Impact 125 wrote:
IAS Freedom Medal Winner 2010 and Volunteer Minister
MOHAMMED KHALIL ULLAH
ends a cycle of human degradation by bringing LRH technology to the children on the dying streets of Kolkata, India.
For all that's wrong in this twenty-first century, there is still no place on Earth that so epitomizes human degradation as the dying streets of Kolkata. They are like something from the Dark Ages, when life was cheap and there was no hope this side of the grave. While the caste system was supposedly abolished a half century ago, they forgot to tell the children who eke out a wretched existence on the streets. But even in this citadel of misery, a Volunteer Minister has appeared to prove something can be done about it. He is Mohammad Khalil Ullah, who learned a lesson in compassion at an early age from the legendary Mother Teresa.
Mohammad is a teacher who first crossed paths with the Volunteer Minister Goodwill Tour in 2006. In the days that followed, he ushered 125 friends and associates to the yellow tent and thus Kolkata's first indigenous VM force was born—the Scientology West Bengal Group.
As a Volunteer Minister, Mohammad wanted to set the victims of the caste system free. These are people who have been tortured, raped, neglected and left on the street. Most victimized of all are the children of the basti (slums). They live off whatever they can scavenge from garbage heaps and whatever they can beg on the streets. More than a few are orphaned and the rest belong to parents who work society's lowest rungs as street sweepers, porters or pawns in the drug and sex trades. To put it politely, these kids are not welcome in Kolkata's public schools.
Mohammad began by handing a few thousand rupees to a local chieftain to secure a 50 by 15 foot plot on Guripara Road. There he built his first school for the children of the slums, the West Bengal Scientology Free School. The first kids seemingly appeared from nowhere: five-year-old Neha, who labored as a domestic to support her family; Rinku, whose mother worked Kolkata's red light district and Sohan, an orphan whom Mohammad had found picking through the scrap piles.
He began with lessons on study from The Scientology Handbook. As the classrooms filled, word began to spread. The next kids came from a stretch of former wasted marshland known as Entally, the ancestral land of the untouchables. The only thing they had ever been taught was how unworthy they were of education, but they were ready to learn.
In the span of just eight weeks, better than 200 students went on Mohammad's roll books. These children of the slums, these victims of caste, became the first in generations to receive an education. They surmounted the barriers to study and embarked on a full school curriculum.
But Mohammad realized that no matter how vital an education was, the street children of Kolkata were still in danger. As a Scientology Volunteer Minister he could not close his eyes to all else that threatened these children, and specifically the unspoken story of child trafficking.
Thousands go missing every year, most sold to brothels or farmed out to Indian sweatshops. A porter at the Sealdah railway station tipped Mohammad off to a shipment of homeless kids who lived in the station. They would be destined for Bangladesh or factories to the south. Mohammad and his party of VMs arrived just before dusk to head off the traffickers. When told to mind their own business, Mohammad simply shook his head and said that those kids were very much his business. One trafficker pulled a knife, another a gun, but Mohammad still didn't move and in the end, eight children were freed and taken under the care of the West Bengal VMs.
Thereafter, Mohammad and his team arrived every morning at 6:00 a.m. to Sealdah station and set up school just beyond the crush of commuters. The unencoded message was that this was now Volunteer Minister territory and the children were under VM protection.
Moreover, so was every other child in the trafficking zones of Kolkata as Mohammad next established open-air schools for the children of migrant workers from Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and Kharagpur. His slum schools began running double shifts, morning and afternoon, which meant that many once lost children of Kolkata were out of reach of human traffickers and now in class.
A soldier of the children, Mohammad next took on the responsibility of bringing all of the Volunteer Minister technology to these children so they could grow in a stable, safer and saner environment. He and the West Bengal VMs set out to answer the call wherever and whenever needed. When 500 stilt houses burned in the Uttar Panchanna Gram slums, Mohammad and his team helped displaced kids in the aftermath. When the Kosi River breached in the state of Bihar, VMs worked in tandem with the National Disaster Response Force to deliver food and medical supplies to children in flood-locked villages. They rescued the homeless from the Chandni Market fire, aided children injured in the Mumbai terrorist attack, provided sustenance to kids who had never known a regular meal and supplied the means to stave off the third-world epidemics of typhus, cholera and polio to thousands at a time.
When the time came for public school entrance exams, every Scientology Free School student passed the test, becoming full participants in India's future.
Mohammad's West Bengal Volunteer Ministers have delivered VM tech one-on-one to some 50,000 people and disseminated LRH technology on television, on radio and in print to 100 million more. His schools educate children across the sprawl of Kolkata—at Guripara and Convent Road for the kids of Entally, at Sealdah station for Uttar Pradesh, Orissa and Kharagpur and at the Motijhil open-air school for everyone else, thereby bringing education to more than 10,000 children in all. When the time came for public school entrance exams, every Scientology Free School student passed the test, becoming full participants in India's future.
In a land where destiny was once marked at birth, Mohammad Khalil Ullah has brought LRH tech to the children. In so doing, he has ended a cycle of degradation and once more proved—Something Can Be Done About It.
IASA (2010). Rebuilding Lives and Restoring Hope. Impact 125,69-73. Los Angeles: IAS Administrations, Inc.
"SCIENTOLOGY INTERNATIONAL VOLUNTEER"?
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Edit: typo
Teresa saw abortion as the greatest evil in the world, followed by the pill and other forms of birth control. Only abstinence was acceptable in her brand of Catholicism. Wonder how she would have felt about the Sea Org abortion policies. 
and on large families already unable to feed their children to get even more, was also cause for controversy, as were her opinions about the guilt of the Jews for the death of Christ. Links with right-wing Catholic organizations like Opus Dei were mentioned. Though never affirmed they were also never truly denied.
The benefits of volunteering in a nice, exotic country...
Someone should write a book about the guy. I can't blame him, looking at his humble backgrounds. But it's not the role-model I'd have in mind. The (probably) American girl is just a misguided tourist, I guess.
