The 4th Intensive English Course was Organized by Buddhist Relief Mission in association with Russa Road Young Buddhist Student Literacy Mission.

It is not so easy to learn any language without having good teachers. I had learnt English from Sayagyi U Saw Hla Oo in 1986-87 in Yangon.  At that time, the Burmese Societies were not ready to accept the monks who learn all these unspiritual learnings.  Even we were driven out from the temple, where we were taking rain retreat, on the ground that we were pursuing English learning.  But now people come to understand that English is very essential for everybody for all round purposes.

It is well known fact that Buddhism originated in India.  However, it is great unfortunate it lost the ground in its originated land.   Even after declination of Buddhism from its mother-land, many Indians are pro-Buddhism.  Buddhism has human appeal.  It may be the reason the Geneva based International Coalition for the Advancement of Religion and Spirituality (ICARUS) has bestowed “ the Best Religion in the World” award on Buddhism for the year 2009.  This Special award was voted only by an international round table of more than 200 religious leaders from every part of the spiritual spectrum.  It was fascinating to note that many religious leaders voted for Buddhism rather than their own religion although Buddhist actually make up a tiny minority of ICARUS membership.

From the time immemorial many Buddhists visited India.  It is quite rational each and everybody wants to visit the holy places related with the religions they professed once in a life time.   Fa-Hsien (Fa-hien), the first Chinese monk left China for India in 399 AD.  Finally he arrived India after six years of hard travel.  Hiuen-tsiang (Yuan-chuang), another famous Chinese monk came to India in 629 AD.  His travel took 25 years out of which he spent 5 years as a student at the then famous Nalanda University.   After four decades later another famous Chinese monk I-tsing visited India to pay homage to these Buddhist holy places and to enrich their knowledge.  We are very much indebted to these monks for their vivid description of the places they visited.   In their travelogues the three monks left for us very valuable materials relating to Indian history and geography which they collected from the traditional sources or from their own personal observations as eye-witnesses.

While returned back, they took many treasuries and they translated them into their local languages.  Unlike those far of days, now we can travel hundreds of miles within hours.  Hundreds of thousands of Buddhists from all over the world visited India annually to pay their deep homage to all Buddhist holy places.  Some came here to pay homage to these places as well as to study Buddhist learning at different universities like those Chinese monks.  Most of the pilgrims and knowledge seekers are coming from Non-English speaking countries.  For example, many Buddhist monks from Asian countries came to India to pay homage to these holy sites and they got admission to different universities in India.  But they found many problems in communicating because of lack of English proficiency.  Therefore, it is great need of the hours to teach English to knowledge seekers.  Keeping this in mind, we started “Intensive English Training Course” from 2006 in association with Buddhist Relief Mission, which is the founder donor of Bodhisukha School, where we are doing this ESL program.   Resource persons were Ken & Visakha Kawasaki and I used to teach basic students.   The Kawasakis are teaching English to non-English speaking people throughout their life.  There were about 25 students in 2006.  Duration of the course was fully one month from mid March to mid April.  It was very successful program.  2nd Intensive English Course has been done at the same time and place in 2007.  This time we had four Resource persons – Ken & Kawasaki, Mr. Cam and Ms. Dushy from Colombo University.

In 2008, with three teachers we continued 3rd Intensive English Course at the same venue.  As usual the Kawasakis were always ready for teaching.  This year we had a new teacher the most favorite by the students.  His name is called Steve Littlepage.  He touched the students’ heart, and reciprocally the students also touched his heart.  Due to this strong teacher and students relation he came 2nd time to teach English in 2011 leaving all his house responsibility.  All students expect him to meet again.  Unfortunately due to some reasons in 2009 and 2010 we couldn’t continue this ESL program.

But this year 2011, we are very happy for being able to continue the 4th Intensive English Course with more able resource persons- the Kawasakis, Steve and two Malaysian English Teachers.  According to many students they learnt many valuable new things from these two teachers such as body language and phonetic which they never learnt in their respective countries, even myself.    Of course, it was very enjoyable and successful program.  It is no doubt this ESL program has given great benefits to the students both directly and indirectly.   We are determined to continue this program as long as health and situation permit us.