Fifteen Years

Welcoming us to their home.

India is a beast of a county to comprehend.  Fifteen years have passed since we first walked into this ever shifting, makeshift community of migrants who left their rural villages to take a chance in the mega city of Mumbai. We’ve learned a few things about them, and about us. It’s been a wild ride, full to the brim of head shaking moments, emotional upheavals that we thought we might not recover from, and so many triumphs in terms of the opportunity to pay school fees for girls, and help families in crisis.  The decisions that we’ve made along the way have been difficult, and easy, and everything in-between. The cultural divide is wide and deep, especially when it comes to the problems of women and girls. We’ve learned that we have to listen and learn from the families about what they need. We’re still here 15 years later, still learning, and still enthusiastic about what we can accomplish when we listen and learn.

So what have we learned? 

What to Do?

It’s been difficult to acknowledge that we can’t help everyone with everything they need. In conversation with friends and strangers about DWP, we’re often asked how we help, who we help, and why we make the decisions we do. A comment we often receive is, “Perhaps school fees should be the only help you give.” When we’re face to face with parents needing help for all things including school books, school uniforms, dental care for a family member whose teeth are causing them great pain, money for rations because of the sudden death of the wage earner in their family, an accident requiring hospital care, or the gift of better sight for the many people in the community who suffer from cataracts, we listen to them, ask questions, consult with Indu, and then figure out how to help them. Their problems affect our hearts first. “What to do?” is a saying we hear often in India when something is not going well. When someone is standing in front of us needing immediate help, they are already in crisis. We do what we can do to relieve the burden. How much financial help we give to each person is the next choice we make. Every person and every problem has a different solution.

Mehndi ritual for a Muslim wedding.

Not Our Culture

We find it especially difficult to accept that women in the community live within the confines of a patriarchal society. It doesn’t matter what we think about the inequality, the collective despair, or the caste system, all so prevalent in this very traditional community. We’ve learned that we have to work within the boundaries of what the culture allows and respect the decisions of those needing the help. We understand and have witnessed that women can face ramifications (moral outrage, shunning, and in extreme instances, murder, or suicide) if they defy caste traditions and the rules of their husband and his family. It’s so important for Indu to lead our conversations with the families, providing culturally relevant insight that will determine how we can help and who we can help. We know to take a deep breath and reel in our emotions for tough conversations and difficult situations where we must acquiesce to the culture, or risk making the problem much worse for the woman.

Off to school. Closing the educational disparity gap for girls.

Education For Girls

If we’re here for anything it’s the chance to provide an opportunity for girls to receive an education, no matter how long we think they’ll be able to continue to attend school. A brief education is better than none. Many parents in the community are illiterate and require nudging to realize how important it is to educate their daughters alongside the education they strive to provide for their sons. We’ve learned that gentle persuasion, along with the promise of removing the enormous financial burden required to educate their daughter up to the 10th standard, clinches the decision for parent’s to send them to school. It’s a beautiful, full circle moment, when the parents proudly show us their daughter’s report card, along with a collection of trophies and awards, and find their rightful place in the audience alongside us and the other parents to watch her graduate from the 10th standard.

Vijay and Jyoti holding their daughter Samiksha's school awards at Annual Day.

Schemes, Bribes and Slumlords

We often get asked if we’ve read Shantaram, the hefty novel written by Gregory David Roberts, an Australian ex-con, about his time spent hiding out in the slums of Mumbai. It’s part truth/part fiction, illuminating the dark side of slum communities and the people who pray upon them. There are slumlords in this community. There are drug dealers and petty criminals, usually young boys enlisted and bolstered by the promise of quick money, or at least a thrill.  We know who the bad guys are, and we know that their business isn’t our business. They have respect for what we’re doing in the community and they sometimes ask us for help for a friend or family member, but we don’t get involved with schemes, bribes, or paybacks to them no matter how dire the situation becomes for a family.  

“Schemes” are funds that groups of families manage where each family pays a very small agreed upon amount to the scheme each month to an appointed person who holds the funds. A Scheme Account is a way for families to stay away from nefarious lenders and instead use the money from the more family friendly scheme. Funds can be accessed from the Scheme Account for emergencies, but they must find a way to pay it back to the fund.  To help offset their indebtedness to the Scheme, Bribes or slumlords, we provide help with medical fees, school fees, food rations, and rent money.

Our home in Mumbai.

