The Green Tara Project

For those of you who may be curious to know what kind of circumstances could possibly lead to a girl being sold by her family, or abducted and trafficked without recourse, here are a few I witnessed in Mumbai:

Mother and daughter living in a traffic median (Mumbai, 2012).

Makeshift sidewalk housing (Mumbai, 2012).

Makeshift housing (Mumbai, 2012).

With pictures like these, it is, unfortunately, not difficult to imagine the life of people who have come to live in these conditions.  So let’s try.  I invite you, for a few moments, to put yourself in their shoes.  Imagine yourself a young woman of perhaps 17 years of age, married for three years to a man who has come to Mumbai from a rural area to make a better living for his family.  Disease overtakes your husband and he dies, leaving you with a small child, no education, no money, no family.  You might also only speak a language from your rural tribal area, and so are further isolated linguistically, unable to communicate with many of the people who surround you.  You pick through garbage heaps for food or anything to sell.  Needing a place to live, you seek an unoccupied space in your area – no small feat when the sidewalks are already crowded with families already in similar circumstances.  What’s left besides the sidewalk?  A traffic median, or open ground under the stairs at the train station, perhaps.

It is barely imaginable, and incredibly uncomfortable to even think about.

But then, miraculously, come these islands of girls at Project Crayons and Save Our Sisters and Kranti, girls whose circumstances, with the incredible help and dedication of Mrs. Josephs, and Robin Chaurasiyas, and other program managers and house mothers, are being interrupted and re-made.   And I have hope that things can change, and indeed are changing.  Food for thought.