Summer 2023 update!

Charity founder Jessica Morwood spent five months in Varanasi working on connecting with children that had become disconnected over the pandemic, making new connections, and setting up new initiatives.

Here are the most significant updates:

The new school that is hosting us for the foreseeable future, ASHADEEP, is just finishing

construction out in the village of Narottampur. Our teachers have been studying Early Education classes online and doing online ZOOM classes with Kati, our German co-founder, to prepare them. The two new teachers, both named Pooja, have been meeting Suraj, a former student, at the camp every morning to give the new kids lessons on hygiene and grooming. After they brush their teeth, wash their face and hands, they receive their breakfast. This is usually fruit, nuts, or bread. This way we hope the children will be ready to do those things at camp every morning before the van arrives to take them to school.

We will be sponsoring 20 kids to study at Ashadeep proper and fifteen young camp kids will be starting in our new classroom at Ashadeep. The new class of little ones will be starting with beginning level Montessori materials in the early morning, working independently, and after will learn with theme-based hands-on activities. Due to a shortage of funds, we have developed our own, homemade Montessori-styled materials for the children to learn on.

For our Further Education Program, we support forty older kids in high school and University. These are kids who started with BHN when they were young, and thanks to your sponsorship and their own perseverance, these kids have been able to progress to high school and beyond! We still provide nutritional support to these older kids, since most of them are not getting enough nutrients to be able to concentrate on their studies, especially the girls. In June, most children sat for their first Unit Tests in class. All these students are expected to provide community service, which include reading stories in Hindi to the children living at the camp in the afternoon and taking small groups of kids out to play at a park. They will also be helping Suraj conduct group games and activities after school, since many of the mothers from the camp are out begging until after four o'clock each day.

We now have an Instagram page, please follow us for more frequent updates @basichumanneedscharity