Krishnagiri: Well paid government teachers bunking schools is quite common in remote villages of Krishnagiri district. But a teacher and his wife work to make a difference at Kochavoor village, by making school their home.
For 38-year-old Dominic Savio and his 35-year-old wife Sagaya Shanthi, work starts every Monday morning with a two-wheeler ride from Denkannikottai to reach Kochavoor, where Dominic works as a teacher in the village government school.
The childless couple return to Denkannikottai, where they have taken a house on rent, only on Friday evenings. As long as they are uphill, they use the school building as their home, though the school lacks basic facilities for a couple to carve out a living place.
Kochavoor school. (Image: DC)
“It is not like the old adage that the place of the husband is the temple for a wife; but to do some service is better than being an idle woman waiting for her husband to return back from work,” chuckles Sagaya Shanthi speaking to DC.
Sagaya Shanthi has a teacher training qualification though she is not a working woman. After her husband joined the Kochavoor school, she learnt about its peculiarities and then “we decided to stay in the village during the working week, not knowing about the challenges that await us,” she mused.
As the villagers had no building to spare to rent a house, “we made the school building our home; the only problem for us is cooking food and an enclosure for our morning chores; our food is prepared in a neighbour's kitchen and the school toilet facility is our bathroom,” says Shanthi.
The couple’s stay in the village has ensured that the dropout rate among children in theelementary school at Kochavoor has dramatically fallen though the village has a migrant population.
“Dropout rate in the school my husband works for was below 10 at the time of his joining here. Now, there are no dropouts at all,” Shanthi smilingly adds with quiet pride.
“Parents here are not against sending their children to the school. They feel it is not safe to leave them in the village when they migrate for livelihood. We met the parents and persuaded them to leave their children with us during migration and this has worked out well so far,” adds Shanthi.
