Money: Donors can specify which Butterflies’ initiative (education, health care, etc) they want to donate to. During Diwali, they can also buy candles and ‘diyas’ made by the children.
Time: Volunteers can help with their education, health or alternative media programmes, which include a newspaper, radio programme and bank run for working children. Food can be donated to a community kitchen run by some of the children.
Contact: ‘www.butterflieschildrights.org’ or call 011-26163935
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Door Step School, Mumbai
www.doorstepschool.org
As she walks through the bylanes of cramped concrete tenements in Colaba, Vijaya Dalvi calls out to the scampering children she passes on the way. She wants to know why one little boy didn’t come to school yesterday, and why another, carrying his baby sister in his arms, missed his computer class. They smile sheepishly and promise didi they’ll be there tomorrow.
Sweeping change: From 25 children in 1989 to 5,000 children in 2008. Abhijit Bhatlekar /Mint
Dalvi is one of dozens of teachers at the Door Step School, an NGO founded in 1989 by Bina Lashkari and Rajani Paranjpe, to educate children of labourers and other underprivileged parents. Their aim is to bolster an already overwhelmed municipal school system by providing extra tuition and classes to children who drop out of school, are unable to cope with their studies, or are prevented from entering any kind of formal education system.
Over the years, Door Step has educated thousands of children through a school on wheels, makeshift classrooms in slums and a school adoption programme that tries to place the children in municipal schools throughout the city.
“We started with just 25 children,” Lashkari says. “But now we have 5,000 children enrolled in municipal schools.”
The centre in Colaba, a series of rented garage spaces around a dusty courtyard, is modest, but bustling. There are 10 classes in session, with children between the ages of seven and nine. Raveena, a shy eight-year-old who Dalvi has brought along, is sent off to her class, where they are learning the months and days of the year. Though bright, she is often kept away from school by her mother, Dalvi tells me. Her case, in many ways, is not so different from that of dozens of her classmates, seated on the floor. Most of these children come of their own volition, bringing along siblings, who are dispatched by parents too busy working to look after them.
Anita, a slim, brown-eyed girl standing outside the classroom, is proof that enrolling in the Door Step School is a ticket to a better life. Her parents are both fisherfolk, and Anita has spent her life in this neighbourhood. Now 18, she is enrolled in the arts programme at Elphinstone College. Her goal, she says, is to eventually become a teacher, to educate children so that they, too, know that outside the four walls of their cramped kholis lies a world of opportunity.
Donors’ contributions are put to varied use—to help pay for teachers’ salaries or buy supplies such as sports kits. Volunteers can assist teachers or help out in other areas, depending on their skills.
(Tara Kilachand)