Six-year-old Fiza grabbed her five-year-old sister Saniya by the hand as they scrambled over a couple of basketball-size chunks of concrete studded with rusting rebar. They were heading home after tuition class where they would find dal and rice left out for them on th...

Why are you punishing me? You have no education. At least I can write my name, a quivering Sachin retorted to his mother after she beat him with a belt for receiving low marks on his recent school tests.

Sachin, his eyes still moist, sat sniffling in embarrassment and p...

See a need and fill it….The Dirty Wall Project provides rations for those whose cupboards are empty because of no job, extra family members coming to live in spaces already crowded, illness, and malnourished children. Below are some profiles of a few of the families we...

What does a mirror, an elevator, and a bus ride all have in common? That’s all it took to make fifty-two kids pretty happy. Add some rides, a fancy mall, brand-name fast food (yes, McDonald’s), a giant bouncy castle and bumper cars and the fifty-two kids are ecstatic....

Her mother showed up at the school the day after she gave Suman away. 

As Suman was telling me how happy she was, I noticed her mother walking up the road when I peeked out from inside the rickshaw where Suman and I were sitting, the rickshaw about to pull away. Some gi...

“Do you like Mumbai?”, a teacher inquired of us while we were waiting at Nandchhaya School to watch students perform a Navratri dance. 
 

“Yes, yes, we do”, we insisted and backed it up with an additional nod of our heads. 
 

“Oh, that is so nice, but I am so sorry for t...

Indu will never be out of a job as our translator. 

Our best efforts at learning Hindi might be thwarted by the short time we’ve allotted ourselves at the Landour Language school in Mussoorie. Located in Uttarakhand in northern India, it sits at 6500 feet; the altitude...

A week after their home was bulldozed along with a few hundred other homes, twelve-year-old Omkar insisted we drink a cup of chai with his family in their new hut. His weary mother, a fourteen-year-old brother, an older sister and Omkar moved into the hut near the rive...

In June, Noorsaba and Dinesh started school for the first time. They are the first of six children in their family to go to school and will soon be able to read to their illiterate, hard-working parents. Samitchka, Sneha and Pritesh who live close to each other along t...

Kai-Li and Suman’s lives couldn’t be more different or more similar. Both girls are pre-teen, precocious, curious, beautiful, innocent, lively and intelligent. They both love to work with their hands to create trinkets, make doll clothes and paint and draw. They both h...