We Know a Guy Who Knows a Guy

Years ago, we met with a realtor who was happy to show us apartments in fancy buildings filled with aspirational middle class families. We’ve lived in a few of those buildings over the years and enjoyed the relative space, western toilet, TV, refrigerator, and sometimes a portable washing machine. When one year he was too busy to help us out, some of the women in the slum community gathered together to solve our problem. They asked a guy who knew a guy who could help us secure a place to live. The guy, Akshay, works with his father out of a dingy ground floor office located in a seven storey building in a colony of identical time-worn buildings. He showed us a different kind of apartment building, populated with a mix of office workers and owners of small shops. The apartments are nothing more than one room with a shelf with a built-in sink for a kitchen, a bathroom with a squat toilet and a tap to fill a bucket for a bath. As you can imagine, the rent is cheap; half the cost of the fancy building apartments. These unfurnished apartments always need the kind of scrubbing that peels paint off the walls, the removal of the last person’s left-over belongings, and the replacement of a few missing lightbulbs. The neighbours greet us with warmth and a profusion of curiosity. We buy a floor mattress, pillows, and some sheets from the neighbourhood shops, gather the few dishes and pots we’ve stored at Indu’s, and happily settle in. Instead of being tucked behind gates well away from the noise of the streets, these apartment buildings face the street abuzz twenty four hours a day with celebrations, feral dogs, food stalls, small shops selling everything we could need, honking auto rickshaws, and supercharged political rallies, and most evenings we get a pyrotechnic display of fireworks. Eventually, the fruit and vegetable vendors offer us the same price as the locals, and the children in the area invite us to celebrations in their buildings.  After a long day in the community, we can choose to watch the night scenes unfold from our window, or head out and immerse ourselves in the vibrant street life that provides us with entertainment until well past midnight. 

We’ve remained friends with the first realtor who’s the guy who knows a guy or two who serve epic food creations from stalls in far flung parts of the city. As we careen around the city in his car late into the night, driving past fancy skyscrapers and wretched scenes, we’ve learned about his world. He’s high caste, male, born to wealth, and has a distinctly different take on modern India from his lofty perch of privilege. His household help, his personal driver, the security guard outside his complex, and his child’s nanny, all live in slum communities. There are millions of people living in slums in Mumbai, employed to serve the middle class and the wealthy, for pay they can’t possibly live on, without job security, who can be terminated for the smallest offence. Our foodie friend has never been to a slum community.

Saki Naka Pipeline Road

Guests are God

We can draw a crowd into a restaurant, be encircled by strangers in small shops as we negotiate prices, and feel like a celebrity along Pipeline Road. There aren’t many foreigners wandering the streets of Saki Naka, so we attract an unnerving amount of attention. Staring is an art form in India, and although it can be intimidating, it’s meant as a show of interest in a foreigner, and to satisfy their curiosity.  We’re rarely alone for long when someone is eager to walk with us and toss personal questions our way. “From which country are you?” “What is your good name?” “How much money do you make?” “Do you like India? “What is your purpose?” “Where are you going?” “Where do you stay?” It’s a friendly conversation and when their curiosity is satisfied they wish us “very well” and disappear among the throngs of pedestrians on the street, happy that they’ve welcomed a guest to India. At the end of the day, our resilience to questions and bold stares has waned and we’re ready to close our door, make a simple meal, and listen to music that soothes our frazzled selves. But Mumbai has other plans. The city seeps through our windows and under our door. We can smell the neighbour’s pungent spice mix simmering on their stovetop and hear them chopping onions. We can hear the high-pitched voices of actors on a night time soap opera playing loudly on their television, and smell the jasmine incense from their nighttime puja rituals. Mumbai never lets us forget that we are in a maximum city, and that we are most welcome guests, but as guests, we are only at our best when we find a way to be calm among the chaos, at least until we hear an insistent knock at our door, usually children who’ve yet to speak to the foreigners. 

Patience and Personal Space

Everyone is always late. Is it the traffic or the culture or both? We’ve learned that if we don’t charge through a crowd we’ll be left standing on a train platform, someone will get our rickshaw, and we’ll always be in a spot at the end of a never ending line. So we do what everyone does - squeeze in, get ahead, move through the crowd, not with it. There’s a type of patience and civility here despite the collective pushing to be first because of scarcity of seats on a train or a bus, or shopping at a food stall, or paying school fees. We’ve learned that if we don’t push in to get in, we’d accomplish very little in a day. Once the race to be near the front of the line is somewhat secure, there’s no animosity from those left behind. It’s a game of strategy, and it’s invigorating.  Some days we win, and some days we’re literally left standing in the dust of a departing rickshaw, or among the throngs of people left standing on the train platform. This is why everyone is always late. Always. And personal space? There is none.

