by Timmia Hearn Feldman
7/6/09
Addie came to the Godavari branch of the Esther Benjamins Memorial Foundation (EBMF) child refuge about four months ago; he’s nine months old now. When he was born, his fourteen year- old mother was living at the EBMF site in Hetauda. She has since been sent back to live with her family. Again childless, she now has the opportunity to make a life for herself. In the mean time, her son is leading a rather charmed existence here. Few babies are as pampered as he is. Anju, the housemother, looks after him most of the time, and when she’s not there, there are dozens of other eager arms to hold and coo over him. The apple of everyone’s eye, he is chubby and almost always cheerful. He is not leading the tumultuous life one would imagine that a child with his background would be doomed to.
He’s not alone. The other 102 children here at EBMF in Godavari may not be pampered as they would be if they were children growing up under the protection of loving and moderately affluent parents, but they are being raised a far cry from the miserable child refuges of more stereotypical third world standards. Besides being clothed and fed, they are given the opportunity to indulge in the fun of youth. Today they spent the day running back and forth, teaching each other and learning Nepali dances, buying presents for their teachers, picking flowers, and playing games. Today there was no school and tomorrow is “Teacher's Day,” a time when students perform for their teachers and give them gifts as a class. For most children, it is only celebrated at school, but the children here will return from their school celebrations and perform for the staff and teachers and give out gifts. I got to watch them practicing their dances, and couldn’t stop smiling as I sat quietly at the back of the room, and let the noise of CDs, laughter, yelling and feet moving wash over me. These children, in general, work harder than the average child of a Western family might. Cleaning, cooking, and studying almost all day, they have only a precious few hours to relax or play games, except on Saturday, when they have almost the whole day to themselves. But they are getting to experience a childhood. They are growing up around their peers, but with adult love and supervision. They are experiencing how enjoyable life can be, and they are blessed with leisure time.
However wonderful my readers and I may think this is, there remains a problem. They are forgetting that these children are all abandoned. That their futures are uncertain, and that only through education and hard work are they ever going to be able to make comfortable lives for themselves. After they graduate from whatever level of education they are able to attain, EBMF will not continue supporting them. These children will need to be fully equipped to take care of themselves.
I had a talk with one of the staff here at the refuge yesterday. Many of the students in the equivalents of eighth and ninth grade are not working hard, and their marks are falling. The staff gave them a test in math the other day and only three out of the nine passed. In the other class, about half failed an exam another staff gave. When I teach classes there are a group of, mostly, boys who do not pay attention and joke around. Or, who are certainly beginning to think that they’re too good for school. In the West we’re more than used to children in their teens getting disobedient. Most of us look back on our middle and high school careers with fond smiles and head shakes. Reminiscing about the things we did then, the things we never told our parents, things we know our parents probably did before us, and our children will do after us.
But here, in Nepal, and particularly for these children at EBMF refuges, screwing up once can ruin a life. There is no safety net. One of the boys here is already suffering the consequences of having given into the temptations of being young. He was top of his class, and given the opportunity to do vocational training. There he fell in with a group of other boys who drank, smoked pot, and generally messed around. Bishnu turned a little wild, and has the clumsily done tattoos to prove it, forever etched into his skin. EBMF found out what he was doing, and brought him back here. He’s now nineteen or twenty, and half-way through ninth grade. Though he seems to have taken this set back quite well, it must be only too apparent to him that he is older than everyone else in his class, even though many of the other kids here are several years too old for their classes, having been deprived of education in their earliest years before coming to EBMF. But luckily for Bishnu, he’s a boy. Though he will graduate school and finally be ready for higher education well into his twenties, he still has the prospect of a good life. He’s smart, very good at math and science, and wants to be an engineer. He still has a chance at succeeding. The girls aren’t quite as lucky. For boys, even if they do poorly in school, they can always get vocational training, learn a craft, and make a living. The girls only have the prospect of any kind of post secondary school education if they do well in school. Otherwise, they will most likely have to marry and become housewives, virtually slaves of husbands.
Here they have not lived under the constant threat of pain, starvation or abuse. And when children have been given the ability to enjoy their youth, they become careless, innocent, self indulgent. It is the beauty of youth, of childhood, but it could be ultimately the biggest issue EBMF will have to face in measuring its efficacy. It is so easy to forget the world out there from their positions of relative comfort. So easy to fail to study and then to fail just one test – which soon turns into two, three, four and, eventually, the course. It is easy to stare, glassy-eyed out the window instead of bending ones head over one’s text book. They are children, and teenagers, after all. But however much I wish that they were truly living charmed lives, and that this safe haven would protect them forever, there is no safety net in this country, especially for these children. And if EBMF is going to succeed in helping them attain stable futures, it is going to have to find ways of reminding these happy, well- fed and well- clothed children that they are still living on the edge of dire poverty and suffering.
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