Tag Archives: Children

The flip-flops have landed!

16 Dec

Educators’ Trust India have just sent me this photo – isn’t it wonderful?

It shows the ETI team distributing the children’s flip-flops which (fellow volunteer) Natasha and I bought a few days before I left Goa.  We went to the local (non-touristy) market and,  with the help of our lovely taxi driver Satish,  negotiated a good price for 20 pairs of sturdy, rigid soled flip-flops in assorted sizes,  from ages 3 to 12.

They worked out at around £1 per pair;  we could have paid less,  but we wanted to get the better quality flip-flops so that they stood up to the wear and tear of life in the rural slum and on the beach.

So here are the children trying on the flip-flops for size – don’t their parents look proud and happy? The mums are looking on and smiling,  the dads are helping to fit the shoes to the feet.

And here’s a group shot of all the kids with,  for some of them,  their first ever pair of shoes.

I just love seeing how much difference a tiny amount of money can make to these children’s lives.  While I was away,  my very wonderful friend Liz saw my Facebook updates about ETI and e-banked me £20,  simply saying: “spend it how you see fit.”

That £20 bought milk for the children and mums in the field for a month.

£10 will buy 10 pairs of children’s flip-flops and help to protect the feet of girls like Jyoti.

£10 also enables the teachers and children at one of the charity’s schools to have rice for their lunch for a month.

£5 will buy apples and bananas for 30 children.

Small potatoes for us – big impact for these kids.

I’m gradually building a fabulous collection of photos featuring Educators’ Trust India and their work and I’ll post a link to my online album once I get it set up.

If poverty has a colour, it’s blue –

13 Dec

- and if poverty is a fabric, it’s plastic.

I’ve had a lot of emails and texts over the last few weeks,  asking for more details of what I’ve been doing in Goa with the good folk from the charity Educators’ Trust India (ETI).  The short answer about their work can be found via this link to my freelance writing site at Collaborative Lines,  where I share some of the copy that I’ve written for the charity’s soon to be launched website.

And here’s the long answer … part one of my report on the wonderful work done by this tiny yet passionate charity.

If you’ve ever been to Goa,  or perhaps to any beach resort in Asia,  you will probably have been approached by beggars and/or beach sellers – usually women and children (I’ve blogged about it before).  They sell all manner of things (here’s a list which I made last year) and are extremely persistent in getting you to buy their jewellery, sarongs, peanuts and pedicures.  What had never ever occurred to me was where these people actually … lived. I knew that in many cases they travelled to Goa each autumn for the start of the tourist season in October and that they arrived there from other Indian states such as Karnataka. But where do they live when in Goa?

It was only when I met the ETI team and they invited me to join them on one of their regular visits to a slum settlement that I really started to give thought as to housing.  Take a look at my photo – it shows an idyllic rural scene, doesn’t it?  This field,  a currently dry rice paddy,  is located about 1.5 miles inland from the popular tourist resort of Calangute.  But,  as the camera pans back a bit,  you can see a woman doing laundry in a muddy stream.  Zoom back a bit more and you can see that the field is actually full of shacks made from blue plastic; basically, tents,  improvised with plastic and using tree trunks as supports. 

This field is home to around 100 adults and children ( a figure which will increase as the season progresses) from the eastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh,  who travel by train (it takes three days) each October to work and beg in the Goan beach resorts.  I have visited urban slums before but have never seen anything like this; this field is where you live when you have nothing other than what you can carry or wear.   There’s no electricity.  No running water.  Certainly no sanitation.  No way of cooking other than in a pot over an open fire.

