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News Guardian, Thursday, November 4, 2010
How your donations make a difference to homeless youngsters in India MADHAVA was ten years old. He was cold, hungry and alone. By day, he worked as a luggage carrier earning as little as ten rupees a day – not even 20p. By night, he returned to the platform at Vijayawada train station to sleep alongside the other railway children. Vijayawada is known as the gateway between north and south India, its busy railway station acting as a lure to youngsters eking out a miserable and diseaseridden existence. When workers from SKCV (Street Kids Community Village) came across Madhava, he was suffering from dengue fever and close to death. Over time, they were able to slowly nurse him back to health. Now despite the odds once being stacked against him, he is 19 and studying for a degree in advertising. This is just one success story for an organisation set up to offer respite to Vijayawada’s railway children. Situated on the banks of the River Krishna, the centre is an 11-acre farm providing a safe haven from the chaos and dangers of life on the street. Set up in 1988 by Englishman Matthew Norton, who had experience of life on the streets as a young teenager in Europe, the centre started off as a small room in
A boy working on the SKCV farm.
Helping railway children their lives back on right Our reporter TEGAN CHAPMAN has been to India to see how money sent there by the Rotary Club of Monkseaton Centenary to support good causes is spent. Here is the third of her reports.
Bombay, later moving to Vijayawada at the invitation of then mayor Jandhyala Shankar. Matthew changed his name to Sriman Manihara Norton, and settled down with his Indian wife Bhakti to run the centre together, but died in 2009, just a year after opening a girls’ branch of SKCV. Now Bhakti has taken over the running of the centres. “My husband devoted his life to helping these children, and even when he was very ill, he made me promise that the work of SKCV would continue,” she said. “He had such an impact on the lives of so many boys, and he will never be forgotten. His memory will live on in SKCV. “We had one youngster who was very ill, and he had not smiled. One day, he got up next to the river and he walked round and round in a circle before he curled up on a bench and finally fell asleep. “When he woke up, he was so happy.
He now always has a smile on his face. “I believe he saw my husband that day, and he told him that he would be ok.” Bhakti has now had a memorial erected to her husband. SKCV is home to 130 previously destitute boys, some as young as six. The farm is managed by the boys, and they look after its 35 cattle, gardens and orchards. The centre offers plots of land for the boys to grow vegetables to eat and sell, and a cow shed where they learn to look after the cows and milk them. The whole centre is self-sufficient and the boys are involved in every stage of their own development. Former mayor Jandhyala said: “More than 300 passenger trains pass through Vijayawada train station every 24 hours. “The children land on the station and sleep on the platforms because there is nowhere else for them to go. “They get chucked off the trains, and they just get back on until they reach here. “SKCV offers these boys not just a safe place to live and food and clothing, but they learn vocational skills so they go and sell the vegetables
Some of the children helped by SKCV.
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to get track they grow, and then the money is divided up and they can spend it like pocket money.” The trust is managed by a group of older children like Madhava in the guise of the SKCV Future Group Second Generation. These young men have been brought up by the trust and have dedicated themselves to its future development and to helping children in the same predicament as they once were. Thousands of street children have benefited from SKCV’s help over the years by leaving behind their old lives and taking up education and training. Bhakti said: “I am always so grateful that people from as far away as England support us here in India. “I am so amazed that we get contributions from people who have never seen these children but want to provide them with a better future. “The generosity people have shown these children is unbelievable. I just wish we were able to help every child in India.” The Rotary Club of Monkseaton Centenary financially supports SKVC, and it has been a partner for several years in assisting 200 children in Vijayawada to be taken off the streets and into school and training for the future. The club regularly sends gifts and donations for meals for the children through the SKVC-Rotary Special Day Scheme.
Artificial limbs can transform patients’ fortunes for just £20
Girls at the centre.
Rebuilding shattered lives AT the age of 14, Anuradha was raped by a prominent Indian figure. Because of his status, she was unable to go to the police, and when she fell pregnant, her family disowned her. She never saw her baby. It was taken from her while she slept in hospital, and she was told it had died. With no one to turn to and nowhere to go, she was left terrified and alone. Sadly, her story is not an isolated occurrence. Most of the youngsters cared for at the Amodini Girls’
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Care Home have suffered some sort of sexual abuse, but Bhakti and her team are doing their best to help them rebuild their shattered lives. “There are so many young girls who have suffered, but they can now smile when they are here with us,” said Bhakti. SKCV opened its twoacre girls’ centre in 2008 to provide a secure and healthy environment for young homeless girls. “A lot of girls are orphans, and some as young as nine are forced
into prostitution in order to survive,” said Bhakti. “Sometimes we have parents come and bang on the door and want to take their girl back so she can go to work for them, but the girls are happy here and they want to stay. “Despite all they have been through, because of SKCV, they can look to the future, where before they would have been too afraid to think they even had one.” n Anuradha’s name has been changed to protect her identity.
EACH year, thousands of Indians are able to start going about their daily lives in a way they would not previously had thought possible, thanks to the generous support of people in North Tyneside. When the Bharat Vikas Parishad artificial limb centre, pictured, was opened in 1993, it had just ten artificial legs to hand out. Now, however, thanks to the support of the Rotary Club of Monkseaton Centenary and those who respond to its appeals for donations, nearly 2,000 disabled people a year are provided with artificial legs and callipers. The club became involved with the organisation in 2005, and its world community service chairman, Vishwanath Pullé, and fellow Rotarian Dr Ram Reddy have been regular visitors to the clinic, taking a keen interest in its work. Disabled people come to the clinic often from great
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distances away, and every patient is treated free of charge. Artificial limbs bought in the UK cost between £1,000 and £2,000, but the Indian centre can produce an artificial limb and fit it for just over £20. Its workshops and offices in Hyderabad employ nine staff, three of whom are amputees, and in the last year they have made nearly 2,000 artificial limbs. Vishwanath said: “What a fantastic achievement in a country where hundreds of thousands of people, young and old, have lost one or more limbs. “Many thousands of these people can now lead normal lives and work to earn money when previously they had been totally dependent on others with many of them being reduced to begging on the streets. “That’s a fantastic transformation for such a tiny outlay of £20.”