Monthly Archives: May 2014

GUEST POST – See you in Savarsai

Robin Cappuccino is currently visiting all of the Child Haven homes and programs overseas. He has been kind enough to share a glimpse of his journey with us.

Greetings from Child Haven International’s Home for 48 formerly destitute children in Savarsai, India. Savarsai is a small village, several hours drive from the Mumbai airport, where our flight lands. Ajit, our usual driver, picks us up in his 4WD Toyota, for the stimulating journey to the Home. The dotted lines between lanes appear to be for decoration purposes only. Often 5 or 6 rows of traffic, including motorized rickshaws, motorcycles, bicycles, the occasional ox-cart, massive 2-wheeled carts pulled by sinewy men, buses and trucks, are packed into what the less adventurous back home might utilize for only 2. Of course here there are many more people going many more places in a great multitude of conveyances. There also is less personal space in general, and that certainly applies to a very intimate sharing of roadways. This is most dramatically experienced in the amount of distance considered necessary to pass vehicles as well as the required vision of the road ahead for that to be deemed a good idea. Fortunately oncoming traffic generally is familiar with this approach to road-sharing and are experienced and adept at quickly riding off onto the shoulder usually without slowing down as the need may arise. All of this is accomplished, and is perhaps only possible, with the use of maximal and near constant hornage. The application of this auditory information and feed-back cannot not be over-estimated in this process. It stands to reason that the use of an additional sense would be advisable if not required in such closely careening quarters. Avoidance of accident reports in the local paper tends to contribute to a more relaxed trip. Fortunately, Ajit is a skillful practitioner, and we make it to the Home once again. It may also help that there is a workshop producing plaster statues of the Hindu God Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, right next to the Home.

Bonniema’s arrival is greeted with great excitement as carrom and cricket games are temporarily abandoned while we shake 48 outstretched hands. The little kids delight in shaking hands repeatedly especially when one shakes 2 or 3 hands simultaneously. We are introduced to several new children including one little boy whose mother, we are later told, brought him to the Home after she had been abandoned by her husband who threw her into the fire before he left. She was still covered in scars. Her five-year-old son had somehow figured out how to support them both selling ice-cream in the street while she convalesced. His cheerful presence gave no indication of his having had this challenging set of experiences.

One of the other kids, Indika, age 7, is quick to show us how well she has learned to climb the metal poles supporting the porch roof. She has learned to hold herself up using just her feet. This skill was doubtless perfected as she and other kids climbed and scoured the top-most branches of our mango trees for ripening fruit. It is mango season in India, and there is no worry about mangoes from our trees over-ripening and going to waste as they are constantly monitored, by dozens of keen eyes and harvested at the first hint of ripeness. Tiny Indika’s dexterity and fearlessness in tree-climbing is near legendary. The bananas ripening near the new library room reach a greater degree of ripeness as they are not quite as extraordinary a treat. The same is true of the jackfruit protruding tumor-like from the trunk of a neighbor’s tree.

It being school vacation, the kids busy themselves with all manner of play in the yard. A great deal of enjoyment is found with an abandoned garden hose, which gets cut up and fashioned into swings for the jungle-gym. Hirakani, a care-giver for the girls, ramps up her status with everyone, by hitting a cricket ball out of the yard when she steps up to bat. The night-watchman and soya-milk maker, Icha’s, 2-year-old daughter, Karyshma, is thrilled to be given pen and paper to begin her writing career.

A highlight of the visit for me is a play put on by some of the older kids about saving girl children. Foeticide of female fetuses remains a wide-spread plague. While the use of ultrasound and subsequent operations for this purpose is strictly illegal, the practice persists. In Mumbai, the ratio of girls to boys is 874 to 1,000. An estimated 15 million girls were simply not born in India over the last decade. The play presents a family discussion on the impending birth of a girl child. At the conclusion of the play, Divya, age 16, gives an impassioned soliloquy in Marathi demanding to know why girl children are not wanted. As translated to me she states, “Now, women are doctors, lawyers, engineers. We can do anything men can do. Plus we take better care of our parents. There is no reason for girls not to be born!” In any language it was clearly a passionate declaration. Judging by the spontaneous applause, it was an articulate and meaningful one as well. Purveyors of injustice take note – a new generation of truth-speakers is well on their way.

