Home of Hope: Project

Home of Hope in India

NC Now Feature

Paul Wilkes and his wife, Tracy, live in Wilmington.  Paul is a writer and former director and producer for PBS.  In 2005, when he and Tracy traveled to India for a vacation, they came home with a new interest, an orphanage called Home of Hope.

During their visit to Kochi in southern India, a coastal city much like Wilmington, Paul and Tracy said they had a little time left in their day so the driver asked us what they wanted to do, and they said, “Well, we’d like to see what the churches are doing around here. There is so much poverty.”  He took them down a rutted road and the gates opened up and many young girls ran toward them and they said, ‘Well this looks like a nice boarding school.  But in fact it was an orphanage.” 

India is a country that is only about a third the size of the United States, but has four times as many people, and half of them, 500 million people live in desperate poverty on less than two dollars a day.  The girls at Home of Hope are from the poorest of the poor families; beggars, rag pickers, people who have lived on the streets, mothers who are prostitutes, this is the lowest economic level of the Indian world.

After Paul and Tracy spent a few hours at the orphanage they asked the nuns there what they could do to help.  The nuns told them they needed only their prayers.  But when Paul and Tracy returned to Wilmington they busied themselves raising money to send back to the orphanage.

“I just knew that I wanted to do something,” Paul remembers.  “It’s like one of those moments in a person’s life---the Good Samaritan story, I mean, I’m not the Good Samaritan, but the Good Samaritan story I think is a perfect example of, you just passing by, ‘OK, that’s fine, I’ll just reach in my pocket and give you a dollar, five dollars, ten dollars, 100 rupees, it wasn’t enough, it just wasn’t enough because I saw also that if you concentrate on one small place, you can make a profound difference.  Five hundred million people in poverty in India I cannot do much about.  I can’t go to Darfur. I can’t go to Calcutta, I can’t even take care of some of the problems here in Wilmington, but if you concentrate on one area, one place, then you can make some changes.”

With Paul’s leadership the Home of Hope has blossomed.  In addition to providing basic needs for the girls---clean water, beds, and school supplies---Paul has fostered several micro-businesses in the community.  There are more than 18 groups in the community where the nuns from Home of Hope go out and meet with the women and say, ‘Well, why are you buying your detergent a little bit at a time?  How about if five of you get together and buy 10 kilos of that and you’ll have enough and you’ll be able to sell a little bit more.”   Paul and Tracy have helped them to create mini-loans and micro-loans to buy a sewing machine so the women can then sew.  There is a street stall where three women banded together to sell tea and sugar.  For the first time, women are running their won businesses.  The orphanage itself is the hub for the community for women’s empowerment.

As Tracy says, “It really is a place of hope.  That’s what we feel there. And that’s what the girls feel. Being in this place of hope will allow them to be educated. And education, as we all know, worldwide, is the only way out.”

Paul said they will continue to expand the entrepreneurial aspects of the community around Home of Hope.  He invites anyone with interest in visiting India to contact him.  He welcomes volunteers who will help to teach or bring other experiences to Home of Hope.

“We have people going all the time now,” he says.  “They spend a week, two weeks.  If you’re a teacher, a physician, a nurse, if you’re a computer wiz, if you speak English, you can teach English there.  If our North Carolina people want to go to India, I will make the arrangements for you. You will stay at Home of Hope and you will be able to work with these precious girls and the sisters that take care of them. And I think that for anybody that goes, it’s a life changing experience.”