Haribol everyone

As I have started my travel, my posting will be more irregular, still in Vrindavan our works are going on and someone is taking care from where I left.
I am now in Taiwan on my way to HK and then China.
See you soon....

A difficult situation for the whole family.

Priti came to us asking for help.
Khemchand, her father is a shop keeper. He rents a little shop. He is diabetic, according to the doctor his sugar level went up to 750. His digestion has been affected, as the photo shows he is severely emaciated as he cannot eat very much.

His son Raju , 12 had to give up his studies to mind the shop.
Priti who is 14 and studying at a private school also had to give up her studies as they cannot afford the fee. Seema 10 and her sister Doli , 7 are studying at SMS, they have two sisters who are already married.

The Doctor wants to admit him in a hospital but Khemchand can't afford it.

A female issue continued!

Kimberly with Janta and her family. Janta is first from right, next to Kim. Photo was taken in 2001.

Kimberly Burwash’s visit this time was tinged with a note of sadness.

Her friend Janta whom she has known since her first visit to Vrindavan 7 years ago, was married a few days after Kimberly arrived in Vrindavan in February.

We went to visit Janta and bring her some gifts. She was very sad that we would not accept an invitation to her wedding. The legal age for marriage is 18 years and Janta is only 15. We did no wish to condone Janta being ‘married off’ in this in way and though we care for Janta, we could not attend.

Janta told us that she was not in favor of the idea but had yielded to the demands of her family.

She also said that her mother has been very harsh with her all her life. She has been beaten a great deal by her, locked up and not allowed to go to school. She has had to do household chores and take care of her younger siblings for most of her young life.

Janta’s mother is a widow with 11 children.

Janta was hopeful that once she is married her mother will be kinder to her because she will not be looked upon as a burden anymore but will literally be ( paraiya dhan) “someone else’s property.”

Janta’s mother has promised to keep her at home till she is 18 after which time she will go to her husband’s home in a neighboring village.

She is apprehensive about how she will be treated there as well, because her husband has 3 unmarried sisters.

She was very brave when she spoke with us and she seemed to have a genuine hope , perhaps a result of all the convincing her mother and elders have tried to do, that her life will improve somewhat with what she sees will be a new beginning.

Janta has now been, married a few weeks. She came to visit us yesterday and she said that the boy’s family is now demanding a fridge and a water cooler.

A recent photo of Janta

On their own

Gaura’s father was arrested recently.
The police came suddenly and arrested him. Gaura’s father had been married before he married Gaura‘s mother. He had one son from his first wife and a son, a daughter and Gaura from his second wife.

The former wife was demanding Rs.100,000, as he had married for the second time without divorcing her legally. As he was not providing for his first wife, the police brought charges against him and he has been imprisoned for a year.

Gaura’s mother died when she was only 3 or 4 years old. Her older sister Suman, who is 14, has been taking care of her and her brother after the death of their mother.
With their father’s arrest they are on their own and have no means of support other than the help of their neighbors who are very poor themselves.
We have given them provisions for one month, and we hope that some kind soul will help us for the coming months….If you wish to help please email me at rupa@fflvrindavan.org. Provisions cost approx. 2,000 rs plus 300 rs cash for green veg. for a month. In USA dollar will be 55 per month.

Parvati & Ankut, Anjali's sisters

I know we have already posted so many photos of these kids, but this is interesting as yesterday we gave Parvati and her sister a coloring book and some crayons, they had never seen a pen in their lives and did not know what it was or what to do with it.

Radha's gifts from Radhika

We bought a mat, blanket, mosquito net and some eatables for Radha. this was done with a donation from little Radhika, UK.

Thank you Radhika!

Parvati & Anjali

Finally with the help of Nirguna, our FFLV officer for child care/protection we managed to get Anjali and also her sister Parvati back to school. here's photo taken before and after a good bath and clean clothes.

Anjali's home

Yesterday I went to see Anjali, again trying to bring her back at school, when she saw me from a distance she came running....

More on women issue

More than 120 million children are not in school, the majority of them girls. Each additional year of schooling for girls results in a 5–10 percent decline in child deaths. For every year beyond fourth grade that girls go to school, family size drops 20 percent and wages rise 20 percent.

Kofi Annan has said: “There is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls. No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity, lower infant and maternal mortality, improve nutrition and promote health — including helping to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.”

