Today was a big day - the project visit.
I was put in a group visiting rural projects, 2 hours drive east of Kolkata. The trip there and back was very interesting. The landscape was very flat and mostly water logged. This is a fishing area and we saw lots of men on bikes with metal fish bowls on the back taking the fish to market. The houses and shops were very simple and the road full of people going about their work.
People were preparing for Puja - a Bengali festival. This involved building huge bamboo structures that where covered in cloth and decorations to make temporary temples. They were very ornate and high especially compare to the surrounding houses and shops.
PROJECT VISIT
Our visit started in the local Save the Children office in a small village. It was a dark room - the electricity had failed some days ago and was not yet back on. We met the leader of the project to return children from the cities to the villages and to identify children that were missing and to find out where they were located. We asked some questions about funding and costs of returning children and it soon became apparent that the problem was much more complicated than money alone. Often these children just go missing, they are sent through traffickers to agencies and on to homes. Often they are moved to new houses so the trail is lost. In addition, the people that hold the information are breaking the law so information has to been coaxed out of them and it is the perpetrators of the crimes that are required to help solve them. They work closely with the police as well.
The picture below shows the action plan for the next few months.
Next we visited some children that had been returned to the villages after working in the cities. They were attending a project that was housed in a room in a school. The room was very basic with no lighting, concrete walls and a floor covered in rough matting. There were no table and chairs and the walls were decorated with Save the Children posters and one blackboard.
We were greeted with great enthusiasm and smiles and everyone was given a garland and their heads marked.
A few of the children introduced themselves to us and told us of their aspirations - many wanted to be doctors but quite a few just wanted to get a good job. After a prayer they took us through a series of performances involving most of the children at some point. There were dances, singing and poetry.
At the end of the performances we had a question and answer session. The most moving point was when someone asked them what else they would like and they all agreed thst they would like some food. They were hungry and did not get any food during their day in the project.
Our instant reaction was to give them our lunches or to pay for them to have lunch today, tomorrow or some other time. This again brought home to me the difficulty of charity work. Was it better to provide these children with food or to rescue more children or run more projects. Also, it would be too easy to give them food today and then nothing tomorrow once we'd left. It was left that Emma from Save the Children would find out more about how we could help these people.
Next we moved onto another school where we met more children. They had been brought into the school to meet us and again they performed for us. This time we also saw a play about a girl being abused as a domestic worker. It was very hard to watch but clearly much easier to watch than to have to live through. It was a reminder of the tough times that these children had had. It was often difficult to tell as they were so outwardly happy and weloming.
Once we'd asked more questions the children left and were replaced by adults who were from the villages and were members of anti-trafficking groups. The group included some ex-traffickers too who now helped fight the problem. They worked by questioning any strangers to the village and warning villagers and people in the neighbourhood of potential traffickers. This had successfully stopped trafficking in many areas but there were plenty more where this was not happening.
There was also a big problem in the area with children from Bangladesh being taken across the border and into Indian cities. These children were harder to trace as it was difficult to know who was missing.
Some of Dave Johnson's pictures who visited the other rural project:
After returning to the hotel we had presentations on our ideas generated during the trek and then prizes for people who had stood out in some way on the trek. Some examples were, the loadest snorer to Ross and Alex got a prize for always being bouncy. We had dinner and then most of us went to a nightclub, partly to celebrate Rob's birthday and the end of the trip. I really enjoyed it for a while but then tiredness took over and I left - others partied on to 3 or 4!
Labels: trip
