Mumbai Marathon Part III. Week Eighteen.

Sorry it’s late again, I’ve just been really busy here with reports and presentations, so I’ve just not had the time to sit down and write up a blog. Hopefully what I write makes up for the 2 week break.

So now to part three of the immense Mumbai blog I’ve posted over the last few weeks.

We were booked in for one trip out of Mumbai as part of our Inter-city visit, this was to the HIV Care Community, which is 3 hours drive from Mumbai, a place called Purnata Bhavan (PB). For Ben this was possibly going to be the highlight of the trip because it was his dad who pioneered the idea of Oasis setting up this community, he also designed the community and Ben spent some of his early childhood at ‘PB’. We left from our accommodation, early on Thursday morning, we’d hired a taxi for the day, a driver called Henry who always drives for the Oasis GATs and soon we were heading out of the city, into the countryside. The scenery was stunning, it was a lot like the southern states of the US or the hilly terrain of Spain, it was beautiful to travel through, really appreciating India’s full beauty and Gods creation. We arrived at PB at around 11am, it’s located out in the ‘sticks’, with rocky hills, fertile farmland and a perfect ‘peace & quiet’ surrounding it. There is a main building that houses the office, classrooms, workshops and a hall for events, as the grounds develop; you find the medical block with bedrooms for the older children and an eating area for lunchtimes. The further two buildings are the bedroom block for the younger children and the staff quarters, all of whom live there full time. The workshops in the main building are for mothers of some of the children and for young women who are suffering from HIV to make women’s bags, purses, clothes and candles, basically PB has this small business which generates money from visitors buying the products. It’s a beautiful place, it’s so quiet, the scenery is wonderful and for the kids who live there, it’s something of a paradise. But I’ve realised some of you, maybe all of you, don’t actually know what PB is and about the work they do. Purnata Bhavan (PB) was set up about 15 years ago, as a care community for orphaned HIV children, who either suffer from the disease themselves or have lost their parents as a consequence of the disease. There are currently 25 children living at PB, with several house parents living with them and most of these children are suffering from HIV, but are given free medicines to boost their immune systems, are cared for 24/7 including 3 healthy meals a day and are either schooled within PB or attend school in the local township. My feelings as we first arrived at PB were that this was an incredible place, the work that the team are doing is fantastic and as we took a tour around the grounds it was quite clear to me that working in something like this is very close to my heart. We met some of the kids as we took the tour, they are all so full of energy, eager to get you to join in their games and just love any attention you give them. There is one little boy, Vilas, who is now immune to stage 2 meds and as the next stage of meds would cost around $100 a day, it’s just not possible to get these medicines, so as a consequence it’s only by Gods grace that Vilas is alive, he is so thin and it breaks your heart seeing children having to suffer like this. But as the day wore on, it was clear that at a centre like PB, you have to be prepared to see people go, it’s just part of HIV, some of them will live a long fulfilling life, just taking stage 1 meds, whereas others will become immune to the meds and eventually the disease will overcome them, but what PB does is give these kids a chance to have a life, which is amazing. We ate lunch with the kids, so even within an hour of spending time with them; we’d built relationships with them and discovered that there are quite a few characters! After lunch we spent the afternoon with a gorgeous little bossy girl climbing trees, searching for snakes, climbing up the massive water tank (with one boy following to the horror of the staff) and generally immersing ourselves in PB life. When it came to our time to go, we were all pretty upset as throughout the day we’d developed such strong bonds with some of the children, it was going to be hard to say goodbye, which was evident as we left in the car and Sunita (the bossy girl) literally grabbed onto the car as we drove off, trying to hold onto the window, it was upsetting to see, but made me realise how needy these children are and how God has placed a compassion in my heart for working with kids in similar situations. If PB staff asked me to live and work with them for any period of time, I wouldn’t hesitate in saying yes, I just totally fell in love with the place, but more importantly the children.

Our final visit to an Oasis Mumbai project was to the anti-traffiking office in Northern Mumbai and this was another brilliant learning experience. The office is also doubles as a half-way house for women that decide to come out of prostitution due to the work that Aruna (see last blog) does in the red light areas. We were set to spend the day with Laura, mostly learning what anti-traffiking is about, but also helping out the office with an exercise in locating towns throughout India where people are reported missing and consequently discovered working in slave type situations or as prostitutes. We found out the extent of what the traffiking industry is worth per year in India and it’s somewhere around the region of 800 crores (£110 million) and is the second biggest crime industry after drug smuggling. So it was really interesting and challenging to hear about how trafficking occurs, where the people traffiked end up and how people are traffiked. Oasis works to stop this; they have four stages of this process and are educating the people that could potentially be affected on traffiking. My favourite way of stopping the traffik is when they send some boys who have been rescued to patrol the train stations, especially if a tip-off has been registered and then because the boys have experienced traffiking, they know what to spot. Once they see a potential traffiking situation, they try and talk to the people being traffiked, then get the police involved, although the police are so corrupt that sometimes other problems occur. Once the victims are rescued, they are required by law to live in a Government care home for a one year period, where Oasis are now setting up a teaching program within one of the homes because most of the people traffiked haven’t received much of an education. Oasis are also setting up another half-way home near a town in between Bangalore & Chennai, which will serve as a retreat for both traffiked victims and rescued prostitutes, somewhere safe and comfortable for them to recover. So there was lots we learnt during the morning and our task for the afternoon was to mark on a map of India & Bangladesh, the locations where people traffiked live, to get an idea of how the traffikers work. Our day was enlightening because I really didn’t have any idea about traffiking and this day really served as an eye opener to what is going on in the world and what people will do for money. It really is a big bad world out there.

Our last day in Mumbai was spent attending the Mumbai Marathon, where Oasis India had an entry in the Half-marathon and also in the Dream Run (6km run/walk) where 150 people associated with Oasis took part. It was great fun seeing the Chennai Team (10 of them came up to run & watch) who had been in Mumbai most of the week too; seeing similar projects that we’d seen and then participated in the Marathon along with the Bangalore Team too. We then spent the afternoon with Jeanie (Heads up Education for Oasis), relaxing, eating, swimming and watching West Ham play, but throughout all of this, I still couldn’t forget what I’d seen during the week and I don’t think I ever will forget the incredible experience of Mumbai.

I hope you’ve all enjoyed reading this 2/3 part blog and I’ll be posting up one more blog before I return and hopefully this will summarise my time here, highlighting what I’ve learnt and how I’ve changed.

Much love and God Bless,

Tom xxx