Women and girls are trapped in a cycle of malnutrition, particularly in South Asia. By tradition, women eat last and least. They eat only the food that is leftover after the males have eaten. Often men and boys consume twice as many calories — even though women and girls do much of the heavy work. Girls in India are two-to-four times more likely to suffer from acute malnutrition than boys.

The vast majority of those living in hunger and poverty are women and girls. And when empowered, women are the key change agents to solve the problem. Studies show that 43 percent of the progress in reducing hunger from 1970 to 1995 was due to educating women, while improvements in food production only contributed 26 percent. Women are up to 15 times more likely than men to spend increases in income on family nutrition. Women grow the majority of food in the developing world, despite being almost entirely bypassed by aid programs.

Every day marks the needless death of 30,000 children under five. Half of these children die as a direct result of malnutrition, in which gender discrimination is a key factor. The other half die from lack of health care, in which there is also tremendous gender discrimination. Because boys are seen as an investment and girls are seen as a burden, poor families are up to seven times less likely to take their daughter to the doctor when she is sick than their son.

www.thp.org

Indian billionaire

One things that the following article does not mention is that in Japan everyone is a billionaire compared to India. While in India you have 36 billionaire, few thousand wealthy people and one billion poor, very poor.

Beijing, Mar 11: Indians topping Forbes' list of Asian billionaires, replacing the Japanese, have flabbergasted the Chinese, who are regularly reading that India is not shining as reported by the Western media and experts.

"I am surprised that Indians have topped the Forbes' list of Asian billionaires," Chen Yu, a media consultant said.

"I must change my distorted impressions about India," she said.

With 36 of its citizens worth over a billion dollars, India replaced Japan as Asia's top breeding ground for the super-rich, the Forbes 2007 listing of billionaires said this week.

New Delhi, India (AHN) - India now leads Asia in the number of billionaires according to Forbes magazine's annual listing of the world's billionaires published this week.

India increased its number of billionaires by 14 from last year to 36 for a combined worth of $US191 billion said Forbes while Japan's 24 billionaires total $US64 billion.

Back to square one!

I am sure some of you remember "the first Anjali letter" that was becasue we also have another little Anjali that came into the picture at the same time, she is more lucky as she has been with us everyday, somehow the mother understood the advantage of having her girl looked after everyday. Anyway, Anjali stopped coming last week, just few days after we took her in. Today I went looking for her and we found her more or less in the same way as she was before. As she saw me from a distance she started running with her arms open.

Nirguna our child protection officer will go tonite to talk with the parents and see if there is a way to get her back.

A persistent glimmer of joy

During the month of December, Lauren Pond (Police Reporter and Assistant Photo Editor, The Daily Northwestern Medill, Class of 2008) spent a month with us on a photographic journey.

I just came across some of her writings and photos…I could not stop reading, and we wish to share her moments with you all. http://thephotopond.blogspot.com/

From her blog:
Sandipani Muni School is having a cultural program to celebrate the New Year. When I arrive, girls are busy putting on makeup and costumes. I look for light in the classrooms, which are strewn with articles of clothing and makeup. The fading afternoon sunlight is streaming through the windows, and girls are checking their complexions in the reflections on the windowpanes. Click. So many colors. So beautiful.

This is the India I have always pictured: the bright colors, dance, laughter, celebration. happy, smiling faces. It is the India I still picture, even though I have seen unfathomable poverty in Vrindavan. Yes, there is pain, there is suffering, there is cold and sickness and abuse. But there is a persistent glimmer of joy.

Monday, Jan. 1, 2007

The beginning of a new year.

How fortunate I am to have begun 2007 in India. I start the New Year with a new perspective, based on my experience in Vrindavan over the past month.

I wake early and begin to pack. I feel like I am taking home significantly less than what I came with. Less worry, less stress, less weighing on my heart and mind…
continued at http://thephotopond.blogspot.com/

Updates on Radha

She was plastered on the 9th, and she will have to have it for a month. We have arrangement to buy her a mosquito net, a mat to sleep on, a shawl, some eatables and water to drink. This was done from a donation we received from Radhika, a little girl from UK.

