When I was in India this past May with Mom Bloggers for Social Good, I saw firsthand how safe drinking water and sanitation needs impact people living in extreme poverty. I spent a scorching afternoon with temperatures climbing almost to 120 degrees Fahrenheit touring one of WaterAid’s work sites, an unauthorized slum named the Vivekananda Camp.
Women living outside the Vivekananda Camp, an unauthorized slum that ironically is located right behind the walls of the American Embassy in Delhi.
At this one location, the people had been fortunate to finally receive somewhere safe and hygienic to use the bathroom. A community toilet compound. Although the slum did not have running water, at least it had somewhere people could go to take care of their bodily needs and help eliminate the spread of deadly diseases and the horrible humiliation of open defecation.
As I stood outside the Community Toilet Complex (CTC), I couldn’t help but rest my eyes on a painfully slow-moving woman. A woman who had undoubtedly spent her entire life living within the confines of a slum. She was hunched over and bent on her cane and slowly dragged her feet across the ground, one step at a time, as she left the Community Toilet Complex we had just toured.
Over the past ten days, Jennifer James, founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good and Global Team of 200, has been in Zambia as an International Press Reporting fellow covering HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and how these diseases impact mothers and children. She was selected to report in Zambia along with nine other new media journalists, who have all covered these topics from different perspectives. It has been amazing reading all the stories about their work and learning more about the conditions in Zambia.
One of the places that Jennifer and the fellows visited that I found truly inspiring was the Fountain of Hope center in Lusaka, Zambia. The Fountain of Hope was founded in 1996 by a group of local Zambians as a way to help rehabilitate the growing population of street children in Zambia’s capital. In a country of 14 million, it has been estimated that there are 75,000 street children throughout the country and 2,000 alone in the nation’s capital Lusaka. Oftentimes these children spend their days on the streets, not going to school and doing whatever they can to feed themselves and stay alive.
Fountain of Hope Center (Photo thanks to Jennifer James).
“It is impossible not to be astonished by India. Nowhere on Earth does humanity present itself in such a dizzying, creative burst of cultures and religions, races and tongues”. -A Rough Guide to India
A trip through the streets of India brings humanity to her knees. No place on earth is quite like India. When asked by friends “What is India like” I seem to suddenly become silent as no words can fully describe the place unless you’ve been there. Through all her culture, her craziness, her unbelievable sights and her charm, India remains perhaps one of the most intriguing places in the world. I don’t think any place on earth can quite compare.
Getting around India is one of the most knuckle clenching, heart racing things you can do. Oftentimes there are cows in the streets, traffic coming at you in every direction and people everywhere. Many times you get awfully close to an overpacked car and the two dozen pairs of eyes seem to stare into your soul.
Inspired by the views seen through the streets of Delhi I compiled a post of my favorite street shots, many taken from inside a moving vehicle as I was tilting or craning my neck. Just taking a ride through the streets of Delhi is bound to capture your attention and your camera. I remembered to take my third eye along on this trip and it is a good thing I did. Everything and anything is possible in India.
Here are some of my favorite captures.
View outside the car at the over-crowded streets of Delhi.
Author’s note: This is the third post documenting my visit on behalf of Mom Bloggers for Social Good to see Save the Children’s work at the Indira Kalyan slum in Delhi, India.To read the first and second post click on the links.
Heading to our next visit within the Indira Kalyan Camp
Having a baby should be one of the most joyous times of a woman’s life. Yet tragically throughout the developing world childbirth is also one of the most deadly times of a woman’s life as well as the life of her newborn child.
Per Save the Children an alarming 3 million babies died globally in their first month of life (2010) and India continues to have a persistently high rate of newborn mortality accounting for 29% of all first day deaths globally or 309,000 a year.
India is not an easy place to be a mother either. A decade ago close to 75,000 women died during childbirth every year. Although that number has been reduced to 56,000 in 2010, it is still way too high, especially given the tragic fact that many of these deaths are preventable.
In India, there is no place that it is more dangerous to be a woman giving birth than in the slums where woman lack access to basic health care services, midwifes and hospitals. Yet organizations like Save the Children are making remarkable progress in educating women about prenatal and postnatal care as well as the importance of delivering their child in a hospital.
Author’s note: This is the second post documenting my visit on behalf of Mom Bloggers for Social Good to see Save the Children’s work at the Indira Kalyan slum in Delhi, India. To read the first post click here.
India has made a tremendous amount of progress over the last two decades fighting to save the lives of mothers and children. A decade ago close to 75,000 women died during childbirth every year and this number has been reduced to 56,000 in 2010. Significant progress has also been made in newborn survival. Since 1990, India has reduced the rate of deaths of children under 5 by 46% or almost in half. Despite the major achievements, newborn and maternal dealths are still way too high given the tragic fact that many of these deaths are largely preventable. The situation is especially dire in India, the second most populous country in the world, with a hugely disproportionate percentage of maternal and newborn deaths.
