My son, Jonny
has produced a video of his trip last year to Kashmir where he was involved in
helping teach 90 India school kids to ski on a golf course! They were
all from CMS-founded Tyndale-Biscoe School in Srinagar (which celebrates its
centenary this year). The invitation to help came when they visited the school,
as part of a visit to the Diocese of Amritsar, following on from the SACYN
conference in Nepal and the Asia CMS CoMP conference in Amritsar in 2010. Jonny
came along as photographer and took pictures of all the CoMPs.
We also
went with Bishop Samantaroy up to a Youth conference in Gulmarg run by the
Diocese of Amritsar and visited the T-B school in Srinagar, near the famous Dal
Lake. A conversation with the
principal’s son over a cup of tea, lead to Jonny being invited to return and
help teach skiing to kids at the school.
You may
also remember that the beautiful (wooden, Chalet style) daughter school in
Tanmarg was also burnt to the ground by a mob in reaction to an alleged Koran
burning by a pastor in the US. Ironically the only Korans burnt were those in the school library
burnt as a result of the arson attack! Kashmir remains a fragile, conflict torn region and
peaceful encounters, like the ski school, are all the more necessary.
Jonny
and Stefan had both served with Skiers for Christ (SfC) - a specialized ministry to
skiers and snowboarders. They desire to share their faith, in practical ways,
by serving the skiing and snowboarding community. So they undertook the trip as a joint AsiaCMS & SfC enterprise
in Feb 2011.
This was
one of 3 AsiaCMS interchange projects in 2011, including Chuli teaching cricket
to Nepali Girls and Frederica facilitating Community Art in Pakistan. All three
trips found their origin as a by-product of the SACYN conference meeting in
Nepal
Stephen,
the CMS Coordinator for India helped to set it all up and to orientate them on
their exchange trip. They also
visited Dr Lalita in Pune and made a video of her work called Positive + Children
The
video Jonny made of Kashmir is stunningly beautiful......
He also
entered a briefer version of the video into the India Is Global video challenge and got
through to the final round - one of 30 finalists - the outcome all depends on
social network voting.
His
video can be found on the India Is website. (or You can cut and paste in the following link...http://indiais.org/rateit_eachvideos.php?userid1=372&videoid=3
and then you have 5 votes ..... so make them count… that's the Challenge...