Deep-rooted Disease

Deep-rooted Disease

By Anjali Modi

The Hindu
…..and there is no clearer sign of this than the rising graph of `dowry deaths'. It spells out the fact that a woman is dispensable if she cannot deliver on dowry demands. Nisha Sharma despite being a dowry giver has become the anti-dowry supergirl only because her story was so unusual in the usual fare of woman who spend their lives being emotionally or physically abused by their husbands and their families or in the most extreme cases simply being killed off. This is a uniquely Indian story.

In the last decade, the official figure for women dying because of dowry-related cruelty has gone up and not down, from 2,500 a year to more than 7,000. The 7,000 figure only reflects the number of cases reported to the police and not nearly the whole story. Even this level of reporting is the result of the campaigns, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by the women's movements which focussed attention on the deaths by fire of married women.
http://www.countercurrents.org/gen-modi250503.htm

Slavery In Modern India

The Price Of Being A Woman:
Slavery In Modern India

By Justin Huggler

04 April 2006
The Independent

In the villages of Haryana, just outside Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that the shortage of women is severe. Unable to find wives locally, the men have resorted to buying women from the poorer parts of India. Just 25 miles from the glitzy new shopping malls and apartment complexes of Delhi is a slave market for women.

Last week, an Indian doctor became the first to be jailed for telling a woman the sex of her unborn baby. India is trying to stamp out the practice of female foeticide. But in the villages of Haryana, the damage has already been done. Indian parents want boys because girls are seen as a heavy financial burden: the parents have to provide an expensive dowry for their weddings, while sons will bring money into the family when they marry, and have better job prospects.

But in Haryana, so many female foetuses have been aborted that there aren't enough women for the men to marry. The result is a thriving market in women, known in local slang as baros, who have been bought from poorer parts of India. Anyone in the villages can tell you the going rates. The price ranges from 3,000 rupees (£40) to 30,000 rupees for a particularly beautiful woman. Skin colour and age are important pricing criteria. So is whether the woman is a virgin.

When the police arrested Tripla's husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally, there is no real marriage. The women are sexual "brides" only. Sometimes, brothers who cannot afford more share one woman between them. Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a particularly beautiful bride will sell her at a profit.

Munnia was sold when she was only 17. Considered particularly beautiful, she was resold three times in the space of a few weeks. Like Tripla, she came from Jharkhand, but she was lucky: she escaped. Today she is in a government shelter for women. As she tells her story, she breaks down in tears several times.

"My father sold me to a man called Dharma," she says. "I don't know if he paid for me or not. I came to Delhi with my mother on the train, and then Dharma took me to his village. He used to beat me very badly. He used to hit me until I allowed him to sleep with me. Usually it went on for half an hour."

She was with Dharma just 20 days before he sold her. Her route criss-crossed northern India: Dharam took her to his home in Rajasthan, before selling her to a man in Haryana. "He told me: 'I have sold you to a man for 30,000 rupees'," she says. "But when we got there I realised that man wanted to sell me on as well. Then I ran away."

She found a social worker who helped her escape. In that she was fortunate: few of the women who run away from the villages where she was make it out alive. Government medical tests found she had been raped by two men. She was only 17 at the time, and the age of consent in India is 18.

"My father told me Dharma would marry me, but the marriage never took place," she says, blinking in the sun. She is deeply traumatised by her experiences; all the time she speaks, her hands play nervously with her shawl. When we ask if she wants to go home, she says: "I don't know anything. I have no will and no hope in this world."

She is the lucky one, all the same. In the villages she escaped from, hundreds of women are trapped in similar slave marriages. The village of Ghasera is a world away from nearby Delhi. It is still walled, like a fortress from centuries ago, and you enter through a narrow gateway. The roads are dirt and the houses ramshackle huts: It is hard to believe you're just an hour and a half's drive from the bright new India that is being courted as an ally by the US and attracting investors from across the world. More than 100 brides have been imported to this village alone, according to locals.

More on the female issue

India's Hidden Aids Epidemic

By Maxine Frith

The Independent, UK
19 November 2003


When she was 21, Kousalya Periasamy was forced into marriage with a man she did not like. She was told she had to marry him because his family owned land that supplied water to her father's factory. What Kousalya wasn't told was that her husband was HIV positive.

"He knew he was positive and his family knew too. I think my father suspected because he knew what my husband was like, but the marriage was all to do with money," Kousalya said.

