Dear Friends,

Our Beloved Ramesh Uncle is turning 73 years on 20th May-2011. Lets all pray for his good health and follow his path of compassion and love that he has shown us. The best gift we all can give him is to work more and more with dedication for the poorest of the poor.

(Self Grooming Personality Development And Self Evaluation)

A group of students from Dinobandhu College in Howrah visited SHM and offered to organized One day Counselling workshop on Fact finding not Fault Finding among children in Education. Five students and a Professor from the College organized the session on 2nd May-2011 followed by lunch and tea. No fees was charged by the Counsellors and it was free of cost.

MEDITATION

The Session started with Meditation and and group of 60 Volunteers from the educational Program attended the session, started from 10am to 4 pm, It was good learning session for the teachers and volunteers.

RAISING QUESTIONS

The Teachers of Samaritan Mission school, after school Teaching Volunteers, asked question on various issues relating to classrooms teaching was raised to the Counsellors and the attendees learnt a great deal from this workshop.

Proff.Shreya Banerjee
(Counsellor)

Professor of Social Science, Mrs. Shreya Banerjee took a very nice session and taught the teachers various methods to be adopted in the classroom to make the children take more interest in coming to school and in their respective interests.

INTERACTION

Nilofer teacher of Pre-Nursery asked many question about How to handle the smaller Kids in her classroom for efficiently.

Q&A SESSION

The session was followed by one to one question and answers session. shaheen raised almost 20 question on the various method of motivation of her students in the after school teaching Program.

ARCHANA SINGHA
Teacher of Class-I

Archana asked about How to Motivate the Back benchers in her classroom for their active participation in classroom activities.

ISHRAT BANO ( Volunteer)

Ishart Bano is a Volunteer in after school teaching Program, asked How make detail enquires when she visit any house in Tikiapara slum and motivate the family to send the child to school and also to adopt a Family Planning method for the sake of his Family, Her question was related to motivate the male member as they create many problems.

A group of ten Volunteers of AFTER SCHOOL TEACHING PROGRAM interacting with UK Volunteer.

We are happy to update you about one more Program added to Samaritan Help Mission work in education. Spoken English Class For SHM Volunteers. A group of Volunteers staying in the US, UK and Canada are voluntary giving time to teach our volunteers to speak fluent english.

We started two class of 10 Volunteers in each batch total 20 Volunteer. As there is scarcity of place in our school, so the class is conducted  in my office. During the time when Volunteers are Online and have time to teach our volunteer no classroom is free.

Our  Computer class is engaged and same time the Volunteers across the world are free and online at that time.  More batches will be added soon on saturday & Sunday.

In coming future we shall start the similar program for our school children by installing one computers in each classes with Internet and many volunteers will join to teach the children Math, english, science , geography and other classes through Skype.

Within one week the confident level of our volunteers have risen and they are talking not with me only but among themselves in english. Once our new school building in Tikiapara will be completed, separate room with all the necessary infrastructure will be created especially to conduct similar courses for the SHM Volunteers.

Later on we have decided to conduct regular career counselling for the students of the Bustee as well as for our volunteers who are studying in different stream and need guidance to go forward.
We can also engaged Br.Rajesh Raman, Br Vinyak Lohani, Br Rupam Deb, sister Sree and other friends who will guide the students of our bustee and also SHM volunteers. Our friends can also interact with our coordinators of different projects to know about the progress of the work face to face.

Interaction And Practical Class In Progress

After the class of 1st shift of AFTER SCHOOL TEACHING PROGRAM complete the volunteers comes to our office and class starts.

Hamida, Shm Volunteers As Chief Coordinator

This program is run independently by our volunteers itself, HAMIDA is acting as Coordinators, she send the list of batches to the teaching volunteers and runs the program.

Nikhat Bano Act As Sub-Coordinator

In case of absent of the chief Coordinator. Nikhat Bano teacher of Computer Literacy program takes the charge of the Coordinator and runs the class.