Inside The Indira Kalyan Camp, an unauthorized slum in Delhi
Nearly 1 in 5 deaths of children under age five are in India. (1.6 million children or 29% of the global total ).
19% of these deaths take place on the day a child is born and 53% occur within the first month of birth.
Large scale inequities within India continue to persist today in terms of wealth disparities, rural-urban divide, education, age of mother, caste, which means that not all babies born in India have an equal change of survival.
Children within the Indira Kalyan Camp pose for a picture
India, the second most populous country in the world, is known for her rich, vibrant culture and civilization that has spanned thousands of years. Over the last two decades, India’s economy has grown at breakneck speed becoming the world’s 10th largest economy in 2011 and is projected to be among the fifth largest by 2050 (per a recent report by economic think-tank Centre for Economics and Business Research). Yet despite the enormous economic success of the “Elephant“, as India has been sometimes called, tragically a large percentage of the Indian population have been left behind.
Millions of Indians live in dire poverty especially the people who have left the villages and have come to the urban centers searching for a better life. According to the World Bank, rural and urban poverty in India remains painfully high, holding the unfortunate record of having the largest concentration of poor people in the world: 240 million rural poor and 72 million urban poor. With poverty, an immeasurable suffering has also taken hold. Hunger, malnutrition and a high level of preventable diseases and death have struck India’s poor and have unfairly impacted women and children.
Smiling and hopeful Indian girls within a Delhi slum are sadly thin.
Close your eyes for a minute and picture Madagascar. What do you see? I see miles upon miles of pristine beaches, lush green tropical forests, exotic flora and fauna and brilliant blue sea. Madagascar, an island nation of 22 million people off the southeastern coast of Africa is home to several exotic species, 90% of which are unique to the country. Because of its isolation from other landmasses, most of Madagascar’s mammals, half its birds, and the majority of its plants exist nowhere else on earth.
Lemurs are endemic to Madagascar. Image Source: Wikipedia Free Commons
Lovely lush Madagascar. Image Source: Wikipedia Free Commons
Waterfalls are abundant in Madagascar. Image Source: Wikipedia Free Commons
This former French colony who gained their independence in 1960 is also home to a lesser, more ugly reality: Poverty. According to the World Bank, 69% of the population of Madagascar lives below the national poverty line threshold of one dollar per day (2011 statistic). With poverty brings hunger, malnutrition, disease, hardship and also lack of services such as access to safe drinking water and sanitation. Although running water, electricity and sanitation are provided by the government, sadly these services do not reach all the people. Based on 2010 estimates only 34% of the rural population have access to an improved water source (World Bank). Sanitation fared worse: 79% of the urban and 88% of the rural population live with unimproved sanitation services (2010 estimates from the CIA World Factbook).
Not having safe drinking water or adequate sanitation is a major hurdle in receiving an education. In a country with only 64.5% literacy rates, education is a key to lifting people out of poverty yet what child, especially a girl, would want to go to school without a toilet?
Last week WaterAid launched an exciting summer campaign to help provide proper sanitation and safe drinking water to Madagascar’s children. Over the next couple of months, WaterAid aims to reach 12,000 children in 31 schools by providing 150 taps and 100 toilets in Madagascar. What is so wonderful about this campaign is that all summer long you can follow the stories and updates of the children who will be impacted as well as the progress of the construction through the celebration on September 19th when the children return to school with taps and toilets for the very first time.
Project Sekoly: Improving School Water and Sanitation in Madagascar
In Madagascar only 41% of the population has access to safe water and 11% to sanitation. We’ve been working here since 1999 and have helped more than 177,000 gain access to safe water and 145,000 to sanitation. – WaterAid
Tsimahavaobe primary school in the town of Morondava is one of many schools in Madagascar with no toilets, no supply of safe water, and nowhere for pupils to wash their hands. We are asking supporters to join Project Sekoly, to help fund sustainable water and sanitation facilities for desperately poor schools in Madagascar. Your support will ultimately result in the poorest children in Madagascar staying healthy, gaining a better education and having the opportunity to achieve their potential. – WaterAid
What you can do?
Over the next few weeks you can follow the story as children in Madagascar get the water and sanitation they need to keep them healthy enough to build their dreams.
Follow their story on Twitter at the hashtag #buildfutures
About WaterAid: WaterAid was founded in 1981 and works tirelessly to provide clean water and sanitation for Africa, Asia and Central America. Since its inception, WaterAid has dramatically changed lives and has worked closely together with local organizations, communities and individuals, to employ affordable and locally appropriate solutions to provide safe water, effective sanitation and hygiene education to people in developing countries
Throughout my travels, I’ve always marveled at the beauty, innocence and hopeful smiles of children. I believe strongly that children are our future. What has amazed me so much is how similar children are despite their unimaginable differences in culture, economic resources and lifestyles. At the end of the day, all children want is to be loved. All children want to have enough food on the table, a roof over their head and books to read. All children want to be respected, cared for and offered the same opportunities in life.