(Some of the Goans complain about this influx of economic migrants and say that,  well,  it serves them right that they live like this – perhaps they should stay put in their home states? To which my reply is – I think it’s safe to assume that they’re not leaving comfortable and luxurious home behind in order to travel across the sub-continent and then camp in this field;  this is an act of the impoverished and desperate …)

The first thing that hit me when we arrived at the field was the smell.  Without labouring the point, when the weather is 30-something Celsius and you’ve got humans, cows, dogs, chickens and pigs all using the great outdoors as their al-fresco bathroom … yeah.  The field does have a fresh water spring and the residents use that for drinking water and the muddy stream on the other side of the field for bathing, laundry and everything else.  However,  this obviously doesn’t work all the time and dirty water does get into the kids,  as we witnessed with the poor child who I visited in the hospital in Panjim a few weeks ago.  She is now suffering from severe kidney failure,  brought about by drinking unclean water.  ETI are paying for her treatment,  visiting her every day and giving her parents money for food so that they can stay with her in the hospital.

This next photo shows the rather clever use of sari fabric as improvised baby slings; each harness contains a six month old baby.  They are twins,  born to a 15 year old girl,  who leaves them in the care of the older women while she works on the beach,  undertaking manicures and pedicures (in reality,  a nail shape and paint,  for which she charges c. £2).  She told me all this in really excellent English,  which she has learned from tourists – and yet she can neither read nor write.

So,  what do the ETI team do to help these field dwellers?  Well,  firstly,  they set up an impromptu school a few times a week,  where the children sit down and have a very basic “lesson” with picture books,  crayons and paper.  They are taught to write their names in English and to count to 10,  to say please and thank you.   This is the most basic of educational approaches but,  for some children,  the simple discipline of learning to sit quietly,  to not fight or play but to listen,  is in itself a learning opportunity.  These are kids who would otherwise be working on a beach,  selling peanuts or doing a little dance to the beat of a drum and then asking for money,  so in some respects,  just having them available to sit down and mess about with paper and crayons feels like an achievement.  The ETI team also work hard to get the parents involved;  they arrived with a basic medical kit and will treat,  where possible,  small injuries – usually foot related,  like Jyoti from last month’s blog entry – but only with permission from the parents.  This photo shows Jacob,  one of ETI’s wonderful volunteers,  showing a few of the men how to write their names – the team really encourages participation and involvement from anyone,  not just the kids.

At the end of each hour long lesson, ETI hand out fresh fruit to the children;  I paid for this one week and for £7 we bought enough fruit for each child at the settlement to get an apple and a banana each.  Diego,  the charity’s Goan founder, insists that each child washes their hands prior to receiving the fruit and so we saw a line set up whereby the children queued up to wash their hands and then queued again to receive the fruit – all administered by the mums.

The gender divide is so marked at this settlement.  It’s really not overstating the case to suggest that the women work (on the beach,  at the camp – cooking,  washing, sweeping up,  taking care of the children) and the men drink and gamble.  The local Goan hooch is a spirit called feni, made from distilled cashew nuts,  and a 60 ml shot of it costs about 10p.  When we arrived at the camp at 9.30am,  there were men lying on the ground in a drunken stupor,  or lurching around, shouting and fighting with each other.  And they absolutely reeked of booze;  the smell oozed from every pore.  Diego told me that many of the men are addicted to feni and that any money earned by the women and children goes straight into the coffers of the local bars or is gambled away in complicated card games played between a group of the men in one corner of the field.

One of the charity’s key aims is to get the children out of the cycle of working,  not being educated, and thus marrying young (the average woman at the camp is aged 25 and usually has five children by this stage; I certainly observed that the amount of alcohol consumed by the men in no way seemed to either impede sexual performance or affect fertility …).  It seemed clear that the responsibility for bringing money into the family coffers lies very much with the women and children,  and that’s why getting the buy-in from the mums is so vital to the success of this project;  if we can persuade the women to allow their children to stop working and to instead attend one of the ETI’s two local schools,  then there is hope for the next generation,  who will be both educated and have ambitions for a life of more than selling peanuts and t-shirts on Baga beach.

