ambedkar high school is located in northeast hungary. 

what follows is an excerpt from an essay written by the school's co-founder janos orsos, a hungarian gypsy, a buddhist, and a follower of dr. ambedkar. 

excerpted from "FOLLOWING IN BABASAHEB'S FOOTSTEPS: Janos Orsos tells of his life and struggles as a European Dalit" from the fwbo blog.  

“I feel that I am much more closely identified with Indian Buddhism. That is why our own  new and independent religious organization wears the name of 'Jai Bhim'. The name gives a  message: it means that we belong to India. We have found a new framework for our twenty-year-old  movement for gypsy education. We began to believe that we too can take our movement in our own  hands and run it ourselves, just as our Indian brothers and sisters do. Our experiences over the last  twenty years fit well with the Ambedkarite movement. Our Indian friends started fifty years ago and  they have big results. So we feel it is worth us starting out on the same path. We have found that Dr  Ambedkar's thinking fits well with our aims, so we have named our new school, 'Dr Ambedkar  High School'.     

“I feel very pleased that I can speak in Europe about Dr Ambedkar. Nobody in Europe has heard for  him, so it is one of our major tasks to speak about him. It is very wonderful for me to see that my  actions find parallels in Dr Ambedkar's activity and movement. We have found ourselves going through the same steps as our Indian friends, because these are the logical steps in our social situation. Our Indian Buddhist friends are able to take their own institutions in their own hands because they have their own hero.   

"So taking Dr Ambedkar's thought as our basis and using his image as our rallying point, we have set  up a new organization, 'The Jai Bhim Religious Network'. If we want to create schools for gypsies in this situation, where we have no real connection with the culture and thought of the surrounding  society, we need a new context of ideas and culture that relates to us. We need to be able to define  ourselves - not for other people, but for ourselves. We are very happy to be members of FWBO. But  we are not Western Buddhists - we have never been welcomed into Western society and it does not belong to us.    

 "Our social situation is not equal to that of Western members of the Order; it is very similar to what  we saw in India among Dalits. So that gives us a feeling of solidarity with them and we identify  ourselves with them. We certainly want to use the knowledge found in the West. There are Western  Order members who are our friends - indeed, anyone who is willing to work with us is our friend.  But our strongest identification is with the Ambedkarite movement in India. That is why we have  named our organization 'Jai Bhim'. It is a message of self-definition to ourselves, which helps us to  be clear what we want. It gives us our ideological background - our background of vision and ideas,  which we need in order to carry out our task.   

“We need the image of Dr Ambedkar because we are still invisible to  society. For instance, my white colleagues are not as good at teaching our  gypsy students as I am, for obvious reasons. But it is always the white  people who are known about. For instance, it is well known in Hungary  that the Buddhist Church is active in the gypsy field, especially at the  Little Tiger High School in Alsosantmarton, in Southern Hungary. But  whenever the school is talked about in the media nobody notices the  gypsy activists who work there without money, even though these  activists get excellent educational results, usually better than the white  teachers. But we are not noticed. The white Buddhist authorities are  highly visible because they 'sacrificed their lives' going to the gypsies -  the biggest sacrifice that one can make! They become famous as heroes  and saviours - but we are nowhere. And this is the story of Dr Ambedkar. In Europe people have  heard about the untouchables and how Gandhi almost sacrificed his life for them - everyone knows  this in Europe. I have nothing against Gandhi, I respect him. He is a real hero for India. But what  did Dr Ambedkar do? Wasn't he a participant in this movement? Nobody knows about him because  he is the gypsy. This is a very easy parallel for me to make.  

“With the Dr Ambedkar High School we are trying to do the impossible. We are trying to provide  education for youngsters who are totally outside the secondary educational system. When they  come here at the age of 16 or older, they often cannot read and write properly. They come from very  difficult circumstances. They don't have proper housing; sometimes they don't even have shoes. So  we work with people in deep misery. We began this work without any money. What we have  achieved is just with our own effort.

“What do we do that is different? The first step is making students believe that they can accomplish a  normal secondary education. We help them to believe that there is an alternative to lifelong  unemployment and lack of prospects in life. Slowly but surely we have to fight the resistance within them to school - because they have developed a resistance due to their previous experience. They  are alienated from school, from knowledge, from books. We have to make school sympathetic to  them. Only after that has been achieved can we teach them reading and writing and calculating.  Once they can read and write and calculate, we can give them the knowledge about the modern  world that is required at university and college. Not all of them will go to college, but they still need  a certain level of knowledge of the modern world if they are to get out of their ghettos. They need to  be able to choose between university and the world of jobs. We consider that what we are doing is  creating possibilities for them - this is the slogan of the Waldorf educational movement, which we  have made our own.     There are many people who are deeply critical of us, even who hate us; there are many people who  revere us; and there are many people who are jealous of us. People ask, 'Are these gypsies real  Buddhists? How can you teach Buddhism to gypsies?' What we are doing is so strange in Europe,  where Buddhism is largely the leisure hobby of the middle classes. People say, 'Isn't Buddhism a  luxury for gypsies in villages?'  Some of these comments come from Christians - but it is easy for us  to answer them: they don't offer effective secondary education for gypsies and we do! But whatever  people say, it doesn't bother us - we just carry on with our work.      

 "That task is running social and educational institutions for gypsies - and for us this is Buddhism. We  don't judge ourselves by how much time we spend meditating. For us our educational work is  effective when people become aware of their own minds. Our goal is to help people to be aware of  the potential within their minds. We help them to grow out of their ghetto world, within a Buddhist  framework. Through us the students can meet Buddhism. These youngsters will easily identify  themselves with the ideas and the vision that helps them. It may not be that every member of our  schools or our movement will take to Buddhism, and they certainly won't to begin with. This was  the case for me too. What was interesting for me when I first came across the followers of Dr  Ambedkar in India was not Buddhism but the social movement. I connected first with that  movement and the people in it. No doubt it will be like that for others too. "

more about the dr. ambedkar school