Solidarity With Beloved Weeping MotherSolidarity With Beloved Weeping Mother
I viewed with great interest the movie documentary, Mother India: Life with the Eyes with the Orphan (2012). With 31,000,000 orphans in India, this movie invites us briefly in the lives of 25 orphaned or abandoned the younger generation (ages three to 25) who live across the railway in South India. I have been thinking a good deal about India which can be suffering intensely from COVID. The world today is sending material help, blessings, and finest wishes to our global neighbors, our sisters and brothers in India.
David Trotter and Shawn Scheinoha, who made the documentary, first traveled to Tenali (Andhra Pradesh), population 3 hundred thousand, in 2004. We meet Geetha, Reddy, Nagareju, Lakshmi, Kotegwari, Polayya, Yellapah, Satkyananda, Aadamma, Yesu, Abdullabi, Baachir, Chilipada, Raja, Ramu, Sekar, Siva, Gopi, P. Gopi, Hussen, Kiran, Mark, Nageswararao, Nami, and Narendra, such exquisite names, shining humans worthy of our regard. David and Shawn interviewed your kids and attempted to see life through their eyes. The youngsters sleep together on cement or dirt floors full of needles and condoms. Some sleep at store fronts. They wrapped themselves in blankets in order that they could avoid mosquitoes and being thought to be an exploitable young person.
The children beg money for food from passing train passengers, sometimes first “cleaning” or sweeping the train-car floor, then longing their hands first or two rupees (1 or 2 pennies). At the end on the day, some may have a couple dollars to obtain food. The group’s leader was the solicitous Reddy (“I simply have my mother; she beat me, so I left.”), in their early 20s but already having lived in excess of 10 years all the time. Reddy would rally the group to assist each other out. Lakshmi was abused by the foster parent who burned her having a hot steelrod. When her boyfriend saw her conversing with another boy, he forced her to get her hand beneath the train. She lost two fingers. Crying, she said she had an infant boy, but that she died when 72 hours old. Satkyananda’s parents were killed inside a bus accident. Nagareju’s parents beat him, and the man ran away. A third in the children were missing a limb, often from falling when jumping within the train (train hopping). The children first wished to show David and Shawn their wounds: missing fingers, hand, arm, leg, deep lesions. That is a major unhidden in fact ignored component from the pain they carried.
“Not above but among,” David and Shawn choose to leave their comfortable, air-conditioned Gotham Hotel room and sleep while using homeless young within the concrete and dirt floor. They experienced, only when for a night, experience the extremely warm weather and a host of biting mosquitoes. Waking up early, they saw children huddled asleep together, a pod of safety being a group of puppies, blanketed people mounds. The children brush their teeth on the well utilizing their fingers and powder produced around the spot by rubbing bricks together.
The younger people are invited to visit a fair where all enjoy yourself and excitement, games, and rides, taking their marbles off constant focus to having to survive. All the kids had “bad habits” to numb the discomfort in their bleak lives. Some smoked or chewed tobacco, while others, dangerously sharing needles, injected a mystery substance, which “took away the sadness.” Some “huffed” by sucking in fumes of rags soaked with Erazex, “White-Out” correction fluid which cost 50 cents, “to not feel the discomfort of police beatings, cold and rain in the winter months, and mosquito bites.”A holiday to the burial site of your youngster who died three weeks earlier of your overdose is filmed.
The children were sexualized, the older kids abusing the younger children. Geetha relates the sad story of his offered to the red-light district, sex for the money. Serendipitously, two men who recognized him took him back for the youth hostel. Folding his hands in prayer, Geetha says, “I am thankful to those two men.” HIV/AIDS frequently occurs among these teenagers.
Yet they have got hopes and dreams. Their eyes can easily still light up. “I need to run my business and revel in life to be a normal person.” “I wish to be an auto mechanic.” “I here is a good house and also to marry.” “I would like to get a residence for myself.” David and Shawn utilize their friends at Harvest India, to place of their main orphanage the 2 main youngest children, siblings, Kotegwari, a seven-year-old girl and Polayya, a three-year-old boy. The group fills a bus and off they’re going to see the orphanage, where they get haircuts, shower, receive new clothing, and savor a delicious meal of chicken, various curries, rice, and yogurt. The children were beaming, “walking different,” with freshness, self-respect, and dignity.
Reddy and the kids support Kotegwari and Polayya to move to the orphanage while they would not elect to live there. Suresh and Christina Kumar oversee daily operations of Harvest India, a website to, with, and from orphaned, abandoned, unaccompanied children. They provide your house to 1400 children at 26 different locations. Harvest India has been around existence for greater than 40 years. Suresh says the discarded youngsters are miserable, distrustful, feeling betrayed, homeless, neglected, no-one to talk to, abused, without dad and mom, consumed instead of cared for, exploited instead of loved. Suresh himself was raised in an orphanage where, after his father died young, his mother had found work. Suresh and Christina start the procedure where Kotegwari and Polayya could be adopted by Harvest India.