By: Dr. Priya Virmani

It was an early morning in Kolkata. It had been raining. Flood waters had receded leaving behind muck dotted with green coconut shells and dead cockroaches. Their corpses lay belly up. I was walking to school and counting reflections in the puddles. Of buildings; of street lights; of a moon I couldn’t find. The counting stopped when I saw street children eating out of a rubbish bag. Street dogs milled about. Their barks sounded more like long shrieks. The children, unperturbed kept emptying the rubbish bag rummaging for food. An older child gave a younger one something discoloured. The little child chewed on it. Perhaps it was a vegetable peel or a scrap of paper.

That night, still unsettled by the scene I witnessed in the morning, I asked my parents and their visiting friends ‘why can’t these children sit on a table like you and me and eat?’

Over a decade later I moved to the UK and over two decades later I had completed my PhD and was living a fulfilling life in the UK. But I still remembered that morning so vividly. The image from my four year old self and other similar images had become a reel of reminder in my mind; a reminder that I wanted to reach out to children in the country of my childhood who were severely deprived. So while working in the UK, I began saving up and then began conducting workshops with children in Sonagachi – Kolkata’s notorious red light district, on biannual trips to India. When I saw the positive difference these workshops were making to the lives of the children, I gave up my life in the UK and returned to India with a mission to reach out to more children faced with the scourge of deprivation and abuse.

With some savings set aside, a conviction to make a difference to the lives of the most vulnerable children, an empowerment model in mind and an understanding of the most pressing ground realities in India, led to the formation of the Paint Our World (POW) model in 2013. Today POW works in Kolkatta and Delhi.
The main aim is to empower children who have been victims of trauma and child sexual abuse using creative and innovative methods and therapies.

Alarming statistics
The current statistics are appalling. The last figures released by the Women and Child Ministry (2007) state that 150 million girls and 73 million boys in India are victims of abuse. This amounts to more than the combined populations of the UK (at 64 million), France (at 66 million) and Germany (at 81 million). Any educated estimate suggests that even this number is an underestimate because most cases go unreported against the backdrop of a culture of reporting that is part reticent and part undocumented. To achieve the dream of an India that is a lodestar of progress and meaningful development, these children can’t be left out of the ‘growth’ story.

Restoring Lost Childhoods

Restoring lost childhood
First and foremost, POW helps to restore the lost childhoods of the most vulnerable children in our society and help them heal so they grow into adulthoods that are happy and purposeful. How do we go about doing this? We use a model of emotional empowerment workshops together with special activities and events. We work with fun, imagination and purpose – it is all about thinking outside the box. And by working in the area of emotional empowerment we are working in a space which is still largely overlooked in India.

Curriculum
POW’s curriculum is designed by India’s leading child psychologists and experts. Our activity therapies, in subtly therapeutic and imaginative ways, teach the children safety, trust, care and the like. As we have measured, this mitigates the emotional stress commonly found in the lives of the children and in so doing translates into better self esteem and focus and facilitates the development of key skills, enabling the children for the school curriculum. The workshops also become a space for children that is associated with security and fun, that are essentially what childhoods ought to be about.

With the special events and outings we organise we give the children unforgettable experiences. The idea is to invest in them, in ways that parents do in their children. It is often the best and the worst times from our childhoods that stand out. Our aim is to give the children some of the best times. Special experiences have included cinema trips, rock climbing, Birthday parties, days out to parks, fun fairs and even a Cruise Party. I was especially touched when a child came up after the collective Birthday party in a Delhi farmhouse and said, ‘Thank you Didi, I had never dreamed I could ever have so much fun’.

The writer, Dr. Priya Virmani is Political & Economic Analyst; Social Entrepreneur; International Speaker and Mentor and Founder and Director Paint Our World and Empower Art