By Mata Press Service

Armed with music to fight poverty and illiteracy, Canadian Jesuit Father Thomas Edward McGuire took to the foothills of the Himalayas to help India's poorest.

"Violin strings are the bootstraps that will pull these kids up," he told a journalist in Kalimpong, a northeastern Indian town near Nepal where McGuire established the Jesuits' Gandhi Ashram school a decade ago.

Father McGuire

With tears in their eyes and gratitude in their soul, that same orchestra bid the Canadian giant adieu after he died from a cardiac arrest this month.

Father Thomas Edward McGuire was 78.

"He was a channel through whom God's goodness was flowing into our lives," said Sony Rai, one of his students.

"I know I have dared to dream big because of the hope father gives us. We are given the self worth and dignity that helps us to grow and be what we are now."

Recalling the days when she first joined the Gandhi Ashram, Salina Tamang told India's The Statesman newspaper, "When I first came here I was only five years old. Our father was not just our guide. He was my belief."

McGuire opened Gandhi Ashram Elementary School, a place that integrates rigorous violin instruction with an equally demanding academic curriculum, in 1993.

He had entered the Society in 1949, spending his novitiate years in Guelph, Ontario. In 1954, a regent at the time, he travelled to Darjeeling, India, where he would spend the majority of his many years in the field of education.

Kalimpong children playing

In the first year, he recruited only 23 students. One of them was eight-year-old Sunita. There is no better example of what McGuire was trying to accomplish with his school.

Before enrolling in the ashram, Sunita spent her days toiling at another family's farm. Like her parents, she was illiterate and on the verge of malnutrition. But after a year at the school, she could read and write not just in her native Nepali but a bit in Hindi and English as well.

And she could play the violin with a determination and dignity that defies her frail body.

"I can't exactly say why, but everything is so different now because of my violin," Sunita explained to media. "Playing the violin makes me feel so good."

As she meticulously places the instrument under her chin, her beautiful music seems even more extraordinary coming from a child who lives with her parents and younger brother and sister in a two-room mud hut.

"I have watched Sunita grow through her music," says head violin instructor Rudi Mani. "As she became more self-assured with her violin, not only did her studies improve but she interacted more with other children."

McGuire hoped that as stories like Sunita's spread beyond Kalimpong, an area previously known only for its lavish Buddhist monasteries and Darjeeling tea plantations, his music theory will become a model for educators around the world.

Indeed, more-affluent Western schools, many of which have discontinued music instruction as frivolous, could learn a thing or two from Gandhi Ashram.

Unlike India's public schools, which children cannot attend unless their family can afford school supplies and a uniform, the ashram is free.

With only C$24,000 a year, raised mostly from individual donations from Switzerland and Canada, the ashram ("house of learning" in Hindi) employs five highly qualified teachers and provides each student with the use of a violin, all school supplies, and two meals a day.

Mealtime is still a highlight of the school day for these children, who before enrolling in Gandhi Ashram couldn't fathom eating such wholesome, plentiful meals.

McGuire believed that providing students with these meals is as essential as providing them with pencils for homework.

A family enjoys their child playing

McGuire first came up with his music theory back in 1980, while working with demographically similar children at St. Robert's School in nearby Darjeeling.

"I brought over Jogen Kahn, the conductor of the Calcutta Symphony, to give the students at St. Robert's some culture," McGuire said. "After watching them sit in perfect silence, I realized the remarkable effect music had on children."

After that day, McGuire hired a violin teacher and bought eight violins from Braganza and Company, a classical music store in Calcutta.

Within three weeks of picking up violins for the first time, the St. Robert's students were playing classical music-and performing better in their studies.

Gandhi Ashram students are serious-about their music and their studies.

The school provides them with instruments, books, supplies, and two meals a day. Chronic malnutrition is a threat in this area; for many students these meals are their sole source of sustenance.

The school also has a reputation for academic excellence.

Even the affluent, who could afford any school in the area, are trying to enroll their children in the ashram.

"If a kid doesn't have a protruding belly, sallow cheeks, a dirty neck, and no shoes, he is not considered for enrollment," McGuire said, adding that due to classroom overcrowding and a limited budget, enrollment must be limited to only the poorest of the poor.

The hills are alive with the sound of music...

Speaking at the mass, the Archbishop Rev. Stephen Lepcha said: "He taught us the lesson of love. It is a great loss."