A Picture Of India: Day 2

Posted on behalf of Jim Cook, President of Children International.

As I look over my notes, I recall with sadness the mother who was holding a child obviously very young and very malnourished...or worse.


I really didn’t need my notes to recall this situation. It’s hard to put it out of my mind.

I entered what she called a home. It was a tiny, dark place with plastic sheets for walls and not much more for a roof. Grim. On a small mat in the center of this “room” was another child…impossibly small, especially considering the one she was holding.

I turned to the field worker with me who was familiar with the mother and she informed me the mom had been told to take the baby to the doctor earlier in the month. When we asked what the doctor said, her unintelligible, illogical answer masked the real story…and at the same time revealed it. She really didn’t believe in, or understand, or could afford it if she did, modern medicine. And she had taken the child to what is referred to, appropriately, as a “quack.”

We made a note to follow up very soon with a more “hands on” intervention. It’s a matter of life and death. Literally.

This sad tale illustrates something that is a frustration yet underscores the value of child sponsorship...that mother is doing the best she knows how to do. She needs to learn how to care for her child. She has never had the luxury of education about how.

Over the years, through our sustained presence, I’ve seen sponsorship change the way individuals in entire communities approach the their own health care and that of their families.

I look forward to seeing that happen here…and the sooner the better! I will be anxiously following this child’s situation. And I’ll keep you posted. But we may have not gotten to her in time, and I’m not sure there will be a happy ending.

As bad as it sounds, it actually gets worse. The father is a rickshaw puller…or more accurately, a rickshaw driver as he uses a bicycle rickshaw. Unfortunately he was pedaling his rickshaw in a part of the city that had banned rickshaws and was summarily arrested and jailed. This clear and present “threat to society” was in jail awaiting his fate while his wife and family slowly starved.

This family was also a product of the relocation group I mentioned yesterday. The lack of wisdom and basic human compassion of both the relocation and the jailing of this “lawbreaker” is appalling. Pedaling a rickshaw. Trying to earn a living in a manner that is so hard its incomprehensible to me. Yet he’s jailed for it!

Oh, and one more thing. The woman and her jailed husband are behind on their $10 per month rent and are being threatened by the “landlord” with eviction.

So, the next time you’re thinking you’re having a bad day, consider this poor woman’s plight...a child in her arms on the brink of death, a toddler badly underweight with not a lot of hope for good nutrition, a husband in jail and a landlord trying to throw you out of what is generously described as a hovel.

We’ll do what we can for this family. I will. But we haven’t yet raised a dime that would enable us to help. Their case underscores the need for a vibrant sponsorship effort in this area. Join me in helping if you can. Call a friend. Let’s make a difference.

Update from the field...In a recent email sent to me from Neeta Goel, who is helping keep an eye on this family, she reported that our staff on the ground has been assisting them with food and medical assistance. Here are some excerpts the note she just sent to me: We began giving the mother and child some small quantities of food each day – milk, bananas, bread etc, and monitored her daily to make sure that the mother was actually eating the food, since she wouldn’t be able to nurse the baby otherwise. We monitored quantities too, knowing she would share the food with all her other kids, who were hungry too. There are no doctors in Bawana, except for homeopathic ones, and although we took the baby to these ones too, they refused to treat the child since they thought he was too sick. We then took the child to a hospital that is about six miles away from Bawana. The pediatrician confirmed that the child was severely malnourished and gave some medications that would help him put on weight. Although he still looks skinny to me, Shweta (a qualified nutritionist) confirms he is gaining weight slowly. The biggest change I saw was that he was smiling, and not screaming non-stop as I had seen him do previously. Anyway, that’s the progress within the last 2 weeks. We just completed the baseline survey and the medical exams today for all kids. Once we encode all the data, we will be able to share those reports with you too.

Tomorrow on the blog, Jim shares more thoughts from his recent trip to India. For more photos and to read his journal entries, visit Jim's Journal: At the Heart of Calcutta.

A Portrait Of India: Day 1

Posted on behalf of Jim Cook, President of Children International.

With our excellent field staff, today I visited a neighborhood obviously in the grip of harsh poverty, where we’re supporting the efforts of a badly-needed pre-school.

At this very small school, Shweta Tiwari, the staff teacher, is performing daily miracles with 15 to 20 students age 4 and under, I met with the children and their moms.


As I write this, I’m still stunned and saddened by what I heard from those mothers, one in particular. A striking woman whose clean, ivory colored sari belied the hell she has endured over the past few years.

