Living Water

NORTH INDIA – Sister Rajini is a woman with a simple vision. “It’s all about our Lord,” she tells me. After talking to her for only a few minutes, I know that she understands the gospel better than most. She sees that the work of the Kingdom of God means both proclaiming and performing the gospel—being the hands, feet, and voice of Jesus.

Sister Rajini is the director of Ashirwad Convent. She is also the head teacher at Mahatma Gandhi Primary School , which she and the other sisters operate. More than 500 students attend from surrounding communities. “It makes my heart happy,” she says, “to see the children learn and grow every day—their bodies, their minds, and their spirits.” She is committed to for the long haul. She has been here for 12 years, and plans to grow old here, caring for the children who come. As most teachers can tell you, progress is slow; but Sister Rajini is patient. “It is like the water in the river. Each day it looks like the one before, but in time, it can change the river’s course.” She answers my questions with analogies, reminding me of Jesus, the patient teacher.

I ask to see the water well that serves the school, and Sister Rajini takes me to the hand pump in the courtyard. “The children all get clean water here,” she says, “but when they go home, we cannot know what they have to drink.” Many of the students who attend the school are from impoverished communities. In the afternoons, when classes have been dismissed, Sister Rajini walks through the communities that “her children” live in, most of them within 5-10 km of the school. She stops into homes, visiting with the children and their parents.

“They are lacking so much,” she says, “and not only the things we can touch.” Many of the families here function as one-parent homes, because many fathers go to the cities in search of work. This places an even greater burden on the children.

“When I first came here, it was too much—I did not know how to begin. And then I came to see that the most basic thing that many of the villages were missing was good water.”

Sister Rajini began to write letters to commercial drillers, asking for help for her communities, but neither the convent nor the villages had the money to pay the rates they were asking. However, one of the drillers told her about a non-profit organization working nearby, and she decided that she needed to meet them. When sister Rajini visited a village where Living Water International was drilling a well, she was delighted to find that these people were doing their work in the name of Jesus, too. “I told them of the need, and in the next months they were here drilling!”

LWI’s team in North India has now drilled four wells in the communities near the school, and is completing a fifth. The difference in the children from these communities is amazing. They stay healthy and can attend more regularly; they run and play during class breaks, and show a marked improvement in their studies.

“I am so happy,” the sister says with a sideways grin and a glint in her eye. “And I know Jesus is happy to see his people working together to serve these children.”