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School in Khajuraho

School at Khajuraho

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Around 25 years ago I was in Khajuraho with a group, exactly in the hotel Chandela, situated very close from the marvelous western complex of temples built by the Chandela dynasty between the the 9° and the 11° century. In the hotel, used to work a boy, I will call him Sunil, to maintain the anonymity. Sunil was a bell boy and used to carry the baggages of the clients in their rooms. He was a very smart and nice boy, he knew only a few words of Italian and certainly didn't hesitate to talk to every italian tourist in the hotel, each time he had the chance to do it. Once he asked me a small loan to come to Italy to sell some silver and me I helped him with pleasure. He has been very punctual in returning me the small landed amount after few weeks and from then, he started coming to Italy often to follow his new business. We became good friends. At the beginning, when he came to Rome he used to call me, after some time, also due to my job that keeps me often out of Italy, I did not hear from him any more. I knew that he had gotten married to an Italian girl and that he lived somewhere in the north of Italy... then nothing more, for many years. But just one month ago, during one of my last trips to India, while I was about to leave the hotel to go to the airport with my group, right in the lobby there is my old friend Sunil. He had known that I was in Khajuraho and wanted to see me. We spoke a few minutes about our lives, of his two children, of his divorce, of his business activities in Italy and of him returning in India. I told him about our child and about the association, also of our intention to build a school right in Khajuraho, and about all the difficulties that we were going through both in the search of the land and in the obtainment of the various permissions. Sunil at this point tells me that the land will not be a problem because he owned a piece of land and would give to me and for the obtainment of the permissions, I could count on his full cooperation since in this last period he had entered to belong to the political administrative organisme of Madhia Pradesh...

Perhaps it is only a coincidence, but I am sure that soon in Khajuraho, there will be a beautiful school with Simones name, that will welcome more than one hundred children inhabitants in four or five near villages. Isn't this a miracle?