Last week,  I had this conversation with Jyoti’s mum, Seevarna;  I asked her if she would allow Jyoti to go to one of the schools and she replied that she would love to,  but that because her husband was a brandy drinking alcoholic,  they needed income from both Seevarna and her two daughters in order to buy enough money to live – and so Jyoti could not be spared from her duties at the beach.

These women lead hard, hard lives; yes,  education is the answer in many cases,  but I do now see how tough it must be to decide that when your 11 year old daughter can perhaps earn £1 or so per day for the family coffers – and if that £1 makes the difference between being hungry (or getting a black eye from your husband when you return home with insufficient money for his brandy …) – that allowing her to stop work and go to school may not be an option.

In a future post,  I’ll write about the two schools run by Educators’ Trust India and how they benefit the children who have broken out of the child labour trap.

Educators’ Trust India are now on Twitter!

2 Dec

Please follow us on Twitter at  EducatorsTrust – and ask your friends to do the same – thank you!

An introduction to Educators’ Trust India

1 Dec

Another brief update, typed in haste before the wi-fi drops out …

So, I have learned to survive without my Kindle,  although I did have heart failure last Saturday when,  for eight nail biting hours,  I had no laptop either.

(Long story. Temporary hard disk fail. Say. No. More).

However,  thanks to the wonderful work of Digital World in Calangute (who,  should The Great Goan Novel ever get published,  will definitely be thanked in the acknowledgements bit at the front),  all was restored by 6pm and so I could breathe again.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook and Twitter may have seen my frequent references over the last week to a small, local charity called Educators’ Trust India.  I met one of their founders quite by chance last Tuesday and he invited me to visit one of the free schools which they run here for the children of impoverished migrant workers.  I ended up spending a day at the school (more on this to follow), joining them when they visited an extremely sick child with kidney failure in the Panjim hospital, spending time with the children at the beach one afternoon (here I am with the girls!) and also tagging along when they visited a slum settlement to give a basic literacy lesson and provide fruit to the children there (more on that too).

It’s almost impossible to believe how much great work these guys do for the children on virtually no money at all;  they are staffed almost entirely by volunteers from around the world and their core team includes a retired British GP and a former headmaster from a tough school in Halifax.  Their faith in the power of education to overcome illiteracy, child labour and poverty  is unshakable and I am so impressed with their passion and love for these forgotten children that I’ve offered my services to help with their new website (hence no URL provided here – yet) and their media campaign.

Here’s a few words from one of their board members, Dr Mistry,  from a email I received from him yesterday:

” … all our brothers and sisters and uncles and aunties who are involved with our ET project are all very disciplined and genuine in the term of caring,compassion and going that extra mile in helping the most vulnerable children with their family in our society.
We, the Indians are poor, but India is rich.
It is one country that I know which has a system which is so extreme, there is a law for the rich and a law for the poor.
We have a school for the rich and a school for the poor, the education standard is such that, it is almost impossible for a poor child to go through the education till age 21 to 24 yrs, this as you know, in UK it is normal for a student to go through, the primary, secondary and University level, UK, gives help at each stages.
We at ET, the Essence is to Empower these deprived children to have the same high standard as the rich, we believe we will achieve this, we obviously need help from like minded people. We welcome you in this mission and as times goes on,  we all be able to see the outcome, in these little flowers who will blossoms into excellent citizen, who in turn  will help their own people who are going through the same journey.”
 

One particularly positive piece of news that I can share is that Educators’ Trust India were able to help Jyoti,  the little girl with the injured foot whom I met in my first week here. She is now fully healed and doesn’t even limp,  thanks to them treating her at their free weekly drop-in clinic.  These people do such wonderful work for the children – I’m proud to be helping them in some small way and will write more about their projects in my next couple of blog posts.

Know before you go

24 Jun

One day during the first of my trips to Goa last year, I found myself improvising a map of the world with a balloon and then drawing a map of India in the sand with a stick; I was trying to show some of the children at Rainbow House where Goa is in relation to other parts of India and also in relation to the rest of the world.