Inaugural of SHM new Health Centre 26th March 2011

On 25th March-2010 Friday, Uncle visited Samaritan Help Mission, interacted with the teachers and show the progress of the children at the school, the teachers briefed him about the progress of the children

The 26th March-2011 will be remembered as one of the golden moment in the work of SHM, this is the first time that one our unit God has started by the auspicious hand and prayer of our beloved Uncle Ramesh Kacholia and Br Rajesh Raman, I cannot forget few words, when I told Uncle to start the centre by his auspicious hand, he just told me, Mamoon, inauguarate it by some local elderly, But all of us had a wish that Uncle and Rajesh Bhai shall start the new Centre, Because GOD has sent both of them at the moment when everything was ready to start, Almighty too wanted that the health Centre should get the blessing of two great souls, Br Rajesh came all across from Singapore for only one day to visit us. It really touched us a lot.

Uncle At Junior KG (Girls Section)

Uncle met the children and the class teachers of various classes, advised them the to work more hard, encouraged them of their work and also blessed all the children. He joined the small kids in their prayers. Thanks to EDELGIVE FOUNDATION for Supporting the Illiteracy Elimination Program.

Interacting With The After School Teaching Program Volunteers

On 26th March -2011 saturday, Br.Rajesh Raman came all along from Singapore to visit Parivaar and SHM.
Both of them reached SHM in afternoon, interacted with the after school teaching program volunteers with encouragements.

Continue Your Education

Uncle advised all the Volunteers of SHM to continue their education. SHM shall help all the volunteers to complete their degree courses. Meeting of all 60 volunteers will be organized on 28th March-2011 and they will be supported by SHM to continue their further education.

Uncle’s Order

None of the nephews and nieces across the country have a courage to refuse Uncle’s order. When all of us joined the inaugural moment, Uncle directed Br Rajesh to inaugurate the Centre. But Rajesh Bhai was willing that Uncle should cut the ribbon and he requested but Rajesh Bhai effort went in vain. He had to follow Uncle’s order.

Togetherness Is The Key To Success

Uncle advised all of us to come together and inaugurate the Health Centre. Br Rajesh with our Lady Doctor and uncle inaugurated the health Centre. We all joined him.

Praying To God, To Entrust More Responsibility To Serve The Needy And Follow The Right Path

After inaugurating the Health Centre, Uncle entered the Premises, Prayed to Almighty for giving us more opportunity to serve the poorest of the poor in whatever way we can and the whole SHM team joined him in Prayers.

ECG Machine Donated By Br.Anil Hebbar (Caring Friends)

Shri. Arun Uncle of Caring Friends visited SHM last year and he saw the need of ECG machine and Br.Anil Hebbar also a very closely associated with Caring Friends sent the High quality ECG machine for the needy and poor patients at our New Health Centre.

Facility At Health Centre

Uncle Rajesh Bhai visited all the facilities made at Health Centre and wished all the success of SHM new step.

Uncle And Rajesh Bhai With Shm Team

The whole SHM family was very eager to have picture with Uncle and Rajesh Bhai.
It was a moment which we all will never forget.

God Bless Caring Friends

Since the last seven years all the SHM success and achievements are owed to CARING FRIENDS. Without you all it was not possible. Almighty GOD has given power to Caring Friends to turn the dream into reality. God, bless you all and thanks to ARPAN FOUNDATION for Continued Support to our various causes.

Support Of Goonj

SHM is closely associated with the GOONJ initiative. Apart from support of materials for the VT Project for income generation and other requirements, GOONJ is also the part of our Health Project initiative. Medical equipments are supported by GOONJ.

Salute to our Hero
We are Proud of You

Br.Vinyak is a hero for all of us, He inspire and Guide us. Our Govt is recognizing his efforts and selfless service, Recently Br Vinyak has been taken as member in the Task Force of Ministry of Child Development in the Central Government, He will be a part of Formulating the policy and schemes and implementation. Now he represent all of us and will be a guide for all. Nimesh Bhai called all our associates Sharing Friends among the Caring Friends, Br Vinyak is in the first row of sharing. May God bless him with Good health, so his effiorts could bring change in the field of child development in our country.

