Lifting up little lives
Seated in the car, looking out of the window, while her husband was attending to their malfunctioning television, the heap of old blankets dumped along the corridor leading to the repair shop seemed strange.
Disinterestedly looking at them for want of something better to do, suddenly to her consternation she saw something moving amidst the blankets.
Ranji Chara
It was a bony hand.
A closer look and her heart ached – amidst the torn, frayed and dirty blankets “were a bunch of children, sleeping one on top of each other”. This was the vivid introduction that Ranji Charavanapavan (shortened to Chara for easy pronunciation) had to abject poverty in Livingstone, Zambia.
There was worse to come – before her very eyes, one child disentangled himself from the heap and began foraging for scraps of food in a garbage bin.
“Something snapped inside me and I started crying,” recalls Ranji of this haunting image, even though it was a long time ago.
Overwhelmed by emotion, she opened the car door and handed over a packet of buns she had to the 14-year-old boy who was rummaging through the bin. Amazement followed. The boy let out an ear-splitting whistle and 35 other children ran to him and as she watched they broke the few buns into “tiny smithereens” and shared the titbits.
It was then that she realised what work was cut out for her – the setting up of a home for the destitute children roaming the streets of Livingstone.
The ‘call’ to engage in this mission had come awhile earlier when Ranji, a staunch Christian of the Assembly of God group, was in Botswana with her family. Their roots firmly entrenched in Sri Lanka, she had accompanied her husband, who is a doctor, to Zambia in the 1980s first when he went there to work.
She was born in Colombo and raised in Kalutara, she smiles, while her husband, Nagendra, was from Kandy. It was at a Youth Camp in Kandy that the couple met and fell in love. She was a stay-home wife and mother but wherever her husband was transferred to across Sri Lanka she would teach Sunday school because her passion was children. She herself has two grown-up children.
To Zambia, the family went in search of better prospects and after several years moved to Botswana. It was there that Ranji had a visitation from God, guiding her towards “greater work”, she says.
“Until that time I was happy and had no big dreams,” she points out, when we meet her while she is on holiday in Sri Lanka recently.
She was afraid. Who was she to be called by God to do such work? She was not qualified — neither did she have any experience. They were dependent on her husband’s salary to feed and clothe their family and worry gripped her. They were being asked to leave everything behind in Botswana and go back to Zambia.
With the conviction that she was being guided towards her life’s mission, her husband complied without murmur.
“We packed our bags and went back to Livingstone. We had no house, no place to stay. We had no savings and no money,” she says, only trust in God. “We went in faith.”
There was another edict – that she should not ask for funds from anyone to begin her work and that is exactly what she did. “I didn’t ask for funds but people came to me with offers of help.”
A friend in Sweden, Kerstin Carlsson, called her and asked her about the orphans in Zambia. On hearing of the pathetic situation these children were in, she had spoken to her church and sent Ranji US$ 300.
Ranji’s first act, with the help of two other church ladies, was to gather the waifs, scrub them up with Lifebuoy soap, for they had not had a bath in a long time, and cook them a big hot meal in two pots that she had bought.
She knew she was on the right path because various people who saw her work joined her to help. In just five months, Ranji had enough money to rent a home and provide comfortable accommodation to 22 boys including Morgan Chilufya whom she had spotted looking for food amidst the garbage. He was an orphan brought up by an uncle who was mistreating him and getting him to work.
Like almost all the children, he had never been to school. Their situation was “hopeless and helpless”.
Things moved quickly thereafter – within a year Ranji was able to rent three houses and give shelter and dignity to numerous children destitute due to their circumstances as their parents had succumbed to the dreaded Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). These were the children who were also being forced into slavery.
Next came the dream to start a school. Beginning from scratch, with the support of Kerstin and also Anne and Keith Olford they were able to raise US$ 30,000 to buy one. It is to Ebenezer Trust School that 350 orphans and vulnerable children walk in to gain an education.
“Education is the key,” reiterates Ranji, “in reaching out to the poorest of the poor to enable them to open any door.” Once word spread, children showed up at the gate not only to be dished out lessons but also all school supplies as well as two meals daily.
By 2008, she also felt the need to look into the “burden of babies”. Young mothers were dying and with the economy in a poor state there was a “tugging at my heart”.
With no funds, however, but the need for a Baby Home, she drew a plan of a house to proper dimensions on a piece of paper, to submit it to the City Council for approval. It was at a garden tea party that another friend, Lenore Burton, Ranji had contacted, sounded out an elderly couple. Before they left the party, the couple had asked Lenore how US$100,000 sounded for the Baby Home project in Zambia.
Currently the Ebenezer Children’s Village is not only home to 52 children and 30 babies but also includes a 40-acre farm to grow the food needed to feed the hungry mouths which amount to about 400 (both children and staff) each day.
The testaments to changes for the better wrought by this Sri Lankan in the lives of Zambian children are numerous.
Morgan is now a handsome man of 28. This boy who even at 14 did not have a roof over his head and did not even know how to write his own name has now emerged from the portals of the Victoria Falls University in Livingstone with a Degree in Information Technology (IT).
Among “my boys” are a WaterEngineer working for the Zambian government and a chef in a mining town, says Ranji with justifiable pride, while the list goes on.
With her motto being “A place to call home and someone to call Mother”, Ranji has now set her sights on still greater plans – the setting up of a secondary school for skills training.
The need is a million dollars but Ranji remains unfazed. “God will find a way,” is her simple logic.