Going to the Movies
           
Sitting on a thin gray-pink mat on the train platform, the children are waiting for us. We make our way over stones and past garbage, through a chain-link fence to what looks like an abandoned station. Along the tracks shanty houses and rows of laundry line the route a few feet from where the trains will come whizzing by.  Some of the children, ages 5-15, live here, but most don’t have homes. They are the street children of Delhi, India, a population estimated between 150,000 to one million in Delhi alone.  Some have grown up in the city and left their homes but more have stowed away on trains and arrived from the countryside or other cities looking for their future.
           
We are visiting Salaam Baalak [Salute the Children] Trust which works with these children to help return them to their families if that’s possible. But if the children have been abused or the parents have sold them to traffickers, they are not returned. In that case training, schooling and places to live are sought. 
 
Our guide is a teenager who himself had lived on the street but for whom intervention made the difference. He notes that for most children, the street will prevail. He explains that 300 trains come into Delhi every day at different stations, and the children slide off of these. If they aren’t found within a few weeks, it is difficult ever to get them back for they may be trafficked for labor or prostitution or petty thievery or just become denizens of the streets.
 
“We go to the train stations and look for the new children,” he says. “We can recognize the new ones; they are looking for help; they don’t know anyone. Kids living on the street learn how to survive, but anyone on the street for a few weeks starts to enjoy the freedom not knowing what may yet be in store.” 
 
Many of the children hide at the stations, waiting for the luxury trains to come through. While the train is stopped, they scurry into the cars to gather the discarded magazines and food which they later sell.
 
“What do you think they do with the money they get?” our guide asks.
 
“Buy food?”  someone suggests.
 
“Yes.”
 
“Buy drugs?” 
 
“Usually glue to sniff, yes.  But the largest amount of their money goes to films.”
 
“Films?”  we ask.
 
“The cinema. On Fridays when the new films come out, the children wash, clean their clothes and go to the movies!”
 
For a few hours a week the children soar away in their imaginations and exist somewhere else.  The question hovers how to feed and nourish these minds so they can in fact someday soar away and live somewhere else.
 
Elephants Are Forever
 
In the middle of one of Delhi’s larger slums the Katha Khazana School serves the community from infants to parents and focuses on pre-school through level 12.   The school is for children of the most impoverished; many are rag pickers who search through the city’s dumps with their parents for items to use or sell.
 
Children enter the brightly colored arched gateway of the Katha Khazana School into a sprawling open spaced building with courtyards and arched doorways, decorated with startlingly original art—brightly colored and friendly snakes, dragons, lions, tigers, fish–all swimming, prancing, hanging on the walls. At the end of one corridor a round-faced elephant with big pink ears and a trunk extended into the hall greets the visitors.  The art is by the children and is added to and replaced every quarter when the theme of study changes. This year’s theme, through which the curriculum of language, social studies, civics, math, science, art, etc. is focused is Sustainable Environment, and the particular focus this quarter is: Elephants Are Forever!
 
My guide Sadik started six years ago at the Katha school and now at age 18 is about to graduate and hopes to go on to college. He also  works with Katha, which has 50 early childhood centers and 96 primary schools, publishes children’s books and works with women on small income generating businesses in sewing, cooking, and teaching.  In the past years, the women have earned hundreds of millions of rupees in their projects and have been able to lift their families out of poverty.
 
“Katha started with a few children in 1988,” said Geeta Dharmarajan, executive director. “We soon realized we couldn’t change the way the slums look, but we could bring people out of them. We hope to educate the children to be leaders in their communities.”  
 
Today Katha helps children and their mothers in 72 slums and street communities across Delhi.  It is just one of many organizations working in the communities in Delhi with staff and volunteers to facilitate the transition from the street by changing first the landscape of the mind.