OPENING OUR YOUNGSTERS' EYES

Uttam Módenes: a practical lesson via videoconference about NGO’s, sustainability and economic systems with 11^th grade students from Celia Viñas High School

The week after a similar videoconference with seventh graders, the teacher of ‘Science for the Contemporary World’ (CMC), Encarnación Segura López, and 11^th grade students had a practical class in which some of them asked questions to the founder of Asha-Kiran concerning India's economy, sustainability, and other issues relevant to the subject of CMC, which had been previously taught. At the end of the videoconference, Uttam encouraged young people to work, to live in justice and solidarity, and to protect the environment. In short, he encouraged every one of us to do his/her bit, from our daily activities, to make our world better.

ADA, one of the students, wrote:

"It was the first time I was in a videoconference and I must say I was surprised by how a high school class can now talk to the founder of an NGO in India to which a teacher in our high school belongs, who was also present.

It seems an admirable endeavor in every way, which I’d love to do at some point in my life. I think of all the people who have been, are being and will be benefited by this man’s will and desire to help them; it is touching and amazing.

Hopefully there will still be other people like this to change the world; we will help them by doing our part."

Mª  Ángeles Arráez - Contributor at Asha-Kiran

BARELY SURVIVING

The social worker found a boy preparing a paste of garlic so that his little brother could stave off hunger until their parents returned from the fields. It is heart-rending how poor children grow up too early, how older children care for younger ones, and how the destitute just manage to cope – if they do. It is tragic that this story is endlessly repeated.

The Integrated Child Development Services program (ICDS) in India is supposed to address extreme deprivation by providing supplementary food, rations and growth monitoring through community-level anganwadis (kindergarten) for children under the age of six. However, 74% of these children do not receive any supplementary food from the anganwadi in their region.

The survivors of hunger in childhood are pursued into adulthood. More than one in three adults is underweight. The government also has a program to provide food supplements to pregnant and lactating women, but only 21% of pregnant women and 17% of lactating women receive any food supplementation.

There are many newspaper reports on children who die of hunger but whose cause of death is recorded as measles or diarrhoea. In the state of Maharashtra, a minister shamelessly announced that 80 children died of malnutrition a day over four years across the state. The urban poor are not better off. Street children and the children of construction workers are more at risk since they do not have access to health and nutrition schemes.

Surveys show that the poor are eating less today than 40 years ago. Government committees dare to conclude that this drop is voluntary and merits a reduction in the minimum calorie requirements, allowing the government to further reduce the amount of grain available through the Public Distribution System (PDS). This, in turn, forces the poor to pay market rates for food - or do without, which may mean cooking wild roots and leaves to survive.

The government programs mentioned, the ICDS and the PDS, have been sabotaged by vested interests. Health activists say that the government forges financial partnerships with companies that make biscuits and baby food. Paediatrician Vandana Prasad condemns the use of commercial products for treatment of severe acute malnutrition when locally-made foods are effective, appropriate and cheaper.

Community involvement - through feeding programs, self-help groups, grain banks, and so on - plays a critical role in tackling malnutrition, but its participation is of limited value unless the government acknowledges its obligation to ensure people’s right to food. Without an assurance of sufficient food through the PDS, people are left to the mercy of the market. The consequences speak for themselves. It is a matter of concern that even as the government talks about expanding food security, we read of proposals that would effectively slow down the PDS. People must act through civil society organizations to make the government meet its commitment to the country’s poor and hungry.

Source: infochangeindia.org

HERDED LIKE CATTLE

Children are the population group that probably suffers most when communities are evicted from their homes or land.

Forced eviction of communities from their homes to give preference to development projects, urban renewal, restructuring or beautification programs has become commonplace in India. Dispossessed and compelled to live in sub-human conditions, tens of thousands of people watch helplessly as their rights are overlooked with respect to livelihood, food, health, education and security.

Children are one of the largest marginalized groups. The loss of a home, livelihood and community affects children in multiple ways. A displacement is not only physical but also economic and social. The demolition of a home often means the destruction of a lifetime's savings, which not only shatters the present but also points to a bleak future for parents and children.

Forced evictions, normally accompanied by lack of adequate rehabilitation, almost always lead to economic and social distress. For the few families who get 'rehabilitated', housing conditions are often poor and inadequate. The right to adequate housing involves not only a house but also access to basic services, work and education facilities. Both in rural and urban areas, resettlement sites are consistently lacking in basic facilities like water, sanitation, electricity and street lighting.