Renuka was both puzzled and fascinated as to how England could be so far away AND in a different time zone,  so we used a second balloon to show the sun, and how it moves around the world, making it dark in England when it’s sunny in India and so on.  By the time of my second trip,  I was far better prepared and arrived with a case full of far more useful things for the children: underwear, hairbands, hairbrushes – and an atlas and an inflatable globe.  
Here’s Jyoti, the sixteen year old girl sponsored by my friend Diane, pointing to California.

I’m already planning my return trip for later this year and am far more wised up as to what to take Renuka (anything red) and what she does and doesn’t like (for the latter: anything “girly”, pink or that requires her to sit still) and also what the El Shaddai team would find useful to have as donations.

So the arrival of TV presenter Kate Humble’s new venture,  a website called Stuff Your Rucksack , struck a definite chord with me.  Her mantra,  based on her travels in the developing world is “if only I’d known before I came away” and she says:

“I’ve done a lot of travelling in the developing world through my job and I’d get to a school or an orphanage and they wouldn’t have something very simple like maps or exercise books. I used to kick myself because invariably these were things lying around at home that I could easily have stuffed in my own rucksack.”

Kate has hit on the fact that many people,  like me,  visit places around the developing world and want to do, or bring, the right thing, but are hamstrung by their lack of local knowledge and wary of, as she puts it,  ”dumping unwanted gifts on local communities”.  So she has developed a website with a map where,  if you click on a specific country,  you can link to local projects and find a list of what the people who work on the ground would find most useful.

Here,  for a great and very personal example,  is a link to one of El Shaddai’s shelters, where we can see  that they’d find it useful to be gifted toiletries, books and educational DVDs.

Fabulous work, Kate – pack a bag,  change a life.

On laptops for children

1 Apr

You know that something’s really made an impact on you when it lodges in the brain and sticks with you for years, don’t you?  My “brainworm” is about the One Laptop Per Child project and I was delighted to see an update on their progress in the Sunday paper.

In October 2006,  I attended the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society in Deauville,  northern France – a three day conference attended by women from all over the world who come together annually to discuss how to further women’s participation in business and in life.  

One of the (many, many) lunchtime events featured a speaker from OLPC,  then a project in its relative infancy.  Her name was Mary Jo and she talked about the goals of the project – at its core, to create and then provide a basic laptop for under privileged children to use as an educational tool.

(Now further refined as  “… to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children via a “rugged low-cost, low-power laptop” – “)

As if it were yesterday,  I remember sitting in that conference room, eating rubber chicken (yes, even in France) and listening to Mary Jo tell us  how computer access could transform the lives and the educational prospects of children in developing countries, how the laptop model on which they were working would be super robust, have an extra long battery life, come pre-loaded with all types of educational and games based software;  how it would have a special anti-glare screen (on which this lady had herself been working, with Intel) so that it could be used outside and yet still be visible in bright sunshine, and how it would eventually be part of a giant hub of wireless enabled laptops so that the children could access the internet.

And the price of this bit of kit?

$100, in 2006.

I’ve kept an eye on the One Laptop website since then and watched their evolution,  but Sunday’s Observer article really brought home their three-plus years of progress. Follow the link and see for yourself what a difference it’s making to the children of Rwanda and how 1.4 million laptops (not quite yet at that magical $100 each price point, but they’re getting there) have already been rolled out to children in 35 countries which include Haiti, Afghanistan, Brazil and Uruguay.

One of the best days on my recent trip to Goa was when I took my own laptop out to Rainbow House with me.  One of the other volunteers had shared her photos of the school’s sports day, and I thought the children might like to see some of the pictures.  I set myself and the laptop up on the verandah,  booted up the photos – and within seconds I was completely covered in children,  swarming over me and the computer,  completely fascinated by the screen and the images.  They played with it until the battery died and absolutely loved looking at the photos and playing games – so I can completely see how it, as a piece of technology,  does serve so many purposes for children everywhere: it makes learning fun,  it’s a new gadget and it’s a unifying tool.  As the article suggests:

“…computers can enable children to learn how to learn for themselves through playful problem-solving and that this will lead to their becoming better-rounded human beings.”

