The Kothapallimitta/St. Peter’s/St. Alban’s Companionship, now in its eighth year, continues to be a highly active and successful program, linking our parish, St. Alban’s Oakland, and the Church of South India pastorate of Kothapallimitta. Kothapallimitta is a severely impoverished, oppressed community on the other side of the world to whose people we have been able to offer financial help and, even more important for all concerned, the knowledge that we are brothers and sisters with much to learn from each other.  See our Vision 2008 statement:  The Kothapallamitta Companionship:  Changing lives, Opening hearts, Sharing faith and Supporting education.

See what some St. Peter's and St. Alban's parishioners have to say about their involvement with the Companionship: see how lives have been changed and hearts opened. Click Here

It all began in the winter and spring of 1999. Zachary Fleetwood, then Rector at St. Peter's, was searching for ideas for a truly significant project that would engage and inspire the St. Peter's congregation the way the South African Companionship had some years before. As part of this process, he asked Prince Singh, then our Pastoral Associate, to give a Lenten adult education series on the tragic Dalit situation in India. Prince knew it first hand. He had close acquaintances working for the Dalit Campaign for Human Rights (centered then in Chittoor), in the Christian Seminary in Bangalore, and at Pravaham - a Christian retreat center not far from Chittoor. Furthermore, before he had come to the U.S., Prince had been the Pastor (Church of South India) for three years in Kothapallimitta, a desperately poor, remote, rural, Dalit ("untouchable") pastorate with one pastor, one main church, and thirty-eight village congregations spread over 3850 square kilometers. The region had been "Christianized" by Australian missionaries early in the twentieth century, and those Australians had been the first ever to tell the "untouchable" people of Kothapallimitta that they were human beings - and not only that, but children of God. It had not been a plum assignment for Prince Singh. "The Bishop sent me there because, frankly, he didn't like my face," said Prince. "It was Siberia." But Prince fell in love with the Dalit people of Kothapallimitta, and they with him.

Following the Lenten series, Zack and Prince began putting ideas in place for a Companionship between St. Peter's and India. After some worrying about whether getting involved would be throwing our know-it-all American weight around in a culture and religion that are not our own, a group of us were won over by arguments that the human rights situation of the Dalits was grave enough to be a worldwide concern and that our own particular mission would not be to try to convert people of other religions to Christianity. These Dalits were already Christian. We Americans could actually learn quite a bit by looking at our faith from the vantage point of these despised, oppressed people. Prince drew up a chart in the form of a cross, with Pravaham, Kothapallimitta, the Christian Seminary in Bangalore, and the Dalit Campaign for Human Rights at the four points, and we set about trying to decide with which one we would try to have a companionship. I recall a meeting in Zack's office, with Buzz Shaw (who had been hugely involved in the South Africa Companionship), Prince, Zack, and Grace Terwilliger. At one point in the discussion Grace looked at me and spoke like an oracle, "Yale and Kitty should go to India and they should take Caitlin." And so it happened.

The decision about where our Companionship should focus (at which point of Prince's cross diagram) had not yet been made when Prince and his wife Roja took Zack and me and my husband Yale (then rising Senior Warden) and our daughter Caitlin (then 20) to India in January 2000. It was, however, an intentional, clear sign of the strong level of commitment St. Peter's already had for this project that the church sent two of its clergy and one of its wardens on the first delegation! In India, though we visited and considered all four "points" Prince had drawn on his cross chart, we, as Prince had earlier, fell in love with the people of Kothapallimitta -- a people of grace and nobility, but living on the brink of starvation. Caitlin summed up our visit in a speech for our congregation when we got back, "No matter how different our lives and our cultures are, I have never before had as much of a sense of God bringing together people who were meant to be together as I had there."

Ramila's Dream

In the spring of 2000 I wrote to the Rev. Jayaseelan, Pastor in Kothapallimitta, on behalf of St. Peter's, proposing a "Companionship." Together with him and his wife Ramila, and their church leaders in Kothapallimitta, a committee of enthusiastic people at St. Peter's -- chaired by myself and Kathy Seabrook -- worked out the aims and principles of our relationship. One of those principles was that the people of Kothapallimitta, not we, would decide what major project (requiring grant money) was most needed. We did make some suggestions. Prince suggested a "mentoring program." I suggested regular visits by a health van from a nearby hospital. Nobody was thinking of a school. But when we asked Jayaseelan and his parishioners in Kothapallimitta for their suggestion, they had already made their choice. As it happened, two months earlier, our St. Peter's Sunday School children had sent the money from their Lenten Mite Boxes ($850) to Kothapallimitta with a note "Please use this money to do something good for the children of Kothapallimitta," and the pastor's wife Ramila had used it to fulfill a dream of hers -- to start a small school in the church building. By the time she and her husband wrote to us to tell us about their decision, the school already had 21 kindergarteners - Hindu, Christian, Muslim; Dalit and "higher caste" -- who, in the words of Pastor Jayaseelan, "sit together, take their naps on mats together, eat together, play together, and study together; that has never happened before in Kothapallimitta!" He explained that the mix of religions and castes was important not only on principle but also because it made the school less vulnerable to caste violence and prevented the Dalit children being "ghettoized" in a school only for them. Education would be non-sectarian and in English. So . . . they had begun the school, and they chose it as our big, joint project. Ramila's dream was a dauntingly big one. But we gulped and said, OK.

