HEALTH AND FUN

Godrej Horizons Builders organized several field trips for the children who attend Asha-Kiran's Day Care Centers at their construction sites. The children went to Agha Khan Palace in

 Pune, where they had a fun-filled day. 

The activities they enjoyed the most were an origami session where they created different shapes using colored kite paper, and a dance class taught by a professional teacher who taug

ht them dance steps seen in popular Indian movies. The organizers also provided a midday 

meal and snacks. 

Aside from the fun, the children from these construction sites also attented a Health Camp where they got chekups and the medication they needed.

ASHA-KIRAN IN SEGOVIA

On Thursday June 11, Asha-Kiran was present at the school Colegio Cooparativa Alcázar de Segovia. Throughout the morning, the students of 10th grade learned about its projects and the experience of being a Volunteer in India. Marta Escudero, a teacher at the school and a Volunteer with A-K, showed them a video about her stay in Pune last summer as she recounted her experiences with the children and other vulnerable groups she shared time and smiles with.

This activity intended to bring the students closer to a largely unknown social reality to them by putting put images and sounds to a different culture, trying to bring about some reflection and arousing interest in volunteering and the work of Asha-Kiran.

GIRLS AND PROSTITUTION IN INDIA

Sister Caridad Paramundayil embodies many years of hard work to help girl victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation. This Indian woman arrived in Madrid as a novice of the Adorer Sisters Order at the age of 17, where she encountered “a different world” without having an inkling of what she was going to devote her life to. ‘One of the nuns explained it to us, but I didn’t understand’, she recalls. Now, in 2015, she emphatically says that she would not change her life for anything.

Sister Caridad recently returned to Madrid to provide support for the organization Manos Unidas, and to lecture on the subject she knows most about: providing decent livelihoods to the daughters of the prostitutes who live in some of the most economically depressed neighborhoods in India. Often, these girls are abducted by mafias that sexually exploit them. Even as young as 12, the girls often live in extreme poverty, overcrowded in slums, with no hygienic measures whatsoever, and hand over almost all the money they make to the “madames” who manage their business.

Fear and disgust. Those were the feelings that shook the missionary’s body the first time she went to a slum in Calcutta. Bachpan Bachao Andolan, an Indian organization that fights child labor, estimates that more than a million prostitutes in India are minors and that their numbers are ever increasing. Even if prostitutes want to have a different job, they often cannot manage to get one, mainly because they know nothing else to do for a living.

Because of the difficulties that rehabilitating adult women entail, Sister Caridad’s project pays more attention to the daughters of prostitutes. According to the nuns, their work includes preventing girls from following in their mothers’ footsteps, which is very common because they lack any kind of education or training. Schools do not usually accept them because parents do not want their children to come in contact with them. Sponsored by Manos Unidas, Sister Caridad contributed to the creation of Shelter Homes in various states in India.

Since the project started, almost 400 girls and teens have learned to read, write, run a business, sew, etc. The hardest part, she says, was dealing with gangs and pimps who even had brought them to trial -paradoxically accusing them of promoting prostitution- from fear of seeing a drop in their income. At first, it was difficult for prostitute mothers to trust the nuns, but they began to do so once they saw they were there to stay.

Now, the most difficult challenge is for the young girls to stay until they finish their training. One of the most difficult moments for the missionaries is to accept the fact that some of these girls will leave, sometimes without saying goodbye. Even if this happens, Sister Caridad says: ‘I prefer to believe that no one is bad. Something will stick from everything we've given them, and someday they will realize it. That is my hope’.

Source: elpais.com

ENJOYING COOKING AND EATING

As was the case with the crafts activity for girls, the session on Food and Nutrition was conducted by the Spanish volunteers Nerea Durán Terrón and María Lucero Rodríguez, who wished to share this dessert recipe with the community housewives and mothers so they could make it for their children.

Also, María and Nerea organized a special session for the women of the Sahachari Self-Help Group to teach them how to make orange jam. The community women enjoyed and tasting and eating what they prepared with the help of the volunteers.

A SMALL YET BIG ENTERPRISE

A successful chemical engineer, Shalini Datta always wanted to do something meaningful with her life, something which would leave a positive impact on the lives of others. When she got her first job in an IT company, she signed up for corporate responsibility activities to come closer to her dream. After a time, however, Datta quit her job to create After Taste, an organization that helps women in a marginal community of fishermen to earn a living by making handicrafts out of paper.

