Hebron Children´s Home

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After spending nearly eight hours yesterday in this very internet cafe struggling ineptly (and typically) to upload photos from our two months in India, i swore it would be at least another couple of months before i went in one again. But then I didn´t know that today I´d walk past a Caribbean sea-view bar (we´re currently on 'R&R´ in an overcast Panama) to see the last twenty mins of Spurs winning away at Villa and find out that England had just thumped France in the Six Nations. Clearly i needed to know the details.

Just looking again at those photos I´m struck by just how little we managed to capture of what daily life at Hebron Children´s Home is like. By and large, all we have are pictures of happy kids with beaming smiles. On the one hand this goes to the essence of what the Home is about and what it remarkably and admirably achieves - happy children. (It´s also making me smile recalling how every time we got the camera out, any and every kid in a 100m radius would run and jump in front of it!). But there´s much more to Hebron that we would want to share. Our month stay came and went far too quickly and not surprisingly we´ve left feeling that the kids taught us much more than we taught them. That said Helen proved to be a very natural and successful teacher - whereas I enjoyed daily games of kabaddi, cricket, volleyball, etc, split up arguments and gave out hugs. I also attempted to leave what I fear is an already expired legacy of tag rugby. Where´s the fun in passing the ball backwards when you can ¨BUNDLE¨.

So a bit more about life at Hebron. The Home is in the outskirts of a town called Palakol in East Godavari, a very remote, poor and rural area of SE India on the coast of Bay of Bengal that is rarely visited by foreigners. In a month we saw no other ´westerners´ and we were a novelty enough to be invited to several social occaisions as auspicious omens! These included a colourful rural wedding and a village celebration for a young boy who had incredibly survived having malaria, typhoid and pneumonia at the same time. The main source of -a much lower than the Indian average- income for people in the locality is from the rice and coconut farming for which Palakol is a trade hub. Hebron Children´s Home offers shelter and education to the most disadvantaged children in this region, its good reputation spread through word of mouth means that kids come from up to 250km away. It was founded 40 years ago by Prakasam Jalli and his wife and is now run by his son, Sagar and his wife Suneeta (along with close friends and family, including past kids from the Home). There are currently 365 kids who live on site, with a couple dozen more that come in daily for schooling and meals, from places such as the nearby leper colony. The youngest is 5 and the oldest are 18.

The Home is obviously all about the kids and they are awesome. Like all children they have tantrums and fight each other as much as they have fits of uncontrollable giggles and are able to create fun out of nothing. Yet in spite of their unstructured, disrupted and often horrific backgrounds they are the nicest children we´ve ever met. The kids show so much genuine compassion and respect to each other that goes far beyond the heartbreakingly humourous gestures that they showed to us as strangers and adults, such as every time you looked up from standing still for a minute you´d see half a dozen children running towards you with a chair and another half a dozen with an umbrella as shade from the sun. Countless times a day we would see unnoticed, simple acts of kindness as the ´brothers and sisters´looked out for each other. Unbelieveably they manage to share an energetic optimism and positive outlook on everything that puts us (and the western world, all adults, etc) to shame and on more than one occaision we had to remind ourselves that we weren´t on a holiday camp. The single and most powerful thought that strikes you is that kids are kids. Regardless of where in the world they are born and live, kids want to have fun and be loved. The experience of most of these kids before they reach the Home means their innocence has been corrupted and their trust abused. We´re certain now that there can´t be many more important things in life than to help prevent and protect any child from this.

To give you an idea of the types of backgrounds these kids have, here are a few. Prianka was given up by an unwanted family after her stepfather threw her, as a baby, in an argument causing her to become mute. The parents of Shiva and his brothers died of AIDS, HIV and AIDS is a rapidly growing problem in the area. Kite, nicknamed for his light frame, was picked up by the Home along with 120 other children as a result of the tsunami in 2004. After 18 months all the other children had been reunited with family or their villages, but Kite´s parents, who both survived, decided they no longer wanted his burden. Two brothers, Sassi and Satish, had recently been brought in by a bus driver who had seen them for several days on his route. Apart from being homeless, their backgrounds are unknown but for boys who claim to be aged 10 and 11 the toll of malnourishment means they can easily pass for six or seven years old.

A lot of the children also come from families that are simply too poor to feed them. This usually results in child labour as the kids will have to provide food for their family or themselves. The ideal scenario is that the kids come in to the Home with an understanding that they´ll stay until they are 16, 17 or 18, so that they remain protected and see out their education. Unfortunately not all do. One girl who had recently left, was the sole witness to her father murdering her mother and was required to testify in court, before he subsequently died in prison. After struggling, she ran away to another city. Another girl´s extended family had arranged her marriage for when she was 16, unfortunately she suffered an abusive relationship that ended with her husband setting her on fire and killing her less than a year after she left. The fact that after 40 years of living at the Home, first growing up and now running it, Sagar remains attentive and sensitive to the needs of each individual child is testament to the care that is undertaken for the children´s welfare once under his guidence. There are also a huge amount of positive stories of kids who have left to live a much brighter and happy future, we met past children that had left to become teachers, IT workers, administrators, print workers now with good homes and loving families.

Our reason to come to Hebron was the Angus Lawson Memorial Trust. The Hebron Children´s Home was one of the first projects that the ALMT supported and what we saw that has been achieved in just two years, thanks to everyone´s generous support, is incredible. Unfortunately you can´t see it first hand - and we didn´t take the photos to do it justice - so I will have to say THANK YOU and try to describe it.

