By Colter Hettich, Features Editor
How much does it cost to heal the blind?
In India about $200 will do.
Thanks to a sponsor donation, a widow who was blind from birth due to extreme cataracts can now see. Ray and Amanda Pettit, founders of Sanctuary Home, have a vault’s worth of stories like this one.
Sanctuary Home provides sponsored orphans in Tenali, India with food, shelter and education. The children also receive tutoring and personal mentoring from hired staff and volunteers. Isaac Palaparthi, a preacher who lives next door to the orphanage, volunteers hours every day to the children.
But years ago, the orphans of Tenali were the last thing on Ray and Amanda’s mind.
Ray, 37, grew up the son of a rural preacher in Strasburg, Va. At a young age he attended services in his basement with 25 people at most.
“I was used to thinking about church as this small thing,” Ray said.
Amanda, 34, lived all over West Texas during her childhood. She went on to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Texas at San Antonio.
First impressions must have been good. Ten days after their first date, Ray proposed. They tied the knot on May 14, 1994 – two and a half months post-proposal.
Ray and Amanda lived in various places throughout the states before coming to Abilene. They now have two children: Virginia, 10, and Edward, 2.
Ray and Amanda recognized the ethnocentric tendencies in themselves from the beginning. Throughout their ministry,
Ray and Amanda made a conscious effort to help and partner with Isaac, in his vision for the people.
“I don’t think my being American makes me the authority on Christianity; Christianity is going to look different in every culture,” Ray said. Amanda readily agreed with her husband.
“A lot of them have been Christians longer than I have,” she added.
The Pettits tend to shy away from street preaching, simply to focus on what they know will reach those in need.
“We may not be preaching to them and converting them, but they are being shown the love of Jesus,” Ray said.
The children, Ray said, understand the importance of education and breaking out of the cycle.
Bryce Powell, senior interdisciplinary major in Biblical texts and Islamic studies, also noticed the children’s awareness.
“I think the kids can sense they are a part of something special,” Powell said.
The streets of Tenali touched everyone involved, especially Amanda. But she never thought she would find herself working and serving in a small Indian village.
“I’ve always been interested in culture, but I would never have put it together with missions if it had not just fallen into our laps,” she said.
-Best Laid Plans-
Twelve years ago, after watching a television ad for orphan aid, Amanda Pettit started praying. She asked God for some other way to help children, some opportunity.
Not too long after the prayers began, she and her husband heard a traveling preacher speak on the great needs of preachers in India and their families. The preacher told of hard-working pastors barely able to make ends meet. So in 1997, Ray and Amanda decided to sponsor a pastor by the name of Isaac for $50 per month.
Isaac’s parents converted to Christianity while he was young. They raised him under Christian teaching, and he later married a Christian woman, Mary, whose parents raised her likewise. Isaac oversees about 70 churches in his area. Very few meet in homes, simply because homes are too small. Most church-goers gather on concrete slabs with four posts and a thatched roof. One could only imagine Isaac’s elation upon hearing that an American couple wanted to sponsor his family.
Around Christmas 2006, after 10 years of sponsorship, Isaac e-mailed Amanda and asked if she could send any money to buy gifts for the orphans and widows – something he did every year.
“So, I e-mailed my sister. She told me that she and her husband had been waiting for an opportunity to give some extra cash they had every month,” Amanda said.
She e-mailed Isaac, asking him if he knew where her money would be well spent. He answered, “Oh sister, we must start an orphanage.”
Ray and Amanda agreed an orphanage was out of the question, so they started brewing ideas, ways to let their friend Isaac down easy.
“Then I realized I had been praying for this exact thing,” Amanda said.
The Pettits strongly believed the messages they received were unmistakably from God.
With a Master’s degree and Doctorate’s degree – minus his dissertation – in computer Science from Texas Tech University under his belt, Ray worked successfully as a computer programmer but then decided he wanted to teach. “If it had only been two years before, we would have actually had the money to help,” Ray remembers. At the time, Ray worked as a teacher’s assistant while attending graduate school full-time.
Amanda believes it was all part of God’s plan.
They started praying to find someone who knew about India, and who they could trust. The next Sunday, Amanda’s sister invited her to go to a bible class. The speaker was Linda Egel, founder of Eternal Threads, who was a reservoir of experience with India and its people. Eternal Threads improves the lives of women in poverty by teaching them a trade, then using part of the profits to educate young girls.
