Illinois children in Vacation Bible School raise enough money for Children’s Hope
to bore four fresh water wells in India.

By SHAWN CLUBB

The Telegraph
GODFREY — Sixty children attending Bible school at a church here have potentially impacted the lives of 16,000 children in India, raising enough money to create water wells for two villages.

Cory Barron, director of public relations of the St. Louis-based Children’s Hope International Foundation, said the children attending vacation Bible school this week at the First Baptist Church of Godfrey raised more than $1,000 dollars in spare change, which was matched by an anonymous donor.

Barron said the $2,000 is enough to construct four wells — two per village.

“Because of the population of the villages, it’s estimated each village well will provide water to 4,000 children,” Barron said. “It’s really phenomenal.”

Tina Qualls, a member of the church who also works for Children’s Hope International, said the children were bringing in plastic bags full of coins every night.”

“We had a competition between the boys and the girls and they were just very excited,” She said. “Every night they had bags of coins and were just dumping it in.”

Qualls said the church was trying to make the children aware that other people had needs.

“Every night we showed them a picture of the people in India and a well and talked about what it meant for these people,” she said.

The pastor of the church presented the money on Thursday to a representative of the organization.

“We’re just thrilled that the little church in Godfrey did this,” Barron said. “Last year, we had donations to bore 12 wells in India and this church is has now collected enough for a third of that.

“That’s all we talked about in the morning meeting today, just how great that group was.”

Lynn Raney, director of humanitarian aid for the organization, said it has been doing the well program for a couple of years. She said the organization works with a non-governmental organization in India called Missions to the Nation, which does numerous humanitarian efforts.”

Raney said Bible schools, schools, individuals and families have raised or donated more to build the wells.

“We’ve done six other wells so far this year,” Raney said. “Every village there needs two wells to serve people.”

The partner organization in India has set a goal of providing 500 wells to serve 250 villages, but “that’s just scratching the surface,” Raney said.

When a village doesn’t have fresh water wells it has two options, Raney said. These are to either truck the water in, which means the women of the village have to walk a long distance to carry the water in urns on their shoulders, or they use local ponds.

Raney said the local ponds are polluted from people bathing, washing cloths and even washing their buffalo in them.

“You can only imagine the diseases they can get from that and the children die,” she said.

The money the Bible school raised will be acknowledged with a plaque in front of each well.

shawn_clubb@hotmail.com