Things you see in pictures are true. They are not photoshopped and edited or taken at the exact right time. This is what is going on around the world. When I saw the dirty and dusty children in Kumbhalgarh, India, working and begging in the streets, it made me realize how lucky I am, to have nutritious food, clean water, a house, an education, and many opportunities for fun extra activities, such as art and sports. Many children don’t have these opportunities.

In Kumbhalgarh, the children slept on the streets in the evening and begged for money in the day. That was their life. They knew they were unlucky to be born into poverty, and they knew they couldn’t change how their parents treated them. They haven’t realized just how unlucky they are. This is their life. They have never known anything different.

A child in Kumbhalgarh and I could have switched places when we were born. I could be living the life they are in right now. They could be living my life on the other side of the world, feeling so fortunate for their great house, family and friends, and being able to go to bed every night knowing they will be safe when they wake up the next morning.

Me to We

I got to see how one humanitarian group, called Me to We, is trying to help. My family and I connected with this group because I went to an elementary school involved with the Me to We program. This kind of school encourages kids to make positive changes locally and globally. At Ohlone, fourth and fifth graders organized bake sales and fundraisers to raise money that was sent to the Me to We organization. These experiences made me realize how hard it is to make money.

My class was able to attend a large gathering of schools and donors for an inspirational “We Day.” At “We Day”, lots of children and adults gathered together to learn how to help other children around the world. Listening to those speakers telling stories about people who had so much less than me helped me realize how lucky I actually was.

Me to We has 5 main goals to improve communities

1. Clean Water and Nutritious Food – Helping people grow more productive and nutritious food and finding or building wells.
2. Shelter- Building homes for indigenous families.
3. Health Care – Getting access to Health Care
4. Education – Helping children go to and stay in school
5. Opportunity – learning skills that can lead to good jobs and a sustainable life

Kumbhalgarh

At We schools, we are educated about how unfortunate some children in different parts of the world are. Although we are told and shown through videos how much less privileged some children are, nothing beats observing it in real life.This is why I think it is good and completely life-changing to see other children’s lives firsthand.

In October, my family and I visited Me to We in Kumbhalgarh, a small rural village in Rajasthan, India, and saw how Me to We is pursuing their 5 goals there. We got to meet several families and their children and we also helped build a girls’ bathroom at their school.

We saw details of how the organization’s goals are important for very poor, indigenous people. Me to We focuses on families who are native to the land and who are not part of mainstream culture. They mostly focus on the mother in the family. Indigenous people are often the poorest and most needy, and the women usually lead the family.

Clean Water

When we were in Kumbhalgarh, we saw many children who looked very unhealthy, whether they suffered from diseases, disabilities, or malnutrition. One disease many children get in Kumbhalgarh is tapeworms. Tapeworms eat the very few nutrients available to the children which causes the children to slowly starve. Tapeworms occur because of poor sanitation and hygiene: children drink water from wells that are open to runoff from the fields. People in these villages are not accustomed to using toilets and they also don’t have access to toilets many times – they just do their business in the fields – so when it rains, their waste gets carried off by the rain water. When a child gets tapeworms, the worms will come out in their waste. When it rains, her poop will get washed into the water well that children drink from. When other children in the village drink the water, they will get those worms in their stomachs.

 

Dirty water led to malnutrition, which led to other problems, like getting sick and not doing well in school. It’s hard to think when you are hungry and hard to learn when your brain is not fed. Many children were getting sick from dirty water because they did not have the resources or habit to filter and boil the water.

Me to We provided families with stove tops and pots to boil the water and spent many hours teaching the mothers and children to use them every day.

Nutritious food

Helping people grow more productive and nutritious food
If you look on the cluttered streets of India, you will probably see many children appearing dirty, sick, and starving. Children that belong to tribal families often suffer even more and have worse health because their older relatives think of food as something to make you less hungry, but they don’t necessarily consider it as a nutritious form of energy. The people of Kumbhalgarh only get vegetables 3 out of 12 months a year because there is a very short period of time when the weather is right to grow wheat and corn, the local crops. So in the other 9 months, they mostly eat bread.