After meeting Egel and telling her their story, the Pettits found out that she worked primarily in the state where Isaac resided and ministered.
That same week, Ray ran into an old friend, Tom Dolan, whom he hadn’t seen in months. After a few minutes of small talk, Ray listened as Dolan told him how he and his wife, after reading James 1, felt strongly about finding a way to help widows and orphans. “If you hear of anything, let me know,” Dolan said. Pettit stood in shock; he had said nothing of his plans in India. Dolan knew nothing of them.
It didn’t take long for Ray to set up a board of directors, on which Dolan and his wife both served.
So with Egel’s guidance, Ray and Amanda wrote a support letter, detailing everything that had led them to this decision and asking for sponsorships. People responded almost immediately and Sanctuary Home took flight.
-Age Before Beauty-
During the Christmas holidays, The Pettits made their second journey to Tenali. This time they brought company: their 10-yearold daughter Virginia, Jana Beck, Grace Hall, Cynthia
Michaud, Emily Antilley and Bryce Powell.
Jana, wife of Dr. Richard Beck, chair of the Psychology Department, started a ladies’ coffee night at Highland Church of Christ. After meeting Amanda and listening to her story, she invited her to speak. Hall listened.
“I heard about the trip at ladies’ coffee night at Highland,” she said. “Through the coffee night, I got to know Amanda better.”
Hall, senior English major from Campbell, Calif. walked up to her afterward one night and was quickly greeted with, “Want to go to India?”
That was all it took.
Most of the students already had extensive traveling experience – unlike Ray who had never set foot off the continent before his first trip to India.
Before departure, the team worked hard to prepare.
The students, Hall, Michaud, Antilley and Powell, hosted “A Night in India,” a student-produced fundraising dinner.
“It was an amazing, teambuilding experience,” Hall said.
The team also took donations of items to sell on Ebay.
After making final preparations, they boarded a plane and set course for Southwest Asia.
“What surprised me was how receptive and hospitable they were toward us,” Powell said. “I felt zero-hostility from the time I got there.”
The crew stayed busy from morning until night. With the children waking up three hours before the team’s 8:30 a.m. alarm, they had to hit the ground running.
Michaud, ministry to family and children and missions major,
wanted to go to India since age 10. She will never forget the time she spent with the children every morning.
“I still think about it when I wake up every morning,” Michaud said.
After the kids left for school, the real work began.
Typical days included three main activities: distributing food – rice, bananas, and bread – in slum areas, visiting churches around the area, and the children when they get back from school.
-Approaching the Horizon-
All of the time spent doing city outreach opened the Pettits’ eyes to another demographic just as in need as orphans: widows.
In India, society will help almost anyone before it helps a widow. Traditional practices, though now abolished, pressured a widow to end her own life by throwing herself on the crematory fire of her dead husband.
Today, widows suffer in less gruesome ways, but no less life threatening. With no health care, no money, no home and no one to offer them a job, widows are left to wander the streets, begging for help.
“Sometimes you wonder, ‘Where is God in all this?'” Hall said. “What good could possibly come from this?”
But when Ray and his wife returned to India the second time, they couldn’t miss the sobering yet encouraging evidence of their work a year earlier.
Widows in the area were still wearing the traditional saris the Pettits gave them, though worn thin and faded from the sun. Some of the women still had plastic bags with “Abilene: The Friendly Frontier” pasted on the side.
The effects of Ray and Amanda’s commitment to the Indian people have only begun to ripple.
The orphanage has grown so much that to keep adding children at this rate would mean adding a building. Because of costs, construction is out of the picture. The Pettits helped raise $9,000 to repair the building that now houses the children and said “we can’t afford to tackle an even bigger project right now,” Amanda said.
This seeming dilemma will actually help the orphanage transition into what the Pettits hoped for all along: self-sufficiency.
Now, instead of expanding into a bigger building, they want to raise enough money to help Sanctuary Home start a local business, like raising poultry or water buffalo.
Ray and Amanda, with their family and friends, will continue to serve in India and try to see their dreams for the widows and orphans of Tenali to completion.
Amanda will never forget the moment she realized how worth it every drop of sweat had been.
One church morning, she noticed two, small girls sitting in the front paying very close attention. After the lesson, she told Isaac how much the girls impressed her. Isaac grinned: “Yeah, those two used to worship the monkey god.”
