A Great Story - From Street Child to Surgeon, Indian Girl Follows Dream

Reuters AlertNet - FEATURE-From street child to surgeon, Indian girl follows dream

18 Feb 2007 23:03:49 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Jeremy Lovell

JAIPUR, India, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Former child prostitute Chand has a burning ambition — to be a doctor helping India’s destitute millions.

And the 16-year-old girl is bright enough to realise her dream, according to the charity that 10 years ago rescued her from the teeming streets of the northern Indian city of Jaipur with a population of some three million people.

“I want to be a surgeon. There are too many people and too few doctors here,” the slim youngster told Reuters on a visit to the Ladli centre where she lives and learns in the sprawling metropolis dubbed the Pink City from the colour of its walls.

“That is my goal. In my society girls have very little chance to get an education. Here I have a chance,” she added, seated under a tree in the dusty yard of the school.

Her story is as heart-rending as it is common. Only the end is different — maybe.

Women, still considered by many as a commodity even in the 21st century, are neglected in the educational system and often sidelined in the social hierarchy.

According to UNICEF — the United Nations’ Childrens’ Fund — there are over two million prostitutes in India of whom some 500,000 are children or minors.

Some reports suggest that up to 200 women and children a day are forced into the world’s oldest profession to pay debts or simply to provide an income for their families.

OUTREACH RESCUE

Chand’s mother was a prostitute with 16 children living in Japiur’s red light area, and the girl — her family name has been withheld to protect her — was already a child prostitute when she ran away to eke an existence on the streets aged six.

Ladli outreach workers found her and took her in to the sanctuary that it offers for abused, orphaned and destitute children in the Rajasthan state capital of 2.8 million people, 260 km (160 miles) southwest of Delhi.

“We try to give the children here their lives back,” said founder Abha Goswami, 50. “We are giving love to our children. We are giving care to our children.”

Goswami, whose mother died when she was just 18 months old and who was orphaned at 16, founded the I-India project in 1993 giving help to 500 of Jaipur’s street children.

Three years later it set up the Child Inn boys home and the Ladli girls home and in 2000 it got its two School on Wheels buses touring the streets offering basic reading and writing lessons to children who would otherwise have no education.

Last year some 3,000 children passed through the hands of Goswami and her helpers — either through the buses or the four homes and one vocational centre — also called Ladli — that I-India now operates.

GIVING LIFE TO CHILDREN

But resources are scarce. The organisation can not offer residential care to more than a handful of children, so the majority go back home or onto the streets every night.

“We have street children, runaways, orphans, children of prostitutes — often child prostitutes themselves — and abandoned children from divided families,” Goswami said. “But we can’t feed everyone in our homes.”

Even for Chand, there is the constant threat of her past dragging her back to wreck her future.

“If I saw my family again they would want me back to become a prostitute again to earn money,” she said simply.

It is an endless struggle with scant help from the government and the centre heavily reliant on its own fund raising and foreign sponsors of individual projects.

One such project is for the children to make and sell jewellery.

At the moment it is 50 percent funded by a sponsor, but the goal is to make it completely self-sufficient — and for each piece that is sold some money is put into a bank account for the girls for when they grow up and leave.

The projects are a beacon of light in a country whose economy is booming but where some 35 million of the one billion population are orphans and where around 300 million people are living on less than $1 a day — of whom 140 million are children.

“Our children are safe here. We feed them and teach them … We give them skills and hope, so they can make their way and earn a living later in life,” Goswami said.

“For just a few dollars a day we can give life back to a child here,” she added.

Great report on poverty

I came across a fantastic 24-page report on poverty from the development arm of the United Nations. Many of the articles are helpful and clear in their discussion of what poverty really is. This has been helpful to our staff in allowing us to attempt to ask and answer questions of how to best deepen our work with the "impoverished" groups we work with including downtown with the homeless and prostitutes and in the precario.

The report can be found at:
http://www.undp-povertycentre.org/pub/IPCPoverty_in_Focus009.pdf



Take a look and then post any comments you might have.

Interesting new report from UNICEF on the state of young people in wealthier nations

The UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre this week released Report Card No. 7: Child Poverty in Perspective - An overview of child well-being in rich countries which focuses on the well-being of children and young people in the world’s advanced economies and provides the first comprehensive assessment.

The U.S. and United Kingdom did not fare so well in this report. The document can be found at this address:
http://www.unicef-icdc.org/presscentre/presskit/reportcard7/rc7_eng.pdf

What do you think the reasons would be that the U.S. would struggle? In a wealthy country that is reknowned for it's levels of philanthropy, which has an active civil society and a church on every corner almost, what could be missing?