As the articulate spokesperson for the group, she recounted how four years ago, the municipal powers informed her and the people in her neighborhood that they would be moved to a new location, as their “squatter area” was needed for new development. Progress!

Except the community the city called a squatter area was the only home she and her neighbors had ever known.

Soon the bulldozers came and the people were sent to an area far away, an area none of them had ever heard of, and certainly one to which no one wanted to go.

But go they did. Just like with so many things in their lives, they were left without a choice in the matter. That’s one of the problems of being real poor…choices are made for you. And to you…you’re left to just do your best what those choices are.

What they were in this case included renting a truck with your neighbors and moving what little you had to a new area where the current inhabitants would violently protest your intrusion.

The city provided no documentation of any type of new home or even the lot they might have been assigned. The home didn’t exist and the “lot” was determined by what can only be described as a desperate land grab of a piece of hard scrabble barely 10 feet square.

They received nothing. “Just get out,” they were told. So this poor woman, her mother and child moved out. Her world ripped out from under her.

And yet as she recounted this horror, she didn’t cry. She smiled.

I wanted to hug her and tell her how I hurt for what she has had to endure. I wish I had. But instead I just mumbled how sorry I was that she and her family had to suffer and that I hoped Children International would be able to bring something positive into what had been a pretty bad decade for her so far.

It seemed a feeble response when placed beside the magnitude of her story.

I visited her home later…it’s hard to describe how bad it was. Inside I was greeted by a goat eating something that looked like stuffing from a pillow. The stench was bad. Rats crawled through the area at night…she showed me the hole they used. I can’t imagine what the home looks like when the rains come, with such a porous roof. No toilet. Ten by ten is probably exaggerating its size. Dark.




Her name is Rafia. Her story is one that will stay with me…like many do.

She doesn’t deserve this. No one does.

I hope we can make a difference in her life…and the life of those other mothers in the room that day. I told them that it was now personal for me…meeting them and hearing their stories and looking into their dark eyes.

We must make a difference for them.

A last thought…as she described the bulldozers entering the area of her previous home, I could only think of the poignant photo of the student standing defiantly in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square in China years ago. And how this poor woman and her neighbors didn’t even have the satisfaction of knowing their plight was, at least, noted by the outside world—by someone who might care when it mattered—as was the case for that lonely student in front of the tank.

Well, even though it was four years ago, it matters now. And we’ll do what we can to help.

Tomorrow on the blog, Jim shares more thoughts from his recent trip to India. For more photos and to read his journal entries, visit Jim's Journal: At the Heart of Calcutta.

A Portrait Of India: Day 3

Posted on behalf of Jim Cook, President of Children International.

We’ve been working in and around Calcutta for over 25 years now. I’ve traveled here often and thoroughly enjoy the city that is like no other place I’ve ever been.

On my first visit here about 20 years ago, I thought I had entered a different dimension. I couldn’t believe my eyes, ears or nose. I couldn’t leave soon enough and wasn’t eager to return.

But now I look forward to visiting “Cal.” It’s quaint, it’s crazy, it’s colorful, it’s grim, it’s vibrant…it’s Calcutta. Or, as it has been renamed, Kolkata.

Whatever you call it, it’s unique. Get here if you can. But be open to witness life in a way you’ve likely never experienced it before.

It has taught me a lot about change and how I approach it. During that first visit, I couldn’t have imagined I would ever find the city charming. But now I do. Change. Embracing change. I do now, much better than I did before and my Calcutta experience has a lot to do with that.

I visited the United States Consul General, Henry Jardine, here today. I try to visit our Embassy or Consul representatives in every country, just to touch base and inform them of our activities.

I especially like Consul General Jardine, whom I’ve visited once before.

He very much supports the efforts of charitable organizations like Children International and has been most helpful in making sure the Consulate is represented at special events we have in Calcutta and with helping sponsored youth secure visas for attending our Children International youth conferences in the U.S.

He indicated he’ll soon be ending his stay in Calcutta and will be moving on with his family, as is the way with the U.S. Department of State. But ever since my good friend, Richard Bank, formerly of the State Department and now in practice in D.C., urged us to establish relationships with our Embassy personnel, it’s been interesting to see how acquaintances like Consul General Jardine tend to show up in other locations where we conduct sponsorship activities.


Reminds me how connected all of us are. And how much we rely upon each other to make the world work. To make it a better place for as many people as we possibly can. I hope you’ll join me.

For more photos and to read his journal entries, visit Jim's Journal: At the Heart of Calcutta.