This new period in Yashodhara brings with it not only the move to a new,
more spacious building, having more children under our care and collaborating
with SAMPARC, a local NGO. For us at Asha-Kiran, this new stage begins with
reaching an objective: some of the children that we have supported over the
last five years can finally go home and be reinserted into family life.
For a couple of years now, and with the conviction that a family is the
best environment for children to grow up in, we have been intensifying the work
with the parents of Yashodhara children. The objective of this work has
consisted in strengthening the mechanisms that parents have to protect their
children, and supporting parents to find better jobs that will enable them to
provide a healthier environment to their offspring.
The social workers at Asha-Kiran have intimate knowledge of each family’s
circumstances and the setting where parents carry out their activities. This
allows them to offer real and timely support to all. It is a slow and difficult
process, but we are getting there! At the beginning of 2011-2012, Deepti and
Aniruddha, our social workers, identified six families whose situation had
improved markedly over the three previous years, and worked with them
wholeheartedly to ensure success in the process of reinserting the children.
The result was that before moving to the new Yashodhara premises last
month, we succeeded in bringing DEVYANI back home with her mother under full safety
and protection conditions. Thanks to the constant support of Asha-Kiran and her
determination to succeed, Meri, the mother, got a stable job at a beauty parlor
in Pune and is registered in the municipal records as a beneficiary of the
urban relocation program. This means that in a short time, Devyani and her
mother will leave their shack in Koregaon Park and move to a small apartment in
Hadapsar neighborhood. Deepti has helped Meri with Devyani’s school change
procedures, who will begin 9th grade this year. Asha-Kiran will
continue to support this family throughout the school year to ensure that their
new situation stabilizes and improves as time goes by.
Work with the rest of the families
identified at the beginning of last year continues with all the energy we get
from the results we are getting, and we hope to have more good news to tell and
more children back home soon.