What started as a small initiative gained momentum and more and more women joined the enterprise. In 2012, Datta organized the first exhibition of hand-made products. Even before starting, Datta was sure she could gather a group of women with no previous knowledge and teach them the trade from scratch. “I also wanted to instill a sense of teamwork in them”, she says. “Since they hadn’t worked together before, I taught them how to cooperate rather than compete.”

Currently, the company manufactures various paper products which include custom-made bags, lamps and picture frames. Among its clients are 25 corporations, organizations and various educational institutions, as well as individual customers. The focus of this company has allowed women who face difficult situations at homes to improve their quality of life, be economically independent and be more confident and outgoing in their social interactions.

Although their workplace is a small room in a suburb in Mumbai, Datta’s dream is to expand the business and get more a bigger place. Her goal is to increase the number of workers so as to reach out to more women, and start selling online. She explains that “We’re not asking for charity; we want to offer a tangible solution to the difficulties that these women face”.

Source: thebetterindia.com

MORE IMPORTANT THAN TECHNOLOGY

On Saturday April 25, the 3rd regional meeting of TESOL Spain Castilla La Mancha, was held in Puertollano. After reading an article that I had published in the newsletter of TESOL Spain about my stay with Asha-Kiran in India, Anita Lutterkort, regional coordinator, asked me to give a short speech and share my experiences, impressions and conclusions from my participation as a teacher at Yashodhara Home with my colleagues - an experience that changed both my approach to my classes and my outlook on life.

Silvia Benitez
Volunteer with Asha-Kiran

“Silvia Benitez gave a talk about her experiences in India, giving the teachers a very personal vision of her stay at Yashodhara. How different it must be to teach a class there! Without any high technology but being supported by the good heart of her peers and a burning desire to learn from her students. We should take note and reflect on our daily lives, so full of objects that we sometimes forget that human relationships are the most valuable thing we have.”

Anita Lutterkort
Area Coordinator, TESOL-Spain Castilla La Mancha.

AN EXCEPTIONAL STREET BOY

Life taught him early on how to survive with nothing. When he was only five, Amin Sheikh left his slum to “settle” in an old train station. As his younger sister joined him soon, he had to learn to look after two people. Shortly thereafter, someone stole everything he had, he was raped, and his sister was kidnapped and forced into prostitution in the red light district. Like Amin, the UN estimates that some 150 million children are living out in the open in the world.

Helped by a taxi driver, his sister managed to escape from her captors. Once Amin understood the risk they were in, and with the help of a nun, he agreed to live in an orphanage where at least they would have their basic needs met. Amin says that although that shelter was not all that comfortable, he considered it “the home he had always dreamed of”. The nun had saved them from the likelihood of dying in the streets like many others: from illnesses or drugs or at the hands of gangs. A series of terrible circumstances brought Amin to the train station and to a life of hunger and suffering, but if all that had not happened, he would not be helping other children in the same situation now.

At present, Amin is a business man, as he defines himself. Aside from having started an orphanage, he dreams of opening a restaurant that will employ young men from his orphanage who, having become of age, are still out of work. This way, they won’t have to take to the streets again. He also wants the 'artists' to have place where the artists where they can show their work, and make a waiting list from which local business men can hire these young men.

To launch the project he has in mind, he says he will need around €300,000. Getting this amount implies going against the odds, but it just may be possible for someone like him. In fact, he thinks he has already found the solution by telling his life story in a book. Through the sales of his novel, he has already raised €40,000 and it looks like this figure will continue to grow. His autobiography “Life is life: I am thanks to you” has already been translated into five languages.

In early 2003, the person Amin worked for as a driver and whom he describes as the father he never had, decided to take him with him to Barcelona. During that trip, he began the process that, years later, moves everyone who comes to know his story. All the people he befriended in Barcelona encouraged him to write what he experienced during the hardest years of his life. Amin realized that he did not have to resign himself to his lot in life.

When not traveling, Amin shows tourists around Mumbai – the more authentic side of the city he knows so well. This activity, aside from bringing funds to his project, is also a way to meet foreigners who often offer to tell others about his work in their countries of origin. Says Amin: “If I survived after everything that has happened to me so far, I can also handle what the future holds for me”.

He knows he won’t change the world, but knows his small contribution can, along with many others, serve to create something greater, and the mere fact of improving one child’s life prospects thanks to his efforts, gives Amin a reason to carry on.

Source: elpais.com