In 2018, Zainab was just 4, but she was already babysitting her two younger siblings, while her mother went out begging on the streets for money. Her father Imtiaz was an unemployed alcoholic. Her mother Mabiya had no skills or education to find a job, and her baby brother Jannat had just been born.
Every morning, Zainab watched her mother walk out onto Mumbai’s streets, begging at red lights and cross roads for alms, while she stayed on at home and looked after a toddler and a newborn. We met Zainab, alone in her house, on one such morning.
We asked to meet her parents, but she said she had no idea where her father was, and that her mother was rarely home. She was right. It took us multiple visits before we finally got to meet her mother Mabiya.
We talked to Mabiya about the dangers of leaving three little children unattended on the streets of their slum community. She knew that full well, but she couldn’t see a way out of her situation.
We explained that our Vision Rescue learning centre inside their slum community would gladly give Zainab the education that she deserved, and that our community centre could train her in vocational skills that would lead to financial independence.
Mabiya was hesitant at first, but she agreed to give us a shot. She enrolled Zainab in our junior kindergarten and she joined our bracelet making classes. While she was grateful to pick up a new skill, she continued to beg on the sidelines though.
At our learning centre, Zainab was diagnosed as malnourished. Besides the daily nutritious meal at our Centre after class every day, we also reached out to her with nutritional supplements and nutritional counselling for the family as well.
Parallelly, we were also counselling her parents – working with her father to give up alcohol, and counselling her mother to quit begging completely. A year into our efforts, we met with breakthrough – Zainab is no longer malnourished, her father has quit drinking her mother has almost completely left begging on the streets and she’s even brought other out-of-school children in her neighbourhood to our learning centre!
It’s your financial support that has reached out with love to this family in desperate poverty, and brought about such amazing change in their lives. The best news? Zainab’s younger brother Tauhid has joined our nursery just this year and he’s loving our classes as well!
Vision Rescue believes that freeing a child from exploitation means empowering not just the child and their family, but also the entire community. Thank you for standing with us in these dreams, and powering us to bring out intergenerational transformation for those who need it the most!