Victory for PinkStinks!

27 Mar

As my friend CJ would say, it’s “very pleasing”  to see that PinkStinks’s campaign against supermarket giant Sainsbury’s has been successful; thousands of children’s dressing-up outfits have now been cleared from shelves after complaints (via a PinkStinks co-ordinated campaign) that they promote sexist stereotypes.

As reported here in the Daily Telegraph, Sainsbury’s (“Try something new today!” – indeed …) were merrily selling nurses’ outfits “for girls” and doctors’ kits labelled “for boys”, along with pilot and “superhero” costumes – but these have now been removed and will be replaced with a new range of gender neutral dressing up outfits.

Nice work, PinkStinks – and a great testimony to the strength of their pester power social media campaign (which I joined even though I don’t have children myself, let alone daughters or even nieces).

Whenever I hear stories like this, or read about manufacturers and retailers unwittingly promoting gender and/or inappropriate messaging and stereotypes (wasn’t it Woolworths – RIP – who hit the headlines a few years ago for launching a range of pink painted bedroom furniture aimed at little girls named the “Lolita”?), I remind myself of a small boy called John and how invidious and impactful gender images can be. 

John is the son of a female friend who works as a GP; she is evidently from a very smart family, because her sister is also a doctor. One day, returning home from a visit to his aunt’s house, where my friend and her sister had been talking medical shop, John, then aged five, asked his mother:

“Mummy – when I grow up, can I become a doctor too, or is it only ladies who are allowed to do that?”

A life in the day at Rainbow House

21 Feb

Rainbow House (RH) is El Shaddai’s residential home for girls aged 8-13 (when they’re aged 2-7, they live next door, at House of Kathleen, and there are two similar homes in the area for boys) and is currently home to 51 girls, including my sponsored “daughter” Renuka. The children sleep in bunk-bedded dormitories and are cared for by four full time staff plus Stella,  the manager.

(One thing I always have to remember when thinking about what to buy Renuka is that each child has relatively little private space in which to store things;  they each have a small, cube shaped locker and access to a hanging rail for their clothes,  and that’s it).

The children are organised into groups and Stella tells me that this is to help to teach them teamwork, responsibility and leadership. The teams are named Love, Joy, Peace and Kindness and each team has a colour which they then wear as part of their school uniform.  Renuka is in the “Love” group and their colour is red,  so she wears a red polo shirt for school and always tries to choose red clothes from the communal pile in her dormitory.  Most recently, I’ve seen her in a red Bayern Munich t-shirt and a red swimsuit bearing the Welsh flag …

Part of the way in which the charity aims to teach responsibility is by making the children part of the routine of the home; for them,  it’s more than just a boarding school environment – they are part of the very fabric of the place. And they have a long and busy day,  Monday to Friday: this is their daily routine irrespective of age.

5.45am                        Alarm call and wake up.

6.00am                        Morning prayers; apparently, these are non-denominational and mostly consist of saying “thank you” to an unnamed god or presence.

6.15 – 7am                  “Duty” – this means undertaking chores of various sorts: cooking, cleaning, laundry and so on. Each group is part of a rota and will do different things each week; one evening when I visited,  Renuka emerged from the kitchen covered in flour, as the Love group had evening duty – making chapattis.

7.00 – 7.30am             Breakfast – as prepared by that day’s duty team, who will also have organised the tiffin (lunch) tins too.

7.30 – 8.30am             Wash and dress for school; the uniform is either a pleated skirt or shorts,  topped off with an appropriately coloured polo shirt, and sandals.

8.30 – 8.45am             Medicine: many of the children have ongoing medical issues due to their previous itinerant lifestyles and poor nutrition,  so Stella lines them up at this time and gives them their medications.

