SEEDS OF HOPE
When you sponsor a child,hild you’re’ sponsoringi a comcommunity, but how? World Vision ambassador Jessica Gomes took Vogue with her to India to witness shifting grassroots.sroo By Noelle Faulkner.
When you sponsor a child, you’re sponsoring a community, but how? World Vision ambassador Jessica Gomes took Vogue with her to India to witness shifting grassroots.
There aren’t many places to see the stars in India. Instead, you’re clamped under a sticky haze between dust and photosphere. Here, existential daydreams are interrupted by incessant beeping; rogue animals coughing up garbage; children yelling “Selfie?” (meaning “photo?”); and flashes of fuchsia, marigold and emerald. With a population of over 1.3 billion, you don’t need the cosmos to remind you we’re all made of stardust, heartbeats and sweat: India does it for you.
Perhaps this explains why when we talk about the poverty it seems … too hard. If your NGO donation isn’t visible on a global scale, did you even donate? A dire misconception. “India was a place I had always wanted to visit,” muses Jessica Gomes, model, actress, founder of skincare brand Equal Beauty and World Vision ambassador. “I’d had my first taste of World Vision’s work almost four years ago in Peru, but India was close to my heart.” It’s important for Gomes to see it in action. And so here we are, rattling through the streets of Rajasthan in western India.
Our journey takes us first to a Jaipur slum to visit a school helping primary schoolaged dropouts (ex-rag pickers) bridge the gap. We pass homes built wildly ad-hoc from scrap metal, cement and Styrofoam. Despite the filth, the residents are pristine and proud; desolation is juxtaposed with hope and colour. We’re greeted by a flurry of dance; glittery-eyed children clamour to show Gomes their books. Science, Hindi, English, maths, singing, drawing: we’re in the company of tomorrow’s doctors, teachers, cricketers, police and nurses. Gomes asks a nervous girl, who, like many we’ll meet, appears much smaller and underdeveloped than her calendar years, her favourite song. With a smile, she sings, bringing almost everyone to tears. “I cannot believe the confidence these children have,” whispers Gomes. Nobody would.
According to a survey of 45,844 Indian children aged 12 to 18, one in two has been a victim of sexual abuse. Child Protection Units (CPUs) are centres built by World Vision and run by locals. A safe space, these hubs offer social monitoring and encourage children to leave the house. Here, little girls’ birthdays are celebrated (dowry payments mean daughters are rarely praised and even killed at birth), and children are taught how to gather evidence in the event of abuse. “This work is giving children the tools to protect themselves and be independent,” praises Gomes. “It gives them a voice.” The presence of NGOs has inspired locals to form their own charities; a women’s self-help group who’ve started a girl-gang trust for community emergencies, for example. When given the right tools, the can-do attitude of India is admirable.
We meet a woman whose then nine-year-old daughter was sexually abused two years ago. “We almost gave up,” she says. “It was only when the CPU helped did we get justice.” What has this incident changed? Shaking, she tearfully looks to the ground. “My daughter had no value. I didn’t think to protect her … I didn’t know.” The tragedy is multifaceted. On one hand, we have the fear the child lived in and the courage it took to seek help. On the other, the weight this mother will carry forever, the unimaginable guilt of allowing your child to drift into harm’s way.
Through the desert we arrive in Barmer, near the Pakistan border. World Vision has been here since 2010, currently with a staff of nine. Needs are heartbreakingly basic: female villagers trek for hours to find a private place to defecate (consequentially, many are raped, abused or die of UTIs), a single hospital services 45 villages (almost 30,000 people). Then there’s the weighty statistic that 48 out of every 100 children in rural India are malnourished, with one dying every day. “It makes you value simple things,” notes Gomes. “Infant nutrition, sanitation or just how a concrete toilet can keep a family safe.” The school is a dusty block void of much other than desks and faded posters. Just four teachers look over 200 beaming cricket fans and dancers.
“The mother in Jaipur told me I remind her of her daughter,” Gomes says later. “I had an out-of-body experience, I felt like that little girl for a second. I’m no different, just born in a luckier country. We all have that scared little girl inside us, and to feel like you have no protection? No child should feel that.” I recently learned that naraka, the Sanskrit word for hell, literally translates to “of man”, and India, with all its wonder, is perforated with man-made living hells like poor education and sexual abuse. The first world has long visited India to seek a cliched spiritual change; relying on the country to say the same. India has the will to change itself, it just needs better tools. To learn more about World Vision’s work, go to www.worldvision.com.au.