india blog

Everyone keeps asking me why I set up a separate blog for India. Here is the answer: We needed several thousand dollars to purchase our dental equipment that we were to take with us to Rising Star Outreach. David Archuleta got on board and raised thousands of dollars for this purpose! We were not only able to purchase all the equipment with the money he raised but the thousands of extra dollars left over is going towards the building of a new portion of the school there for the children among other things there at Rising Star. I was asked by several of David's fan sites to set up a blog of our experiences there at RSO so that David's fans, especially those who had donated, could feel a part of the whole experience. I didn't want to post to my personal blog as I didn't really want the entire world of David's fans having access to it so thus I set up a completely separate blog for our Rising Star Outreach experiences.

What is Rising Star Outreach? It is a school, like a boarding school really, that was started by an LDS woman from Atlanta, Georgia named Becky Douglas. The children of RSO have parents who have Leprosy. These types of children in India are denied education because of the horrible social stigma of Leprosy. If a parent has it then the children carry that stigma for the rest of their lives, and they usually end up getting Leprosy as well, leaving them destitute and begging on the streets. So the cycle continues - no education, Leprosy affected, begging, dying. Their lives have no hope. That's where Rising Star comes in. The purpose is to stop the cycle. The children live there at RSO, are cared for, and are given a good education especially in English. If these children know English by the time they enter the work force their earning potential goes up 500%.

The children there had never seen a dentist before, so we went in and spent a week there at RSO doing dentistry on all 160 of them. We saw so many miracles that week. Just the fact we got through every single child was a miracle of it's own! Our hope now is that other dentists will also go in and continue the work. We left our dental equipment there for that purpose.

It was the most amazing life experience that I could never put into words.

I continue to post to my India blog so again here is the link:
http://rsoindia2009.blogspot.com/
(or you can click on the link on the upper right)