Is it that these countries are strong, proud and productive within a system that places the system and productivity above human relationships and well-being? Is it that these nations have large immigrant influxes and are in conflict of how to respond to them? This does seem to be a problem in so many nations. We decide who should be here and who should not and yet that doesn't stop them from coming. What it does stop us from doing is responding to them in a way that will help them. "Why should we? They are illegal!" And yet they are here.

We begin to respond to them as illegal, invisible people and sense no responsibility to pay attention to them. Many of us see it as charitable to ignore them...at least we are not kicking them out. And yet the numbers of these people increase and they begin to define who we are as a country. Is that phenomena part of why the U.S. and U.K. are getting such bad grades in regards to how they care for their children?

Can You Take the Girl Out of the Precario?

Boy With a Ball or La Bola as we are called down here in Costa Rica took some important steps last week in our work in the precario or squatter's settlement called El Triangulo de la Solidaridad a few miles from our office.

Public schools started classes last week and the mother's of this precario when into a tizzy trying to gather the $100 or more necessary to buy all of the supplies and uniforms for their children to be able to go to school. School is so important. I know that statement may seem to be childish or overly simple, however, we are watching on a daily business as it seems that only those who go to school have any chance of making it out of this neighborhood of dirt floors and diseased soil, drug dealers, fear and hopelessness.

Costa Rica's average income is $6000 a year which is about 1/6th of what it is in the United States. The precario is even more dramatic in it's comparison to the average Costa Rican family. Family's probably struggle to make $1000-$1500 a year. (I will check on that in the next few weeks to confirm what that amount really is.) This income is made usually with the man of the house starting at 5 am and working on after dark six days of the week. Many families are in debt to the grocery stores for trying to buy rice and beans for their family.

In this economic situation, $100 for school for EACH child is impossible. Sadly, their child not being able to school is a life sentence of living in precarios.

We have made it a major focus to educate the young people and families on the importance of education. We have researched how to help kids who have dropped out get back in. So last week, when the moms began to crowd around us and beg for help with buying school supplies, we were kind of in no place to say no.

Unfortunately, as an organization, the last month was not a great one. We had no funds to put toward this. Many of us had even not received a full paycheck. However, it was impossible not to tell some of these moms that we would help...even out of our own nearly empty wallets.

As a last resort, I sent out an email update detailing the situation. I hoped one or two people might join in the fight and help us raise the $300 we needed to help these families. I was amazed by the response. One after another, emails came in. "We want to help." "Jamie, we will help." "We want to help." Individuals, couples, families, churches, organizations...one girl even put out a bulletin to her friends on My Space! (Thanks Annie!)

As a result, we have been able to expand our help in this situation. Team member Anna Currie and I had to hold back tears as Joanna, a mom of three, almost broke down when she saw us walk into her house with every thing her two boys would need to go to school the next day. She had probably given up hope. She couldn't stop thanking us and thanking God.

The week kept rolling. We had another installment of Soccer Night where a really healthy group of guys from a local church gather and invite all of the young guys from the precario to come and play soccer for two hours in an indoor arena. I will have to post about this seperately another day, however, it is so dramatic to watch these young guys from the precario sense that they belong with this healthy group of amazing kids. The mentoring dynamics that are happening in this situation are worth writing a book about.

Finally, the local church we have been helping in their response to young people held a youth camp and we helped staff it. We have been inviting two young people from the precario named Raquel and her cousin, Diana, to the youth group meetings lately. Raquel is the only person we have ever met in the precario who is graduated from high school and headed to the university. Our hope has been to surround her by some of the young women in the church youth group who go to the same university to help build a peer group around her to help support her and her family as they head into this new frontier of higher learning!

Their family is surprising considering their surroundings. They run a alterations business next door to their house. The father is a great father and the mom stays at home with the kids.

We are careful to focus on helping equip people within their situation for the most part. Taking a poor young person into middle class houses can sometimes hurt them more than help them. They can get awed by pretty furniture and big portions of food and feel hopeless in the situation. There is another way to do it where they are instilled with hope by the experience. We have hoped that this would happen with Raquel and Diana. With this in mind, we invited the two to the camp.



The two girls looked uncomfortable at times. They certainly had to face significant fears. Yet as we all drove back across the city to take them home last night in a bus filled with 60 Costa Rican youth, I could not help but be content.

It seems to be working for these girls...they are gaining strength in believing that they can make it our of the precario. They are gaining interest in their studies and building friendships that they are using to help give them a map of what they will need to have and be in order to live the lives they could not have even dreamt of before.

