| Gordon D'Arcy, Evening Herald, 11th September
2006
For the one week that I spent in Calcutta’s slums - home
to some 18 million people - I confronted a society on the opposite
end of the spectrum to ours. There hunger is inextricably linked
to living, and where so busy scavenging a living are some of the
kids that dreams don’t even come into the equation.
It is this eye-opening sight that I witnessed first hand following
an invitation from GOAL’s John O’Shea to see the work
that GOAL are doing at the coalface of poverty in Calcutta, India.
From the moment I arrived, the sheer scale of depravity was evident.
On the drive from the airport on the outskirts of the city to the
GOAL headquarters, squatter colonies of canvas and cloth shelters
and huts of corrugated iron covered in plastic sheeting lined both
sides of the road.
Some 300,000 street children call Calcutta home, according to the
United Nations.
In the Sunderbans we caught a glimpse of people living a life most
of us imagined was confined to the history books.
For the past three years, GOAL has been working in this region
of Bengal, a desperately impoverished area which lies at the mouth
of the famous Ganges river.
Traditionally, huge numbers of locals migrate to Calcutta where
they typically end up living on the streets, desitute and homeless.
Here GOAL has set one of the islands up as a model village development.
The drive for education on the island was phenomenal, 3 primary
schools and a secondary school.
Wading through sludge for several hours, eventually we made it
to an illegal slum on the outskirts of the city, funded by GOAL.
Not only are they slum dwellers, but in the hierarchy of slum dwellers,
they were the worst type – residents of an illegal slum.
Consequently the Indian government will have nothing to do with
them.
The GOAL project organise classes for young children giving them
the basics in schooling.
In India, children must have a basic education before being accepted
into what they call “formal school”.
This forms a large part of GOAL’s work –taking in children
and providing them with the opportunity to get an education.
These kids own nothing but their dreams.
And they hitch those dreams habitually to sports.
I tried to educate them in the intricacies of rugby, by holding
a rugby workshop. The kids were so excited that all notions of teaching
them the niceties of the game went out the window, and some mongrel
cross-breed game somewhere between rugby, soccer and bowling emerged.
And it was fun to play.
But while sport will never be a viable option to lift them out
of where they are, it allows them to interact with each other in
a friendly and secure environment.
While in the long run my own trip to Calcutta did not make any
ground breaking difference to society, at least for the couple of
days I spent kicking a ball around a field, that was a couple of
days that those kids were kids, and stopped worrying about where
their next meal was coming from.
For a couple of hours at least, they had a great bit of fun and
just acted like kids.
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