taking a single task and as you all know we eventually decided to fund the construction of a school for the Dalits. The school was to be situated in a location in the state of Punjab where it would school children from multiple local villages, and in anticipation of a brand new school building, enrolment and schooling of a kindergarten class began. We figured education was one of the key components that are required for the Dalits to eventually be free. Back home we kicked-off the campaign with an event and awareness night that was themed and titled 'Let the Children Dream' where we featured special speaker Joseph D'souza. That night 'The Living Hope School' campaign had officially begun. We had publically and officially committed ourselves to the task. To the memorable and humorous delight of the DFN representatives in attendance that night, twelve year old Timothy holding a brick in each hand, raised his hands into the air one after the other and exclaimed, "One dollar two bricks!"
After Dream Night, the road ahead seemed long and tedious, school construction was just phase one and raising $100,000 alone was daunting enough, but we were committed for the long haul so we were determined to run with it and even further, because once school construction is complete our next focus will be to make sure that any child that attends that school that needed financial sponsorship would get it. What was a certainty was that we weren't certain of how we would accomplish our goal of coming up with enough funds to fund the school construction as well as along the way inform others about the injustice that the Dalits are suffering from so that they may be moved to act as well. We were asking how long would it take for this small bi-lingual church located in East Vancouver with a membership of roughly 130 people to raise the necessary $100,000? Some of us were thinking it may take 2 years or more for us to do this and what we feared was that a drawn out duration would slowly extinguish any momentum we had. We didn't want our efforts to dwindle into inaction, we wanted results and we wanted it fast.
So we pushed aside all doubts and just ran, ideas were bounced around, individual members stepped up turning their ideas into realities and in doing so we spurred others into action. An individual unbeknownst to us had heard of what we were doing, he was man that was blessed financially and he was touched that such a small church such as ours was to take on such a tall task, thus he pledge to match donations dollar for dollar up to $50,000. He was just one of many that has helped and encouraged us along the way but by far he was the biggest contributor and to this day he remains anonymous to most of us. A God send, a sign that we are all in this together. What we are doing is just a small part in the global process of fighting the injustice that is out there, making right what was wrong, and what we know is that where injustice exists there will be others doing their part bringing justice to it.