VIRAMPUR ASHRAM CELEBRATES REPUBLIC DAY
Virampur Ashram is the creation of Hasmukh Patel. Fresh out of university Hasmukh dedicated himself to Gandhian principles and to helping the poor. He met his wife Manda when the two of them were imprisoned for a year for resisting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s declaration of emergency powers in the 1960’s when the Supreme Court threatened to remove her from office. The rest of Hasmukh’s family are doctors. His brother, who supports Hasmukh, who has only given and never been paid for any of his work, Jitubhai, owns several hospitals in Ahmedabad and is a past president of the All Indian Medical Society. Both of Jitubhai’s daughters are also doctors in Ahmedabad and Hasmukh’s son, Mihir, is a doctor in Johnson City, Tennessee, only an hour’s drive from Asheville.
Following the model of other Gandhians Hasmukh first volunteered with the Gandhi Peace Foundation and then with the help of rich relatives and others built an ashram, a school for tribal children in Amirgadh, a short distance from his new ashram in Virampur. The ashram is a boarding school for under privileged tribal children who have no access schools. Tribal people are the marginalized first indigenous people of South Asia before the Aryans came. The children attend this school for the primary years and then go on to government schools for their secondary education. The children are provided school uniforms and a simple place to sleep and good meals and a good education.
But the Virampur Ashram is much more than a school for tribal children. It is also a development center for all kinds of adult activities including building check dams to catch the monsoon runoff and channel it underground from which it can be pumped the rest of the year, a farmer’s support program and development fairs, a children’s nutrition programs and much more. In all of this he is aided by Shilpa Vaishnav who runs a number of UNICEF funded programs for children.
For years Hasmukh has hosted Warren Wilson student groups that I led and has found homestays for students and has introduced us to his Gandhian programs. He and Shilpa are good friends and now Susie and I and Todd are here as friends. He has a building with a number of guest rooms where we can stay and we eat meals together and are included in whatever activities are going on while we are here. This time we arrived just in time for January 26th Republic Day, a national holiday in which the children are encouraged to celebrate a pride in being Indian. That was on Thursday. On Saturday we attended the Medical Camp in which about 15 doctors from the Vishvanager Eye Hospital about 120 kilometers away give free treatment to tribal people for one Saturday once a month.
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On Thursday, Republic Day, the day started with speeches and the unfurling of the Indian flag, both of which I found myself involved in. Then the children of the school dressed in their freshly washed uniforms paraded to the sound of a drum as they shouted out slogans, waving Indian flags as they walked in a long column to the Virampur police station. Here they were given a speech by Shilpa in which she said that the police were their friend and that they should honor the police. Then they returned to the Ashram and put on a talent show of dance and yoga for a large crowd and then had a special meal.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 