Women's Ministry Mission Project

Project Sweatshirt

The destination was New Delhi, India, St. Michael’s Hostel for Girls. The sweatshirts and paints were purchased, the cards were ready to be decorated. On a Sunday afternoon in November 2007, close to 100 women and children gathered in The Great Hall at Signal Mountain Presbyterian Church to decorate 84 sweatshirts and write notes to the children at St. Michael’s. It sounds easy enough, just make them and ship them. Well, it wasn’t quite that easy. The 68 pounds of sweatshirts could run into hundreds of dollars to ship and then there was a very good chance they wouldn’t even get there!

When Jean Smith told Kari McCleery that we may not be able to send them, Kari said, "It was like a V-8 commercial – only God smacked me on the head and reminded me of Choton, Mike’s brother-in-law". Choton Basu is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, and happens to be from Calcutta. Every year he takes 16-18 of his college students to study in India and China for two weeks. They just happened to be leaving for India December 28th.

Choton was more than willing to take the sweatshirts with him, but he wasn’t sure how to get them to New Delhi. When he told his students that 2 duffle bags full of shirts for the children had been packed and shipped to the University by Tracy Peele, they were so excited and asked if they could be the ones to deliver them.

This meant the students had to pack less for the trip to stay within the poundage for travel. I think Choton was shocked at the response of the students, he said they were so willing to change everything in order to make the delivery happen. They even asked if they could take pictures to send back to Signal Mountain Pres.

When they arrived at St. Michael’s, most of the girls were not there, but they got to love on those who were. They toured the school and saw the new addition being built to keep up with the need to help more children.

Samaritan’s Purse had just delivered shoe boxes and a group from Alabama had been there with boxes and boxes of stationary. Choton believed it was a program to teach them to make cards so they could be sold to help with expenses.

Because the school was expanding, all the beds were pushed into one large room. This is where they stored the sweatshirts until they would be given out the next day.

Choton said the facility is working well and doing a good job at meeting the girls’ needs. There are guards posted to protect the girls because of the chance of being taken and sold into prostitution. Choton said his own female students were warned as well, because they could be sold for a large amount of money.

Another problem is keeping the girls in school after 6th grade. At that time they can choose to leave and a lot of them do, returning to the ways of their family.

What is really neat about all of this is Choton now wants to make this a priority on all his trips and to get more students involved in more activities like this.  For them the desire to do for others more than self is a great step for them, who knows what could come of that?

Choton plans to keep in touch with Timothy Shaw at the Hostel for future trips. The students begged for extra time to return to see all the children on their return to Calcutta, but transportation didn’t work out this time.

For more information about our womens mission projects, please contact Jean at 886-2190. 

Related Links

• Circle of Prayer
• In His Service
• Mission Projects
• Mothers of Preschoolers
• Signal Circles
• Women of the Word

Signal Pres Church Office	T: (423) 886-2190
612 James Boulevard	F: (423) 886-3977
Signal Mountain, TN 37377