I arrived back after a total of 19 hours on two lags - not a good idea as my ankles swelled up, some good advice would have been to break the journey in London for a day or so. My colleague went on to finish visiting the other hostel while I headed back to Mumbai to recuperate and recover from this heart wrenching but soul satisfying trip to the interior areas of India. Below is what happened with our work as reported by my colleague Razia:
We were in Kutch for almost five days. My maximum energy was put in visiting most of the homes personally. To-date I have only done 40% of homes as this has taken a toll on my health and I sometimes got mentally upset.
Note from Nusri: Her being mentally upset reminded me of the place we had gone to visit in Porbunder. I just couldn't get over the total helplessness we felt for these men: Razia remembers "about 10 yrs back we could see lots of mentally retartded people roaming around in town. Someone on this earth needed to do something about this problem. He bought a piece of land and built up an Ashram for them. Took all of them, gave them baths and clean beds. We went to see the place, this was heart wrenching. He has about 50 of them, all men. Some of them were behind bars in a cell 3 x 6 as they could be violent. We listened to funny stories, for e.g some thought they were president of USA."
My last journey/work began for Kutch via Rajkot. We went to Upleta and then 20 miles inside to a village called Bagh, only one family of farmers there. Man, were the roads ever full of potholes, I had tons of snacks for us but no one could eat anything as we were all trying not to get nauseated from all that rattling and shaking!
The family has sold everything and now both of them sell Pakoras door to door. We are thinking of moving them into Karimabad at Porbunder where they can be in the city with their sales.
From there we went to a village Bhayawadar. Interesting story. The main income earner, Ms. Daulatben's husband had died when she was pregnant (2mo) with her fourth child. for 14 years she would go to the farm to clean onions, she would take her kids with her and get 5 Rs.(12 cents) a day. She got her girls married now. Only her son remains at home with her as he is deaf mute. She looked for a deaf mute bride for him. Now both husband and wife stitch clothes and earn money. Their first son is deaf mute too and they have put him in a school for the deaf mute. It was so neat when I was able to use my sign language with them, I had learned this quite a few years ago in order to communicate with my deaf mute sister in law here in Vancouver! We have picked up their second child Sahil who can talk and have sent him to the Maliya Hostel.
As we were getting ready to leave, Daulatben called her brother-in-law whose son also has problems with his speech. He has a little girl he wants us to take her and put her in the boarding school.
The following is an account from Razia:
After that we went to Gandhidham (Kutch) where we have 4 welfare cases. From there to Nagalpur, where we picked up couple more cases suggested to us by Mukhi Kamadia (local ministers in our community).
Our next stop was Mundra. This is the hostel we repaired last year. I was glad to see the kids happy now. After holding the meeting with the parents and the kids , they (kids) presented a request list.
1. our rooms need cupboards so that we don't have to hang our clothes on the nail
2. Fans are old and they break every now and then, this is very hard in summer.
3. We do not have a fridge so our milk goes bad in summer and we don't get anything cold.
I got them a fridge right there and then while I was standing. I saw smile on their faces. Rest will be done soon.
Finally time came on Sunday to visit all our 25 kids. I love this part of my work as each one of them know me by name. Met with 25 sets of parents and the kids. This ended at night.
Now that I am back, I am attempting to post some pictures as well as thinking about what can be done to raise funds urgently needed to repair the Maliya Hostel's Girl's wing that can fall apart any day as it was badly effected in the earthquake they had a few years ago, it certainly cannot withstand another earthquake and there are about 75 girls sleeping in it everyday.
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