I happy to participate to the annual day on 27th febrruary. I could see that all the parents and the villagers were entertained by their own little ones. There were approximately 1500 people gathered in this day. Dear friends, I was in Asmoli in the month of March 2005. The gradual changes taking place in the project area are amazing. The children in the school started learning and their parents are really happy. Since majority of the population doesn’t value the education of girls and hesitate to send their girl children to school, we insisted on the importance of educating the girl child quoting their own saying: “If we educate a boy, we educate an individual, if we educate a girl, we educate a society”. From the parents, I could understand that all their concern is to get the girl children married as they reach their early teen age. Once they cross 18 years, most of them are mothers. Child marriage still exist in the villages. The female fetucide is also increasing. I was happy to be present for the Annual day of the school. All the children were given a chance to perform his/her talents. The new admission procedures have already started. We expect to admit 130 more children in the new academic year 2005.  Marc Valentin, President

The father said : "it is God’s will, the child was not meant for us."

In the project areas we have animation programs for the villages including special programs for women and children. We have volunteers in the villages and once a month, they organize the meetings for the women in the village. In this meeting, different issues are discussed. From time to time, our teachers participate in this meetings.

There are many issues which have no immediate solution until the new educated generation grow up. Here is an example from the house where two of our teachers stay:

According to the village custom,when a child is born, the mother feeds her baby only after her siser-in-law comes and put a few drops of milk in the mouth of the baby. The wife of the house owner where our teachers stay, delivered her baby boy. They already have two girls, one studying in our school and they were eagerly waiting for a baby boy. As per the custom of the village, the mother waited for her sister-in-law to come and she is living in another place, far from there. Due to some problem the woman came two days later and the child was dead meanwhile. The teachers tried their level best to convince the mother to feed her baby and even threatened the father to take this child to the hospital as the child was dying; but they didn’t do it. They were not ready to break the custom, the mother of the child was scared of her in-laws.....at the end the father said, it is God’s will and that the child was not meant for them.

The local people are very superstitious. The main problem is that they are afraid to break the local customs because if they do that, they are going to be blamed by the rest of the society and their own family. Joint family system is prevalent in India and the women has no say in the decision making of the family. Some of the customs are very strong and it becomes a choice between life and death. All our effort is to educate the women and men, to change their way of thinking and to open their eyes to the knowledge and truth.

We hope that Angali, their daughter who is in our school may have the courage to fight against the social evils...

	Balls, puzzles, games, all were welcomed for the children's activities.

It is surprising to see the amount of toys coming in Europe from China and India, but when we went looking for some games in India for our school,we could hardly find any on a reasonable price. They are very expensive. Very few children play with toys and games in India. The reason may be that they are expensive or they have not yet started to value these things.

An action was initiated to collect some second hand games and toys from Belgium. Many people were happy to give them for the school. The problem we faced was to transport them to India. The Air Line companies are very strict,often we had to leave behind when it was over weight,that is above 25 kgs. However, we transported enough of them to the school for the moment in few trips.

Let us hope that the new generation we educate will bring socio-economic changes in the society.