"I knew nothing. I didn't like my husband but he forced me to have sex with him and his family said it was my duty. I became ill and my husband's family said I should go for tests, and that is when I found out I was HIV positive." Kousalya's story is tragically common in India, and goes to the heart of its burgeoning Aids epidemic.

While the country is becoming increasingly wealthy from foreign investment, and the growth of call centres and its hi-tech industry, the status of women has remained hugely unequal. Women have few rights to property, or control over whom they marry. Rape within marriage is legal, and domestic violence is condoned rather than condemned.

Low-caste women are often forced into prostitution, and even those who are better off can find it difficult to receive health care because they are put under pressure not to leave the house alone.

Campaigners say the inequalities are adding to the rapid spread of HIV and Aids. A report by the British charity Voluntary Service Overseas, to be published this week, will warn that unless women's rights are improved India could face disaster.

The Indian government insists that only 4 million people have HIV or Aids - about 0.4 per cent of the population. But most aid agencies say the real figure is much higher. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington has estimated India will have 25 million cases by 2010.

A female issue

Dear Rupa
Last week we read this article in the Guardian and thought of you who
look after the ones who survive...
Can people be that horrible really?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,,2022983,00.html

ys,
Cintia

Actually the answer to all this is very simple; EDUCATION.
We are dealing with humans who have not learned anything except how to survive, and as we know survival make us do the unthinkable, the unimaginable. We see this so much with our SMS children, recently we had an instance of two sisters, one died for not good reason, she had some stomach pain, and went on and off from hospital for weeks until she died. We did not know until two week after she had died, in the family nobody informed us even though she had been coming to our school for the last four years. And more striking her younger sister which must be 9, or 10 came to school regularly and never said to anyone, my sister is sick or my sister is dead. We came to know by doing our regular monthly check up on the kid's attendance. can you imagine? Your sister die and you do not even talk about it to anyone?
These children are used to much more hardship than we can ever imagine, and so is most of the 1.2 billion Indians who walk this land.

Radha is her name

I was able to get more details on what happened to her, she got hit by a motorcycle who of course did not even stop, and she was lying on the road, so many people around and passing by but no one really cared, then Brajkishor a 14 year old from our SMS school saw her and brought her to the school where we do Kitchri distribution, the rest is history...
.

Today i went to see her and here she is, on the 9th she will need to go back to the hospital for a check up and maybe she will need surgery before the proper plaster is done, I also saw the X-ray and the bone is broken completely in two parts. I have no idea how much it will cost, so far we spent about 1,500 rs or 20 pounds. If someone is wishing to help her, please do not hesitate, we could get her a wood pank to sleep on and a mosquito net at least.
I will keep you posted on the medical situation after the 9th.
Thanks to all for listening...

Alone and alone

This evening at Kitchri distribution I saw a girl of maybe 6 years of age, she was sitting with the other kids waiting for the kitchri. She was crying and holding her left leg, very restlessly, our nurse had put a band around her leg, I asked the nurse what was wrong and she said that she has been hit by a motorcycle, immediately I did not register what was going on, but as few more minutes passes, the girl contined to lament and hold her leg. I went up to her and I asked if she had some brother or sister there with her, or her parents, she was alone, she could not even tell me her name or where she lived.
As I got the feeling that the leg may be broken I called for our car and I sent her with our nurse to a nearby hospital for an X-ray.
Just half an hour ago I got the information that the leg was actually broken, she got plastered and somehow between the driver and the nurse they managed to find out where she lived and took her home.
If I had not been there most probably she whould have had to walk home with a broken leg and only God knows what would have happened next.
We cannot even imagine the hardship that these children have to face in the struggle for survival. I hope to see her again we will certainly try to monitor her state.

When is the next meal?

Today two different girls came up to me for help, Shakuntala's sister said that her father has some phisical problem and cannot work, she asked if we can give some money to buy food for the next two weeks, here's Shakuntala photo.

The second is Priti, she said that they also do not have anything and she asked for some atta or flour for cooking chapati. I gave her a bag of 10 Kg. and she walked away with a big smile.

Yesterday Hema also got her second lot of Veg. grains etc. as they really do not have anything to eat for days on end. look at her smile.

And here I am, dealing with souls who really have no idea how to get the next meal. And when you cover that bit there is such an incredible energy around that you would like to do more and more...