Jayaseelan, Ramila, and their local church leaders suggested that we should divide our efforts. St. Peter's outreach money should be used only for the construction of buildings for the school. That appealed to our Vestry and Outreach Commission because it would keep us from having to commit to the open-ended outlay of money that "running a school" would entail. The Kothapallimitta pastorate and Prince Singh would try to convince the Diocese of Madras to purchase the land and to fund and run the operation of what would eventually be a K-12 school. The Diocese of Madras agreed. (The Bishop was no longer the same one who had sent Prince to "Siberia.") The Diocese proposed that it run the school under its excellent Diocesan education program which already operated three large, fine schools in Chennai (Madras). The Bishop engaged an architect to draw up preliminary plans for buildings and estimate the cost. It was the rupee equivalent of $190,000. That, then, became our fundraising target - to be reached through outreach grants and fundraising events at St. Peter's, and outreach grants from the Diocese of Newark.

In September, 2000, Prince Singh left St. Peter's, Morristown, to become the Rector of St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Oakland, a church in northern New Jersey, about a 40 minute drive from St. Peter's. That seemed to us a devastating disaster. Not so. St. Alban's became part of the Companionship.

Ramila's school in Kothapallimitta rapidly grew to a hundred students, meeting in the little church, an old parsonage house, and a van shed. Led by her, we had stated two goals in the documents with which the school was founded, one was "to build a bridge for the children of Kothapallimitta out of abject poverty, illiteracy, and danger from caste violence - to positions that are reserved for Dalits under the Indian constitution in the universities and civil service of India. Many of these positions remain vacant, hopelessly out of reach for children like those of Kothapallimitta who have no way to acquire the English proficiency and high school education that would qualify them. The goal of our school is to make it possible for these young people to qualify for these positions." The second goal was "to bring young children, every school day of the year, into a community where there is a mix of religions and castes in an atmosphere of equality and respect - where it is simply taken for granted that they will get along, have fun together and learn, and treat one another well." (In other schools in the area, Dalits have to sit in back, use different sets of drinking cups and dishes, and more or less just audit the classes.)

The second goal began to be met the day the school opened (as Rev. Jayaseelan had written us). The first was far more difficult, but in October 2005, although the school was not yet K-12 (it adds one grade each year and at that time educated LK through 5th grade), we made a huge, unexpected jump ahead toward that goal. Two 5th year girls from our school won scholarships in an incredibly stiff competition that awarded only 20 scholarships for over 4000 applicants. The scholarships allow the winners to continue their education at no cost at top-notch government boarding schools. No Dalit child from Kothapallimitta would have been able to achieve this before our school existed. Our "bridge" had worked, even before it was fully built! Though Jayaseelan and Ramila had by then moved to another posting, replaced by the Rev. Earnest and his wife Nilipher, and School Administrator Thaines Raja and his wife Helen, Ramila's dream was coming true in a big way!

Learning to "adjust"

It came as a shock when we learned that the Diocese of Madras was funding the school by charging tuition. This is not unusual for an Episcopal or Anglican Church school, but in Kothapallimitta it was a problem. Whereas in other Diocesan schools there were enough paying students to allow the school to carry non-paying (unable to pay) students, in Kothapallimitta the extent of poverty made it impossible for nearly every family to pay the tuition. Matters deteriorated when Hindu students (who tended to be the least poverty stricken) were for a time lured away by another school that promised they would not have to sit and learn beside Dalits. But the Rev. Thaines, Administrator of the School, never lost hope that when the new buildings were complete - impressive and beautiful - and the school was no longer held in a Christian church, the Hindus would come back. Ours was, simply, a much better school. In the interim we held a "sponsorship" campaign at St. Peter's and St. Alban's and sent about $6000 to help defray the costs of those pupils who could not pay. The cost per student for a year was, said Thaines, $120, so the sponsorships went a long way to help.

It took longer than we had hoped to get the buildings started because of problems with obstructionist  wealthy land-owners who withdrew their agreement to sell otherwise useless, unsellable land. Finally the school was built on other land, not quite so desirable because it is nearer the main, noisy road. Similar obstacles came up every time a license was required, when the water and electrical connections had to be made, or an inspection was needed. We in New Jersey learned that Thaines Raja was reluctant to use our outreach money for bribes, and ashamed to tell us that he needed to.  We told him we did not sit in judgment and had little understanding of local practices.  He began to inform us proudly when they encountered "an honest person" and didn't have to pay a bribe.

In the summer of 2006, when the school sorely needed a new bus to replace one bought with St. Peter's outreach money five years earlier, two New York City churches came to our aid: the Riverside Church and St. Thomas Fifth Avenue both gave grants that, added to a grant from the Diocese of Newark International Outreach, allowed us to match funding coming from the Diocese of Madras and purchase a large school bus.

