New Light Kolkata

I’ve mentioned the organization New Light a few times now, but not really done justice to explaining what they do, and the impact they are making on the lives of those they are serving.

New Light’s mission is to ‘promote gender equality through education and life-skill training, and thereby reduce harm caused by violence and abuse to women and young children’.

They do this in a number of ways, and it has been our privilege to spend a small bit of time with some of the team of incredible staff and volunteers, dipping into the work, and meeting some of the beneficiaries.

On the whole the beneficiaries are the children – children of prostitutes who, depending on their ages, are either in need of day care whilst the mothers sleep, or in need of after-school homework clubs, or in need of a safe shelter for the afternoons and evenings, or in need of alternative accommodation for the longer term due to the abusive situations and vulnerability to intergenerational prostitution that they would be in if they remained at home.

The women are supported to a certain extent, but unlike our partner Women At Risk in Ethiopia which runs a rehab programme for the ladies and as a result supports the children as well, here the emphasis is on supporting the children, and then if any women want to explore ways to get out of prostitution and into alternative income generation, then New Light will facilitate that and help them move forwards in their lives.

One of the programmes that we visited is called ‘Starfish’ and is a day care facility for the under 7’s in one of the red light areas of Kolkata. The children who come along to Starfish spend the morning doing pre-school type lessons: familiarization with numbers, letters, shapes, colours etc. And they get a cooked meal for lunch. Without Starfish neither of these things would be remotely available to them. Certainly their families can’t afford pre-school fees, and as well as that their mothers, all of whom are prostitutes, would be sleeping during the day due to being ‘at work’ all night, and so the children would be left unattended, roaming the streets, scavenging and begging what scraps they can find.

So Starfish provides safety, a nurturing environment, caring adults, and a chance for the children to be children. And the mothers can rest easy knowing that despite the horrific cycle of employment that they find themselves in, through New Light there is some hope for their children at least.

This hope for a better future is also seen in the safe shelters that have been set up for approximately 35 boys and 35 girls who are particularly vulnerable.  Up to the age of 12, the children are fairly safe to stay at home with their families, albeit in far from ideal circumstances whereby they are having to fend for themselves evenings and nights when school is over and mum is out working. But around the age of 12, the children start to become a lot more vulnerable, as the clients that the mum brings home may well start to want the girl rather than the mum. And in other situations, where prostitution has been the form of income for several generations, the girls are at risk of being forced into it by their mothers and grandmothers if they remain at home.

And so homes have been set up to give them the chance to break out of the cycle into which they are in danger of being sucked. Mostly it is with the family’s blessing, but sometimes it can be a case of child against parents.

We visited one of the shelters yesterday – 35 girls in a 4-storey house, 4 girls to a room, and the kitchen on the roof. The girls were all busy doing homework when we got there, and one of the older ones proudly told us how she hopes to graduate from high school soon, and then go to university to study English so she can become an English teacher. It is so encouraging to hear such positive dreams and aspirations being realised, especially given the incredibly tough and disadvantaged start in life.

New Light isn’t just about supporting the children of women in prostitution; it has in it’s remit a whole range of issues that stem from the gender inequality that is so deeply ingrained in Indian culture and practices. Rescue and rehab from trafficking, campaigning at all levels against gender-based violence, providing access to education and skills-based training, assisting those suffering from HIV-related diseases, empowerment of women…

And of course its not just the girls; boys also need the support and care that is so absent in their home lives, and as they get older, they are also at risk of being sucked into the commercial sex world. So boys are very evident at all the day care centres, there is a boy’s shelter, and there are male staff providing positive role models to all the children where their main experience is so different and so negative.

I don’t know what my further involvement with New Light will be. I’m still praying about that and waiting for God to show me how it fits with the rest of life. But I do know that the route to us finding New Light was a God-one, and its been a real privilege to spend time with them, getting to know more of what they do, and seeing how they put the starfish philosophy into practice – changing lives, one at time, for the better.