Voltas Makes Water Filter and Cooler for the poor Patients and School Chidlren

Donated by M/S Websopider PVT Limited
(Courtesy:- shri. Siddharth Jhunjhunwala)

Last year Shri. Dhanesh Bhai Visited Kolkata and Introduced Br.Siddharth Jhunjhunwala, Managing Director M/S WEB SPIDERS (INDIA) PRIVATE LIMITED, and he was very generous to help SHM to install water Purifier and Cooler for the children and patients.

Doctors Chamber, Family Planning, Reproductive Health Care & ECG Unit

In the year 2010 Samaritan Help Mission signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Family Planning Association of India, to work for the Family Planning in Tikiapara bustee and other deprived area with the main focus to be the awareness.

The initiative have already started in Tikiapara and it will be implemented in our new centre as well.

By Sumati Yengkhom/TNN

Children at the Samaritan Help Mission's school in West Bengal.

Howrah: Eight-year-old Urmin looks older than her age. At this tender age she knows what’s brown sugar, the drug her father peddled for a living.

Bubbly Sabina hated the uncles who thronged her house. They wanted to buy the “stuff” from her mother. The reluctant seven-year-old helped her widowed mother wrap brown sugar and heroin in paper packets.

Hundreds of children like Urmin and Sabina have been driven to peddling drugs in Tikiapara, a slum in Howrah.

Now, however, they’ve found an alternative. For perhaps the first time in their miserable lives, they are even beginning to smile. And they owe it all to their “Mamoon” (uncle). Mamoon Akhtar has brought a slice of paradise into their hellhole of a world.

Samaritan Help Mission teaches slum kids that there is an alternative to selling drugs for a living

“If it was not for him, I would have never emerged from the hell i lived with my children,” said Sabina’s mother Reshma Khatoon. She stopped drug peddling and works as a domestic helper after Akhtar persuaded her to opt for a decent livelihood. Sabina studies in the school run by Samaritan Help Mission (SHM), a non-government organisation floated by Akhtar and his friends. Urmin’s father too has given up drug peddling and sells fruits.

Akhtar grew up in the very Tikiapara slum and was exposed to the same miseries. An incident six years ago changed his life. And that of so many others.

“One evening in February 1999, a boy came to me saying his widowed mother was being beaten by a man for refusing to peddle drugs,” he said. Akhtar and his friends rushed to the spot and got the man arrested. Sensing Afzal’s desire to study, Akhtar began teaching him. That is how SHM was born.

The article in the Sunday Times of India

His friends helped him collect funds and build a room on a 600 sq feet plot he had inherited from his father in the slum. More than 400 students study here in three shifts.

SHM also provides vocational training like tailoring to girls, organizes literacy campaigns, conducts awareness programs against drug abuse and HIV. Akhtar also campaigns for family welfare.

If Akhtar has become a messiah to many, he has also earned the wrath of fanatics and local maulvis for his secular teachings and attempting to propagate family planning among women. Anti-socials have also threatened him several times for trying to cleanse the slum of drugs.

Akhtar donates whatever he earns as a librarian to the organization. Individuals donate books and stationary. Former US consul general George Sibley and his wife Lee Alison were among those who offered him monetary and moral support.

24th April 2004

By Kastuir Basu

Article about SHM in the Statesman. Photo by Piyal Bhattacharjee

The chatter of hundreds of tiny tots neatly attired in clothes that have seen better days, clutching books and bags, comes across as a grotesque anachronism in a dingy lane that reverberates to the sound of hammers, tongs and iron rods. At another time it would be hard to distinguish the dilapidated red building of the Samaritan Help Mission in Howrah from the others around with the usual carts laden with sheets of aluminium and the drain in front overflowing with putrid factory effluents. But it’s eight in the morning and yet another day for Mamoon Akhtar, Noor Alam and Shah Azam. And for the 300-odd students of the school, it’s another opportunity to get a step nearer to those dreams that saw the light of day almost accidentally three years back.

