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Soon I was to learn that working with street children was not always as peaceful and almost romantic as this first day might have suggested. Tania took me to Khar Danda, where the children were living with their families. I had seen many slums before when I had been living in Bombay as a trainee for a few months, but I had never taken a closer look. The huts the children were living in were more than miserable. Rags and cardboard sheets as roofs, buckets full of water as improvised bathrooms, the crowded street as front yards. There was filth and garbage everywhere. Still I was surprised how comparatively neat the children looked. Tania told me about the agreement she had with their families: She would come to teach the kids the basics about reading, writing and calculating, take them to the doctor if necessary, introduce leisure activities like the karate lessons or little field trips to the beach from time to time, and the parents in turn would see to it that the kids were as clean as the circumstances would allow.
The next days were packed with preparations for the Christmas performance that should take place Sunday before Christmas Eve. Tania, her volunteers and the children had been practising dances and a little play explaining the meaning of Christmas. Besides, during the past months they had been working on various crafts they planned to display: collages made of colourful origami, pictures showing the kids playing and frolicking at the beach, and a lot of cheerful drawings, many of them scribbled with clumsy hands that probably never had held a pencil before.
Again, I was impressed with how much enthusiasm the kids threw themselves into work. To plan and carry out a project over weeks - that was something none of them had ever experienced before. Most of the kids seemed to be so eager to learn, to practise, to show their hidden talents.
In spite of the practise for the performance, daily classes went on. Tania and Pallavi, one of the volunteers, gathered everyone around them on a few ragged mats lying on the ground at the side of the street. The kids grabbed their exercise books and tried to copy the Hindi letters Tania and Pallavi showed them. I was watching the dishevelled black heads bend over the books lying on their thin dusty legs. It didn’t take long until some of the girls came to sit next to me, almost crawling on my lap, proudly presenting me their work. Fairly quickly they found out that although I was a foreign lady like Taniadidi, as they called their teacher respectfully, I didn’t know too much about Hindi. What a strange white woman! But they soon seemed to be satisfied with my more outstanding talents: making funny faces and swirling the kids around in the air.
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Trouble started when a few days before Christmas, several of the slum families suddenly vanished without previous notice, and with them most of the children that were in the Christmas performance. The remaining families told us that some of them had gone back to their village, some had left for a wedding - where exactly no one knew. It wasn’t sure which of the kids would be back for the performance on Sunday. I was shocked, but Tania only sighed and shrugged her shoulders. She was already used to the fact that she couldn’t rely on the Khardanda families too much. I realised how much patience her job afforded. In an Indian slum, things wouldn’t go like Swiss clock-work as I was used from at home.... Fortunately, on Saturday most of the families had returned from their trips and - what a relief! - at the performance on Sunday almost all the kids where there. And what a change in their appearance! They didn’t look like a pitiable bunch of slum kids at all, but were nicely combed and dressed up, wearing their best clothes that their mothers had miraculously managed to produce from some well-kept place in their little shacks. I couldn’t tell whose faces beamed more with pride: the mother’s who came to watch the show, or the kid’s who performed the play and dances they had been practising for so long.
It was an interesting, challenging and very cheerful experience to spend Christmas in Bombay with "Taniadidi" and the Khardanda kids. From at home it’s not easy to imagine what it could be like to live and work with street children. How much organisational work there is around leading a NGO. How much patience it needs to take day by day, never exactly knowing what life will bring tomorrow. But seeing the pride and happiness in the eyes of little Sangeeta, of Ramesh, Roopa, Radha and all the other kids, I knew that it is worth a try. Even though no one knows what will become of the children in a few months - their families might decide to go back to their village or move to some other slum - I am still sure that the basic education Tania has already been teaching them, the pride and self-confidence the children feel by accomplishing little goals, the feeling that they can achieve something if they work hard, all these experiences will have an impact on their lives - no doubt.
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