Friends Academy

Purani Bazar in Ramnagar is always a hive of activity. Friends Academy sits right in the middle of all that West Champaran life. If you walk down the street, you’ll hear the shopkeepers shouting and the motorcycles zooming past. Our school is a bit of an escape from that, though the noise still drifts in through the windows. It’s not a huge campus with sprawling fields. We have a few floors in a building where we’ve set up our classrooms. It’s a bit tight sometimes, especially when we have all the kids in for an assembly. We don't have a glossy website or a team of people to handle public relations. To be honest, most people find us because they live just a few streets away or their cousin’s kids went here. We use simple benches and desks, and we go through a lot of chalk and paper. The teachers are hardworking people from the local community who just want to see these kids do well. Sometimes the rainy season makes things a bit difficult with the leaks and the mud, but we just mop it up and keep going. We don't make big promises about changing the world. We just try to make sure every student can read and write and do their sums properly before they head home to their families in the evening.