The School at Varni: Children's Fund - Part 2

In the mid-1990s, Hemalata and Lavanam founded a rural school, Sanskar Ashram Vidyalayam ("vidyalayam" means "school"), near the first village to which Hemalata had taken her song. The school was for the children of the former joginis and the reformed thieves. I am a volunteer teacher at this school. It goes from the first through the tenth grade. It now has 300 students. Half of them are boarders and are the children either of families which Lavanam and Hemalata have already served or else of other families on the dark margins of civil society: children with a parent who is a convicted crook or a common prostitute or a drug-addict. These students come from many parts of Andhra Pradesh. The other half of the children are day-students from peasant families.

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• Varni
• Humanist
• Mark
• Lindley