The Parish Magazine June 2022

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The Breakthrough Trustees would
like to thank everyone at St Andrew’s
for your prayers, encouragement and
continued financial support during
the uncertain and difficult period
of covid. Your support enables us
to make a difference to the lives of
children and young people at Karun.
Karun School was closed for over 19
months during covid but is now finally
open again. Many children have had
no formal schooling for nearly 2 years.
In this academic year alone because
of a general lockdown in the state,
children have missed more than 6
months schooling. This has had a
devastating effect on their education.
Covid has led to many changes in
schools and children's homes. Karun
School has yet to return to its precovid
strength. At present, children
come to school by a bus funded by
Karunand they have breakfast, midday
lunch and a snack before returning
home. Families very much welcome
this provision.
HOME VISITS
Karun children are from
disadvantaged backgrounds and
many have poor basic skills. The long
school closure has meant they have
fallen even further behind in their
work. Although the government
provided some online lessons, most
families have no internet so the
children were unable to follow them.
Karun teachers tried to help them
with reading and writing by visiting
them in their homes.
This year the government is
providing refresher classes and after
school catch up classes and there
are plans to shorten the summer
vacation to make up the lost time.
Teachers have welcomed these
initiatives and have found that after
school catch up classes are of great
help to the children.
The school is very fortunate to have
a dedicated computer room that was
kindly donated by the Rotary Club of
Loddon Vale and a new specialist IT
teacher has been appointed to give the
children more opportunity to develop
their IT skills and access the internet
to support their learning at school.
Sewing and IT classes for the local
community continue to be very
popular and the numbers enrolling
have been steadily growing. Sewing
classes take place three times a week
and the IT class is at the weekend.
Many of the girls have become very
competent and some are looking to
apply for jobs in textile companies.
The Trust has also funded girls for
nursing and teaching degree courses.
The professional qualifications they
have gained has enabled them to get
jobs very quickly and to earn a good
salary. We are also funding two girls
on degree courses.
One boy, the Trust sponsored to
train as an electrician at a technical
college, is now an apprentice in a large
firm.
The Parish Magazine - June 2022 27
Your support is helping Karun emerge from Covid
An update from Leslie Stephen
From growing and harvesting cotton to teaching IT and internet skills and sewing, Karun
continues to help the disadvantaged families in South India
We continue to explore different
ways to fund opportunities that
encourage girls to access higher
education. Two high achieving girls’
schools approached us to fund students
from disadvantaged single parent
families who were badly affected by
covid and we now fund two girls with
mentoring so they will hopefully
continue to higher education.
The garden project started by
the ancillary staff during lockdown
continues to thrive with good harvests
of vegetables, and a cotton crop proved
to be very successful. Both provide a
good income for Karun. The children
have been using the garden to support
their work on the environment.
Thank you once again!