Little Aksa’s parents always dreamt of sending their daughter to school, but poverty always quelled their desires. In the summer of 2018, Aksa was 3 years old – the age that children in India begin their education at nursery school – but Aksa remained at home.
Aksa’s mother Nausheen had managed to study upto Class X but she could find no employment with so little education. Her father Shakeel had completed a turner-fitter course but job opportunities are lean in overpopulated Mumbai, so he made ends meet by selling cloth. The couple earned just enough to survive in their hutment in the slum community, not enough to educate their only daughter even at the subsidised municipal schools nearby.
That’s when your support reached out to Aksa and drew her into our Beacon Learning Centre inside her slum community at no cost to their family. Within the first month, we completed Aksa’s health assessment and we discovered that she was clinically malnourished.
Like all our children Aksa too was receiving the hearty, nutritious daily meal at our Learning Centre, but she needed more to restore her body. Our medical team stepped in with nutritional supplements, diet counselling for her family, and her health was closely monitored all through nursery.
A year later, today, you should see Aksa! She’s healthy and whole, bright-eyed and enthusiastic about education in our Junior Kindergarten!
Your support has also been life-changing for Aksa’s mother Nausheen. She was enrolled into our mehendi course for mothers to develop their vocational skills. Soon after that, she took up a role as Community Champion in her slum community, encouraging other families to pursue education, nutrition and healthcare for their children. Next, Nausheen joined our Culinary Training Institute and she’s now a month into learning culinary skills that will eventually find her employment in Mumbai’s booming hospitality industry!
Nausheen is so overwhelmed by Vision Rescue’s support to empower her and her daughter, that she recently sent her two sisters to work with us as well. Nasreen is a Community Intern assisting our community workers, mobilizing people in her community for awareness workshops etc, and Shaheen is a Medical Intern assisting our Healthcare team’s nurse.
The transformation in Aksa and her family has been possible only because you believed in their worth and invested unconditionally into their lives. Vision Rescue’s dream is not just for a brighter future for children like Aksa, but also to empower the present generation – citizens like Nausheen and her sisters – to be incredible change-makers in their own communities.
We believe that real upliftment of communities can only take place when leaders with a sense of ownership arise from within communities, and that’s exactly what Aksa and her family are a shining example of. Thank You for partnering with us to make these dreams reality!
