GPT Children’s Voices [Issue 1]
By Brajasundari Hausner (9 years old)
I am in fourth grade at the Bhaktivedanta Academy in Alachua, which is like my second home. Growing up in a big community with lots of devotees and going to a Krishna conscious school make me feel very fortunate because not many devote children have this rare opportunity. At my school I am free to talk about Lord Krishna, have deities, chant japa, and read Krishna’s pastimes with my friends, without being criticized by classmates or teachers.
No matter what day it is, all the classes do Krishna conscious activities, which make every one feel happy. All the teachers at the school are devotees and they care so much about both our spiritual and material life. They want to teach us all they can. It makes me feel so lucky that they care so much about me and all the other students. If I were attending a non-devotee school, I would feel very uncomfortable with the atmosphere and not being able to talk about Krishna. I feel that it is necessary to open gurukulas near temples for the benefit of both the children and the parents because it makes the parens happy that there child can go to a Krishna consicouss school and have devote friends they can associate with.
Also, having a school right on the temple property has many advantages. I can hear the arati going on while having lunch outside. I can even get up early to go to the temple for kirtan and arati to see the Lord. When the kirtan is finished, I can walk from the temple to the school with my friends. Having gurukulas is very important because it gives parents relief knowing that their children are having a Krishna Conscious education. Srila Prabhupada himself very much wanted this. He once wrote “Gurukula is our most important project. If the children are given a Krishna Conscious education from early childhood then there is great hope for the future of the world.” He was very determined to establish schools because he wanted devotee children to have a Krishna conscious education.
He knew that if the children go to schools that are not Krishna conscious, they may start to go away from spiritual life, forget about Krishna, and be engaged in bad activities. However, if they go to a Krishna conscious school instead of going away from Krishna they will be with Him at school some way all the time. I am praying that Krishna will shower His mercy and let us open more beautiful gurukulas for the benefit of many more children around the world.
Brajasundari has been a student in my wife Satyaki’s class at Bhaktivedanta Academy for the last three years. Braja is a very dedicated devotee and delightful company. I feel at once proud of her and grateful for this essay. She recently graduated from my wife’s class, which she calls Audarya Bhavan, along with a number of other students for whom developing Krishna consciousness is their life and soul.
It is nice to see that a nine-year-old from any school can produce such a well-written and thoughtful article.
“From the mouths of babes”, they say. We really do have to pay attention to Brajasundari’s message and develop better educational opportunities for the children in and around our communities.
In our recent Monthly Sankirtan Festival in San Jose, we were thinking, “How are we going to get 300 devotees to go out on book distribution?” Well, guess what? Of the 556 who ended up going out, 51 or them were kids, from infants to 16-year-olds. The kids’ party ended up distributing over 1,000 books.
These are special kids and they deserve to be educated in the association of devotees. We should not let our past failures in providing gurukula training sour us from the mission of getting it right.
One of my former gurukula students from Hawaii just reminded us of this from Srila Prabhupada: “These children are given to us by Krishna, they are Vaisnavas and we must be very careful to protect them. These are not ordinary children, they are Vaikuntha children. This is very great responsibility, do not neglect it.”