Couple of hours with the children @ Snehadaan (Sneha Care Home)

Last Saturday (March 25, 2017), we bought all the items for school kits (notebooks, coloring books, geometry boxes, pencils, pens, erasers, sharpeners, crayons, pencil boxes, sketch pens, rulers etc)  required for one academic year for each of the 83 kids @ Snehadaan and handed it over to the children.  All the children in the Bangalore center are aged between 6 years and 12 years, and we got the items according to the age group. Initially we thought of creating separate kit for each kid, but then ditched that idea as shopping itself took little more than 4 hours !! We got good discounts as we bought it in bulk from Metro.

 

All the children are very energetic and really smart kids. When they saw us unloading all the materials, lot of young volunteers (6-9 year old) joined and eventually they took over the whole process (no one told them to do so!!). Needless to say, they were fully excited and thrilled to see all the different items that we got for them.  The counselor  and the staff there told that they love to be engaged in such activities.  They love gardening, taking care of love birds, helping the staff with all the daily chores etc.

Snehadaan is doing an excellent job in giving them good care and training (academics, extra curricular, communication skills, leadership skills etc). What's most important for the children is the nutritional food as their immunity is very low. They said that these kids fall sick very often because of their low immunity. Hence they end up spending lot of money on their food and medicine. When they started this center few years back, they used to get lot of support from the  government. But now, the only support that government gives is by providing the HIV medicines.

All the children in the Bangalore center are from north Karnataka.  20-25 children out of 83 are orphans and a majority of the rest has only single parent. Parents are also HIV patients and all are from extremely poor background. They have a separate center @ Krishnagiri (Tamilnadu) for the kids aged between 12-18. They are trying to give job oriented training in that center based on the interests of the kids. Even though they are doing their best, they have a big concern for which they haven't found any answers yet.  It's not legal for them to keep these children once they cross 18 and their first batch is nearing 18. So, the questions for which they don't have any answers are many: 
           1) Who will give them jobs ? 
           2) Can they send back these kids to their respective native places ? 
           3) Will the society accept them ?  
           4) Will  they be able to lead a normal life ?
           5) How we can ensure that they continue to get the medicines, nutrition, treatment etc after they leave Snehadaan? 

These are the questions that we should ask ourselves and we all should help them in what ever ways we can. My initial thoughts are about enabling/training them to do a back end/data entry BPO kind of jobs from a small rehabilitation center?

In the short term, we have agreed to be there again in June to set up a garden and an aquarium for them and they are already excited about it (so are we !!). 

It's really hard to believe that those small children are living with HIV and that painful thought will keep on haunting you, even after you leave the campus after spending some time with them.

Also, spare some thoughts for all the people who are running this center (director achan, counselors, nurses, teachers, sisters and other staff). It's difficult to explain in words about their love, passion and the commitment that they have towards these small kids, you will have to go there and see/experience it yourself !!  Leaving with some pics from our visit....