School is where the heart is

Located at the deep end of a road and overlooking acres and acres of green fields and trees, Karunalayam feels like the earth’s last stop. While that is poignantly true for a large number of people who die at Karunalayam or go back from here and later die in their homes, ‘the last stop’ has surprisingly given birth to a new idea that has some merit. 

HIV pundits will have none of this. Ghettoism versus mainstreaming is how the issue would be perceived and no one is going to favour ghettoism over mainstreaming.   

But there are two practical problems in mainstreaming. One is mainstream schools’ refusal to admit HIV-positive children. Karunalayam’s brood of seven kids met this fate last academic year. 

Two, kids may not receive as much love and positive attention as they do in their ‘own’ school. Bency and Benson in Kollam, Kerala, fought their way into school but actually got to study there two years after they began their fight.  February 2005 is when they finally made it to school. The children studied in a library across their school for some time when parents of other children objected to their presence.    

There are 41 children, all orphans (5 of them semi-orphans with one parent dead) living in Karunalayam who have been attending on-campus school since November. How is the venture faring? This reporter decided to find out. 

We meet little Swati with bright, laughing eyes, who sits in the front row at class. She is four but tells us she is three years old. She nods happily when asked whether she likes it here. Does she like studies? She immediately breaks into a narration of a, aa, e, ee and English alphabets. We find later that she is on TB drugs. 

In class, the chorus of kids’ voices is loud, focused and enthusiastic. When the teacher asks them to write something on the blackboard, they can’t wait to come forward. One after the other, they run out to do the exercise. The teacher is warm and encouraging.

Would they be as motivated and free in a regular school, one wonders. What does Swati’s single parent Vengala Rajamma think? Rajamma and Swati (then a few months old) were condemned to living in a hut away from their village after Rajamma’s AIDS afflicted husband committed suicide. Media reports led to their being brought to Karunalayam in 2005. 

Ask Rajamma whether she would like her daughter to study here or outside and she quickly answers “Here”.  ‘Outside’, there is no respect, she explains. 

This point is underscored by Father Joseph who feels that a regular school’s rigour could be too taxing for an HIV-positive child. “The lone boy I got admitted to Class VI in a regular school last year died of TB three months later.  He joined school in July while classes there had begun in June. There was a lot of extra work and he used to be very worried about his studies,” says he. 

School hours at Karunalayam are spread out and exceedingly comfortable. The routine is as follows: wake up at 6 am, breakfast at 7.30 am, followed by medicine at 8 am. All the children sit down in a row and take medicine at this time. Those not on ARV are given bactrim prohylaxis to prevent PCP and diarrhoea; vitamins and antibiotics are provided as per need.

As of now, the nascent school runs two classes (headed by teachers who have HIV and are widows), one for those aged 7-14 years and the other for under 7-year-olds or those who can’t read and write. The senior class (that has 12 students) follows the state education board’s Class VI syllabus. Depending on how the children cope with the syllabus, they could be groomed for taking Class VII board examinations, and later, if they live, maybe Classes X and XII board examinations, says Father Joseph. Logically, they should be able to pursue college or a vocation after passing school. At that stage, their school lineage should be of little consequence. 

Interestingly, the number of children here has almost doubled over the last couple of months, going up from 23 to 41, and 10 children had to be refused admission as there was no place to accommodate them. Clearly, the centre and the school are answering a need — old grandparents and relatives, finding it difficult to nurture these children, are bringing them here. 

While the right of an HIV-positive child to study in a school of his or her choice is unarguable and schools should be able to provide them a congenial atmosphere to grow to their full potential, one cannot deny the important role that Karunalayam school is playing in enabling HIV-positive children to lead a full life. And so, until an even studying ground is available to all children, there is a role that schools such as Karunalayam can and should play.

Sadhna Mohan won the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for HIV/AIDS in 2007