Valk Welding: Valk Welding for India

Jayanta Rout is the proud owner of a new laptop, a gift from Remco Valk.

Jayanta is a young (23 years old) Indian man who lives in one of the poorest states in his country. His family was plunged from a reasonable standard of living into hardship with the death of his father many years ago when he was a young child. His three older brothers left school to work for the family income. Later on when he went to the state-run school he had the good fortune to have good teachers, a situation that is not very common. He finished his primary school with good marks and, supported by his eldest brother, he enrolled for a course in fitting and turning so that he also could contribute his income for his 14 family members. Jayanta did it so well (he was consistently top of his class) that he decided, with help from the west, to further follow his technical training, combining it with computer applications. Remco's gift is invaluable for Jayanta for the AutoCAD calculations needed for his course.
 
Jayanta's old laptop, which he also received from Valk Welding a few years ago, was donated to the school that his brothers 4 and 6-year old children attend. This school is based on the humanitarian principle of providing inspiring lessons to children to better their future prospects. This is difficult to the situation at most state-run schools where the poorly paid teachers are often uninterested and barely give lessons.

Among other subjects given the children are exposed to the English language from day one at school. The 4 to 17-year olds have in general reached a high standard compared with others at a national level. The school is very grateful Jfor ayanta's old laptop, as it is with the further gift of two 'written-off' laptops from Valk Welding.

P.S.: After an article in a local newpaper about the sponsoring of the school the request for admission of childrenhas taken the school numbers from 60 to 95 this year!

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Valk Welding has finally arived in India... and not as a subsidiary of the company, but as the sponsor for a water pump for a village in need.
 
That water is a basic essential for life goes without saying. Yet something that most of us take for granted. You just turn on the tap and you have a glass, a saucepan or a bath full of water. Until the end of October 2008 the 20 families who live on the eastern side of Balipada village in Orissa walked a kilometer a day to fill their buckets for ther cooking, cleaning and washing needs and carried the heavy loads home again. Obtaining the water was made more difficult by the fact that they had to walk over private land to get to the well which caused conflicts from time to time. The quality of the water is effected by monsoon floods, where water in the wells is contaminated by the down-flow from hundreds of kilometers of unhygienic wastes.  

Remco Valk was looking for a community project to help better the lives of poorer Indians in some way. It was decided to install a water pump.
 
At the selected central site in the community a bore was drilled to a depth of 150 meters and the water was extensively tested for the present of contaminants before the project could go ahead. The planned works were complicated by the unexpected heavey monsoon floods in September of last year that forced inhabitants of the surrounding areas and far beyond the flee to the higher built national Chennai-Calcutta highay which passes through their area, and occupied it for several days. Once the waters had subsided sufficiently and the villagers were able to pick up their daily lives again the actual work began. From the time the pump was attached to the bore the villagers have been tapping water to their hearts content, even while the concreting was still going on.
 
The most effective way to help poorer people is the ensurrance that they have sanitation and good reliable water supply. This is now a fact for this community in Balipada thanks to Valk Welding.

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“Please sir, can you help me?!” are the words Gerard can remember from his very first contact with Ranjit Rout. Gerard Elkhuizen, Assembly Engineer at Valk Welding, has been in India four times already en this has changed his perspective at life tremendously. You will not easily find him complaining. He has seen a lot of the poverty and misery in India. Gerard instantly explains which key problem is highly related to the poverty and misery: "there are 1 milliard people living in India and I can not help them all. That is the reason I asked this man what makes his situation different than those of others”.

 It turned out Ranjit is the only person making money in his big family, consisting of 14 persons and his  son under the age of one year old, had a very serious harelip. In Holland such a child would have received the right care without much trouble, but in India such a child is often disabled for a lifetime and sometimes even sentenced to death, because the parents do not have the sources to fulfil the high cost rates of the long-term care. The family already had to sell a big part of their needed land (where they cultivated vegetables and grain for the family) in order to be able to pay for the first operation.

This is how a relationship started to grow with the family Rout. “They live in the village Votaka, Orissa, which is one of the most pover states of the country. Ranjits father died when he was about 13 years old which caused him to cancel his study to make money for his mother, his 3 brothers, 2 sisters and his childless uncle and aunt”. In the meanwhile, the family has expended because of the marriage of Ranjit and also one of his brothers and the births of 3 children. “Since they had to sell that land the family had less food, so we did not only offer help for medical care but also for food”, Gerard states. 

 

With every holiday Gerard and his wife also bring clothes and other important goods along with them to India. Next to that they have bought a cow (EUR. 60) and all Ranjits family members are vaccinated (EUR.117 for 11 people!). For two years already they are also sponsoring Ranjits youngest brother, Jayanta, with his education and the 2 younger children of Ranjit also go to school, where they –along with other things- get to learn to speak English. 

 Jayanta has already finished the first part of his education as bank employee with very good results and has now continued with an education in computers so that he will also be able to take care of the family in the future. Related to this education, he has received a generous gift from Valk Welding: 3 laptops for him and the other students to use for their education. Gerard is very happy with this way of sponsoring by Valk Welding. “It’s a gift that adds very much value to their possibilities, because it creates great opportunities for their development”.