MOVIE starlet Isabel Lucas has reached out to Cairns schools to help a children’s home in India

The former local schoolgirl turned movie actress was filming an independent flick in December, The Waiting City, in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), when she took time off to visit the Udayan Resurrection Home for children with leprosy. “I think it was very emotionally moving, talking to the children and hearing their stories, ” Ms Lucas said. “Some of their parents had died young.”

The home, built in the 1970s, is a sanctuary for 300 children who come from the leper colonies of the city’s slums. Many of the children also suf­fer from tuberculosis and other infections common to people living in extreme poverty. “They are very happy and have very light spirits, ” Ms Lucas said of the children, who are aged between three and 18 years old.

At the home, they are not only treated for their illnesses, but educated. Redlynch State College and Ms Lucas’ old school haunts, St Monica’s and Holy Cross Primary, have agreed to help. Redlynch State College principal Richard Ruddell said his school would send old text books, exercise copybooks and stationery and his students would write letters to the children of Udayan.

Ms Lucas plans to send soccer balls, compressed for the journey, with the help of her father. “My dad did it once for an orphanage in Nepal five years ago, so he knows where to go, ” she said. Ms Lucas has a history of highlighting causes. She spent two months working at a village in Namibia with OzQuest Australian Adventures in 2006 and she supports the work of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society ship, Steve Irwin, which regularly thwarts Japanese whaling missions in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. She said she plans to bring more human plights to the public’s attention