Child Rights and You

It was an eventful day. I never knew that you could get lost even if you took a direct bus to your destination. Initially there was a lot of heat and then there was rain, but mostly it rained.. cats and dogs... Then my friend also forgot to carry the address to our destination along. In short, we were lost.. and late for the volunteer orientation meeting.

I visited the CRY office today over here in Kolkata. Yes, its an NGO. and in case you haven't heard about it, you could read more about what they do and how, on their website. CRY is the only NGO, where it is very simple to become a volunteer. Even simpler than creating a mail ID. Unlike other big NGO's where half the time people don't even answer calls, and even if they do, they never revert. So you keep wondering whether you're not good enough for volunteering or what?!

Earlier CRY was 'Child relief and you', but recently they've changed it to 'Child rights and You'. The reason being that whenever relief work was undertaken, the benefit was not long lasting. The only way to achieve this was to adopt the 'Child Rights approach', which involves looking into the underlying root causes of deprivation.

During the presentation, we were given an insight into a 12 year old girl's life. Her name was Ursula. Her father used to work for one of the West bengal tea garden owners. And due to illegal lockouts, her father lost his job and the family their daily source of income. Poverty led to illness. Her entire family had to be admitted to a far away hospital. Ursula's uncle came down from Mumbai, helped her family to get better and offered to take Ursula and her sister along with him back to Mumbai.. Ursula dreamt of meeting Shahrukh and Karishma that night... Her parents never heard from the uncle or the girls ever again.. They were trafficked...

CRY is an enabling organisation as opposed to an implementing one. For example, they do not encourage volunteers going to orphanages on weekends and spend some time playing with the deprived children. Of course singing and dancing does take their mind of the terrible environment they are living in for an hour or two, but what after that?? Instead, CRY encourages volunteers to help with improvement of the surroundings like the quality of meals, cleanliness, hygiene etc.

Now I know that CRY is not 'Charity'. Because charity is a one time effort. This is an on going process. And it'll never stop till the time all the children of India have to right to life, health, nutrition, education, leisure, expression, religion, thought and protection from abuse, exploitation and neglect.


"Stand up for what is right..."