Here are some of the world’s children and their friends who have captured my heart and have filled me with hope.
Here are the smiling faces of some of the girls I volunteered with in La Ceiba, Honduras.
The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship. – Amelia Earhart
They called her Braveheart, a name that symbolizes a fighter. People have also called her Fearless and India’s Daughter. Due to Indian law, the real name of a rape victim is withheld from the press. For some reason the name Braveheart seemed to stick.
Months after her tragic, horrifying death Delhi’s Braveheart continues to tear away at Indian society and many Indians’ cry for change. Braveheart’s December 16th gang rape on a moving bus has gained worldwide attention, outrage and grief. Further high-profile rapes such as the recent rape of a Swiss and American tourist have continued to push the not so pretty truth about the status of women in India into the forefront. Meanwhile, India’s tourist industry has been reeling with a 35 % decline in female tourists for the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year (Source: Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry in India). It is evident that foreign women travelers are concerned about the dangers of traveling to a place with such a tarnished reputation for women’s rights and safety.
In a country where a rape is reported every 21 minutes, and gruesome rapes of young children are inundating the news, you would think that it would be enough to push for societal and governmental change. Yet has anything really truly changed for the millions of women in India and around the world who are faced with violence, discrimination, harassment, intimidation, neglect and unworthiness every single day of their lives?
Traveling the world with a third-eye has always been the way I prefer to experience life. It means to view life openly and see everything – good or bad- with an open mind and heart. The world through my eyes can be contradictory and complex. Seeing both good and bad can bring so much immense joy and happiness while also such deep sadness that it makes your heart ache. Yet in my humble opinion, you cannot go through life with a blind eye. Otherwise nothing will change.
On my most recent trip through the Delhi slums as part of Mom Bloggers for Social Good, I saw a tremendous amount through my eyes. If I could look beyond the immense poverty, destruction, destitution and disease, I could also find beauty and hope. Beauty in the lovely warm smiles across the children’s eager faces whenever I pulled my camera out to snap their photo. Hope among the innocent faces of the girls in schools finally being given a chance to learn.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The world through my eyes sees so incredibly much.
This post was written in response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: The World Through My Eyes. To view more entries, click here.
There are moments in life when you are so deeply moved by what one person can do to make a difference in the world that it takes your breath away. This is how I felt when I met Sonal Kapoor, founder of Protsahan, a school for underprivileged girls in the heart of India. Not even thirty years old, Kapoor is already considered one of the most inspiring young social entrepreneurs in the world and after a visit to her beautiful school in the slums of Delhi, it is no doubt that she and her pupils will go far.
Many are aware of the huge inequities and poverty strangling India. Although India has seen rapid economic growth over the last decade, the gap between rich and poor has become even wider and more profound. As migrant families leave their villages in rural India and come to the big cities in search for a better life, the growth of urban slums, many in deplorable conditions, continues to grow at unmanageable rates. In just Delhi alone, there are thousands of them. (The slum population in India is estimated at 62 million people and around 1.7 million residing in Delhi alone. Source: The Hindu). As almost 75,000 migrants come to Delhi alone each year, many of them end up populating the already over-crowded urban slums that can be found all throughout the city, even alongside some of Delhi’s poshest neighborhoods. (Source: The Hindu).
An all to frequent site within the Delhi slums: Garbage and the sacred cow.
Education is without doubt one of the key ways to lifting people out of poverty. In India, a country of over one billion people and an estimated 400 million living below the poverty line (World Bank 2010), education has become a matter of survival for the millions of children living in poverty in both rural and urban Indian.
Per the 2012 the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER): Learning levels have dipped to an all-time low. So, almost half the 6-7 year-olds (Class I) in India cannot read even one letter in any language, over 57% cannot read any English while almost 40% cannot recognize numbers between 1 and 9, the report said. Access to education is becoming a key problem and obstacle for many of India’s poor children.
Pratham is the largest NGO working in India to provide quality education to the country’s millions of underprivileged children. Pratham’s multi-pronged approach ensures the following four initiatives:
Enrollment in schools increases.
Learning in schools and communities increases.
The education net reaches children who are unable to attend school.
Models are replicated and scaled up to serve large numbers of children to achieve a large scale impact.
Source: Pratham
What is so great about Pratham is that they work with the government and view their programs as a supplement not a replacement for education to underprivileged kids. As resources become more and more stretched and more migrants are moving from their rural villages to the slums of urban India, there is a dire need for educational services and Pratham has worked hard at filling the gap. It is no surprise that Pratham’s model is “Every child in school and learning well”.
While we were in India, Jennifer James (Founder of Mom Bloggers for Social Good) and I had a chance to visit one of Pratham’s many urban learning centers located in anEast Delhi slum, where we witnessed firsthand the dire need of education and the techniques of learning that Pratham is applying to some of India’s poorest children.
Inside the classroom children are learning basic English schools.
