TRIP TO INDIA

Dear Adopting Families, here I am again on my sixth visit to India. On my departure I was convinced that India would have offered me great joy, affection and understanding as always.
I would have returned from my trip revitalised with energy, my heart warmed by an ever stronger motivation. But I had never imagined that I could still be amazed, that that part of me which I was convinced I knew well, could still be affected. Instead....
I want to share with you my experience in Mumbai, a new facet of the India that I had seen previously. For those who do not know it, School For Children also looks after a group of about 60 children in Mumbai and so for this reason I decided to visit them. A strong, sharp odour of India, not to be found elsewhere, total chaos, traffic jams at every moment during the day or night, house, or to be more precise, shacks, one on top of the other, a new ultra-modern school adjacent to the so-called "vertical slums" or enormous apartment buildings where hundreds of families live, sharing a few square metres under shelter: it is terrible and one cannot believe that such a dense concentration of humanity can exist. But the worst thing I have seen was along the roadside; the mountains of rubbish shown in the documentaries but completely different when seen in reality, with hundreds of people walking all over them searching for anything that could be sold, or eaten or simply traded. Our own differentiated rubbish system is truly non-existent in comparison.
Millions of people who live around the mountains of rubbish and survive thanks to the rubbish!
From the mountains of rubbish we pass on to the slum area where we have our centre, where the children take turns to go to school and to take part in after-school activities.
Narrow lanes and alleyways where houses, without doors, reveal people working, sectioning up rubbish bags, barefoot children, open drains and you are in a metropolis where Bollywood produces films costing millions of euros: you seriously ask yourself if all this can be real. We are almost in the year 2010: is it still acceptable that the numbers of people suffering from leprosy and tuberculosis is still increasing? It's true, but here everybody works a day at a time; if you don't work you don't eat, because here you don't have a field where you can grow a fistful of rice and you can't stay at home for a day to be seen by a doctor. The law of survival rules your life...
We arrive at our school, 5X5 mts. On two floors; at the moment it is empty because the children from the first shift have finished and those from the second still have not arrived. We climb up the steep stairs leading to the second floor and the terrace: we are planning to cover the terrace in order to use it as classroom space for other children. Below us, covered with a corrugated iron roof, we find a sort of shop selling vegetables, or a wooden stall with some vegetables on top; the shop measures approximately 2X4 mts and is for sale.
If we could buy it our assistants could enlarge the school but it costs 30,000 euros, an exorbitant price for such a property, but the central location and the shop will be bought by some rich tradesman who will rent it at unbelievably high amounts: this is the business reality! The government is now threatening to close down the Dharavi slum and for this reason the rents in other slum areas have doubled. Mountains of rubbish on one side, open drains, shacks, dirtiness and terrible smells: you feel like you are in the depths of hell, when a mother and father appear at a glassless window with their newly born baby...
At that moment I felt...
Jesus was born in the slums of Mumbai...
... In that moment everything else disappeared from sight.
Hope blossomed in my heart and I climbed down the rusty stairway (forget about the legal decree 626) approaching our children seated on the ground waiting to start lessons... lessons which really change their lives: they are totally unrecognisable from their photos taken before they started attending school!!!

Lara Meroni
School for Children

5 x 1000

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