The heart of a small tea shop reaches around the world to help impoverished young women realize their fullest potential.
By Lisa Lombardo
Call it a serendipitous convergence of events. Who knew that by volunteering for a trip to India sponsored by her local Rotary Club Katrell Christie’s life would change forever?
Christie traveled to India in the summer of 2009 on a Rotary-funded project to help women in the small village of Hyderabad establish a handicraft that their husbands could sell at market. While there, Christie witnessed the devastating poverty that many young women face—often because of the lack of educational opportunities available to them—and vowed to help assist a small orphanage in the Darjeeling region of West Bengal, India with uniforms, school supplies, and shoes for its young girls.
Aiding the orphanage inspired Christie to do more for young women in the region affected by the forced labor, sex exploitation, and child trafficking industries so rampant in the region. Building on her experience, Christie founded The Learning Tea in 2010, to help fund the university educations of 3 orphaned girls in Darjeeling. Funds from tea sales help Christie provide these at-risk orphans with shelter, medical care, educational scholarships, and futures free of poverty and exploitation.
Since 2010, more than 50 volunteers have traveled to India to help the girls and to perform routine maintenance and repair work on their established living facility. And in only 4 years since its founding, The Learning Tea has accepted 11 young women—all honor students in their respective grades—into the center.
Donations from supporters have helped The Learning Tea establish and maintain a modern housing unit in Darjeeling that includes a water-filtration system, a renovated bathroom, space to accommodate 11 girls, and a lower level that could accommodate 10 more after improvements. The organization not only provides for the scholars’ housing, tuition, food, clothing, medical benefits, and other life necessities, but also music lessons, tutoring, computer classes, and other extracurricular activities through the proceeds.
A Life-Changing Trip
Before launching The Learning Tea, Christie had been owner and operator of a small tea shop, Dr. Bombay’s Underwater Tea Party in Atlanta, Ga. for 7 years. While she loved selling teas, and used shop proceeds for small charitable efforts such as buying school books for a local library, nothing had inspired her the way her foray to India did.
“I had Dr. Bombay’s, and was collecting used books and buying books for the library, and was giving to an animal refuge,” Christie remembered. “Then one day, a customer of mine asked me to go to India with her to fulfill a scholarship project. It took her a year of asking but I finally said yes!”
Christie went, not knowing what to expect. The Atlanta West End Rotary, which sponsored the trip, asked her to stay for 60 days, “which was a huge commitment,” she admitted. The handicraft project she was helping her friend with was completed in just 3 weeks. But as soon as she got there, Christie said, she realized the desperation the women who lived there felt. “I wanted to help the people there, and I realized I could with as little as a dollar a day! So I started sending money—it took so little to change life there for those women so drastically.”
Recognizing that she was already in the Darjeeling tea business, Christie set out to determine if there was a way she could contribute more through tea sales. She returned to the region and saw the conditions on the tea plantations. It was while visiting Darjeeling that she met several young, orphaned girls and made a personal connection, spending weeks with them. The government there did fund an orphanage, but children had to leave once they turned 16. The girls she had bonded with would soon have nowhere to go.
“I realized I had 6 months, so I made promises to come back—I told them I would not let them be put out on the street,” Christie shared. “I came home and put a bowl on the counter in my shop for donations, with a sign telling customers about the 3 young girls. Customers who only spent about $3-4 in my store would put their change in the jar to help the girls’ dreams of getting an education.”
Within 6 months, Christie had enough money to get the girls an apartment, pay for visits to doctors, fund their schooling for a year, and set up a food stipend at a local grocery hut—all from donations from her small neighborhood tea shop. “It was all they really needed to survive,” Christie enthused. She told the girls to hold down the fort—she’d be back.
“We really had no way to communicate—their village was basically a hill station on the way to Mount Everest!” she recounted. “They had no phones, no computers—it was the poorest area.” Back in Atlanta, Christie put the donation jar back out with photos showing what she did for the girls: paying for health care, getting them uniforms, and so on.
