The Girls

I don't have much time to write because I'm just biding my time in the Internet cafe waiting for Raphaelle and Elysia to come back from the railroad ticket office, but I haven't even gotten to the most important and most interesting part of my experience here, which is the girls in the home. We've been reading some of their files lately, and their backgrounds are really unbelievable. One girl's father poisoned her mother so he could marry another woman, then abandoned the child, who was taken in by a woman in her village who basically kept her as a little household slave and wouldn't let her go to school. On a trip to Delhi, the woman abandoned the child in a railway station, where she was picked up by the police and transferred to the guardianship of Udayan Care. That was a year ago. Now, she is 10 and in the first grade at school (having no previous education), and is a bold and charismatic girl who reminds me of nobody more than Sophie Mitchell, for you Pattenburgers. It's amazing for us to see how resilient some of these girls are, considering all that they've gone through. Many of them are not technically orphans, but have parents who are incapable of taking care of them, like the three small sisters whose mother is terminally ill and whose father is serving a life sentence in jail. Others ran away or were taken by the police from abusive homes. With all of the traumas they have been through, most of the girls have turned out to be absolutely lovely people. One one hand, they are terribly unfortunate in that they lack the love and care of a mother and father, but on the other hand they are amazingly lucky to have landed in Udayan Care, which provides them with education, counseling, and health care superior to that which probably 99.9% of other Indian children receive. The amazing second chance that Udayan Care provides for these children only makes it more painful when we see some of them fall through the cracks, wasting second and third and fourth and tenth chances, the opportunities of a lifetime, by rebelling against the discipline of the home, refusing to go to school, skipping class to meet boys, etc. It's frustrating because, as short-term volunteers, we don't have enough time to really get to know the girls, understand them, and gain their trust so we can hope to nudge them back on the right track