Arrival in Delhi
on Margaret Campbell's Rambles (India), 08/Aug/2009 05:03, 34 days ago
 Twilight found dozens of kites flying high over Old Delhi, and hundreds settling down for the night on the pavement outside the largest mosque in the city. As middle class Indians return to their homes for supper and rest, the homeless come into focus. I am in Delhi to complete the cycle of training that VSO provides its (paid) volunteers. As part of the in-country training we went on an evening field trip to observe AAA, a program for homeless men, mostly 18 - 30 (only 1% of homeless people are women in India.) AAA provides a safe place to sleep and medical care for 30 - 40 thousand young men who have migrated to Delhi for work, casual labor that often doesn't provide enough compensation for basic needs. To eat, the homeless must rely on the charity of the mosques and temples. The culmination of our tour was one of AAA's shelters for abandoned children. See snaps below. There are no other shelter programs in Delhi for these kids, so AAA expanded their program to include them. They go to formal k - 12 school and live and sleep in a big room divided from the men, no adults (except staff) allowed! They did plays and sang songs for us and the evening ended with all participating in a lively round of the hokey pokey. As is often the case in India, regulations work against this disadvantaged population, as in order to enroll in school, a child must have a permanent address and parents to sign. The leader of the AAA program goes to court to formalize his guardianship of each individual child and gives the shelter address for registration. Similarly, AAA had to get permission from the courts to open bank accounts for the men. If they sleep on the street, their money is stolen, either by the police or by other homeless people. Thus, it's typical for them to use it to buy alcohol instead, as either way, it will be gone by morning. When offered the opportunity to bank wages, many create their own ladder to a more stable life. In many ways, the problems of the homeless here resemble what we see in San Francisco, but more brutal. The men migrate to Delhi for work when there is none at home but they do not have the language, education, personal connections or resources to do more than casual labor, and the lack of safe shelter at night puts them at risk of robbery and violence . Friday morning I had my first language lesson in Oriya. It is the native tongue in Orissa and related to Sanskrit, like most of the other Indian languages. We have no textbook and there is no Oriyan dictionary published in arabic script (Oriyan, like Hindi, is written in a fancy-dancy script we have no hope of mastering in a matter of weeks.) It follows many patterns of the 5 other languages I have studied but failed to learn so I am quite comfortable following along, understanding the rules and memorizing the vocabulary but utterly unable to speak. Fortunately, I can read an Indian menu already so I don't need classes to order Bhaigan Bharta.