Children in Need
Kerala’s House of Hope Sisters of the Sacred Heart nurture children with special needs by Jose Kavi with photographs by Jose Jacob
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n early June, the beginning of the academic year in India, a school in the state of Kerala buzzed with uncommon excitement. A student, Jijomon Mathai, had been selected to participate in the 2015 Special Olympics World Summer Games. The 18-year-old young man from a remote village in the southwestern Indian state would go on to join some 7,000 athletes with special needs from around the world in Los
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Angeles. There, he would compete before an international audience. “We are very excited Jijomon was selected for the Indian volleyball team,” said Sacred Heart Sister Elsa Tom Karakatt, principal of the school known as Ashabhavan, the “House of Hope” in Malayalam and Hindi, the local languages. The school now holds Jijomon as a model of what children with special needs can achieve, given proper care and support.
Through this initiative in Nedumkandam, a village in Kerala’s Idukki province, the Sisters of the Sacred Heart have been serving children with special needs since 1994. A religious community of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, they offer a loving environment to children with autism, cerebral palsy and other developmental disabilities. Jijomon came to the school in 2006, the same year Sister Elsa took over as principal.