 

Until next time,

Robin Cappuccino for CHI

 

Stay tuned for another ‘glimpse of the journey’ as Robin continues his travels through the CHI homes in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Tibet.

GUEST POST – Hyderabad Hello’s

Robin Cappuccino is currently visiting all of the Child Haven homes and programs overseas. He has been kind enough to share a glimpse of his journey with us.

 

Greetings from Child Haven International’s Home for 225 formerly destitute children in Hyderabad, India. Bonniema and I arrive for the climax of the Home’s Summer Program, planned for the school vacation period. It has lasted for the past several weeks. Just after dawn, on our first day, the boy’s cricket and girl’s “kabbadi” finals take place in the comparatively “cooler” early morning, (the temperature reaches 109 degrees Fahrenheit by mid-afternoon). Kabbadi is a traditional Indian game in which team members who cross over into the other team’s half of the playing field are not supposed to take a breath until they return to their side. They repeat “kabaddi, kabbadi, kabbadi,” over and over so the referee knows they’re not breathing in. Both games are played with great enthusiasm and vigor and are the culmination of multiple earlier games. The second early morning, boys’ volleyball, and girl’s “kho kho” finals are held. Kho kho, another popular Indian game involves lots of mad dashes between seated players, with much laughter and shouting from the side-lines. Kabaddi and kho kho require no special equipment, but great attention is given to measuring out a playing field marked with light sand on the clay dirt of the playground.
After breakfast, carrom finals, girl’s and boy’s, are held. Carrom, a kind of table billiards, popular in almost all our homes, is played by flicking disks with your fingers into corner pockets of the playing board. These games are played with intense concentration and quite a bit of advice, cheering and commiseration from the assembled enthusiasts.

The dining hall is freshly decorated with posters from a competition based on protecting the environment. These could be posters from anywhere in the world highlighting the dangers of air and water pollution from industry and careless human behavior, but with an Indian orientation. They focus on concerns like keeping rivers clean so that water buffalo have a safe place to eat and bathe. Providing milk rich in fat and protein, water buffalo are also harnessed to plow rice paddies, and eat aquatic plants that could otherwise take over rivers and streams.
The afternoons progress with the little kids playing in the shade, while the cooks escape the heat of the rice and dahl cooking in the kitchen by bringing vegetables out on the dining hall porch to chop in the light breeze. Pockets of girls sit and comb each other’s hair and carom continues to entertain.

Later in the day a water truck brings a load of drinking water to fill the reservoir in the courtyard, much to the delight of the littler boys. The water available from the town pipeline is suitable for washing and bathing but not pure enough to drink. It is the great multiplicity of these kinds of expenses for our 1,300 Child Haven kids that keeps our monthly donations just barely able to keep up with monthly expenses.

We also receive a visit from the husband-to-be of a staff member who grew up at the Home. He arrives with several of his family members. Their upcoming wedding is a source of much anticipation on the part of both children and staff. As Child Haven is the bride’s only family, we take on the traditional duties of a bride’s family; discussing her future living situation, making sure that she will be allowed to continue working (which is her desire), and agreeing to provide pots and pans, a bed, table and chairs and other basic household items traditionally provided by the bride’s parents. We also make clear that we do not believe in dowries, which does not appear to be a problem. After consultation with a Hindu priest to determine auspicious days, it is decided that the wedding will be at the Home, in several months and Bonniema will schedule her next trip accordingly. Everyone seems quite pleased with the deliberations.

Our final evening features a dance performance, much singing, a play and a prize ceremony. Fortunately, all the kids receive a prize. Staff members have picked out a variety of beautiful and practical prizes including new towels, drinking cups, pens, belts and ribbons which are handed out with great fanfare.

As I walk to my rooftop room for the night, the full moonlight, miraculously the same as the full moonlight I have enjoyed so many times, so many miles away, brings both a sense of longing for and connection with, loved ones far away. The gentle glow encircling, illuminating, conjoining all of us on this wondrous spinning sphere.

