Below, we will present the linchpin of our club – the projects, which we support in India. Every single of them has its own individual emphasis and special impression on us. Our time there was both a moving and lasting experience. We advise everyone, who can effort such a journey somehow, to visit these institutions – the kids alone are worth it!
(Street Kids‘ Community Villages)
...was founded in 1984 by Matthew Norton, respectively Sriman Manihara, who grew up in Great Britain and fled at the age of 16 to escape from the school system, which was oppressive in his eyes. In this time he was homeless himself. Currently, the projects consist of a girls’ centre, Amodini, and one for boys, Prema Vihar. Beside these villages, which present a permanent accommodation and a new home for the kids, there is a night shelter, Santosh Bhavan, as a first contact point. Altogether the project cares for circa 200 children at the age of 5 – 19 years, who ran away from home, live on the street and/or were separated from their families by the chaos of an Indian rail station. Extraordinary: since Manihara’s dead, called pataji (=father), young people are active in the management of SKCV – they are former street kids themselves, lived in the project and got a new perspective at the hands of it. They managed to redeploy the focus of donations from Great Britain to India, which renders SKCV independent and ongoing.
Further information: www.skcv.org
(Vasavya Mahila Mandali)
...fights for female empowerment and children’s rights in respect of social, economical and political aspects – thus, it is a true forerunner organisation in India, for more than 40 years. The focus is on support for children, who are affected by HIV and Aids and/or lost their parents because of that. Our VMM partner project exactly implements this idea with a children’s village a little distance outside of Vijayawada. There lives a community of 70 – 90 girls, who are either directly or indirectly affected by Aids. Defined goal is to enable these girls to live a "normal" life as far as possible. In wide sections of the population the knowledge about HIV and Aids or the transmission of the disease is barely-there, which leads to prejudices and baseless fears. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the concerned girls are outcasts and even the children’s village is avoided by outsiders. Thus, the pleasure about every visitor is overwhelming. We felt more than welcome and had a wonderful time, which confirmed us to support VMM, a pioneer of equality and education, and especially the girls’ village.
Further information: www.vasavya.org
(Children Toy Foundation)
...was founded in Mumbai in 1982 by Devendra Shivlal Desai, an enthusiastic chess player, whose main business is selling paper. The elderly gentleman, single and childless, likes to explain, that the games are his children and Toy Foundation is his wife. For more than 20 years he collects donations in the form of games of all sorts. With childlike excitement he – of course – tests all of them himself and there is no visiting time in his office passing by without playing at least one game. Yet, the organisation is as convincing as the founder. The Toy Foundation has set itself to offer slum kids, who can often only dream about own toys, the possibility of playing together. Therefore, the organisation constructed four unique buses, which regularly make a stop in respective city zones – bulging with games and stuffed animals – even the outer walls of these vehicles can be used as playboards. That is the only carefree time in a tough everyday life for many of children, who benefit. Moreover, the Toy Foundation managed to entrench playrooms in several slum schools. Hundreds of games and toys are stored there, that are used at specified playing times supervised by dedicated employees of the Toy Foundation. Dancing and singing are also inherent parts of those game hours. All in all, the Toy Foundation absolutely deserves to be supported and sponsored in future.
Further information: www.childrentoyfoundation.org
(Navajeevan Bala Bhavan)
...is part of the Don-Bosco-Order and was founded in 1989 by Father Thomas Koshy. In 2012 a change of leadership took place: now Father Balashowry, who is dedicated to the same aims as Father Koshy and who has been working for Navajeevan for several years, assumes management. The vision of the association is a society, which respects the welfare of children and their right of life, protection, development and participation. For this reason, Navajeevan created a lot of aid projects for children over the last years. Inside the rail station, which is one of the most important traffic junctions in southern India with approximately 200 trains per day, the organisation is represented by a small shelter. Employees of Navajeevan deliberately pick up children, who either came here being already homeless or who were just separated from their relatives by the excitement of the crowds. During our short visit we observed, that two new boys were brought to the shelter within a few minutes, two more had recently arrived. We also spent one afternoon in the children’s village of Navajeevan and by the way we got to know a few volunteers. The association is the biggest provider of volunteer work in Vijayawada and permanently employs 5-11 volunteers in different projects.
If you want to become a volunteer and help actively we can arrange the contact with Navajeevan.
Further information: www.njbb.org
...is an organisation, which orientates itself by the ministry of missionary Mother Teresa, who got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 because of her self-sacrificing help for the poor, homeless and invalids. The sisters of the order follow Mother Teresa’s impressive example and do an outstanding job in several institutions in Vijayawada, e.g. in an asylum for tuberculosis sufferers. Without the sisters’ care they would have neither access to social nor medical support. For "du für alle" (you for all) especially two of the projects are the focus of attention: a nursing ward for profoundly disabled children, who are completely expelled from Indian society, and a boys’ village. There the 8-18 years old live together as a community, comparable with SKCV.
"du für alle" e.V.
c/o Friedo Hehmann
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