The generosity of Christie’s customers paid off. Five years later, 11 girls now live in a fully furnished dorm. She has opened a new Learning Tea center in Kolkata, which is in the process of interviewing new students to live there, and she has plans to open another location in Chennai in April. “Parents of [around 16]girls there are in bonded labor, so we are funding their education for them,” she related. “Girls in the village have gone to school for civil engineering or nursing degrees. We expect them to spend 20 hours a month giving back to their community as well.”
‘A Risky Venture’
Once Christie decided to enlist her employees at Dr. Bombay’s in her altruistic efforts, she had a bit of a shock coming to her.
The Learning Tea had no corporate sponsors; Christie had been relying on donations from customers and sponsorship from Atlanta West End Rotary primarily for funding. Once a month, Dr. Bombay’s holds an Indian-inspired dinner at the store for $20 per person and generates money from the sales of used books and teas. With the money, she buys Darjeeling tea from plantations in the region that provided education, housing, and clean water for the children and families who labor there. She uses the money to pay for the scholarships and the costs of basic life necessities. Christie does source tea from Darjeeling and the proceeds from this tea go specifically toward funding the scholarship program.
After raising the funding with friends and family—but mostly by herself for 3-4 years going back and forth to India—Katrell realized she had limited time to save the orphans from becoming homeless. She returned to the states and told her staff she’d provide them with raises—but only if they pledged to donate their tips to help her fund their own trips to India for The Learning Tea. To her shock, most of her staff quit.
“I knew it was a bit of an ultimatum; my business manager told me not to do it, but I said, I can’t NOT do it—I’ve gotten this far,” she admitted. “I felt it was so important for us to give back to those communities that produce our tea. The women who are on their feet in the fields could never afford an education. I felt the staff had to have their own stories to tell from their own trips to India. It was a risky venture,” she shared.
She rewrote her job descriptions to entice workers who would be willing to travel—and it paid off. “Now, they get to build personal relationships with the scholars, like a big family,” she said. “We’ve grown in the past 5 years and doubled our size because of this. Everyone wants to be a part of our little revolution. My staff is amazing; I could not have done this without them,” she enthused.
And she’s ready to go back. Christie returned from India on Nov. 6 and plans to go again in April. “We’ve raised all the money—our customers made it happen! We sell out our dinners, because everyone knows what we do [with the funding]. My staff goes with me every six months—they know working at Dr. Bombay’s means working for The Learning Tea.”
She’s gotten some larger companies involved, too. They offer the opportunity to travel for The Learning Tea as an incentive to get their employees to visit tea plantations and tastings, to better learn where tea comes from. Thanks to this outreach, Christie has taken more than 50 people on the journey in the past 5 years.
It’s no luxury trip. “It is definitely not a vacation, but an experience,” she relayed. “It’s 31 hours on a plane, then 7 hours in a Range Rover heading up the mountains on very dangerous roads—it’s a crazy trip, but you will never experience anything like it. You can smell the Darjeeling, it is above cloud level. And I can honestly see Mount Everest from our front porch! We have a beautiful station there; the climate is perfect for growing tea. It’s just very magical.”
A New Family
On a personal level, Christie says her work with The Learning Tea has helped her forge lifelong connections. “It means I have a family on the other side of the world,” she stated. “I have a personal connection to each of the students. We send photos back and forth, and they now have English tutoring and even music lessons. They have turned into amazing, courageous, beautiful women at top of their classes. They deserve the opportunity—all of them came from desperate situations, but they were willing to go to school with no promise of anything—but they continued to go and get good grades. They have all proven to be amazing students.”
Her future goals include developing new teas for Darjeeling, Assam and Nilgiri. But her real dream? For a bigger tea company to take The Learning Tea under their wing. “If a larger company came along, that knew all about our mission and what we were devoted to, it would be nice. There are many companies who would have the clout to do it. We’re a pretty small tea shop, and what we accomplished shows that one small person can make a huge difference. For the future, we’re looking to grow, not simply maintain. It is my dream.”
For those who want to get involved, reach out to info@thelearningtea.com.
