CHENNAI: A graceful portrait of the Avvai Home founder, Muthulakshmi Reddy, peeps through the dusty ledgers and old wooden shelves of the Avvai Home office building. The school and orphanage that was started in 1931, recently celebrated the 128th birthday of the founder.
Most of the buildings on the campus were built in the 1930s and remain in the same state, and the existing hostel, or ‘home’ as secretary V Susheela prefers to call it, has peeling paint and cold bare floors to sleep on. But the girls will soon be shifted to a new home — the recently constructed three-storeyed hostel block for the girls with dormitories, dining halls and bathrooms.
‘We never even dreamt that we would get to live in such a house,” says K Rathnam, who came to the school around 50 years ago and now works in the administration. The girls are excited about the imminent move to the new block - they would now get bunk beds, clean toilets, a common room and a library and unexpected luxuries like showers in bathrooms.
The bright new well-equipped kitchen is a stark contrast to the existing room with dark floors and utensils kept on the floor behind which a cat runs about.
“We feel our madam has built a Taj Mahal for us,” says S Jayalakshmi, a Class 7 student.
Jayalakshmi came to the school two years ago, when she was orphaned, and now stays with the 160 other girls who come from either single parent or destitute homes. “Since I came here, I cannot say I have nobody, as we all consider madam as our mother,” she smiles.
“I can write a separate story about each of the girls here,” says Susheela, who has been the secretary since 2002. She took over after the demise of Mandakini Krishnamurthy, Muthulakshmi Reddi’s daughter-in-law, who was running the school until then.
Changes have taken place in the past few years - there are now English medium sections. But the English medium section has not yet qualified for government aid and runs on donations, Susheela says.
Many of the girls have come back as staff of the school, some stay here and act as wardens until they pursue correspondence degrees, while some are permanent ‘house mothers’.
“Some of them are helped by their relatives after their Class 12, but for those who have nobody, we help them get admission. I recently went with one of my girls for her college orientation programme as parents were called,” she says with pride that her children are now college students.
The students are given extra coaching in all subjects after school and volunteers teach them English on weekends. Being a Tamil medium reduced their enrolment, like in most Tamil medium schools. “We hope to soon get government aid for the English medium too, and then some repair and upgradation will be possible to improve the campus,” says Susheela.