“HOW CAN I STUDY IN A FLOODED HOUSE UNDER A LEAKING ROOF?”
Little Rifa is the youngest in her seven-member family. Together they live in a one-room house that leaks every monsoon. Their slum community is home to over 600,000 people living in tiny shanties in a ward that has the lowest human development index in Mumbai. The average age at death here is 39 years, according to the Mumbai Human Development Report (2009). The national average is 68.8.
Rifa’s father is a zari worker (hand-embroiderer), and the family’s sole breadwinner. When the pandemic hit this community in March 2020, thousands of daily-wagers like him started to walk or cycle thousands of kilometers back to their hometowns. An estimated 10 million migrant workers returned to their villages at the nation’s first lockdown. Rifa’s father contemplated joining the exodus.
In their slum community, the families who stayed back were beginning to go into starvation, and Rifa’s family feared the worst for themselves too. A study in this slum community showed that 81 percent of families here struggled for food, and 70 percent borrowed money just to buy themselves drinking water and food during the pandemic. The scale of desperation here deepened when the first wave of the pandemic was followed by the second wave, both with multiple lockdowns and closures of work.
Little Rifa has been a student of our Beacon Learning Centre in this slum since 2019. When the pandemic closed our classrooms, not only did she miss her daily nutritious meal at our center, she had no way of joining our online classes either. UNICEF says that the pandemic “adversely affected” the education of 320 million learners in India. A majority of these millions are children in poverty like Rifa. At least 29 million children like her have no access to any kind of digital device for online learning according to India’s Union Education Minister.
To make matters worse for Rifa’s family, the monsoons arrived over and above the pandemic, hunger, and digital divide. Their roof began to leak and their home began to flood. For Rifa’s father unemployed and at home, sleepless nights staring at their leaking roof were routine.
It was in these difficult times that the Vision Rescue community of supporters like you reached out to help Rifa and her family. Monthly groceries reached her home every month from April last year to date, and an Education Representative was hired and trained to visit her home every day to teach her on the Rep’s phone, and best of all: our community center manager arranged for tarpaulins to cover Rifa’s house. Their leaking roof was finally covered so now the children could sleep well even when it poured.