Who made a difference in your life?

Much of the work of Boy With a Ball is focused on relationships. I honestly believe that the world is in the state it is in because of negative relationships and the painful consequences that come out of them...broken families, abandoned children, abusive parents, hopeless communities, violence, manipulation, fear. The only way to fix the result of negative relationships is through positive relationships.

We focus on four main tools in this fight to put young people in the "garden" of positive relationships: aggressive outreach (we hit the streets in teams to go to where young people are, meet them and become their friends), one-to-one mentoring relationships, small group communities (the young people we reach and mentor are set into communities of caring adults and other young leaders where they can grow while being surrounded by others growing in the same situation) and then finally educational resources (we use the mentoring relationships and small group communities as a platform to offer training/counseling/coaching in the areas that young people need.)

My life was changed at 16 years old when I met a pastor named Jim Newsom in the midst of a tumultuous time. He pulled me into an amazing community of people who were growing and learning as I wanted to and the garden of these relationships equipped me to change dramatically in just a few years. Issues like character, spiritual development, relationships, finances, my future and much more were touched on and transformed.

If you have the time and don't mind sharing a bit of your story, who was the person/people that impacted your life?

Youth in Poverty and Precarios

Youth is synonymous with potential and hope. Robert Frost spoke of "nature's first green" being gold and all of us have felt the tremendous power and promise of a new day. Young lives are much the same. They are fresh and forming with infinite possibilities.

Working with youth is not about keeping them from dying. Death and youth are words that were meant to be strangers to one another. Death is already a horrific intruder into life but it is never more unsettling than when it touches youth. Young people were born to live, not to die. Like a plant in a healthy, vibrant garden, young men and women within healthy families and communities will grow up into healthy, wonderful human beings capable of as much as their faith will carry them to.

Many young people who grow up in poverty grow up in very healthy gardens. Their lack of material possessions, the latest styles of clothing or gourmet food actually serve to simplify their "garden" and prune their hearts to value what is important: relationships, family, friends, work, faith, hope & love.

However, poverty can also form into ghetto-ish gardens where families are not strengthened by the adversity of limited resources but fragmented and demented in their hopelessness and helplessness. Poverty is also often coupled with limited education which makes the individuals involved vulnerable to accepting incorrect ideas and perspectives.

Currently, Boy With A Ball Costa Rica is working in a Nicaraguan precario or squatter's settlement.

Every country, it seems, has the people that they don't need and, in fact, don't want. In Costa Rica, the group that fits this bill in many of the people's eyes are the Nicaraguan immigrants who flood into the country from the homeland to the north. Nicaragua entered the 1980's as the "breadbasket" Central America and exited the very same decade following the war between the Sandanistas and Contras as the poorest country in their region. Costa Rica, their neighbor to the south, has been a stable socialist republic for the last 60 years, providing free health care, education and more to it's inhabitants. As a result, Nicaraguans flow into Costa Rica in pursuit of a better life with better opportunities. Costa Rica 's reaction is predictable. Nicaraguans are called "Nicas" and are considered the reason behind almost every problem a Costa Rican has.

Many Nicaraguans can only afford to live in squatter's settlements called "precarios" where thousands of immigrants will crowd into a few acres and live packed into small shacks with dirt floors. Many of them can only get water from a small amount of water faucets located across the precario. As in any situation where poverty abounds and hopelessness with it, teen pregnancy, sickness, malnutrition, drugs, crime and gangs abound more. It is very difficult to emerge out of a precario and into a life beyond it.

Boy With a Ball/La Bola Costa Rica began going into this precario called Los Triangulos two years ago in connection with another local organization. Recently, our team has committed to going into this community several times a week. Our focus is to reach young people and families in order to draw them into one-to-one mentoring relationships and small group communities as a platform for providing educational resources that can help develop leaders within the precario. We hope to deeply reach and equip 5- 12 individuals within the precario who can then turn and do the same with their neighbors.

Do young people matter?

Do young people matter? Are they worth fighting for? Do they need fighting for?

These are good questions that can best be answered by realizing that the predatorial forces in the world are saying yes to all three. The child abusers, drug dealers, sexual predators, pimps, child pornographers, gangs and even other young people looking to use someone to feel better all have focused their attention on young people.

Why? Because they can and because it pays off so handsomely.

Young people are beautiful, fresh, full of life, gifted, fun and, above all, moldable. They are also less jaded, more niave and considerably more trusting. In a way they are like diamonds laying out on a front lawn...incredibly valuable and amazingly reachable. This spells danger.

