Monsoons and Meetings

So the monsoon, after taking its sweet time getting here, has finally arrived, and its a little bit messy. It's nice because the rain cools things down, but there are problems with flooding in a lot of areas, and we got positively soaked coming in to Delhi today for the Mentor Mothers meeting. The Mentor Mothers work with the children in all the homes, and we get together to discuss all sorts of things, but today the big issue that was weighing on the minds of the three of us didis was the behavior of the permanent authority figures in our home. We try to encourage good health and hygiene, but the head Aunty refused to acknowledge or deal with the dead rat in the kitchen when we pointed it out. We try to work with the girls to solve their problems in a peaceful and constructive fashion, but Uncle advocates slapping the girls when they are disrespectful, and worse, the Aunties beat the girls for wetting the bed (which is a problem for some of the older girls as well). It's not like they're wetting the bed on purpose; surely it's a result of all of the emotional trauma they've been through, and beating them is only going to traumatize them more, in addition to the original humiliation of wetting the bed. We can't communicate much with the Aunties, who speak next to no English, and they ignore our input anyway. I think that since they are in the home all day, they can get very controlling over their small domestic domain, and view us as intruders. Uncle is easier to communicate with, but he is still a firm believer in corporal punishment. Fortunately, today at our meeting we were able to communicate our concerns to Dr. Modi, who is the head of the organization, and she is totally receptive to our input and really awesome, and she got right on the phone and gave Uncle the what-for. She is planning to have more workshops to train the caregivers and everyone who works in the homes in proper conduct (although they already had some where they were all taught not to beat the children, and look how much that helped). It's kind of frustrating to be a only a short-term volunteer in this kind of situation, but hopefully the organization can derive some permanent benefits from the concerns that we've raised. Next on the list: attempting to organize a talent show for the girls! Should be a good time.