Salaam Baalak Trust

Day 8 - August 11th, 2011

Our last site visit for our social entrepreneurship group was to the The Salaam Baalak Trust (SBT). SBT became a realization after the movie”Salaam Bombay!” brought to the world’s attention the matter of street children in India. The earnings where used to start up the organization and for the last 23 years, SBT has served in assisting the street children in the areas around the Mumbai, New Delhi, and Bhubaneshwar. Helping children to be rescued from the streets up to the age of 18, SBT provides education programs, drop-in shelter services, health care services, and mental, HIV/AIDS, and TB awareness counseling. SBT has a vigilant presence with outreach points near the railroad stations where SBT outreach workers work around the clock to save girls and boys that run away due to abuse and poverty, or abandoned by their families.
In New Delhi, SBT have used guided city walk tours with their own reformed street children through the neighborhoods of Pahargani and around the areas of the railroad station. The guided city walk tours have assisted to continue to generate the attention of street children, but also illustrate the organization’s successful social entrepreneurship impact in saving the children from the streets. SBT uses all 100% of the earnings from the guided city walk tours towards the street children in creating more opportunities and the ultimate goal to be reunited with their families.
Our social entrepreneurship was very privileged to have our guided walk tour by Iqbal, a reformed street child who now works for the organization. For the street children of Delhi and all over India, their stories of how they ended up in the streets are incredible and emotionally moving. Iqbal provided us a tour of the Pahargani neighborhoods and the outreach point at the train station. At the train station, Iqbal showed us the entrance where the men would wait to pick-up the new girls that would arrive into the city. It is here where the girls are trafficked into prostitution and where the boys are recruited into gangs. The children that are picked up range from ages six years old up to the age of eighteen. When we visited the bus station where the girls and boys would be found by a SBT outreach worker, the kids are taken to the outreach point located within train station. The outreach point acts as a shelter and the children are checked by a doctor and the process of locating their families begins. The process usually takes six months and the children are once again are reunited with their families. As I enter the outreach point, a group of 6-12 boys where sitting at the front of the entrance on a rug playing games and conversing. Observing the young boys, I noticed that some of them had tattoos and some of them high on some kind of drug.
One of the workers pulled out pencils and pens and white paper and the boys began to draw. Eventually all the boys where drawing houses. As I observed these boys drawing their stick-figured houses, I suddenly began to cry. At first, I didn’t understand why I broke down crying, but I eventually realized that these boys reminded me about my father’s childhood. The life stories of these you boys are no different from the stories my father shared with me.
At the age of four, my father lost his mother after a difficult childbirth. After the death of his mother, my father along with his three brothers were left neglected after their father remarried and when their stepmother would not accept them. My father’s childhood was overshadowed with his father’s new life in creating another family. While my father was left in the care of his brothers as they struggled for years living in various homes. Eventually at the age of fifteen, my father decided to make a new life of his own and lied about his age to join the Salvadorian army. It was in the military where my father was finally able to find stability, shelter, and most importantly the infrastructure of a family.
Unlike other boys that would end up on the streets, my father strived to succeed on his own to eventually begin a new life in the United States. The street children at the outreach point resonated with my father's life. It made me realized how important it is to have organizations like SBT to continue their work in providing new opportunities for runaway and street children. Overall from all the NGO's we got to visited, SBT's experience was the most impacting not because it was really personal to me, but because it demonstrated how the income that is generated has provided optimal results and SBT's continues it's hard work in saving children from the streets.

Day 7: Salaam Balak Trust

For our last site visit in Delhi, our group met with Salaam Balak Trust, an organization that works with both young boys and girls that are runaways. Rickshaws dropped us off and two tour guides, Salaam Balak alums, met us to give an introduction to the organization as well as a tour around the area. We walked around the community as well as heard our guide’s childhood story of how he found his way to Salaam Balak. The most resonating aspect of his story was how, after years of abuse from his father and stepmother, he felt suicidal. To be so young and feel like there is no other way out of your circumstances aside from death was extremely hard to handle.

Our guide also informed us of the high amount of drug use amongst runaway children in order to numb the pain from the frequent beatings they receive from law enforcement. The substance abuse issue is also very apparent in the eyes of the youth in the area. I couldn’t help but think of the extreme importance of mental health in these situations. These children grew up without a familial support system and most lack any relationship with their parents. They’ve grown up facing the challenges of survival every day and Salaam Balak provides a solid network for children with similar backgrounds. I couldn’t help but think of the importance of mental health in these situations as well. Salaam Balak provides a great opportunity for these children but I might incorporate an additional mental health service/substance abuse rehabilitation program.

