Nevett Fund children are all doing well

FR. BERNARD BASSET, S.J.
writes about the youngsters of India you are educating
IWAS warned when I arrived that Bombay was not typical of India. I am glad of that. It seemed a gay city with an artificial Western flavour and its poverty reminded me of Pimlico 50 years ago.
The parks on Sundays swarm with cricket matches; fish and chips are wrapped in newspaper; boys squat on the paveenents in surreptitious circles to take their chance with the dice.
The thousands who sleep on the streets at night are casual workers from up-country, who sleep on the floor always and far prefer the pavement to paying rent. For all the signs of squalor, misery, overcrowding, malnutrition, Bombay is a prosperous place.
In Madras, more than a thousand miles from the Eucharistic Congress, a far more lovely and stricken India tears at the tourist's heart. Here, in the South, few look Western or Want to look Western save the college boys.
The women and girls, with their long hair and coloured saris, seemed so much more feminine and gracious than their Western sisters gaping at the latest Paris fashions in Regent's Street. In the Cathedral, the congregation squatted motionless round the monstrance for the Holy Hour and, at Mass of a morning I heard no noisy coughing and blowing—but the soft padding of bare feet.
Madras itself is as Victorian as Bournemouth, with Englishstyle houses, university buildings, hotels and office blocks. Cows wandering across the roads, calves frolicking in the rush-hour traffic, serve as a timely warning that the old-time English veneer is now wearing thin. Off a main thoroughfare you suddenly come upon a native village; the shock would be no greater if a visitor to London came upon acres of thatched cottages between Piccadilly and Oxford Street.
English thatched cottages would be palatial if set beside these Indian hovels made of leaves. Yet Madras must be reckoned a prosperous city. To see real poverty, the missionaries told me, I must cover the 600 miles South to the Pearl Fishery coast.
I visited several native villages around Madras. Pride, dignity, courtesy, faith, all assumed for me a deeper meaning as I saw how these poor Indians bore themselves, Their cottages were made almost entirely of palm leaves, bound to wooden uprights, set in a floor of mud. Only a very few were strengthened by two or three rows of bricks.
For much of the year the mud is dry, but heavy rains, in the week before my visit, had wrecked many of the houses and flooded the surrounding ground. It was here that I met Mary, 12 years old and one of our Nevett children, whose baby brother had been drowned.
Was there a cottage without its sorrow? I could not afford to walk any further to answer the question for myself. The family who posed for me mourned a mother who had died earlier in the week. Backed by our Nevett Fund, I could promise to pay the schooling for Lourdesnathan and Annemarie, his sister whom I photographed in a family group.
Just across the lane, four little girls were mourning for their father so I invited the missionaries to extend similar help to them. I walked no farther; imagine the suffering between Madras and Cape Comorin I
Yet for all the poverty and pain, my Indian friends seemed happy. They streamed out of their little homes to greet me and to welcome me in. Each Christian hut had its statue of Our Lord or Our Lady and all the Christians together had constructed a thatched chapel at the entrance to the village, to which, from time to time, a priest came to offer Mass.
I was pleased to see this chapel, for in the hills to the South Fr. Nevett, with our funds, had built a similar chapel for the poor workers on the banana plantations with the imposing name frudayakulam, meaning Sacred Heart.
The thousands of poor
Indians in Southern India are wholly occupied in keeping their families alive. The Government has done much to improve the irrigation but the rains, which flooded Madras, failed for the second year in the Southern regions and the vital rice crop is now not likely to materialise.
The poor live entirely on rice. They cook once a day, at nightfall, and what is left from the evening meal is mixed with water to a tasteless porridge which the children take with them to school. Then there are bananas, costing Is. 6d. for 30; cheap enough unless you happen to have no money and no hope of it.
Few country people have any money. They are paid in kind for their work on the plantations, and the failure of the harvest spells disaster to them. A few try to rear hens to sell the eggs to the middle classes in exchange for rice.
Mariadas can help to illustrate my point. He is the fifth of
Fr. Bernard Basset, S.)., went to the Bombay Congress as spiritual adviser to the CATHOLIC HERALD pilgrimage. Whilst there he spent some time with Fr. Nevett and the children who are educated by funds raised
through this paper.
seven children born to poor Christian villagers in the far South. The harvests failed in the middle of his schooling and his parents could not feed their family.
Thanks to a missionary, Mariadas and his brother were given some kind of employment in a Jesuit house. When I first met him he was washing cups— next he served me at dinner. He is an alert, intelligent, happy little boy.
All hope of education for him had been abandoned when we arrived. But then five Carl-tom Hustle pilgrims stood sponsor for him and we raised the £90 which will send him to boarding school for three years. So Mariadas posed for his first picture; I, sthug in my Montague Burtons, giving him moral support.
On every side one heard praise of the Indian Government, working so hard as it is for the very poor. Education is free, irrigation extends, loans of grain and cattle are freely offered to poor villagers. Yet this very aid can cause a further trouble: if the harvest fails the' poor find themselves hopelessly in debt.
Between the Government and the poor are the middlemen, corrupt and callous, syphoning off much of this aid for themselves. While I was in Madras a drive against such corruption was under way.
My friends—priests, nuns and
laymen—were savagely insistent that great care is needed if the truly poor and starving are ever to get our aid. For the Church has its middlemen too, writing endless appeals to Europe, asking for literature which they never open, as a means of obtaining addresses from which to beg. A bishop has condemned the use of heartbreaking photographs of poverty to draw European money to less worthy ends.
Our Nevett Fund total had reached £7,400 when I came to Madras. Fr. Ncvett is a Yorkshireman, Fr. Clayton was born near Blackburn. Both have a grip on the purse-strings and their hearts with the poor. I come home deeply satisfied that every penny of our money is wisely used.
We now have a hundred and more poor Indian children at school. For the majority we pay £12 per year on clothing, transport, slates and books. Sometimes we assist the parents that the children may be freed for school.
read the reports. "Yes", writes a teacher, "all your children are doing well. Savanianima is in the 8th Grade, Lourdes is in the 8th, Selva Teresa in the 5th, small Agnes and Raju have reached the 3rd.
"There is a girl called Rethanam in the 7th. Her mother is not paying for books or anything. She told me to write to you for help; it seems that you promised to help the child. I told all the children to pray for you in a special way; so let us trust in God."
Perhaps the greatest joy of my visit came with the reports on those children whom we first set out to help. Philomena has finished at college and is now back as a teacher in the village; her brother is a teacher too.
Teresa, thanks to the fund, has done a needlework course and can now support her ailing mother. Alphonse, whose father died of cholera, is training as a teacher. Kulandai Therese (Little Flower), who was playing in the village, lacking sufficient clothes to go to school, has now reached the top grade.
This report is as factual as I can make it in so limited a space. Those who have helped in the past or may like to help in the future should share my contentment.
To meet such noble people, and to know at first hand the only way to help. a journey of 7.000 miles was not too long. The post is less tiring and arrives more quickly. All that we need, all the time, is money—sent, maybe in gratitude, to the Nevett Fund (I. Albert Road, Bournemouth, Hants).
Postscript: Grateful thanks to "Fixed Odds", Belfast, whose postal order for flf) arrived as I typed the last sentence.