“It seems like it all happened yesterday,” says Akhtar, founder member of the Mission, sitting amid the strangest assortment of files, a computer and about a dozen children who’d gathered around him for their quota of sweets. “I was sitting with my sister when a child from a nearby slum approached us. He said this father was beating his mother mercilessly. I’d known the child and his family for quite some time and I knew the father was a drug peddler. We went with him immediately and found the man was forcing his wife into the profession and was beating her up because she refused to obey him.”

Kasturi Basu reports on a school in a Howrah slum that is doing wonderful work on a need-not-creed basis

He was able to save the woman from not only the clutches of a brutal husband but also from being thrust into perpetual hell, but what haunted him from then on was the traumatic effect this brutality would have on the child’s psyche. The boy wept and later told him he wanted to study. This was no isolated incident in this slum. Children of almost every slum in the locality are confronted with the same situation day in and day out.

Samaritan Help Mission was conceived with the dream of pulling these children out of the quagmire of drug peddling, addiction, prostitution or destitution that would transform them into delinquents. With about 60 children and just one motto – help people in need, not by creed – the school started in Akhtar’s house. Friends Alam and Azam joined in enthusiastically and are now an inseparable lot.

In the four years since February 1999, the school has come a long way and is now not just a rehabilitation centre for the children of lesser parents. Their smiling faces and proud voices reciting, “Twinkle twinkle little star”, “Sare jahan se accha”, or “Hattima tim tim” speak for the camaraderie, contentment and, above all, a secularism that has replaced the insecurity with which they first stepped in.

Akhtar’s secular outlook has been the inspiration for the teachers as well. They work here for a meagre Rs 100 honorarium – most of them college students driven by a passion to do something different by infusing these children with an outlook they would never have got from their own families.

This school has no source of income. So we really don’t accept any payments. We come here for the honour. Anywhere on the road a child will suddenly stop to greet us,” says Tabassum Riyaz, whom drops in regularly after her classes at Narashimha Dutta College. Resham Rashid, a housewife, teaches here after finishing her household chores. She explains the difficulties of dealing with these children from various problematic backgrounds and various levels of mental development and the curious pleasure she derives from their being able to overcome problems and work towards what can only be called “national integration”.

Plagued by the lack of space and funds, there is only provision till the third standard. Besides, the space constraints demand that two classes often be run simultaneously, which calls for extra effort by the teachers as well. While one batch of students is busy with the verbal regimen, the other batch is entrusted with writing work.

The school runs in three shifts – morning, afternoon and evening. The toddlers of the morning and afternoon give away to the adolescent labourers who come in the evening after work hours. Sarita Kumar, Ashok Pandey and Shamina Khatun, who started here some three years ago as school dropouts, are ready to resume studies at a formal school, thanks to the Mission’s effort.

Under the guidance of the teachers and particularly Akhtar, the dropouts are soon back to formal study. “We are also thinking of vocational programmes, especially for girl students, so that when they leave school they can lead respectable lives without begging anyone for help,” says Akhtar.

But the hard work doesn’t end here. The real work, according to Akhtar, starts when the students are deemed fit to graduate to a formal mode of education. They are taken to nearby government schools and, most importantly, enrolled in a medium that would suit them.

“We also appeal to the few people we know to shoulder the responsibility of their education for at least a year, if not more. But what is made clear in the first place is that need and not creed should be the basis of help. It should be of no consequence whether the children are Muslim, Hindus or Harijans. If they have the academic competence they have a right to aid,” says Akhtar.

The STATESMAN in Kolkata Covered the full story of Samaritan Help Mission

Having initially faced the ire of various religious communities, his obviously secular outlook has now managed to convince even the local goons and fundamentalists. He has even managed to enlist the help of the local imam to hard sell government programmes to dispel the religious aura associated with this and try to make people aware of the benefits of small families. We have special programmes for communal harmony as well,” says Akhtar, explaining how special attention is paid to the participation of women in these programmes.

When it comes to the success of his projects, Akhtar doesn’t hesitate at indulging in a little blackmail here and there. For example, neighbours coming to complain about the lack of proper drinking water facilities or the electricity problem are coerced into sending their children to school in return for his promising to remedy these ills. But a lot remains, says Akhtar.

