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Man Starts Street School To Teach Kids From Slum To Read And Write

India has the largest population of illiterate adults in the world.
By Sarah Ruiz-Grossman

Humans Of Amdavad

When a factory owner in India realized the kids in his slum couldn’t read or write, he took it upon himself to teach them.

Kamal Parmar has been running an after-school program in the streets of Ahmedabad, India for the past 15 years, according to a post from Humans Of Amdavad. Much like Humans of New York, the page documents the lives of people in the city of Ahmedabad, or Amdavad in the local pronunciation.

“I was standing outside my factory and saw around 20 students [from the] Municipality School going back home after their exams,” Parmar explains in the post. “I was shocked to [learn] that none of them knew how to read and write. And the most surprising part was that they all were in eighth grade.”

India has the largest population of illiterate adults in the world, according to Oxfam India. The country has 287 million people who cannot read and write, representing 37 percent of the total illiterate population worldwide.

Parmar conducted a survey of 400 students in his area, and discovered that only five of them were literate. That’s when he decided to start the program.

“I teach them for two hours every day, and then we all have dinner together,” Parmar continues. “Due to [the] dinner, a lot of students are attracted here.”

triloks via Getty Images

Every day after school, Parmar teaches the students everything from the alphabet to preparing school exams to higher education material. Over 15 years, the program has grown from 10 students to 155 today.

“Imagine, those who couldn’t read and write are now engineers and doctors and managers at a bank,” Parmar said. “For me this is success.”

The biggest indicator of his success may be something else altogether: some of his former students have come back to teach alongside him.

“I just have one request to the people at large,” he concludes. “Try to educate just one child a year, and see the difference it makes [in] society.”

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Prison Ministry Can Do A World Of Good. Especially, for One Whose World Crashed!

The love of God changed David’s life forever, but without someone like you, he might never have heard the Gospel.

If you ask him today, David will say that God saved him by sending him to prison. His life was out of control. He couldn’t stop drinking. It was only a matter of time until his freedom would be taken away.

In prison, David lost everything that mattered to him, including his children. But something else also happened. He surrendered his life to Jesus Christ. David got involved with Prison Fellowship and signed his children up for Angel Tree. Slowly, life began to change.

Today he is out of prison and reunited with his family. Together, they are following God with all their hearts. They are a powerful example of what God can do and is doing when you give. But there’s another family—it could be any one of a thousand prisoners’ families. This family still needs to experience the power of the Gospel.