Meet Gowsalya

Despite fighting grinding poverty Gowasalya always aspired to go to school and receive an education. However this remained a distant dream until the Foundation’s intervention.

Gowsalya was born into abject poverty in a small village in the state of Tamil Nadu, south India. She lived with her two younger brothers and widowed mother Amirtham. Her father tragically died of tuberculosis at a very young age.

To support the family, her mother worked in a quarry receiving very little by way of a daily wage. Gowsalya’s future looked extremely bleak and a life time of servitude was all that she could look forward to.

Gowsalya wanted to work in the care profession, with the aspiration of qualifying as a Nurse. This was in part in seeing first-hand the adverse experience the family endured during her father’s illness. Coming from a poor background and not having any medical support or advice she felt was totally unjust. Gowsalya was only a child and she remembered thinking, if only he could have received proper medical treatment with good nursing care, he would have survived but he didn’t and tragically died. That’s when she started thinking about entering into the medical profession and to help the most vulnerable like her father, so that they can receive the care and treatment they fully deserve.

All this took place because of perceived low status of the family, adding the fact they were also extremely poor exacerbated the family’s plight. Like most of the villagers in the locality they were not able to access medical facilities purely because of their status.This experience haunted Gowsalya and she made a pledge to her Father that she will serve the poor in whatever capacity before he died. This was her way of ‘giving back’ to society

Our intervention proved timely and Gowsalya excelled at school life and the Foundation met all costs related to her schooling from Primary to University. This enabled Gowsalya to concentrate on her studies and not worry about finances. She successfully went onto College and then to University to study BSc Nursing.
Gowsalya relished University life and in between her studies she helped out at an elderly people’s home on a weekly basis. Providing comfort and solace to people entering the twilight of their lives was a life changing experience for her.

Gowasalya studied Nursing at the Mount Zion College of Nursing in the city of Pudukkottai. The course lasted four and half years and she successfully gained her degree in Nursing in 2018. After graduation Gowsalya was recruited as a Staff Nurse and now works for a leading hospital in Chennai. In her spare time she is a mentor in her village and helps counsel and support vulnerable children and their families and champion the importance of education.