Prince of Peace School

The caste system is a powerful and uncured plague within Indian society. Outlawed by Ghandi, lamented in the media, a source of shame among other nations, it is nonetheless painfully preserved in rigid detail throughout every stratum of Indian society. The wealthiest man in India, a multi-billionaire, is still openly forbidden to enter many places, because he was born into a low caste, and can never rise above that station.

The tsunami of 2001 dramatically amplified the scope of human need in Rameswaram. Also, in the growth of the King of Kings School, Body of Christ Ministries grew to realize that they could not protect the students from the entrenched caste prejudices of many of their families and villages. Some of the higher caste families would not accept their children attending next to the lowest caste children.

The solution was to open a second school. Prince of Peace School was opened in early 2006, with 120 students. It is designed to accommodate the poorest of Rameswaram’s populace. These children, some gathered half-naked from the streets, are given three sets of clothes, books, bags, lunch and transportation. Their education is first rate, yet without the $2 monthly tuition fee required at King of Kings School. For most of the families of the Prince of Peace students, it is their only option for any education for their children.

One poor family from a village on the island had come recently to a point of hopeless despair, and starvation. ( Just a week earlier, a nearby family had taken deadly poison together to end their own plight ). Now these parents silently soaked themselves and their four children with kerosene. As the mother picked up the matchbox to end their lives, a neighbor lady, smelling the kerosene, came running out, screaming, “No, no, no! Don’t worry about your children! Those Christian people have started a school, and you can take your children there!”

Persuaded, the mother later brought her four children to the new Prince of Peace School. Enrollment for 2007 had just been closed, because the school was at maximum capacity. As the mother was turned away, she cried: “I wish now I would have done what I should have months ago. I came to find hope. If you say no to us, where will I go from here?”

Billy heard her crying, and recognized the meaning of her lament, and what could happen to them, so he called her back and enrolled the children.

Billy has recounted his own memories as a boy in Rameswaram, during the deprivations of their beginnings there. He remembered fainting from hunger on the way to school, using thorns to hold his shirt together, and being beaten at the Hindu school for not having notebooks. Enduring such has printed in his own mind a compassion for what so many impoverished families endure.

Recent tragedies of students dying from fires in overcrowded, unregulated Hindu schools, ( 85 alone died in one school ), has moved the government to impose limits for student enrollment on certain schools, such as those of Body of Christ Ministries. This limits the Prince of Peace School to only 300 students, with fifteen in teachers. Because of that, we had to turn away 100 children in 2008.

Now God has provided designated donations to purchase fourteen acres of suitable land available nearby the Training Center. We are slowly moving forward, as God allows, and we hope to someday expand into a 27,000 square foot self-sustaining school through twelfth grade, with capacity at first for 2000 students, and eventually many more.

It is our conviction that the very best strategy to reach any people long-term with the Gospel of Jesus, is through patient laboring with the children. Our experience during recent years of ministry outreach here in Rameswaram has validated that vision, and we are fully determined to grow and concentrate on discipling as many children as possible, and through them reaching the whole Island of Rameswaram, and beyond.

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