The boy who inspired me to transform a village
When PR boss SYLVIA HOLDER met 12-year-old Venkat in India, she had no idea how many lives would be changed as a result of their enduring bond
AS I walked into the tiny fishing village in India, nearly three decades ago a teenage boy started running towards me and enveloped me in a huge hug. It was so good to see him again. His name was Venkat and although our paths had crossed just once before, we had developed an immediate and lasting bond.
Venkat and I had first met three years earlier when I was on a business trip in Chennai in the south east of India. It was the late 1980s and at the time I owned a PR business in London, where I lived with my husband.
Although I’d been put up in a plush five-star resort on the coast near Chennai, I wanted to see what life was really like in India so I took a stroll up the beach towards a small fishing village a few metres along the shore.
As I approached, a 12-year-old boy in an ill-fitting T-shirt and shorts came running up and asked if he could give me a tour of the village, which was called Kovalam.
He introduced himself as Venkat and chatted away in broken English, telling me he was the son of a fisherman and that he had two brothers and three sisters.
As he led me down the narrow streets past cramped huts with roofs made from palm leaves, I couldn’t believe the poverty the villagers lived in.
Most families lived in one room without any furniture. They had just a single pot to cook in and mats on the floor for sleeping.
I was shocked and saddened at the hardship in Kovalam, which was just a stone’s throw away from the luxurious hotel where I was staying.
At the end of the tour, he took me to a café and we ate one of the most delicious meals I’ve ever had in my life, made with fresh fish and prawns straight from the sea.
He and his friends ate hungrily and took food home for their families too.
After the meal, Venkat asked if I would pay £10 for him to go to secondary school as his dad couldn’t afford the fees. I was so touched by our afternoon together I said I’d sponsor him through secondary school and pay for him to go to university too.
Over the next few years we kept in touch by writing letters and I sent money to cover his fees.
Then one day I was back in Chennai for business and went to the village to find Venkat.
When he saw me, he came running up and immediately gave me a huge hug.
He proudly showed me the one-room house where his family lived, where the only decoration on the bare walls was a photo of me I’d sent him in a letter.
He was an extremely bright young man, working hard at secondary school, and when I saw him again just after his 18th birthday, he’d passed all his exams.
After that he studied for a business degree at the University of Madras and three years later he sent me a photograph of himself at his graduation ceremony.
It was amazing to see how far he’d come and I was so proud of him.
After university, he moved to Qatar in the Gulf to work and sent money home for his family to buy a bigger house.
Then he qualified as a translator and continued to work in the Middle East.
In December 2003, when he was 27, Venkat emailed to say that he had been shortlisted for a job in Mumbai.
But a few days later his brother JR called to say Venkat had been killed in a road accident.
I was devastated by the news, I’d come to think of Venkat as a surrogate son.
I wanted to do something in his memory for the village where he’d grown up, and I flew to India to meet his family.
WHEN I arrived, Venkat’s brother showed me to the primary school. “Is there anything you could do to help here?” he asked.
The building was in a sorry state. The tiny classrooms leaked when it rained and the school was so overcrowded that some of the classes were taught outside in the baking heat.
The children were dressed in rags because there was no school uniform and the teachers were barely trained.
When I asked the headmistress what the school needed, she wrote me a lengthy list and at the end she wrote “a secondary school”.
“Steady on,” I thought, but said I’d think about what I could do to help. When I got home, I was haunted by the children’s faces in their cramped classrooms.
I decided to start a charity in Venkat’s honour, and called it The Venkatram Memorial Trust, or Venkat Trust for short.
I appointed some trustees in the UK to help me raise money and Venkat’s brother JR agreed to oversee logistics in India.
In the first year we managed to raise £27,360 and began improving the classrooms.
The trustees take care of all the administration costs so every penny raised goes towards educating the children.
Now we’ve raised more than £1million and the primary school has gone from a few leaky rooms to a spacious and colourful place to learn, with an open-sided dining room and space for playing sports.
We’ve brought in trained and experienced teachers and provided uniforms for the pupils, who are always immaculately turned out – despite the lack of facilities at home.
What’s more, we partnered with the government to build the desperately needed secondary school. It has a state-of-the-art science lab, a computer suite and a wonderful library.
The charity now sponsors 400 students there. As well as paying for secondary school, we have started a fund to help the pupils go on to university. So far, 35 children from the school have graduated from university and now have good jobs in Chennai.
It’s important to me that instead of moving away, the children carry on living in the village and bring money back into the community.
Now, I’m approaching my 80th birthday. I’ve long-since retired and was widowed in 2007.
I imagined I’d spend my retirement in Hove, East Sussex, being a lady of leisure but the charity is a full-time job.
As well as fundraising in the UK, I travel to India twice a year to see how the school and its children are getting on.
It’s incredible how different the village is now and I hope that soon every child who lives there will be able to have an education.
When I think back to that day when I met Venkat on the beach, I had no idea how one meeting would transform both our lives and those of the other children in the village.
Although it was devastating to lose him, I like to think that he would be very proud of what we’ve done in his memory. For details, visit venkattrust.org. uk or call 01273 719 362