Your Gifts have Protected Ashish’s Rights to Education during the Pandemic.
“Without the support of all of you at Vision Rescue, our lives during this pandemic would have been difficult,” says Ashish’s parents.
17 years ago, Ashish’s parents moved to Mumbai from Nanded, a small town in Maharashtra. Coming from a rural area, where education is not accessible to everyone; Ashish’s parents had not completed their education. But they knew how important education is and they started their journey towards Mumbai hoping for a better future for their children.
Ashish’s father settled in one of the poorest slum communities north of Mumbai. He found work as a daily-wage laborer. With the little that he earned, he managed to enroll his older daughters in formal school but little Ashish would spend time at home or on his community’s streets playing with his friends.
When Vision Rescue first met Ashish, we found out that he was not interested in school but loved playing games in his gully (street). Ashish’s mother overheard our community case officer speaking to Ashish and she quickly jumped in to know more about enrolling him in our learning center in their slum community. She couldn’t believe it when she heard that her son could access quality pre-primary education for free at Vision Rescue. Ashish was quickly enrolled into our Beacon Learning Centre.
On the first day of school, Ashish was scared to step into the classroom. Our community case officer encouraged him and gradually Ashish gained the confidence to come to class. Your gifts reached out to him with daily nutritious meals, health assessments, dental checkups, lunch boxes, stationery, books, schoolbag, and much more. Over the next few weeks and months, Ashish grew to love education at our classes.
When the first wave of Covid-19 hit the country, Ashish’s father lost his job. With no source of income to feed the family of six, they started to worry about surviving the pandemic.
That’s when generous supporters like you stepped in to help Ashish and his family with groceries kits each month from April last year to date. Your support ensured that Ashish’s education didn’t stop when our classes went online. His family had one working smartphone at home, and Ashish was able to continue his studies with us online right from home.
While Ashish was busy with online education, our support services teams were working closely with his family.
Alongside the monthly grocery kits, our medical team was sending the family awareness videos on dealing with the pandemic wisely and our dental team was providing them with information on safe dental practices.
Our case officers were in touch with his parents continually counseling them and equipping them to find daily-wage jobs.
It is your donations that have made all these outreach efforts possible.
Thank you for standing by Ashish and his family through the first and second waves of the pandemic in India. The last 1.5 years have been brutal for the poor in slum communities like Ashish’s. Many children have dropped out of education due to a lack of access to digital devices.
The widening of the digital divide in India has made vulnerable children like Ashish easy targets for social evils like child labor. It’s your gifts that have safeguarded Ashish and over 1300 other children enrolled in education with Vision Rescue during this difficult time.
Thank you for protecting their right to education and thank you for paving the way for children like Ashish to stick with their studies against all the odds of the pandemic.
