3-year-old Ruqaya’s father sorts garbage for a living. Alongside thousands of unauthorised ragpickers like him – he spends his days sifting through the trash in Mumbai’s largest dumping ground – a plot larger than 268 football fields receiving 9000 metric tonnes of waste daily from Mumbai’s 20 million inhabitants.

What he finds – reusable plastic, broken glass, recyclable metal – fetches him his day’s wages at the local markets.

This life mired in rubbish is the only way Jamil knows to make a living. While his profession keeps his family alive, it comes almost at the cost of their lives.

The average life expectancy in the slum communities that surround this garbage dump is 40 years, compared to 73 in the rest of Mumbai. Moreover, the smoke billowing into Jamil’s community from the dump’s mega incinerator means that tuberculosis and malnutrition are rampant here
In fact, when Jamil’s daughter Ruqaya first joined our Beacon Learning Centre inside their slum community, she missed two months of classes because of unexplained illnesses. Thanks to generous donors like you, Vision Rescue was able to help Ruqaya out of sickness and back into class

Your donations toward children like Ruqaya gift their parents like Jamil hope. Jamil’s sole income supports their family of 8, and he is so grateful that Ruqaya can lead a better life than his because she’s been gifted early education. She’s just 3 today, but she can read and write, recite the alphabet and rattle off rhymes.

When she returned, she came all guns blazing. She couldn’t wait to catch up on the time lost, and she’d even volunteer to study at home in the evenings! 

Thank You for gifting dreams to Ruqaya and lifting burdens off Jamil. This family is so thankful to you for reaching out with love to them!