Friday, 9 November 2012

Reflections

We are in Dubai on our way  home from India and I am spending some time reflecting. My mind is full of images from the last few days. My heart is full of gratitude for all that we could experience as well as anger and sadness for some of the things we have seen.

Yesterday morning - our last morning in Lucknow - Chris, Jacob and I went to visit the slum where we held medical camp on the first day. We first went to one of the 'informal' schools where we did some songs and stories with the kids, and they also sang to us.  They were sitting/standing on a plastic sheet on the floor in a very simple room, incredibly well behaved!


 Most people in the slum don't really value education of their children, as it is considered more important that they go out and earn money for the family. In these little slum schools the children are taught  the very basics, for a couple of hours every day. The lovely teachers are doing an amazing job for very low pay. The manager of the school and his wife, quite newly married, spend their life loving and helping the people in this community. They help with all sorts of social, medical and practical issues and have also founded a church there. They also run another informal school in a different part of the slum. The school was being held under a straw roof, which has now collapsed, and their dream is to erect a proper metal structure so that the children don't have to sit outside. This would take around £800, which at the moment is an impossibility for them.
The school - a collapsed roof and a blackboard
In this particular slum there are 350 houses with an average of 10 people per household. The houses are constructed with any material the people can get their hands on - bamboo, straw, rope, paper, sack cloth, leaves... The people may be ordered to move at any time, and I can't even imagine what it's like to live there during the monsoon season or in December/January when it gets very cold.  I was told there are 800 registered slums in Lucknow - a city of 3 million people. It was lovely to see, as we were walking around, the good relationship that our friend has with the people who live there.

One thing that stood out to me was the large number of eyecatchingly beautiful girls everywhere we went. Like little diamonds shining among the dirt and the squalor. I wanted to tell them all that they were beautiful, created in the image of God, and some of their faces remain imprinted in my mind. We met a girl who is 12 years old as she was looking after her seven younger siblings while their mother was at work. This beautiful child is to be married in three months' time, to a man she has never met... Our friend who knows the family has tried to dissuade them from this but without success. This way there will be one less mouth for the family to feed.  Girls are not considered of any value to the family in these communities.

Here are some facts about the situation for women in India:

  • 70% of women live in poverty
  • In Uttar Pradesh,, the state where we were, the literacy rate among women is 34%
  • More than 2 million female babies are aborted every year just because they are female
  • One woman commits suicide every 40 seconds (according to WHO)
OM are reaching out to women across the country through education (the basic tool for empowering women), micro finance schemes, vocational training, medical care, spiritual empowerment, safehouses for trafficked women and in many other ways.




Before I went this time I felt quite overwhelmed by the scale of the problem in India. Looking back now, I have been so encouraged and humbled to meet many people who are giving their lives to serve the poor there in different ways, people who will never be famous but who are my absolute heroes... I feel like our role was to come alongside them and encourage them with our presence and our prayers, contribute some of our expertise and then tell their story to others back home. It takes many of us, together, to make a change and an impact. And each one of us is significant.







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