 

Until next time,

Robin Cappuccino for CHI

 

Stay tuned for another ‘glimpse of the journey’ as Robin continues his travels through the CHI homes in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Tibet.

GUEST POST – Keeping cool in Kaliyampoondi

Robin Cappuccino is currently visiting all of the Child Haven homes and programs overseas. He has been kind enough to share a glimpse of his journey with us.

 

Greetings from Kaliyampoondi, India and Child Haven’s largest Children’s Home, with 316 formerly destitute children. Once again I am travelling with my mother, Bonnie Cappuccino, Child Haven’s International Director, whose 80th birthday we recently celebrated.

Morning comes early at our Kaliyampoondi Home. When I get up to look around a little before 6, Tamil Selvi, a children’s care-giver, has already drawn a rangoli with rice flour on the ground outside our door. This swirling blessing will be appreciated and walked over the entire day, only to be swept away by Tamil Selvi before she draws another pattern the next dawn.

By 6, the kids are gathered for a morning non-denominational prayer in the dining hall, and then line up for cups of fresh soya milk, which Johnson has gotten up at 3 to prepare. Clusters of girls sit and drink their soya milk on the dining hall verandah, a few of them chatting with Pam Hellstrom, a volunteer intern from Ontario. Groups of boys prefer the big sand pile in front of the new girl’s dorm now under construction.

Taking advantage of the cooler morning air, some of our older girls, back at the Home for their summer break from college, help clear construction debris from inside the new dorm. We keep a watch out for scorpions and the small poisonous snakes that might have moved into the broken piles of bricks we are moving. The last time I was here, a boy helping move some fire-wood for the kitchen, was bitten by a scorpion and rushed to the health clinic down the road. We see only toads.

The girls, actually young women, are studying a range of courses; Juli is in the final year of a Bachelor of Commerce degree, and Nirmama Devi is studying English with the hope of becoming an English Teacher. In addition to Pam interning here, my little sister Kim Chi’s daughter Krystal is here for 3 months. In several days she has managed to learn more Tamil (the predominate language in this part of India) than I have learned in the past 14 years of visits. Maybe it has something to do with already being fluent in Vietnamese, French and English, or maybe, (probably), she’s just a lot sharper than her uncle. In addition to learning Tamil, Krystal has been hard at work learning names, helping Kuttiyamal and the other cooks in the kitchen and learning some interesting variations on jump-rope.

On the roof of the dining hall, where I go to watch the sunrise, a tarp of chilies from the garden, dry in the hot sun. I am told they will last for less than a week of cooking for the 400 or so people Kuttiyamal and crew cook for each day. This is my first visit in the heat of the Indian summer. I am discovering the rhythm changes the searing heat brings to activities in the Home. Heavy work, and strenuous play (cricket, volleyball) where possible, happen early and late in the day. On my first day in Kaliyampoondi I wondered where all the kids had gotten to around 2 PM, and took a look into the boy’s dorm to see everyone sound asleep.

As I often complain to the kids, the hot sun wreaks havoc quickly on my relatively useless skin which lacks the melanin present in darker skin to protect it from the sun’s rays. I don’t tend to get a lot of sympathy though, the $500 million dollar a year scourge of skin whitening and bleaching products speak to a pervasive prejudice against darker, more sun-resistant skin. Massive advertising campaigns of corporations such as Unilever, purveyor of Fair and Lovely, Pond’s White Beauty and the Vaseline and Dove whitening products capitalize on racial inequities and foster a sense of inferiority while marketing products that are dangerous and or ineffectual.

A Gandhian activist visiting the Home, described how darker skin can affect everything from finding a husband or wife, to finding a job, driving some misguided mothers to apply skin whitening baby oil to their precious infants. Perhaps vestiges of colonial or caste inequities, these biases are being strongly challenged by the Dark is Beautiful Campaign among others. Certainly whitening products are not welcome in any of Child Haven’s Homes, where, as the photos attest, each of our children is the most beautiful child in the world.

Until next time,

Robin Cappuccino for CHI

 

Stay tuned for another ‘glimpse of the journey’ as Robin continues his travels through the CHI homes in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Tibet.