The dream depends largely on the availability of funds and of course he admits receiving some aid since the day he started, “I earn a meagre sum as a librarian in a school nearby and it wouldn’t have been possible to do everything by myself. I am indebted to a lot of people who have contributed after visiting the school. I want to especially mention Lee Alison Sibley. She has visited the school many times, spent time with the children and gave them a lot of advice. I still remember how pained she was when she visited the first time and realised that there was no toilet in the school. She immediately gave us money to build one.”

But a mission being just that, Akhtar isn’t one to flinch.

21 June 2003

By Dipanita Nath

CHASING THEIR DREAMS: A class in progress at the Samaritan Help Mission which imparts free education to poor children. A picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhaya.

Though situated cheek by jowl against similar unpainted buildings, it is difficult to miss the Samaritan Help Mission at Noor Md Munshi Lane, Tikiapara, Howrah. A line of tiny tots, neatly attired albeit in cloths that have seen better days, inevitably signals the landmark building flanking a byland. This is where Mr Mamoon Akhtar, Mr Shah Alam and thee other invested all their savings to chase a dream.

Their mission was rescuing the people of neighbouring localities from the clutches of drug traffickers and crime lords, increasing health awareness and civic responsibility besides making women and children self-sufficient.

The multi-pronged objective could be reached through a single method. “Education alone can cure social ills,” states Mr Akhtar, director of the NGO. A Herculean task given that Mr Akhtar works as a librarian in a school nearby and his associates too aren’t very affluent. Though short of finances and other resources the Samaritan Help Mission has made steady progress.

Education is imparted in Hindi, Urdu and Bengali and students are admitted to schools in the locality. “Our students are made up of children of drug traffickers and alcoholics, poverty-stricken girls and boys, school drop-outs and even domestic help who want to know more,” says Mr Akhtar.

All this in three shifts extending from the morning till late in the evening in a classroom that measures less than 600 sq ft with no shutters in the windows. “The open windows will pose a big problem when the monsoon arrives.” he says.

His concern about the rainy season temporarily replaces an equally disturbing problem about the school having no toilets.

The story in The Values Age about the work of Samaritan Help Mission

The Samaritan Help Mission admits students into class one or class two directly. The syllabus comprises alphabets and numbers until the student is ready to graduate to a more formal school. Improvisation suffices when difficulties arise. “Students of both classes in a particular shift, occupy the same classroom. Students of one class write while the other repeats lessons verbally,” he says even as eyebrows rise in curiosity. The teachers are women graduates from the locality. “These girls render their services voluntarily, and are paid Rs 100 every month as honorarium.” he says.

Mr. Akhtar and his colleagues are often reduced to blackmailing parents in order to get the children enrolled in school. “This happens when people come to us with the problem of civic amenities like lack of water supply. We assure them of getting the corporation to lay a water pipe only on the condition that they send their children to school,” he says. It always works. The NGO can now boast more then 300 students. Another notable point is that admission is granted only if mothers accompany their children. “It is more effective that way.” says Akhtar. The Samaritan Help Mission also arranged counseling centres for women, a task that came under criticism from several religious leaders. “We render our services based on need, not creed.”

When it was time to hard-sell projects like pulse polio, we enlisted the help of mauls at the mosque as well as priests of the temple. Despite that we found that four children had not been given the polio drops. We fetched them from their homes personally for the medicine.” says Mr. Akhtar. Local goons have learnt to leave the NGO alone as have politicos. Tales of success alone explain where the NGO gets its strength to carry on. Children maintain a regular attendance and are performing well even at their formal school. Drug trafficking may not have been checked, but the new generation will never get involved.

A former smuggler, who once earned more than Rs 50,000, has now quit in favour of the straight and narrow. But the NGO’s dream is far from fulfilled. “Its a hurdle to the tune of Rs 27,000 per month that stands in the way of a complete change.” says Mr. Akhtar. Anyone listening???

For more details

127, Noor MD Munshi Lane,
Tikiapara
Howrah-1
Phone:28494068