Swathi is dancing with joy shortly after being admitted to SH.

Amanda Pettit never imagined herself a henna artist.

She also never expected to own half a dozen saris, travel to southern India, host an Indian couple in her home or become an advocate for homeless children. However, since Amanda and her husband Ray, of Abilene, Texas, founded Sanctuary Home for Children in 2006, she has done all of those things.

Sanctuary Home, which provides a home to 85 children in Tenali, India, began with an email from Isaac Palaparthi, a humanitarian worker in southern India whose work the Pettits had helped sponsor for several years. Each November, Isaac wrote to the Pettits asking for money to buy Christmas gifts of saris and rice for widows in Tenali. After seeing the email, one of Amanda’s sisters asked about widow sponsorship. Could they arrange monthly donations? Amanda emailed Isaac and his reply was immediate: “We must start an orphanage!”

“My first thought was, ‘There is no way!’” Amanda said. “I didn’t want to say no – but I was mortified at the thought of asking people for money.”

Despite her fears, Amanda soon sent out a letter with pictures of 30 children and their stories. They quickly found sponsors and a building to rent, and Sanctuary Home was born.

Isaac and Mary hand out food in a slum area in Tenali as often as they can.

Hundreds of children in Tenali are left orphaned each year by disease or accidents, or have relatives who cannot provide for them. Dozens of SH children are brought in by their caregivers; others come straight from doing hard labor in the fields, or scavenging for food on the streets.

“I feel so blessed to participate in such a basic ministry – food, clothes, school, shelter,” said Jana Beck, who serves on SH’s board and sponsors several children. “Every penny spent goes toward the betterment of someone’s life. In my world of fast food, baseball practice and modern convenience, it’s nice to be reminded of basic needs.”

“The greatest thing SH gives those orphans is the opportunity to be a kid,” added Grace Hall, another board member. “They have responsibilities there; they have homework and chores, but they also have family and education and the chance to play.”

In December 2006, Amanda and Ray traveled to Tenali to meet the SH children. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience – which they repeated in December 2007, joined by Jana, Grace and a small group from Abilene.

Pravallika and Anusha on the beach of the Bay of Bengal. The SH kids were taken to the beach for a picnic. It was the first trip for most of them on a bus, first trip to the beach. For the handful of them who came from the coast, it was their first trip to the beach as kids, not as beggars or workers. They loved playing in the waves.

“I think the best moment, both years, has been getting to Tenali at midnight after 24 hours of travel and stepping off the train – and here come the children,” Amanda said. “We’re tired; we’re disoriented; it’s dark. And then, in the distance, with the light behind them, I see all these little jogging figures running towards us. They’ve got marigold petals and they start throwing them at us and smiling and shaking our hands – and someone says, ‘Where is Virginia?’

“I broke down completely because I thought: They know who my kids are.” (Virginia is Amanda’s daughter.) “They care about us. And they are so excited that we’re here.”

In India, particularly in rural areas, the outlook for orphans – and especially widows – is grim.

“If you don’t have an education, you grow up collecting trash or working in a field; you only earn enough to feed yourself,” Amanda said. “There’s no insurance; there’s no welfare; there’s no foster care if something happens – and ‘something happens’ a lot in India.”

The kids, although there are 85 of them, function as a large family. Here they're doing chores, washing their dishes after a meal.

Sanctuary Home seeks both to answer day-to-day needs and to provide long-term prospects for a better life. Monthly sponsor donations pay for food, toiletries, school uniforms and fees; the ultimate goal is to help each child complete his or her secondary education, or set them up with tools and skills to succeed in a trade. It has also begun sponsoring local widows at $12 a month, providing basic necessities for women who cannot hold jobs and are outcasts in Indian society.

Amanda calls SH her “joyful burden,” saying, “It’s demanding, but very fulfilling. I’ve learned a lot about myself, and about how nice people are. And I’m truly moved when I see people make sacrifices in their own lives to help somebody.”

“Participating in social justice in a country where that’s hard to come by feels significant to me,” Beck agreed. The faces of 85 happy children tell the rest of the story – at least, the current chapter. With SH’s potential for long-term positive effects, the full story may not be written for decades.

“The family of SH is good for the soul,” Hall said. “SH looks after their physical needs, but it also works to nurture and heal their broken souls.”

Now that’s a gift worth writing home about.

WEB

For more information about sponsoring a child, donating to Sanctuary Home’s general fund, or to read about the team’s India trips, visit www.sanctuaryhome.org.

AMANDA’S MUST-HAVES

The elementary school SH kids walk to school on a concrete canal, and on either side of it is open sewage.

1. “One of the first words I learned in my anthropology classes was ‘ethnocentrism.’ I think just being aware of that concept helps you be less ethnocentric.”
2. Her trusting relationship with Isaac and Mary – “It’s invaluable to have someone who lives there, speaks the language and knows the culture.”
3. George Muller, an evangelist and worker who cared for more than 10,000 orphans in Bristol, England, in the 1800s. (Amanda read The Guardian of Bristol’s Orphans, a children’s story about Muller’s work, several years before founding Sanctuary Home.)
4. “One person who’s done it before” – in this case, Linda Egle, Eternal Threads founder. “I’ve leaned on her for a lot of advice.”
5. The movie Water (2005), about a group of Indian widows and their poverty, is “like a punch in the gut” but very moving.