Limerick teacher brings club GAA jerseys to India
OVER €25,000 was raised for the HOPE Foundation when a Limerick teacher travelled the long distance to India with 10 of his students, to gift the local children Limerick club GAA jerseys.
Eoin Whyte, originally from Castletroy, and a University of Limerick (UL) graduate, took the long haul flight of over 13 hours to Kolkata, formerly known as Calcutta, to carry out various youth projects with his students.
Now teaching in Midleton in Cork, Eoin got the opportunity to gather 20 Garryspillane GAA jerseys from a friend involved in the club and decided to gift them to the Indian children they would soon meet as part of the HOPE Foundation project.
After fundraising for over a year, Eoin and his 10 students, who each raised over €4,000 in total, did so in a bid to help the HOPE Foundation - a charity which aims to protect street and slum children in Kolkata.
“We went out and visited a number of the projects run by HOPE, which included very young kids in creches, to kids working at age five in dumps, and then to the older kids who were taken out of troubling circumstances,” Eoin said.
“We visited those boys - some who were coming out of addiction, and other challenging circumstances - we met them, we played soccer with them and after that we gifted them Garryspillane GAA jerseys.”
The trip, which is officially called a ‘cultural immersion trip’, gives the Irish students an insight of what people their age live like in Kolkata and how the HOPE Foundation aims to make positive lifestyle changes for the Indian children.
Eoin continued: “The rest of the week we travelled around to lots of shanty towns, slum towns and other things like a school bus, which was converted into a classroom.
“We went to another school whereby every student, which is 150 in total, is sponsored by someone in Ireland and that was 50 per classroom, which was a bit mad!
“The kids really enjoyed that - we went to the HOPE hospital which is fantastic, a number of schools including Limerick’s Castletroy College contribute to that such as defibrillators and such.”
The week-long trip was described by Eoin as “really really good”, and Garryspillane jerseys are now being proudly sported by people on the other side of the world.