Today is Renuka’s ninth birthday; she is the little girl I sponsor at El Shaddai’s Rainbow House, a residential home for girls in northern Goa, India. I sent Renuka a letter, birthday card and small gift a few weeks ago and it occurred to me this morning that she is likely, I hope, to be having a very different birthday experience this year compared to last year, because this January will be the first of her life in which she has had a permanent home, an education and three meals a day.
Renuka has only been living at Rainbow House since May 2009; prior to that, she and her mother and brother (her father, an alcoholic, left them some years ago, re-married and does not provide for them financially) were living rough in a roadside shack, having arrived in Goa in 2004 as economic migrants from the neighbouring Indian state of Karnataka. An El Shaddai outreach worker met them and encouraged Renuka’s mother to come to one of the charity’s night shelters, which provide a safe place to sleep and a hot meal to those who need it. After a few weeks, Renuka’s mother was offered a cleaning job and accommodation (worth about £40 a month) at a hotel – but there was no room or capacity for Renuka, only her brother (this part of her story really upsets me and makes me think many thoughts as to the feelings of emotional rejection and abandonment that this must have caused in an eight year old child – not to mention how symptomatic it is of gender inequity in India, where sons are valued over and above daughters).
Fortunately, Renuka was offered a place at Rainbow House, El Shaddai’s residential home for 51 girls aged 8 to 13 and now enjoys, in their words: “… love and care along with nourishing food, and a good education”.
Upon arrival, she had only the clothes she was wearing at the time and was issued with her uniform of a school skirt, two Rainbow House polo shirts and some underwear – these remained her only clothing until I visited her six months later and provided her with the dress she’s wearing in the photo and a few other t-shirts – hence the huge grin, I suppose (or perhaps that was at the thought of the chocolate bar!). The girls sleep in dormitories with bunk beds and attend a private school, also run by the charity, in the next village. This is called the “Shanti Niketan”, meaning “Non Formal School” and the classes are organised according to ability rather than age. Stella, the manager of Rainbow House, told me that Renuka wants to be a doctor when she grows up; the scale of this ambition impressed me hugely. I don’t even know if it’s possible in terms of cost and education – but I hope that my sponsorship of Renuka at least makes her feel loved and cared for a little bit.
I visited her about six times when I was in Goa before Christmas and she became a little less shy with me each time. Several of the girls have sponsors and they are fiercely competitive with each other about this. Stella told me that Renuka, as one of the youngest and newest arrivals at the home, had previously felt very left out when other girls received letters, cards, gifts and visits, so she (Stella) was very relieved when I arrived in order to make a fuss of this little girl. Renuka speaks three Indian languages and is learning English, so our interactions were by necessity limited to the bits of English which she did know and an awful lot of hand gestures, plus miming, drawing in the dirt with a stick and improvising. But we played noughts and crosses, drew pictures, looked at photographs and she showed me some of her traditional Indian dance steps, as she is a member of the school’s dancing troupe (I envisage this as being nothing like an Indian dancing version of “Glee” – ahem). However, I am slowly learning a little Hindi and I hope that a combination of feeling more familiar with each other and our respective increased vocabularies will make our next visits (in February) a bit easier.
Watch this space. I’m also a bit more clued up as to what to take as gifts for both Renuka and the other children; it was much easier to shop for her this time around, as I have a rough idea of her size (far smaller than an English nine year old would be), her likes and dislikes and of the limitations of her home environment. This time, I’m taking her a dress and some underwear from my wonderful mum, who I imagine had great fun choosing Renuka a little cotton dress (we only have nephews/grandsons in our immediate family, so shopping for girls is quite the novelty) and I bought t-shirts from Old Navy when I was in the US before Christmas. Prompted by a game that the children and I played with two balloons representing the Sun and the Earth, where we talked about time differences and different countries (“when it’s dark in India, it’s daytime in England …”) I’ve also bought an inflatable globe as I thought that it might be fun to look at a map of the world and talk about different countries, especially as the El Shaddai sponsors are based all over the world.
Plus of course I had a whale of a time with a very helpful sales assistant in Waterstones, who spent about an hour with me a few weeks ago, helping me pick out suitable books. My criteria was quite defined, which made it harder and hence made me grateful for the continuing High Street presence of a bookstore: written at a suitable level of English, not too many Caucasian images in the illustrations, no mentions of stuff to which she could never relate (which cut out tons of American books, with their mentions of “sleep-overs” and the like), no branded books like “Hannah Montana” and “High School Musical”, nothing pink and stereotyped … but we got there in the end, so thank you, Rachel in Waterstones, you’re a star. I go back to Goa on 31st January, so I hope to return to Rainbow House in early February – I’m really looking forward to it.
