A Bangalore friend recently asked me if my blog is up to date. I told her it wasn’t and have been feeling very guilty about that fact since. I used to be so good about writing about every little thing that happened in my not-so-new city of Bangalore. I loved writing to both process thoughts and feelings about what this experience is like, and to also have a record of this insane adventure.

I do have a good excuse for not writing as diligently as previously. Trying to start an NGO or Trust or whatever it is that we are trying to start is time consuming. And it’s not even the trying to turn it into something official that devours my time because that’s last on our to-do list, but it’s the relentlessness of the needs we are trying to address. Our focus is just on 2 issues—health and nutrition of migrant kids 0-6. That’s it. And yet, every minute of every day finds us busy connecting with NGO’s, running families to the hospital, updating our work on very active Facebook page, creating fundraising campaigns for surgeries or blanket collections, etc. Everything we do is listed at www.facebook.com/linksformigrantchildren, and of course you can tell I’m the one who writes the posts since they are anything but short and sweet, and I won’t repeat them all here.

In thinking back to the dual purposes of my blog, I realized that a record of my experience in Bangalore would be significantly incomplete without spending at least a bit more time writing about the work we have been trying to do for the past 2 years, as part of Links for Education in the past and presently through Links for Migrant Children. And rather than write about all the roadblocks and all the times we have heard “no” (but in a round-about way because in India no one comes right out and says no; they just never call you back) and all the initiatives that have failed, and the relationships that have broken down, and when people have failed to do what they committed to do, and the government has asked us for money or kicked us out of their offices, I want to focus on 2 really great things that have happened recently. Because things don’t always go according to plan. Because things NEVER really go anywhere close to plan. And because God has heard the kiddos in these poorest communities.

The Toilet:

As I wrote about in a previous blog post, during monsoon season last year because of the heavy rains and rerouted water exit routes, many of the homes in Ambedkar Nagar, the community Urvi and I were working in were destroyed. We fundraised, and many of my friends and family back home (Nicole, Lara, Mom and Dad) generously donated money for rebuilding. Unfortunately, rebuilding never happened for a variety of reasons, but mainly because we know nothing about building, we didn’t raise enough money to completely rebuild the 14 homes that were damaged or destroyed, no NGO or governental agency would touch this project with a 10 foot pole, the land was disputed to either be defense land or private land, and the community was fighting with each other over how much help each of them should receive from us, many of whom hadn’t lost infrastructure in the flood but wanted to get in on some free shit. After lots of deliberation, we decided the best route would be to give the community anganwadi/preschool a toilet, like we had been trying to persuade the local government to do before the flood happened and they refused to take our phone calls. With a toilet inside of the school the children wouldn’t have to use the flooded, trash filled field across the dirt road from the school. They would no longer be potential targets of child abuse or leering from the men in the community.

After lots of internet searching and talking to everyone we know, we connected with Sochara, an NGO who builds toilets. Perfect! Now all we had to do was figure out the logistics. Sochara does not do the building themselves, nor do they pay for the toilet. We had to hire a mason and use the money donated earlier for flood rebuilding to pay for the toilet. What Sochara does do is educate communities on how to build low-cost toilets, and help oversee the project. So we asked the Ambedkar Nagar community who would be interested in learning how to build a toilet, and their response floored me, although by now I should be very familiar with how India works. They said that Modi, yes, him, the Prime Minister, announced that the government would be building a toilet in every home in India, so they were going to wait until he did that. Yup.

So we decided to start the building project inside the school while the rest of the neighborhood waited for Modi to show up. The thing about the poorest in India is that they have blind faith in a government who could not care less about them. My guess at why is that if they started to question the government there would have to be blood in the streets for all that it’s taken from its people. Anyway, back to the toilet, the mason we hired from the community bought the supplies because if I did, the price would end up being double. Being white can be a help or a hinderance in this kind of work, and when trying to get a good deal it’s always a hinderance. Because of the recent rain, the sand, bricks, and cement were left on the porch of the anganwadi under a blue tarp, which could be seen from the busy road which passes by the slum. The local government must have seen the building materials and approached Baghya, the teacher, telling her that there was no need for us to build the toilet because they would come back tomorrow to build it themselves outside of the school for everyone to use (it is some kind of law that toilets must be built in government schools, which the anganwadi is, but when we met with BBMP over and over again to ask them to do so, they brushed us off). The following day Baghya waited until midnight for the local government to show up, but they never did. The next day work on the toilet was started. And a week later it was finished. There were a few hiccups along the way, like the fact that the person from Sochara went on vacation during the building portion of the project and we had to project manage it ourselves, and the fact that we asked for a Western toilet because that’s what Baghya wanted the kids to get used to using, and Sanjeev, the mason installed an Indian one. And the fact that Sanjeev was supposed to dig 2 large pits for waste, and only dug one, refusing to do the other one because he was out of room, and the fact that for 3 days there was a large hole in the ground filling up with rain water next to where kids play that any of them at any time could have fallen into and drown. I had to bribe him with extra cash to finish and cover the pit before a child died. Oh, and the fact that his masonry labor charges were almost equivalent to the building materials for the toilet. We were definitely ripped off, but the project was done! And done fairly well!

The heart

Mariyam is a 2 toddler from Munnekollal migrant community with Tetralogy of Fallot. Her parents were very proactive about her care and asked us for help. They had been to Sai Baba, a free hospital that does free heart surgeries, but they told her to come back in 2 years for reassessment. For parents of a child whose lips are blue and can’t run, play or breathe, that wasn’t good enough. They asked us to intervene, and we took the family to Jaydeva Hospital, which is the same place we took Nane, for a second opinion. Their doctors said that Mariyam needed the surgery and the date was set for mid-June. We set up a Ketto fundraiser since we don’t have our FCRA license to collect foreign funds ourselves. Through everyone’s generosity we raised over 1 lakh (about $1500) for Mariyam, her surgery, and after surgery care. Not only did the money come in, but Mariyam had the surgery and it was successful! 3 days after the surgery, she was up and about, and actually running around like any other toddler. Her parents couldn’t believe it. It was almost seamless! Except for the fact that her parents didn’t want to stay in the hostel we found for them to recover in and brought her back to Munnekollal, the waste management site they live in, before she was completely healed and the top of her incision opened up, and they wouldn’t take her to the hospital because of Eid, the Muslim festival at the end of Ramadan. But she is alive and well!

When things don’t go as planned in this type of international development work, and again, they rarely do, it’s so important to think about Mariyam and the toilet. Good things can happen. The work can pay off. It may take 2 years to get a toilet built, and you may get ripped off in the process, but it’s built. And the stitches may come a bit undone, but the child can breathe and run!