George - India

Nickname: George

My name is George, and I am a Jesuit priest serving God in India. When I first arrived here fifty years ago, I wanted to be fully at God’s disposal and had no enthusiastic dreams of grandeur.
As a young lad, I grew up in a Christ-centered home in the US and attended Catholic schools. I became an altar boy and decided I wanted to go to seminary after the eighth grade. However as the only child of my parents, I was advised to complete high school first. I won a scholarship to a Jesuit school - that was a blessing because my parents could never have afforded the price of my education once my father’s business failed in the Great Depression.

In high school, I invited Christ into my life and after dedicating my life to his plan, I joined the Jesuit Order at seventeen. I continued my education with doctoral studies in physics. This decision, like many more that followed, was one I left to God.

At thirty-two, I became the principal of an Indian school, first grade through high school; and over the next ten years, I chose to teach scripture courses rather than physics. Hindu and Muslim alumni still gratefully quote scripture to me, a heartwarming experience.

There have been many special opportunities here, such as I would never have had at home. With four other principals, I am the founder-secretary of an association of English medium schools, now numbering seven hundred, which is the majority of private English medium schools in India. I believe God has led me throughout my life, and I am grateful for the long life I have enjoyed.

My experiments with cameras go back a long way. As a young boy, my father presented me with a 25-cent camera and a 10-cent roll of film. Since then and for sixty-five years, I have been keen on photography and making short documentary films. Many have been broadcast on TV in the US. Photography and videography have also been an important part of my focus as an educator and have helped develop our students’ knowledge, character and loyalty to their institution.