Sponsoring Renuka is one of the most significant things I feel I’ve ever done. It’s only £15 per month but it makes such a difference to Renuka, to children like her and to El Shaddai’s cash flow.
Happy birthday!
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Lack of internet access for much of my second week here has resulted in much reading, including “Yoga School Dropout”, which I enjoyed hugely. Lucy Edge had a high flying London based career in advertising, and dabbled in the occasional trendy yoga class, until burn-out led her to chuck in her job and head to India to see which of the many branches of yoga would allow her to find herself and gain inner peace and harmony. She spent five months travelling from ashram to ashram, experimenting with different disciplines and encountering a wide range of gurus, fellow travellers, 1” thick Indian mattresses and random men. 
A tale of two sisters: Chandra and Geetha
15 FebThis is Chandra. Aged 24, she works on the beach, providing sun lounger based body massages to tourists. I first got to know her last November, when she was shadowing her older sister and learning how to give a massage. It’s a popular career option here in Goa; you learn from another woman and the only investment you need to make is in a large bottle of coconut oil (about 10p) and a flannel with which to remove the sand from your clients’ feet.
At that point, her sister Geetha (aged 37) was the Queen of the Sun Lounger and ruled her section of the beach with a rod of iron. Geetha had been providing massages for 12 years and charged 500 rupees (c. £6.50) for an hour; while she slapped the westerners around with coconut oil, Chandra would crouch at the end of the sun lounger, watching, learning and occasionally making herself useful by fetching drinks from the nearby beach shack or adjusting an umbrella. The beach shack owner paid her around £3.50 per day for helping out.
On a good day, Geetha would do 10-12 massages and refused absolutely to allow herself to be bargained down on price or to comply with requests, usually, so I was told, from male Russian tourists, for a massage “around the side” – a euphemism for a “private” massage undertaken without swimwear. I learned all this at the time and was impressed by her strength of personality and awareness of her own value.
When I came back this year, there was no sign of Geetha and Chandra appeared to have graduated to Masseuse. When I asked after her sister, she told me that Geetha has returned to Karnataka in order to have her 7th child; I was very surprised, as I’d had no idea that she was pregnant, but Chandra just shrugged and said “she hide it in sari”. Chandra told me that Geetha would be returning to Goa next November when the 2010/2011 season starts and was keen to retain her pitch on that bit of beach, so they had agreed between them that Chandra would take over between Christmas and March – providing maternity cover, I suppose.
Of course, Chandra lacks Geetha’s expertise, so she charges a little less (£5) and is also much less busy – yesterday she did three massages; today, only one. She manages to keep up with her shack based duties so she does earn that money as her basic wage, but she’s clearly worried about cash. Unlike Geetha, she has more time to chat and is grateful to sit next to a friendly face and talk, especially if you buy her a Coke or a bottle of water, or both.
Chandra can’t read or write and never went to school; she has learned (quite good) English and some Russian from working on the beach for the last 8 years. She told me that she and Geetha are the top and tail end of a family of 8 children – Geetha’s the oldest, Chandra is the baby. She also told me that her father drank; he died when she was 13, leaving Chandra, the only child still living with her parents, and her mother, virtually destitute. To help the family finances, Chandra married aged 14 and went to live, as is the custom, with her husband’s family. Shortly afterwards, her mother moved to Mumbai to live with a cousin and find work and Chandra hasn’t since seen her. She had her first baby aged 15 and now has three children – two girls and a boy.
She is extremely proud that her children go to school and can read and write; she wants them all to stay at school until they are at least 16 and to then get good jobs – “never ever work on beach, not be like me!” she said, with great passion and fervour.
Each October, Chandra and her husband leave their children with his parents and take an 18 hour bus journey from Karnataka to Goa. They rent a room in a village about 5 miles inland and live there until early April. Chandra’s husband works in a clothes shop in the nearby resort of Calangute and seems to keep her on a tight rein; he calls her several times a day to see how much money she’s made and she has told me that he’s “not a good man”. One day, she had a black eye; he’d hit her the night before when she returned home with one thousand rupees (about £13.00) less than she’d previously told him she’d earned; she thinks that she lost the money from her waist purse when she opened it and the wind blew the notes away. Like her father (in fact, like many men, according to other stories I’ve heard here), he drinks and, in that regard, Chandra is happy that her children are away from him for half the year, as she tells me that her in-laws are “very good people”.
Back in Karnataka, Chandra doesn’t work and told me that she enjoys being at home with her mother-in-law, cooking and cleaning. Her husband takes work on a day to day basis as a labourer and she says that they rely on their savings from Goa to tide them through between April and October, as sometimes her husband will only work for a few days each week, or not at all.
Goa is full of Chandras, Geethas and women like them; just another aspect of the prism of womanhood in this vast, mysterious country.
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