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The casual visitor to a poor area in Bangalore, India, might get the impression that the Carroll Dragons have a local fan club here. In fact, they do, though no residents have seen the Dragons play.
Last year, the Carroll Athletic Booster Club and the Dragon's Den teamed up with Sabre Travel Network in Southlake to clothe hundreds of children in the town.The story begins in 2005, when Sabre opened a technology development center in Bangalore, India, and also adopted the Parikma School, located in one of the poorest sections of the city."The school has been open since the late 1990s and was started by a successful Indian businesswoman in an effort to try and eliminate the poverty cycle that exists in Bangalore," said Paul Rostron of Sabre. "The school started with the early elementary grades and is expanding each year to include older children ...," he said. The company has contributed to the school financially for the past five years by adopting a class. The arrangement pays students' tuition and provides them with uniforms and two meals a day at school. "Over the weekends, the kids often have little or no food until they get back to the school on Monday mornings," Rostron said.Not only do the children have little food, they also lack clothing. Beyond their uniforms, many students have few clothes to wear. Cindi Rostron, Paul's wife and a CABC board member, heard about the situation and had an idea. Why not ship excess shirts from the Dragon's Den to students at the school? Usually, Cindi said, the Den just discounts the shirts "down to almost nothing to get rid of them."So, in November, with the CABC board approval, the Dragons Den boxed up the excess clothes and Sabre shipped them to India."[The students] were very excited about the shirts, since a lot of these children do not have a lot of anything," Cindi said. "I think that some of the larger-size shirts may have gone home with some of the children for their families," she added.Although there are no plans for donating in the future, most volunteers hope to see the program continue."We haven't been approached yet," said Dragon Den committee member Lisa Manning, "but if the opportunity presents itself, I am sure we would be happy to do something like this again."Madison Manning is news editor and assistant editor-in-chief of the Dragon Tribune . Lisa Manning is her mother. A version of this story ran earlier in the Tribune , published online. Madison has also worked as an intern for the Southlake Journal.
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