The Dream becomes a reality

After many exciting months during which Thaines was finally able to send us increasingly promising pictures of the school building as it rose, the construction was completed in the spring of 2007. The new school consists of eight large, airy classrooms; a chapel/assembly hall where the whole school can meet together; library; computer room; offices; and bathroom facilities. The building is remarkably large, towering over all other structures in the neighborhood in the way medieval cathedrals towered over their surrounding towns -- and beautiful both in total effect and architectural detail. A large delegation (see list below) from St. Peter's and St. Alban's traveled to India for a truly splendid, moving dedication, attended by all the children and teachers and some impressive government officials. In the fall of 2007, there are 300 children attending the school.

*New:  Read the Annual Report for:

St. Peter's School, from the Rev. I. Thaines Raja, School Administrator. Just Click

Companionship on other fronts

Though our Companionship has mainly been with the pastorate of Kothapallimitta, another of the "points" of Prince's "cross" diagram - the International Campaign for Dalit Human Rights -- also received a good deal of our attention. One of our youth, Jonathan Yardley, was instrumental in getting the Episcopal Church at National Convention to recognize and condemn the Dalit situation as a human rights violation of international concern. Many other St. Peter's parishioners took part in a signature campaign to bring the problem to the attention of the United Nations and the government of India. Long lists of names resulted when our college students took pages of the petition to their campuses and solicited many, many signatures.

Through the years the leadership of our Companionship at the New Jersey end has changed. When Kathy Seabrook moved to England in 2002, Fritz Rosebrook joined me (Kitty) as co-chair, and in 2005, John Roff took over the chairmanship entirely. From the beginning of the Companionship at St. Alban's, Dagi Murphy has been the chair there. Companionship business was initially conducted almost entirely by e-mail and phone among a loosely defined, self-chosen group of people, with quarterly meetings open to everyone and a twice-yearly "newsletter" mailed to the parish. The emphasis was that the Companionship wasn't the business of a committee but of the entire congregation. In 2005 we began having monthly meetings of a group of people known as the Companionship Directors. They now select Companionship projects and organize fund-raising activities where necessary.

The school project became closely tied with projects linking us person to person: Two college-aged young people (Michael Haslett and Danielle Allatta) lived in Kothapallimitta in the summer of 2004 for two months, helping teach English and providing loads of fun for the school children; a parishioner who is a professional builder and carpenter (Fritz Rosebrook) volunteered three months working on building projects for the Diocese of Madras and spent a month in Kothapallimitta; one of our grad students (Joel Lee) lived for two years in India, partly in Kothapallimitta but also working for the Campaign for Dalit Human Rights; seminarian Erika Murphy from St. Alban's spent 6 weeks at the school in the summer of 2006. Nor has the travel been only one way: In the fall of 2000, the pastor from Kothapallimitta, Rev. Jayaseelan, his wife Ramila, and their young son came to Morristown and spent six weeks living with nine different families from St. Peter's and getting to know us, and we them. That set the pattern for similar visits from Rev. Jayaseelan's successor, the Rev. Earnest, and his wife Nilopher; and from Thaines Raja, the Administrator of the school, and his wife Helen.

Other Companionship projects have been two very successful and meaningful letter and picture exchanges between our St. Peter's Sunday School children and the children of Kothapallimitta; and a less successful attempt to begin exchanges of letters between families here and in Kothapallimitta. Though most of the funds for the school construction came from grants from St. Peter's Wilks/Outreach, and a grant from the Diocese of Newark International Outreach, our fund-raising projects have included used-book sales (Caitlin Ferguson, Mike Taormina) . . . creation and sale of Christmas cards, note cards, and calendars (John Dyer) . . . collection of loose change in a sorting machine (Kitty Ferguson, Mike Taormina) . . . a concert by the St. Peter's Girls' Choir (Anne Yardley, director) . . . a dinner, show, and Chinese auction (St. Peter's Youth Group led by Danielle Allatta and Mickael Haslett) . . . a quilt auction (Marge Rice, who made the beautiful quilts herself) . . . donations honoring St. Peter's high school and college graduates (Connie Lucas) . . . sale of unusual and moving photographs taken in India (Emily Taormina, photographer) . . . sale of St. Peter's Cookbooks (Verna Farmer and the Thursday Luncheon Club) . . . a concert by the American Boys' Choir (including Nivedh Singh) at St. Alban's.

The Future of the Companionship

Plans under consideration for the future are a combined St. Peter's-St. Alban's youth group trip to Kothapallimitta, better awareness of our activities through use of a web site and the internet, the development of a video presentation about the Companionship to take to other churches who might be interested in joining the Companionship, and a link with Drew University that would encourage Drew students to spend time in Kothapallimitta to teach English at the school.

Our two New Jersey churches have, from the beginning of this Companionship, been convinced that the Dalit people in Kothapallimitta had more to give us and to teach us than we could ever give them, and that has proved true. The name, Kothapallimitta, loosely translated, means "village moved to higher ground." Two New Jersey churches and a pastorate in South India ARE that village.