A simple observation that I made exactly 20 years ago to the Rev. Jerry Hazen, former pastor of Monmouth’s Faith United Presbyterian Church, unexpectedly took a life of its own.

I told him I was amazed at the extravagant lifestyle in America and the enormous waste it generated, and how wonderful it would be if the excess could be transferred to India – the country from which I hail.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of what began as a modest project, the improvements made to a small village called Kandithankulam in the southern tip of India. Over the past two decades, the project has expanded to embrace four villages and two slums, besides serving the medical needs of seven area villages.

Saro sits with her husband, Raj, on a well they helped construct in a village in 2004.

In 1988, the congregation of Faith U.P. Church collected clothes, pens, pencils, toys, trinkets, etc., and sent them to Kandithankulam, along with a gift of $400. When my husband, my son and I arrived in India for our summer vacation that year, six huge boxes were awaiting us to be distributed to the people of Kandithankulam. With the money, we bought saris for some of the women, uniforms for the schoolchildren and other basic necessities for the rest of the village.

Seeing how far $400 stretched, the Faith Church congregation decided to increase its support for the work in the village. Some of the projects we completed before we moved on to other villages include:

• Thatched roofs of houses were replaced by tiled roofs to prevent fires and leaks.

• Every house in the village now has electricity.

• The drinking water supply in the village was augmented through bore wells.

• In addition to uniforms, schoolchildren were given notebooks, pens, atlases, maps and other supplies.

• Restroom facilities for the school were built.

• Several individuals and families were helped to stand on their own by the purchase of goats, bicycles, sewing-machines, etc.

• A bus shelter, providing refuge from the hot sun and the monsoon rains, was built.

• A family caught in the clutches of a loan shark was extricated from huge and mounting debts.

• Smart young women, who could not afford college education, were helped with their tuition.

• Seed money was given to several homeless villagers to build homes of their own.

In 1994, a group from Monmouth and Chicago, that included MC faculty members Richard “Doc” Kieft, Craig Watson, Esther White, Dorothy Douglas, Dorothy Julian and Harlow Blum, along with Blum’s wife, Lila, and visited the village and were amazed by the work that had been done.

After their visit, not only did we branch out to more villages that were much poorer and needed more help, but we undertook a very challenging project – building and operating The Light Eternal Medical Clinic. The facility, which has in-patient capabilities, was constructed in 2000.

Kandithankulam locals wait outside a clinic funded by an anonymous donor from Monmouth’s Faith United Presbyterian Church.

On hearing the story of a poor shepherd woman who nearly lost her hand due to a careless diagnosis, a couple from the church, who wished to remain anonymous, came forward to build the clinic. The interest from an endowment that has been gradually built – by our congregation and other friends – pays the salaries of the part-time physician, the resident nurse, the managing director and other staff, as well as utilities. From identifying and helping to arrange free cataract surgeries for scores of senior citizens, to treating common and prevalent diseases, this medical facility is a boon to at least seven area villages.

On our latest visit last summer, we focused on a new village. We have noticed that as the flourishing middle class has more to spend, the cost of living has rocketed sky-high, leaving the poor worse off than they were before. We chose 14 families for whom we built houses. It might be surprising to know that each house was built at a cost of only $750. Of course, they are the simplest of houses, with no electricity or any of the basic amenities that we take for granted. But the families were ecstatic because they had been living in shabby huts with dirt floors. I am proud that our son, Vinod, helped us in many, many ways in our work in this village. There are at least 10 more families for whom such houses have to be built, but we are aware that we have to take things in small stages.

The elders of the new village, as well as of the other villages, pointed out other pressing needs of individuals and families, which we did our best to accommodate. In addition to the houses, there were other exigencies with which we had to deal. Those included helping out with medical bills, buying a sewing machine or goats so that families could augment their meager incomes, assisting with financial difficulties, repairing a roof and providing financial assistance to a few struck down with polio, and cancer, polio and other diseases. We did all these within three weeks last summer.

This is the first year that we have started on this new village. It will take many years for our work at the new village to be completed to our satisfaction, just as it took us several years to have a feeling of fulfillment in Kandithankulam. Thanks to the generosity of the Faith Church congregation, in Kandithankulam there are no more houses with thatched roofs, all houses have electricity, there are no homeless people, water supply has been substantially augmented, the elementary and pre-schools have better facilities and much, much more. We are aware that it will take us several years for us to say the same of our current project. We are also aware that this will not be our last village, for we have requests from a couple of other neighboring villages.

In the meantime, we have been busy making arrangements for our next medical camp to be held at The Light Eternal Medical Clinic. At such camps, four or five physicians volunteer their services, and people from seven or eight area villages attend. The camps are held three times a year, and each one treats between 200 and 300 patients.

Two decades of partnership between the congregation and friends of Faith U.P. Church on the one hand and the villages of South India on the other is changing the lives of thousands of villagers halfway around the world. Our current pastor, Bill Myers (a 1985 MC graduate) is actively promoting the 20th anniversary of this global endeavor. I’d like to close with a quotation from a letter to our church’s monthly newsletter from Sudha Rao, another Monmouth College graduate, and a major contributor to the clinic’s endowment. She visited Kandithankulam and its neighborhood in 2004 and wrote:

“The grassroots effort that the Ambroses and their church are carrying out is the only one of its kind I know of that is targeted toward bettering the lives of the poor. Without such grassroots endeavors, rural life would remain virtually forgotten and untouched.”