Salaam Balak Trust - Q2 2008

New Girls Shelter Home
After several years in planning and building, SBT’s new girls’s shelter home is now open.  For the first time, the Trust can cater to the needs of some of its children in a specially designed building, rather than having to make do in cramped and often inadequate spaces rented from the Delhi authorities.

It has been a deliberate policy of the Trust to provide girls with a separate home, and one which is away from the city centre / Railway Station area, with the dangers of pimps and gang leaders which runaway girls there may encounter.

In Gurgaon, just outside Delhi’s southern boundary, the new building (left) has been created with funding from the Japanese Embassy, Monsoon Accessorize, Esprit, HDFC (an Indian Bank) and CAF.

Around a central atrium there are 3 floors of dormitories, classrooms and office space; a fitted kitchen and eating area, and large multi-purpose rooms in the basement.  Instead of sleeping on mattresses on the floor, all the girls now have proper beds in dormitories with balconies. 

It is light and airy and even with the temperature in the mid 30s when I visited, the conditions were good.  And the staff have been amazed by the way the girls treat and take care of a new place which they are proud to call their own.

Vicky Roy – New York award

The Maybach Family Foundation selected Vicky, and one other photographer from Europe, to take part in the World Trade Center Documentary Arts Project, which will document the re-building of the 9/11 site.  Vicky, who ran away from an impoverished home in West Bengal aged 11 and spent about a year working and living on the streets of Delhi until he joined SBT,  will now be fully funded by the Foundation for his six-month stint.  He has now certainly joined the ranks of SBT beneficiaries in the Arts, alongside professional choreographers, actors and puppeteers who have already benefited from SBT’s emphasis on the Arts.

Annual trips
Every year, SBT gives as many as possible of its street kids and shelter home residents a chance to escape the stifling heat and humidity of summer in Delhi – usually in two or three groups who head up into the hill station areas by coach.  This year, the holidays have been more ambitious than usual. At the end of June and into July, different groups were taken to some of the traditional destinations of Mussoorie, Dehra Dun and Nainital.  These included the 50 younger children from Aasra shelter who, because  for whom any chance to leave their shelter is

Meanwhile, for the older boys in the two shelter homes Apna Ghar and Aarmaan, SBT staff took on the challenging task of getting 108 of them to (and back from!) Kerala in the south of India – nearly 3 days’ train journey from Delhi.

Indian inflation
Just as a reminder that many things in and around the streets of Delhi are far from  rosy, the administrators are having to struggling to find money for some basic services, in the context of Indian inflation (now running at 11%) and the sharp global rises in the cost of food and fuel.

Every day, the SBT kitchens provide 3 meals to over 300 kids.  There is no government or private funding for this, and the cost of the meals has gone up by about 20% in the last few months.  At the same time, more expensive fuel affects the Trust’s transport costs.  And while there have been (so far, and touch wood..) not so many power cuts this summer, the water supply has been as poor as ever.  There has been hardly any supply of drinking water to one of the boys’ shelter homes in the last few weeks, so the Trust has been forced to behave like sweltering tourists and buy 2-litre bottles of water – a very expensive alternative – for the 60 or so kids affected.