The Better India · 9 hours ago

Ex-Journalist Opens Free Boarding School in India’s Highest Village

Grief sent Portia Putatunda searching - not for answers, but for proximity, for the impossible nearness of someone gone. "I thought, if I am high up in the mountains, then I'll be closer to heaven and hence my father," she explains, and so the former CNN news producer left everything behind and moved to Komic, the highest village in India. What she found there were children whose poverty had made them as unreachable as she felt, and in teaching them she discovered the thread back to her father - a man who used to visit rural areas and distribute books for free. Her school now shelters ten children, offering them food, warmth, and a classroom lit by a tandoor, and one of her first shy students now teaches seven younger ones and buys gifts for her grandmother with her earnings. "All of this work and my foundation are a tribute to him," Portia says - not as an ending, but as a conversation she is still having with someone she loves, conducted in the lives of children who needed exactly what he taught her to give.