Imagining what the impact of buying and raising land and building a wall for the campus is a lot harder to visualise than the impact of the Angus Lawson Vocational College, but I wouldn´t want to skip them. There is little room in the Home´s campus and this becomes even smaller when the rainy season starts and the kids can´t eat or play outside and the classrooms without roofs are rendered useless. Yet the raised land means that the worst flooding during monsoon is now avoided. It also more than trebbles the recreational space for the kids as well as providing the site for the college. Without it the strip for outdoor activities was roughly 120m by 30m, now as well as space for games there is also room for kids to find quiet corners when they need them, which there certainly isn´t in the dorms. And while the new wall defines the campus it has also stopped the regular beatings that the neighbours from the rice factory or Brahmain colony (India and Hindu´s highest social caste) would feel free to take out on the kids.

Personally, the caste system is difficult to rationally understand and justify, but it is the prevailing system of social hierachy that governs the lives of a billion Indians. It determines occupation, education, marriage, where you live, what your politics are, who your friends are, etc. It shows little sign of breaking down as India modernises and has a particularly strong grip in rural areas such as where Hebron is. The children of Hebron are, in the overwhelming majority, in the lowest caste and as such they typically have very few prospects, low expectations and would be expected to have low self worth. This is where the Angus Lawson Vocational College comes in. Built on site at Hebron and with control of admissions, the children of Hebron can get a much better education for free. Skills based courses such as electronic wiring and primary nursing as well as teaching English, means that job prospects are greatly improved for more of the kids. During our time at Hebron we went with the girls training to be primary health workers to a medical camp in a local village. Trained in basic first aid and early diagnosis of diseases they will work across a region with a single doctor. The camp was impressive but it was the buzz in the evening from the girls who felt pride in what they were doing and optimism for their futures that was the real measure of success. The longer term potential for the College is also exciting as the quality of education it offers is attracting fee paying students from outside the Home. More of them should quickly help the College become financially sustainable and will improve the integration within the next generation of Palakol´s society.

BUT for all the good work that is being done, there is more to do.

The dormitories are overcrowded. It is six to a bed for those that have one. For those that don´t they have to share mats on a concrete floor. More beds need to be provided.

Once a year the children get a set of clothes made from cloth bought wholesale and put together by visiting tailors. As you´d imagine there´s plenty of holes, missing buttons, etc. Likewise not all of the kids have a uniform either, which might seem superfluous but they stand out from the local students.

Water for drinking and washing comes from a bore-well. It is salty and dirty and in summer often drys up meaning water needs to be bought in (it was 30-35 degrees C when we were there and it gets up to 50 in a month or so!). The kids share the drinking water using four cups chained to taps, each taking turns while making sure the cup doesn´t touch their lips. To wash, the first kids get up at 4.30am. When more funds are raised a water filtration system will hopefully be bought which could utilise the local canal water.

The dozen or so hole-in-the-ground toilets are far too few for 365 kids. The stench is particularly bad in late afternoon.

The ALMT provides all the costs for ongoing food and medicine for 365 kids. In close confines illnesses and diseases spread quickly and visits by the doctor or a large quantity of medicine in more regular than you might think. We both caught headlice, which for us was (is being!!) treated by special shampoo. On site it is managed by very close crops for the boys and daily grooming and lice-popping for the girls. There was a nasty, but fairly common outbreak of scabbies while we were there too.

Food is a rice based meal three times a day with a ladel full of veg curry. Meat and fish are provide once a week. Helen and I felt it was a total privilege to serve the children each day, but the giant vats from which they are served, the tin dishes that are one of the very few and sacred possessions of the kids and the silence that accompanied the serious business of eating, was a reminder of how important the basic provision of food is. This montly cost is big ($5000 USD) and ongoing.

The Home receives a small amount of money from the Indian Government for the schooling and is otherwise overwhelmingly reliant on foreign donation. Since the world economy has taken its dive, the two other supporters have relucatantly withdrawn their help leaving ALMT to carry the costs. www.almt.org has different options of how you can help if you might be able to extend your support.

That leaves me with a Top Five to write. I thought it might be difficult as I didn´t know where to start but I feel I´ve probably written a bit about it now! So, simply, here is my TOP FIVE HEBRON MOMENTS:

1. The drunken king dance. For the school´s annual day the kids were organised and rehearsed to perform skits, dances, songs, etc. Some of the youngest lads had spent the week running up nervously and secretly practicing a routine with Vikrim the biology teacher. The evening was a huge social occaision with over 2000 locals attending and the boys had to wait four hours before they came on at about 11pm. They blew everyone away with an awesome dance - the crowd literally went wild and rushed the stage. The response was far beyond that for any other act, the boys were hoisted up into the air and cheered. First stunned, the boys then quite rightly enjoyed their hard earned celebrations. Knowing some of their backgrounds it made it all the sweeter watching them

2. Sports day started with the youngest doing 20m dash, etc. Then came the plate race?! Picture waiting for a race to start only when all 15 kids have successfully balanced a tin plate on their heads. No sooner than one was on than another was dropped with a ´ting´. The PE teacher tried for five mins to get the race under way, yet all we saw and heard was "Ready... Steady... ´Ting´. Priceless, Hel and I ended up laughing so hard. It was then done all over again with the next class

3. Class 2 would finish for the day at 3.30pm, a full hour ahead of the rest of school. It was my favourite time of day when I could play, uninterupted, cricket, beatings or stones with the youngest kids

4. Kabaddi. A totally underated sport that requires strength, stamina, agility and courage. Playing wasn´t as much fun as watching (the younger boys was let me win and the older boys thrash me soundly). Watching the older Hebron guys beat local non-Hebron students was fantastic. The most competitive game of sport I´ve watched live in a long while

5. 6am was also a quality hour for me. With the luxury of a coffee I´d sit quietly outside by myself and listen to the girls sing every morning, usually as the mist cleared and the sun broke through. It was a rare and welcomed moment of peace and strangely spiritual in a pretty chaotic place!

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