A child abuser looking for an innocent to crush can take five steps out of his building to find one. A drug dealer looking for new blood has only to rent a hotel room, fill it with drugs and walk into the downtown area of any major city to invite dozens of youth. Two days and a massive drug binge later, the dealer has a whole new crew of addicts/workers who need more drugs and will do whatever he wants them to do to get them. A sexual predator can walk to the nearest playground and say a few nice words to a little girl or boy playing alone before inviting them back to his apartment for "candy."

A pimp can walk up to a beautiful young girl, seduce her, deflower her and then draw her into a life of drugs and sex for hire to deaden the pain and support the habit. Child pornographers can build relationships with any of the above young people, already damaged by someone before and lead them blindly into letting themselves be photographed. Gang members, in cultures where they represent power, protection and belonging, can easily recruit solitary young boys who are tired of being scared and alone, humiliated and weak. In the gang, they are offered the strength of community, mentoring and functioning in the power of a collective. They find shallow versions of loyalty, sacrifice and love easy bait when they have never tasted anything deeper. Young girls find themselves easily drawn into being the "property" of something so strong and so powerful.

Finally, young people themselves remain the most powerful predators of each other. The innocent girl growing up in the U.S. has quite a fight on her hands to be able to resist the way Hollywood spells out the journey of life. Her friends, most of whose parents are taken away by their work and their own conflicted lives, rally around TV shows and movies that paint a romantic version of love that involves life as a waiting game for the special boy who will show up and fall in love with her, overcome some singular adversity and then live happily ever after. The blogs, chat rooms, magazines and lunch room messages reinforce it all daily. When a boy who could possibly qualify shows up, driven by hormonal urges that she can satiate, it is hard to say no. All that is left is to negotiate how quickly to consumate her initiation into movie-like love. Sadly, it doesn't feel right. He doesn't act right. It doesn't go right. Even if she escapes the first "miss" without being pregnant, the next try and the next try and the next try come with increased risk to STD's, abusive relationships and pain. By the time she is ready for an actual relationship, much of her has been destroyed. Her "near misses" have left her missing.

Young people are being fought for and won every second of every minute of every hour. Seduction, addiction, devastation and elimination are the constant flow through the large majority of youth populations across the world. And as they are damaged, so is the future of each community, city, nation and the world. Disease, danger, high-risk behaviors and damaged, unfortunate outcomes are the constant result.

Who will fight for them for their good? For all of our good? Who will love them in order to add instead of seducing them in order to take? Who will bring them life, better life instead of deception and death?

Will it be you? Will it be us? Can we rebuild the mechanisms necessary to help them? Gardens of love like families, neighborhoods, churches, schools, communities that provide an atmosphere of protection, education, equipping, care and then releases them into their dreams? Every seed sown, every stalk watered will one day blossom into fields of flowers covering the landscapes of our world.

They are worth it. The future is worth it. It's time to fight.

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant." Martin Luther King Jr., Accepting Nobel Peace Prize, Dec. 10, 1964

Young People Are Dying

Imagine

Imagine a country decimated by the highest teen pregnancy rates in the industrialized world (costing the country at least $7 billion annually). Where more than five million high school age young people binge drink at least once a month. Where 53% of twelfth graders report having used an illicit drug in their lifetime. Where 17.4% of students reported carrying a gun to school in 2001. Where an average of 14 young people are murdered each day. Where a young person commits suicide every 15 minutes. Where 11 million young women and men report struggling with eating disorders. Where one of every 3 girls has had sex by age 16 and 2 out of 3 by age 18. Two of 3 boys have had sex by age 18. Imagine a country where young people between the ages of 13 and 24 are contracting HIV at the rate of 2 per hour.

The country you are imagining is the United States of America. Regardless of all of the horrific issues facing young people in Latin America, Africa and across the world, we must realize that the United States remains one of the most destructive places in the world to grow up. Something must be done. Please help us.

boy with a ball is a non-profit organization that works in teams to dynamically impact young people in cities across the world through:
• reaching young people in their neighborhoods
• equipping them to grow into leaders
• building communities of and around them
• releasing them to improve the world

You can help boy with a ball help young people today by getting involved.

Please become a regular visitor and participant in this website and spend some time checking out our website at www.boywithaball.com.

Together we can build a future for our communities and nations by equipping young people to listen and lead, live and love. There is no fight more worthy of living for. There is no fight more worthy of dying for.

Come fight with us.

Jamie Johnson
executive director
boywithaball
www.boywithaball.com
email-boywithaball@gmail.com
phone-866-510-3688

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
Martin Luther King Jr.US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 - 1968)