Because of a festival that comes right in the middle of the month of February, there are people who associate the entire month with romance, love, and friendship. So, this month, instead of looking at a single ‘candle,’ we will look at a couple of them. They are actually a married couple – both of whom are shining examples of committed, courageous service to people, especially the poor.
The husband is someone whom the well-known English newspaper, The Guardian, in January, 2008, identified as one of the fifty environmentalists who could save our planet. Sanjit Bunker Roy, known simply as Bunker Roy, is a Bengali, who grew up in West Bengal. Born in a well-to-do family in West Bengal in 1945, he went to prestigious educational institutions. When his parents had great expectations for him, he went to Bihar to study the impact of one of the worst famines in India, called the Bihar famine. “I saw starvation, death, people dying of hunger, for the first time. It changed my life. I came back home, told my mother, ‘I’d like to live and work in a village.’” The shocked mother refused to talk to him for two years.
Dedicating his life to the rural poor, Bunker Roy spent five years digging wells in villages in the district of Ajmar in Rajasthan. In 1971 he founded the only college in India that claims to be “built by the poor for the poor and managed by the poor.” The Barefoot College (TBC) in Tilonia, Rajasthan, admits illiterates and semi-illiterates from the most oppressed castes in remote Indian villages. It trains them to become water and solar engineers, architects, teachers, midwives, accountants, IT workers and marketing managers. TBC runs night schools for rural children who, during the day, have to work in their houses or fields.
Fr M A Joe Antony SJ
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