At the end of our tour we had the chance to sit in with a group of the young boys staying at Salaam Balak. They sang and danced for us and it was incredible to see the similarities of children across cultures and backgrounds. It was also interesting to witness how the young boys interacted with one another and the brotherly relationships within the group. You could sense the trust within the group of young boys, which is so important for childhood development. I was extremely impressed with our tour guide’s English speaking skills and charisma as he guided us through the community. He captivated us with his story as well as generated some profit for the Salaam Balak through the cost of the tour. He was able to cultivate his skills during his time at the organization and now has the ambition to further his education. Spending time with the young men of Salaam Balak Trust was a fantastic way to end our long journey through India and to really see the potential for street children to improve their lives through organizations like Salaam Balak.

The Eternal Hope of Youth

On the penultimate day of our trip, and our third in New Delhi, the GWU team visited the Salaam Baalak Trust (SBT). Started by Mira Nair, the director who made the movie Salaam Bombay in the 1990s, SBT works with runaway children who leave home due to abuse, poverty, abandonment and make their way to the streets of New Delhi in search of a better life. Each day approximately 30-40 children arrive on the platforms of the New Delhi railway station. Many of the girls are immediately picked out by canny predators for a life of prostitution and the boys end up living on the streets. SBT is committed, along with the Delhi Police and other Indian governmental programs (ChildLine 1098), to rescuing as many of these children as possible, providing medical assistance, daytime food, and short term shelter, attempting to reunite them with their families if they can be traced and if the child wants it, providing long term support like education and a home for the children who cannot be reunited with their families.

Salaam Baalak Trust receives about 40% of its funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 50% from individual, private donations, and about 10% from the Indian Government. Recently, the USAID grant ran out and SBT is looking to submit applications to continue the funding.

SBT also functions as key partner with the Indian Government as part of the ChildLine Program, by serving as the social worker service center for the Central Delhi Zone (one of 86 such service centers nationwide).

We spent the bulk of our site visit participating in a tour provided by Iqbal, a young man who was himself a runaway child and was picked up by the Salaam Baalak Trust. Iqbal now functions as a roving ambassador with the SBT City Center Walk Program and conducts tours for visitors among other activities. Iqbal took us through the process a runaway child undergoes from arriving at the Delhi railway station to encountering SBT services through Contact Centers, some of the street life options the children experience such as working as ragpickers for the recycling industry, spending their money on video games or movies, getting into smoking and drugs, and finally joining a shelter home and abiding by its strict rules.

Our visit to a short-term shelter to meet with the 80-90 children living there temporarily was the most heartbreaking part of the site visit. The children range in ages from 4 to 18. The older children sat by the back wall of their classroom, quietly observing the strangers in their midst. Many of the younger children were still young enough to be excited about engaging with the GWU students, playing with our digital cameras, taking photographs, playing hand games, and generally talking a mile a minute and loudly sharing stories with us! The very youngest children were somewhat shy but had the sweetest expressions. All it took was one smile or an outstretched hand and they immediately responded with faces wreathed in smiles. Coming from a culture of plenty and a throwaway society, it also gave one pause to see these children in relatively good spirits despite their somewhat meager living and school conditions.

This experience was one of the saddest ones of the trip, it alternately brought out feelings of frustration and anger that children could be betrayed by their own families out of desperation and largely by society. But it also was one of the more hopeful encounters in that at least some of the children were being rescued and looked after and even supported in their educational endeavours till they were old enough to stand on their own two feet. It also demonstrated how some of the children, like our tour guide Iqbal, over the years are able to get past some of the traumatic feelings and positively contribute to SBT by supporting younger children who newly join the SBT fold.

One wishes the social conditions which give rise to the unbearable home conditions of these children could be eradicated, that all these runaway children could be rescued and helped, that these shelters and homes offered by organizations like Salaam Baalak Trust could offer more services and more spacious conditions, like more extensive counseling, anti-smoking and drug prevention programs, improving public health and environmental conditions, and that the revenue streams could be more stable to ensure continued quality of services.

A striking point was how artistically inclined and talented many of the children are and how one of the most common themes of their art was that of a beautiful home in serene surroundings. One hopes the children have in some measure found some sense of home and serenity in Salaam Baalak Trust and that they all find or eventually have their own dream homes where they feel safe and secure.

Visits to institutions like Salaam Baalak Trust also help reinforce the need for social entrepreneurship models and new ways of looking at things to tackle some of these intractable social problems. In a sense they provide the impetus for courses and study abroad opportunities like ours at GWU and challenge us to think of ways in which to apply our academic public health training and knowledge based on real-life ground conditions.