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.