How one woman’s extraordinary efforts gave a poverty-stricken island its own English-medium school

Source: The Hindu

In 2012, two women and a sewing machine made a 100-km journey from Kolkata to Hingalganj, an island in the Sundarbans in the lower Ganges delta, 5 km from the Bangladesh boundary. Today, that journey has caused in the only English-medium school on the 238 sq. km island, all because one of those two women happened to be a teacher.
Satarupa Mazumder, 46, remembers that day like it was yesterday. Her aunt, who lives in Toronto, had come on her annual visit, and took her along on the three-hour drive to donate a sewing machine to a community of women. They spent all day in the village, but when it was time to leave, a few young girls, having learnt Mazumder’s line of work, pleaded with her: “Didi, kichu korun... aamra kichu korte chai.” (Didi, please do something, we want to make something of our lives.)
Mazumder had observed how the children were just playing around or rolling beedis with their slim fingers for their parents who were beedi workers, doing pretty much “anything except studying”. The reason was not hard to find. The only school the village had was a government school, and it wasn’t operative. When it did, there were two teachers for 100 children. The kids would go to school only to have their mid-day meal. The mothers asked Mazumder to teach their children anything she could.
At that time, the middle-school teacher was education economics at a supposed school in Kolkata. A steady job and a settled life with her husband and their little daughter. And here, in the Sundarbans, were vast bands of people soaked in poverty, and not one decent school for their children.

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