8.45am                        Uniform check: are you neat and tidy? Is your hair brushed? Then off you go to school! The children travel by mini-bus, as donated by a British based charity.

9.00 – 4.30pm             At El Shaddai’s own private Shanti Niketan school,  the children are organised into groups on the basis of ability rather than age – so Renuka,  for example, aged 9 and good at maths,  is in a class with children of 12, 13 and 14. All lessons are taught in English,  which is the common language; the children end up in Goa from all over India and many have other languages as their first tongue,  but school work is always done in English. 

At 12 noon,  they break for lunch,  which they eat, seated, from the tiffin tins.

5.00 – 7.00pm             The children arrive back at RH and evening duty commences for the relevant team.  This is also visiting time for sponsors and interested tourists,  so there’s always a stream of people calling into both RH and HoK, sitting on the veranda and playing with the children.

7.00 – 7.30pm             Prayers, followed by dinner.  This is usually vegetarian food (rice and dal, or a vegetable pullao) but they have meat once a week for those who eat it. They sometimes also have laddu, a very sweet Indian pudding; Renuka told me proudly that she is “the very best” at making this.    

7.30 – 8.00pm            More duty – washing up!

8.00pm                        Homework

9.00pm                        Bedtime; lights out by 10.30pm.

At the weekends,  the regime is a little more relaxed,  although the children still have “duty” in the morning; yesterday,  they were washing sheets.  However,  in the afternoon,  it’s the highlight of the week,  when they all pile into the mini-bus for a trip to the beach; they absolutely love this and it’s truly wonderful to see them have a chance to be children.

El Shaddai set up camp on the beach, and,  with a great flair for strategy, take the charity to the people. They have very cleverly realised that the children are their best ambassadors and so simply seeing the kids playing on the beach and splashing in the sea (as opposed to begging or selling jewellery) can give people an awareness of how different life can be with the assistance of ES and other charities.


The afternoon follows a loose structure. Having blown up numerous pairs of armbands and rubber rings, we all charge into the sea and play in the waves (at one point,  I had three small girls hanging off each of my arms). Then it’s out onto the sand for a bit,  with some organised races (relay running,  bunny hopping and so on) and a sand castle building competition. 

The staff then chop up some of the huge pile of fruit donated by the visitors and the children dig in to slices of pineapple and chunks of watermelon;  there’s usually so much left that all four homes can have fruit for the rest of the week.

I was particularly pleased to see so many men joining in and playing with the kids,  as these children really need strong male role models; many of them have been abandoned by their fathers,  or mistreated, victims of neglect, violence and alcohol. And whilst they don’t lack for love and care from the (mostly female) ES staff,  there are fewer men around to provide an alternative view of masculinity,  so the work that these guys do is hugely important, I think,  for both boys and girls. They need to know and see that men can be kind, gentle, playful and fun – all qualities in great abundance at the beach.

Finally,  it’s one last play in the sea – much shrieking of “the big wave! The big wave!!” – before we get dressed, pack up toys, equipment, leaflets, banners and fruit and return back home.

Great fun – and I get to do it all over again today.  I had planned to pack to come home,  but Renuka had remembered that my flight back is actually on Monday and so could see no valid reason at all why I shouldn’t come to the beach on Sunday … so that’s where I’ll be.  Can’t wait.

The plural of anecdote isn’t evidence –

21 Feb

- but here’s an anecdote anyway,  which I think somewhat bears out my theory that the begging culture here is supported by western tourists.

I was in a beach front restaurant yesterday where, by chance, I was the only such tourist sitting at the front, overlooking the beach.

In the 90 minutes that I was there, I was the focus of a variety of beggars – the elderly, the infirm, women holding babies – who all asked me for money and occasionally prodded me with a sharp, insistent finger – but who resolutely ignored the Indian customers (who, it must be said, also ignored them with notable consistency).  I also noticed that we had no child performers while I was there – perhaps they took a look and decided it wasn’t worth their while given the demographics.

