14.08.2023
Busy Second Day for DUMCN Visitors to Chota Nagpur
Archbishop Michael Jackson is currently visiting the Diocese of Chota Nagpur in India with Canon Dr Maurice Elliott, Director of the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, the Revd Steve Brunn, Dean of Residence and Church of Ireland Chaplain at Trinity College, Dublin and Dr Kerry Houston. The visit is organised under the auspices of the Dublin University Mission to Chota Nagpur. Here the Archbishop reports on their second day, August 14.
The second full day of our time in North India took us to Hazaribagh, where much of the sustained activity of The Dublin University Mission to Chota Nagpur was centred. St Stephen’s Church is the parish church in the city and from there the rector administers and serves five further rural congregations among the tribal peoples. St Stephen’s is a thriving parish and contains lists of the men and the women who served DUMCN in and from the garrison town from the inception of the Mission in 1892.
We visited a number of schools. The first was St Columba’s which is synonymous with the work of the Mission. At full strength its student cohort is 700 but it has fallen to 350 during Covid–19 and is gradually building up again from a low base of 350. We had an in–depth discussion with the principal and teachers and learned not only of the curriculum but of where graduates of the school tend to go in later life, particularly the civil service and the police and military services.
Secondly we visited St Ciaran’s Girls’ School which has a student cohort of 450 with 170 students in the residential hostel. St Ciaran’s has a beautiful chapel, recently refurbished and has a need to build a large assembly hall. On September 9th 2024, it will celebrate its centenary. St Elizabeth’s School has one hundred and seventy–seven students and is a day school. Hamilton School is a small primary school and is the oldest school in Hazaribagh dating back to 1892. Again this school with 46 students and three teachers has been hard hit by Covid–19 with one third of the pupils not returning.
Our visit to St Columba’s Hospital was positive. To many in the Church of Ireland, St Columba’s is synonymous with the Mission and countless generations of people in parishes across the church have supported its work. It has gone through very difficult times and seems to be turning a corner. Contemporary hospitals rarely survive on the basis of mission activity and need an ever–widening range of inputs and skills as the capacity and expectation of medicine expand. It has thirteen doctors on–call and two resident doctors. It has plans to develop a School of Nursing on site. It is once again beginning to contribute to the needs of the local population in a sustained way. It has been there for one hundred and thirty years and was described to us as the anchor a Hazaribagh. We found that its spirit is good and were greatly pleased to find this to be the case.