Women helping women.

It’s Captivating

We’re entangled in every way in the daily lives of the community which always includes some juicy gossip. There’s nothing like a gathering of women dressed in saris and salwar kameez, sitting cross legged in Indu’s home, talking about the pulse of the community. Their bracelets tinkle as they wave their arms in spirited conversations bursting with rumours about other women’s husbands, lost jobs, jealousies, the sadness over a death, the mournful news of a new mother who gave birth to another daughter, how much a dowry costs, the cost of rent, the ongoing problems with the water supply, and which politician is giving gifts out in favour of a vote.  We’re invited to celebrations, religious events, death rituals, births, and weddings, which require us to understand the customs of both Muslims and Hindus. We know now that after witnessing a Muslim death ritual our legs and feet must be washed before we step inside a Hindu home. We know we’re not allowed to make noise or cry during the viewing of a deceased person or their soul will delay their departure which in turn will cause mayhem to the living. We keep our emotions buried deep until we’re alone and allow the sadness to wash over us. 

Neighbours wait outside the home of a deceased woman to pay respect.

Lunch invitation.

An invitation to have food with a family, no matter how long we’ve known them, means that as guests we’ll eat first and the family will eat after we leave, sharing what’s left. We know to protest when they try to ladle more food on our cleaned plates, and have learned that a simple Hindi phrase, “mera pet bhara hai” (I am full), is how to stop the delicious gravy train so that there’s plenty left for the family to eat.

Language

Yes, I’ve learned some Hindi - enough so that I can tell if someone is speaking Marathi (the native language of the state of Maharashtra), or Urdu (the language of Muslims), and to understand most of a Hindi conversation. I can speak rudimentary Hindi with a two year old and swear at a cheating auto rickshaw driver.  The children are brutal in their assessment of my language learning skills, and yet I remain a willing target for their animated pleasure. We’re immensely thankful that many of the children attend English Medium schools, and that Indu’s English speaking skills are excellent, allowing little to be left to translation.

Embracing Noise and Fearing Dogs

I don’t know what decibel level is too much for the human ear, but I know that Mumbai is loud. There’s a continuous level of noise twenty four hours a day - traffic (HONKING), people chatter, dogs barking, bells tinkling, vendors shouting out their wares, religious parades, wedding processions with brass bands, squealing brakes on busses and large trucks, engines revving, fireworks….. It’s a tangle of cacophony that is as irritating as it is comforting to us. Quiet is not something we expect in this mega city populated with millions of humans roaming the streets trying to survive another day, so we embrace the noise. 

When we can’t sleep, it’s usually because feral street dogs roam in packs and howl into the night, fighting each other, drawing blood and letting the pain out with high-pitched yelping. By five in the morning they’ve found some shade to curl up in, licked a puddle, and are content to wait until dark to deal with their enemies. If we’re out late at night we ask the auto driver to get us close to our building so we can make a dash for the entrance. Rabies is a thing here.

Becoming Vegetarian

If you didn’t grow up in India, or don’t have the natural immunities of a small child who’s used to the different standards of hygiene, or tend to look away at a goat carcass dripping blood in the street, or can’t stomach the visceral smell of the filthy chicken trucks stuffed with skeletal chickens with fear in their eyes, or the street side chicken vendor stalls where live chickens wait in cages below the counter where their pals are killed, their blood dripping into the cage, the only way forward is to become vegetarian. I’ve learned years ago to plead my case that I am “veg only”. I don’t have force myself to eat goat stew, or chewy chicken, or fish that was cooked hours ago and left to cool in the humidity and heat of the city without refrigeration. Families in the community love to invite us in for food and they want to treat us with a meal of meat of some kind, even if they’re vegetarian. Indu, who’s vegetarian, pleads with them on our behalf to serve “veg only”. We are thankful for her every day.

Just When We Think We Understand 

Every day out on the street, we encounter a jumble of spectacles that can include comedy, tragedy, and celebrations, sometimes all at once Too often, we’re left wondering what we just witnessed and we’re more than a bit curious about the answer. For us to assume that we’ve understood an issue or an event we’ve witnessed is pure folly. There are as many versions/truths/untruths of any event as the number of people we’ve asked to explain it to us. We’ve come to understand that few people in India don’t want you to know that they don’t know. It’s their way of not letting us down. They’ll tell us what they think we want to hear. This results in many more questions, many twists in the plot, and finally an abstraction of each conversation we’ve had, to reach what we think is a somewhat agreeable reason regarding an incident - only to find out how wrong we were, or were we? This very often results in some madness and breath holding on our part. It can be India’s charm, or its undoing of any foreigner trying to understand this very complex layered culture. 