Proof of learned behaviour? I think so.  Why waste your time with the people who you know won’t chuck a few rupees your way,  when you can instead focus on the visitors who’ve been proven in the past to be a soft touch?

On children at the market

17 Feb

I went to Anjuna market again today – not particularly to shop (there are only so many sarongs, pashminas and necklaces that one woman needs) but to say hello to the El Shaddai team, drop off my used paperbacks for their bookstall,  soak up the atmosphere and take photos.

I travelled via boat – not an experience that I’d recommend or will be repeating.  It was a small,  six seater boat with an outboard motor, piloted by two psychotics who thought it was fun to gun the boat into 20’ high waves. To be fair,  there were five other people in the boat with me – young “up for it” Russian tourists who loved it; cue much screaming and arm waving as if we were at Big Splash Mountain (or whatever it’s called).  The journey is only a mile or so,  but it took twenty minutes,  due to all of this water based chicanery.

So of course,  we arrived at the market completely soaked – I was absolutely sodden from head to toe, hair to flip-flops, and staggered up the beach as if I were re-enacting the Normandy landings.

To continue the analogy, I then had to fight them on the beaches and fend off the ministrations of the hawk-eyed female beach sellers,  who take up residence on a rock and wait for soaked tourists to drag themselves ashore.

“Hello madam! Oh you are so very wet. Come, come, I help you get dry.  Come to my shop [stall], relax, buy lovely new dry clothes.  My name is Nikita,  what is you? Where you from, how many children you have?”

Etc.

However, the amount of child beggars and performers at the market continues to depress me;  apparently,  people travel from all over western India to participate in this huge orgy of tourism,  and that includes children.

At the market this morning,  I witnessed tiny children performing on a tightrope in front of a paparazzi like array of camera and camcorder wielding western tourists, who then filled the begging bowl which was passed around by the adult ringmaster.

(For obvious reasons … I don’t have any photographs of this event – I actually felt so nauseated by it that I couldn’t bring myself to be part of the throng – but here are, I assume,  the parents,  setting up the tightrope first thing).

What do these visitors think when they get home and show their friends and family that film footage of a tiny child,  perhaps five years old,  balancing on a tightrope – how cute? Isn’t she clever?

Or: “why isn’t she at school?” Or: “what future can she ever have if this is how she spends her time as a child?”

This week,  there are more Western children than usual in evidence,  as it’s the British school holidays, and so the contrast between the children that one sees is particularly pronounced – some are in Ben 10 t-shirts and are on holiday with their parents … others are working or begging,  or both. I was staggered (and disgusted) to see one tourist filming the child performers and then sending his seven-year old son down to the beach to pay the children – with no apparent sense of the irony of this act,  as far as I could see.

Goa seems to be such an economic magnet to so many people from other India states,  particularly Karnataka.  If western tourists stopped making it appear to be so economically advantageous to be either a child who begs or to have a child who you can send out to perform (thus making your child a resource) then perhaps the influx would cease or at least slow down?

I truly believe that every time a tourist gives a child money,  be it for either begging or performing,  they reinforce the notion (to both child and adult) that begging is an economically viable way of spending time and that it is,  in every sense of the word, “worth” it to be on the beach or at the market rather than at school.

The Goans are constantly telling me that their state’s infrastructure (water supplies, electricity, the road system, food supplies, accommodation) can’t cope with this influx of workers from other states and that the Goans disapprove of the children who beg – but yet I don’t see any evidence of the powers that be challenging it – for example,  policing child beggars/performers and/or the adults who visibly control them.

I think I need to go back to Rainbow House again tonight (I’ve been going to see Renuka every few days) in order to remind myself that there is another way and that it’s possible, through the work of El Shaddai and other charities, for children in Goa to have a different, brighter, more hopeful future.

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