SERVE India

Dear e-pray friends,
Thank you, as always, for all of your prayer for us! Last month we asked:
Please continue to pray with us for those who are serving to file an application for our teacher training school, for wisdom and guidance and the cooperation of the Indian officials in their effort.
We thought we would give you a little more of an update as to where we are with the teacher training school… We have been asking for prayer for it for many years now!! We can see that the Lord is working His way, His perfect way, in His perfect timing, with us imperfect people! Thanks for your continued prayer!!!

2010 – John received information that since the federal government, at that time, had promised that there would be a school in every village in India this meant that in our state of AP there was a need for 35,000 trained teachers for those schools! So the state government, realizing they did not have the facility to train that many future teachers, opened up the opportunity for existing NGO’s to run a teacher training program if they were capable. They could apply to be a recognized teacher training school.

So, we prayed… we felt that the Lord was giving us this great opportunity! We could have a very good influence on the very ones who would then be of great influence in many unreached villages!!

John started the process of submitting the application… whew! it is a very tedious and time consuming process! They only want to give permission to those who are not faint of heart!

2011 – After many hours of work, many miles of travel locally and trips to our state’s capital, Hyderabad, after obtaining many signatures of approval from many offices and officers proving our credibility and our organization’s legitimate work, and finally proving we had the funds deposited for the required endowment (thanks to you generous donors) John made the 26 hour train ride to Bangalore to hand submit the application, as was required.

Then we waited to see if they would accept our application for our organization to be given permission… in the meantime, John began to get the estimates to what it was going to cost to renovate our training center buildings to the specified requirements… He figured that it was going to cost around $50,000… OH.

We were notified that we WERE accepted and that when we were ready an inspector would come to give the final okay and we would be given the official recognition, including the government’s program of scholarships for 50 students! We would be able to help so many! We were so excited! But, we had to have the renovations done by then and we didn’t have the funds we needed to do the renovations…

We prayed and sought council, maybe we could take a loan as all the other NGO’s did, because it is a ‘business’ that would make a profit… We weren’t sure… We just kept praying, and then, a developer in India came forward and offered to buy some land that we had in a different area that we didn’t need, and the value of the land there had gone up tremendously, in fact, if we sold that land we would have the $50,000!

2012 – We started on our land sale saga!
Little did we know how much that guy would … well, it took more than 3 years to complete that deal! Again, we were trusting that it really was in the Lord’s timing…

2015 – Although John kept in touch with the office where we had our application pending, many things had changed and in order to complete the process for recognition… we were going to have to basically start over.

During all those years John had been meeting with many, many different people, looking for who the Lord had in mind to work as the Correspondent (which is like a manager) and the Principal of the school. (Remember His timing in all of this!) Last year he found a few families who were already working in schools, who were qualified and would love to do this job and were willing to make the move to our area. They started working with John in getting the whole application ready again.

2016 – In March the government made an announcement that they made some modifications to the application process and the deadline was May 31st.

John met with the men many times to work on the application, but he was scheduled to come back to the U.S. in April, so it was up to them to complete the submission. Once he was back in the U.S. he was on the phone almost every night (daytime in India) helping the guys to walk through the process… helping them understand what steps to take next, since he had been through this whole process once already.

One of the new requirements was that now it all had to be uploaded online, which is not as easy as it sounds in India… they have to find an internet café that had the capability to scan, and this is of course working between the times of power outages, especially during the hot summer months, uploading page after page, one at a time, about 60 pages! Land documents, staff credentials, building plans, building approval plans, permissions from local government offices, proof of organization status, all of which takes appointments with officers and acquiring their permissions and signatures, and of which all are connected from state to district offices.

They were able to do all of this! And thank you, by the way… this is a HUGE answer to prayer!!! We have had few people stick with it through this kind of hard process to the end… and these guys were ready to quit a few times, but John would get on the phone with them, explaining & encouraging and they did it!

After all of that work, they still had a few last requirements … and… they DIDN’T make the submission deadline… Oh, we just couldn’t believe it and we were SO sad.

Again, we had to trust that the Lord has His perfect timing!and all the lessons that needed to be learned through this…we know He is always up to His good purposes in all these things, whether we can see it of not!

After a few days of the Lord working in all of us, someone contacted us and told us to check the website… the government had extended the submission deadline by a month! We would still have a chance after all!

This time they did it! Last week they submitted it by the deadline!

Please keep praying, because although we have come this far, there are still a few steps left… The men will travel tonight(7/6) to Hyderabad and they have work that will take about 4 days to get done. Then they will need to travel on further to Bangalore to hand submit the hard copy with the final signatures of the offices in Hyderabad.

Once it is officially accepted it will take months to process, and then they will give a date for the official inspection. Please pray that all will go smoothly and all will be ready to meet all of the requirements, which is a long list, from the number of rooms, each with certain dimensions, the equipment & supplies, including the number of computers in the computer lab, down to the number of chairs and 10,000 titles in the library!

We are trusting the Lord for this to be accomplished!

Thank you, again, for your prayer and support!! We couldn’t do our part without you doing yours! We are happily in this great work together with you and we will get to rejoice together in the ways the Lord works through it!
Much love & blessings,
His joy,
The Nanda’s

P.S. Please also, don’t forget to pray for the Together 2016 event happening in Washington, DC, 7.16.16! (& still come if you can!) You can check out the information on their website www.reset2016.com