By Tanya Kasozi

I had always wanted to go to India, but not as a tourist, so when the opportunity arose to join trustees, Jo and Terry Sherring, and their friend, David, on a 10 day trip last month, I grasped it with both hands.

India was new to me, my prior knowledge being limited to a vague awareness of recent economic growth, Bangalore call centres and Bollywood films. But, having lived in Uganda, another low income country, I also knew we would encounter visible poverty and that, as white faces, be a prime target for street beggars. What I didn’t realise was that the beggars tapping on our car windows were just the tip of a huge poverty iceberg in India; one that represents around 40% of its 1.1 billion population, but which remains largely hidden from the rest of the world.

Our primary purpose was to re-visit a number of people and projects identified by the trustees during their previous trip last October, in order to work out how they might best be supported by Rianna’s Fund.

For me, one of the revelations of our journey was the complex layers of poverty that exist in the urban areas. As we drove through crowded city streets, cobbled together pavement dwellings were a frequent sight, as were the vertical and horizontal slums, home to 9 million people in Mumbai alone - that’s the entire population of London! Yet slum dwellers, like the children in the film Slumdog Millionaire, are one step up from the children we met on our first day, homeless boys and girls as young as 8 or 9 who live alone on Mumbai’s main VT railway station. These are orphans or runaways, like 14 year old Parsunam who came expecting to find work to support his mother and sister but, along with the others, is forced to exist by begging or stealing, to supplement the few rupees he can earn from menial jobs like cleaning train floors .

Just a few hours after arriving in Mumbai, we took to the road and didn't stop for 10 days! Yet meeting so many people, and visiting a range of different projects across four cities, gave us valuable insight into the problems and issues faced by the poorest children every day. Children who live on the street or the railway endure frequent evictions and beatings, have nowhere to wash themselves or their clothes, and the young girls are constantly under threat from predatory traffickers. We learned of their particular fate when we spent a sobering and quite heart-breaking afternoon in Mumbai’s red light district, where girls as young as 15 are literally imprisoned for the first three years and gradually become brainwashed into a life of prostitution.

We also learned there are problems within problems. When street boys do earn a few rupees they may choose the escape afforded by paint thinner over food. We met older children, exploited and underpaid as day laborers in the construction industry, and duty bound to hand their wages to an alcoholic parent.

It would be easy to feel overwhelmed by all we heard and saw, but for two things. The first of these was the individuals we met who have made a long term commitment to the poorest children and are working to give them a better future. People like Mrs Rani Krishnan who, 30 years on, continues to provide care and education for tsunami orphans and ‘dustbin’ children in the Annai Fathima home in Chennai. And Bhaskar, who was a street child himself at 14, and could barely conceal his pride as he introduced each and every one of the 45 children in the Rescue and Restore home in Hyderabad, before we joined them outside for a competitive game of cricket!

It became very clear that education is a key need if the poorest children are to be helped to an independent life. In Kalyan, a poor area outside Mumbai, we met a dedicated young couple, Pastor Raju and Shilpa Ram, who fund a pre-school in the slums, and a pavement school for railway children out of their own pocket. During our visit we discussed Rianna’s Fund support for their exciting plans to build a new home for some of these children, where they will be cared for by the couple and be able to attend the municipal school.

In Chennai and Bangalore, we visited projects located right in the heart of the slum communities – drop-in centres, after-school clubs and a transit school, all developed after a long period spent listening to, and talking with, the local people, so that the projects serve the specific needs of each community, encouraging their participation and ownership.

It seems the nurturing of good relations with the adult population is also a key to helping the children. Parents who have spent their lives in poverty are ignorant of the changes an education can bring and are often initially hostile to activities which distract children from their earning potential, even if it’s only by begging. We also learned that there is something of a poverty mindset amongst the adult poor, and that project workers spend hours visiting parents in their homes, to gain their cooperation until they begin to witness the transformation in their children with their own eyes.

In contrast, the children themselves require little convincing; the literally hundreds we met were my second source of inspiration on this trip. The fact that many of our discussions with them had to be through an interpreter, did not disguise the fact that they were well aware of their problematic situations and could articulate them in graphic and poignant terms. “I made a wrong choice. I’m no good now”, Parsunam told me as he spoke of his longing to get back into school and learn to read and write.

On another occasion in Chennai, 17 year old Sita told how, since a 2 year old was crushed beneath a bus, families like hers are frequently evicted from the bus shelter and can only sleep there undisturbed for a few hours early in the morning. We were all downcast after listening to the whole catalogue of problems faced by the bus shelter families, yet we also learned that Sita and some of the other children have been helped to form a children’s council with the aim of mobilising support themselves. We were shown their letter to an NGO requesting shoes for the 10 children who walk to school; they were brought in by project worker, Raju, during our visit.

But, it wasn’t until we sat with some boys from the Bangalore slums, who benefit from an ingenious sports development and back to school programme, that I fully realised what supporting India’s poorest children can mean. Hearing the former school drop-outs talk with renewed purpose and ambition, you could see it’s not just about providing a roof over their head, a place in school or instruction on health and hygiene, it’s also about re-affirming each child’s worth as a human being, and enabling them to reject the idea that a life of poverty is all they are capable of and all they deserve.

I took many photographs of beautiful smiling children on this trip, some of whose lives are already being changed by the care and commitment of others. Yet, somehow, the images that stay with me are the pictures I couldn’t take; 26 families squashed into a bus shelter in the early hours of the morning, and the barred windows, behind which young enslaved girls the same ages as my own daughters endure a nightmare, whilst the rest of life carries on around them. The only consolation is that we were not seeing any of these desperate circumstances as social tourists. We were there on behalf of Rianna’s Fund, with the means and the intention of helping share the challenge of supporting some of India’s neediest children.