Shaheen Rasheed
From the coffee rich valleys of Chickmaglur in Karnataka, with a Bachelor’s degree in Interior Designing and Master’s in Business, from the garden city of Bangalore, Sarah Shah discovered her innermost passion and her life’s purpose at a very young age, after leaving the comfort of her home and the garden city.
Back in Bangalore, Ms. Sarah Shah was an active emcee where she hosted live shows across India since her college days. She also had an online business selling clothes and accessories all while holding a job in a multinational corporation. She seemed content with everything she had and loved the hustle and bustle of city life. Yet, there was something missing. She wasn’t happy deep down. She yearned for something to do with nature and animals. Deep down within her was a desire to do something challenging, different and unusual. This triggered her to take a sabbatical from work in 2015 and travel. She came across a remote school called Haji Public School in the Himalayas of India that was looking for volunteer teachers, she took the opportunity and signed up to volunteer as a teacher.
The journey to the school was a 7-hour horse ride up the mountains since the school wasn’t connected to a motorable road. The minute she reached the village and started teaching little kids, she immediately knew that THIS was what she was meant to do. Her 3-month sabbatical was now crossing 8 months and she still wasn’t done with it. She chose never to return to what she was doing in the city but rather explore remote villages and volunteer as a teacher, for as long as possible.
There wasn’t really a plan, as she was just exploring what the universe had in store for her. Around the same time, while on a short vacation to Ladakh, Sarah was informed by a taxi driver about a village called Turtuk, which was the northernmost village of India, at the border with Pakistan, where anybody would hesitate to go, because of the harsh weather and rough surroundings. This school badly needed teachers. Shah reached out to the people of Turtuk and offered her voluntary services as a teacher. She was warmly welcomed in the middle of the winter of 2016 when she contributed as a teacher at a community tutoring program.
The kids were extremely curious to learn and often circled around her with lots of questions. They were eager to learn about everything under the sun and beyond. Looking at the kids’ level of interest, Shah stayed back and ran an after-school program for 6 months in personality development and communication skills and wanted to do a lot more. Due to the lack of funding and limited resources she had to return to Bangalore. She continued to send like-minded volunteer teachers to Turtuk so that the continuity in teaching could be maintained.
Sarah Shah wanted to set up a school or a center, which would be more sustainable. A few years later, in 2020, the universe conspired and a tourist visiting Turtuk from Mumbai, Mr. Jitendra M. Mandlecha, the General Secretary of AFAC TRUST, was drawn to the village and to Sarah’s story. He and his family were so inspired that they immediately offered to help set up a school for them. AFAC TRUST and Mr. Mandlecha went out of their way and supported kick-starting the school from scratch in 2020.
TURTUK VALLEY SCHOOL is what sprung up to cater to the needs of the extremely curious children of a remote village with endless challenges and to mainly bridge the gap between the kids from the cities and the villages. The school follows a play and experiential-based learning where the students are taught to think, question, and explore rather than just memorize the facts and answers. The kids love coming to school and hate to be kept back at home, even during holidays.
During the Covid Pandemic when all schools were closed and online classes were on, and Turtuk not having a stable internet connection, the school was conducting community classes in the open fields with social distancing.
The school is running out of a rented building and has classes from Pre-nursery to 6th grade with 108 students.
The students at Turtuk Valley School, have been studying free of cost for the past two years and the senior students will be sent to Mumbai on a free educational trip, and all the expenses will be taken care of by the school.
The backbone of the school is its active volunteer program where volunteer teachers from across the country, from all different walks of life, come and live in the village for a few months and share their experiences and teach the students. They help the school with academics as well as extracurricular activities.
Kind strangers and philanthropists too from various social media platforms contribute to the school in the form of donations in kind. They send in teaching aids from books to toys to study materials, which have been of great help to the school and the students. The school has recently won a philanthropy award from the Education World magazine as India’s number 7 Philanthropy School and Ladakh’s number 1 philanthropy school.
“I have a dream,” says Ms. Shah, “Of expanding and constructing the school’s own building with the required infrastructure where more students can be accommodated from the neighboring villages as well, thus gifting the innocent and bright minds with knowledge and education to come out of the shackles of illiteracy.” Kids from the villages also deserve access to good quality education and a platform to unleash their talents.
If you would like to join Ms. Shah in fulfilling this dream, please log onto https://gofund.me/91aeef2d and for donors in India log onto https://www.turtukvalleyschool.in/and help kindle the light of education in the remote villages of Ladakh for the next generation of talented minds!
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