Malnutrition hurts people’s health in different ways. For example, cuts and scrapes affect children’s bodies more because their immune systems are so weak. A lack of protein in children’s diets leads to iron deficiency, a common problem in Kumbhalgarh not only because meat is not widely available but also because the local religion doesn’t allow them to eat meat. In order to be healthier, bigger, and smarter, people need enough nutrients in their food. In Kumbhalgarh, nobody has enough land to grow enough food for their families. Also, the food they are growing does not contain adequate protein and nutrients. Many times malnutrition leaves children with mental or physical health disabilities, and they are not able to get help. This malnutrition results in smaller brains and mental illnesses which makes it harder to learn. Teachers in India often don’t have much sympathy for a slow or tired child, and the child may get hit or sent out of the classroom because of something they cannot control.

Me to We has introduced more productive modern agricultural ideas that taught better farming practices, such as crop rotation, proper fertilization techniques, higher protein crops, and planting techniques. The indigenous people of Kumbhalgarh had been using their irrigation techniques for centuries. They worked. However, some changes can help a lot. The farmers were still using a plow design that was 4,000 years old! Just switching to a modern plow design that turns over the soil can improve their yields drastically. Modern hybrid seeds are more productive than the ancient seeds that the farmers had. However, the new seeds are not a perfect solution. Over time the modern seeds will become less productive, so then the farmers have to buy new seeds. Me to We helps educate the family on how the seeds would give families more food from the same amount of land. Me to We buys starter seeds for the family and helps them learn how to make money from extra products. This way they can buy new seeds every 5-6 years when the productivity goes down, and also have more food to feed their family every year.

Health Care

We observed in Kumbhalgarh that almost everybody has some health condition, whether it is physical or mental. When unhealthy children get a minor virus, such as the flu, they can get very ill and even die because their body is already weak from malnutrition and dirty water. Though healthcare in India is free, many people do not get it solely because they do not know it exists.

Me to We helps by just informing the families where the nearest clinic is. In rural areas, this is harder because it is so far away from the nearest clinic. Sometimes they help people learn how to get to the clinics, and when to go. When a woman is pregnant, sometimes the clinic will travel to them.

Education

We visited the local school in Kumbhalgarh. They had 4 classrooms for 300 students, with about 70 students in each classroom. The walls were crumbling and they had no bathrooms – only a recently installed pit toilet.

 

Me to We builds schools with help from volunteers and donations. They work with people in the community and check in on families to make sure their children are going to school. Me to We also provides books, pens, and uniforms for the children.

When we visited, the We program was in the middle of building the school’s first toilet. The school realized that when girls hit puberty they usually dropped out of school because there was no toilet with privacy. Me to We started helping by just digging a hole in the ground. I helped build a foundation for a private girls’ toilet. We put rock after rock and heaping spoonfuls of “masala” cement. (In India, masala is anything that is mixed. Masala tea, masala cement: mixed herbs, mixed sand, same thing.)

 

By helping build a bathroom for that small school, we hopefully helped the girls ages 10-14 continue to go to school to further their education. Children in India go to school for an average of 12 years, as well as having a 62.80% literacy rate(World Factbook, CIA), but in Kumbhalgarh, the average years of school is much lower, an average of 6-8 years.

Opportunity

The We organization tried to focus on helping families stay together and become sustainable in their villages instead of moving into Western civilization, such as big cities. They started achieving this by teaching the families useful things to make everyday life easier, such as boiling water so they don’t get sick every week. They taught them skills that would be helpful in their community that could lead to a sustainable life. They also taught them how to grow more food on their land so they could sell some in the towns.

How does Kumbhalgarh symbolize the rest of the world?

This year, we are seeing children around the world. Most of the children I have met were smiling and seemingly happy, but not everyone has the same things. Some children, like us, have clean water, nutritious food, doctors, schools to go to, and opportunities. Others have much less. They speak different languages and laugh at different jokes, but they all have the same needs. They need to be healthy, and they want to learn things and accomplish things in their lives. Me to We may not have all the answers, but they provided a good outline of what people need to live a happy and healthy life.

 

Sources

1. The World Factbook
2. Me to We