The Last Piece of Cake

I entered the community for the first time fifteen years ago. I was there for a six week visit with Kane to see what he was doing in the community. The first day, I was full of anticipation and eager to meet the people in the community that I’d only seen in his photos. That day I observed something I’ve never forgotten and reminds me why we’re still here. It was Kane’s birthday and they’d arranged a party for him in the small building recently built with DWP funds to house a free kindergarten and community events. I was astonished to see that a crowd of forty or more children awaiting our arrival could fit in the small room. They were there to greet us with much enthusiasm and they also knew that there would be cake. The birthday cake eight was about eight inches in diameter, enough to serve ten children at a birthday party in Canada. The children assembled themselves into a ragged line, and quietly and patiently waited to receive a smear of birthday cake onto the palm of their hands. The children didn’t shout, cry, push, or plead for their turn as they watched others receive a taste as the cake got smaller and smaller.  When the last bit of crumbs were scraped off the plate, the children without cake at the end of the line simply left the room. The children who still had remnants of  cake in their palms shared with them and happily licked the remains of the cake crumbs off their fingers. No one came with an expectation of tasting even a few crumbs. We’ve learned that this is a metaphor for their lives. They move on, they adjust. 

Everything Any Time

No one says, “no”. Anything can be done. It might take some time, or no time, but rarely do shopkeepers disappoint. They’ll send someone to another shop to buy the item and run it back to their shop while we wait. If we need a shoe fixed, someone to fix a broken watch, a seam repaired, a key cut, wifi installed, a toilet unplugged, a blood test, anything, anytime, it can be done by any number of people who will find someone somewhere to come to us to fix something. 

The Big Question

Have we made a difference in the community?  

There are many children whose school fees have been paid by DWP for years, who are now in college. There are illiterate parents who’ve never had the chance to go to school in their villages, but now have literate children. There are families who still have a loved one with them because we could pay the hospital fees. There are elderly people whose eyes aren’t milky with cataracts anymore. There are hundreds of children who have had outings to water parks, movies, and beaches and been celebrated for their achievements. There are visits from other foreigners who add to the collective understanding of different cultures that they don’t have access to otherwise. We’ve had the privilege of being here, of being helpful, and in turn receiving lessons of humility and humanity, and what it means to be immersed in another culture and feel the beauty of being welcome here.

We’ve been swallowed whole by the sounds, the people, the dust, and the stories of a community doing their best to survive in Mumbai, known as the ‘city of dreams’ for anyone migrating from rural villages. Fifteen years later, we’re still here. Every day since is as delightful as it is difficult. And we’ve learned that we should always buy the biggest cake, and sometimes two cakes, so that everyone gets a share. And we’re no longer astonished about how many people can fit into a small space.

How we’ve used your donations (April 2024 - October 2024)

School fees:

Megha Ingle: Sith Computer Institute: 6000 rupees

Karan Ramesh Badar: Chandrabhan Sharma College of Arts, Commerce, and Science: 26,000 rupees

Anusin Mantesh Leimani: Shree Katayayani Banshwar Vidhyalaya: 2000 rupees

St Jude’s High School/Ahana Amin Chanda: 10,000 rupees

Nandichhaya School:

Disale Sakshi Nandkumar: 13,000 rupees

Ansari Kaiba Abdul Rehman: 14,300 rupees

Khan Muskan Abdulwahab: 10,400 rupees

Bind Aagya Akilesh: 9950 rupees

Shaikh Mohd Aftaab: 4000 rupees

School uniform:

M/s Parwati Garments: school uniform 1240 rupees for child in Goa

Medical/Hospital fees:

Doctor Eye Institute/Sujata Hoval/cataract surgery: 7000 rupees

Receipt from Sujata dated March 23, 2024. We gave her cash for the receipt June 2024 when Indu returned from her village) check to see if I put this on the last post

Apex Multi-specialty Hospital/Mr. Pintu Bind: 63,000 rupees

Rations:

Food rations for one month for family: 2500 rupees

Total: 169,390 rupees( CAD3387.80)

If you’d like, please check out dirtywallproject/instagram/Facebook for weekly updates and information about the families, and what we do in the community.

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