As most resettlement sites lack functioning schools, displaced children are often forced to halt their education abruptly. Girls are more likely to drop out due to lack of easy access to schools and safety concerns. In situations of economic stress, it is usually the girl-child who is pulled out of school first. Many girls are also forced to drop out due to the increase of domestic work, loss of social networks and support systems, and increased time spent away from the home by adults.

Using provisions available in international human rights instruments like the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, both of which India has ratified, could help bridge the gaps. The Basic Principles state that evictions are acceptable only under the most exceptional circumstances and after all alternatives have been explored, and painstakingly detail the nature and extent of State responsibility in cases of development-based evictions.

Recognizing the specific vulnerabilities of children and other marginalised groups, the Basic Principles list a variety of measures that can be adopted from the earliest stages of displacement in order to mitigate its adverse consequences. If incorporated into law and implemented afterwards, said principles could greatly aid in ensuring that forced evictions are minimized and their impacts do not lead to further human rights violations of vulnerable sections of society, particularly children's.
 

Source: infochangeindia.org

PROMOTING SYNERGY IN ASHA-KIRAN

The Community Kitchen concept is very widespread in the slums of Pune. Be it among families or communities with close ties and harmonious coexistence, women choose to cook together, thus reducing costs (in food and fuel) and, not always on purpose, helping to safeguard the environment with less CO2 emissions.

Through our Community Center project in the slums of Hadapsar, we wished to replicate this model of food preparation with two aims in mind: empower the women who belong to Self-help groups in the Community Center, and reduce the cost of supplying meals to the Day Care Centers for Migrant Children.

When we started working with the Day Care Centers in December of 2011, a catering company was supplying the food to us. At the same time, the work of Asha-Kiran in Hadapsar was beginning to bear fruit through the formation of the first women’s groups, which quickly became Self-help groups. Always attempting to integrate the work of the different projects, we realized that this was a good chance to take a first step towards the employability of women from the Hadapsar group via the Community Kitchen.

Asha-Kiran provides the women the necessary foodstuffs for the meals as well as a space specially equipped for cooking them. Every morning, they are in charge of making lunch for the 250 children of the five Day Care Centers we work with. Asha-Kiran’s staff directly supervises the quality of the food and delivery times to ensure that these 250 children receive the best possible service.

BACK HOME

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 9^th 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.

JOY

Since I joined Asha-Kiran in 2007, I have been travelling to India three times a year. The country never seemed foreign to me. Quite on the contrary, it always felt like home, probably because, having been born in a third-world country, the beneficiaries of our projects reminded me of the people from the disadvantaged social groups I grew up with - different language, different dress, different religion, but so much the same heart.

Spending time with the children from our projects -‘our’ children- brought me very close to them, just as if they had been part of my family. Considering the terribly hard lives they had led, their blooming after joining Asha-Kiran is something to behold. It is hard to imagine children from ‘developed’ countries having so much resilience and being so grateful.

Soon, I’ll get to visit and communicate with our children in sign-touch language once more… a most welcome prospect. I will also meet my Indian coworkers and see our new Day Care Centers at construction sites. I look forward to feeling the warmth of the people and their relaxed inner pace, seeing and hearing the bustle and constant horn-blowing in the streets, watching the monsoon rain pour, and feeling the mosquitoes mercilessly eating up my legs in the evening.

As my journey is about to begin, my wish is that everyone who hasn’t felt the welcoming embrace of these unassuming and sincere people will have the chance to do so some day.

Sadhana – Volunteer at Asha-Kiran

IMMUNIZATION CAMPAIGN AT THE DAY CARE CENTERS

500 children from six different Marvel Builders’ construction sites participated in the vaccination campaign that Asha-Kiran carried out along with Marvel Builders, the Builders’ Association and Pune Municipal Corporation.

250 of the children who got immunized came from five Day Care Centers that Asha-Kiran manages at said construction sites. The children, aged 0 to 14, were vaccinated according to their age and previous health records. Their mothers received ample information on the importance of vaccines at the various stages of a child’s life, together with an immunization card with clear explanations of the timetable to follow to complete the full immunization schedule.

Parents who work at the construction sites where Asha-Kiran operates the Day Care Centers will receive support and special monitoring with regard to vaccinations and consultations at the health center.