Day 14 - Monday 20th October
 We arrived in Mumbai yesterday morning. Our flight from Hyderabad was actually cancelled, the credit crunch is hitting India now and a number of airlines are rationalising. We managed to pick up another flight half an hour later with Air India so no great disruption for us.
We are staying in the most outrageously luxurious hotel for our three nights here. It is all free thanks to a large amount of Starwood points we had accumulated, but after a day in the Mumbai slums I am finding the contrast very difficult.
So, some scary statistics – Mumbai (formerly Bombay) is a city of approximately 20 million, with 8 – 10 million living in slums. Only 3 in every 10 people in Mumbai have a regular salary, of the rest a few have their own small business (maybe a tea stall or auto rickshaw driver) but the majority are day labourers who can earn as little as 30 rupees (38p) per day with no guarantee of regular work.
 We hooked up with Sarita from the local NGO at 0915 this morning and headed off to Bandra to visit a pre-school centre for slum children. Bandra is just one of the slum areas around Mumbai, and is home to between 5,000 – 8,000 families. They are mainly from the nomadic Banjara tribe who can no longer make ends meet in the rural areas and they head to Mumbai with great dreams of getting well paid jobs. The size of this slum area was just daunting; we stepped out along the river and were met with the same acrid stench of polluted water and waste that we had experienced in Chennai.
It turns out they were being really kind to us by inviting us to see one of the more luxurious slum areas, and they told us about the pools of stagnant water and the filthy children with sores and boils all over their skin when they first arrived here, a condition which still exists in many of the other slums.
 We walked up a narrow space between the slum dwellings in to the centre, which is for children between 2 – 6 years and caterers to between 30 – 40 children. All of the teachers here have been trained and employed from the slum area, and we heard about the vision to get the community to take ownership of this project and then move on to start other similar ones.
The centre has been here for 6 years now and we were told how difficult they found it at first to persuade the mothers to let their children attend. However, they persevered and through communication with the mothers, talked to them about the benefits of education for their children.
Most of the women in these slums work as day labourers so most of the children are just left to play in the dirt during the day. The men from this tribe, we are told, generally do not work at all. Children will play at the centre and have some basic schooling, it starts the school habit and they enjoy it so much that they are then really keen to go off to the local school.
The centre is not only for pre-school children, there is an extra floor (up a very narrow ladder) where there is a centre for training school drop outs in computers and tailoring, and the downstairs is used as a homework club and for English teaching for the older children once the play group leaves in the afternoon. From this small space they also have a health clinic and offer an immunisation programme. They now have a lady who offers ante natal and post natal care and advice, and they were so proud to tell us that some of the gypsy women were now actually attending the local hospital for deliveries rather than having their babies in the slums where the umbilical cord would be cut using a sharp stone.
Again we heard about the problem with HIV in this poor community and how they are trying to work to create greater awareness amongst the teenagers. Even small children are taught about the importance of washing hands and some basic hygiene, which they share with their parents.
 We left the day care centre and walked around the corner to meet up with Andyat the Blue Edge Project. We had noticed the huge number of teenagers hanging around in this area and were told that many were now joining gangs and being lured in to crime. Often, these young people had not completed their education and so the Blue Edge Centre has been funded by the local branch of DHL as a Soft Skills training centre. Young people between 18 – 20 are invited to come here for an intensive 4 month course in English, computer skills, life skills, interview techniques and customer service. They have morning and afternoon programmes and so in this really small space can cater for up to 50 students for the four-month course. They are invited to the DHL office and given certificates when they graduate. The project started in February this year and we were told about the successes of some of their graduates, infact Andy kept a  spreadsheet on all students showing their current situations. Andy is originally from Hong Kong but had been in India for over 10 years and was obviously passionate about his work with these young people. He encouraged them to keep up their education via a night school or maybe going on to college after this course. We met some of the students who were obviously enjoying their time here.In the afternoon we had arranged to meet up with the Director of Oasis India to talk to him about possible opportunities to work together. Oasis India work in Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore with poor communities and we talked to him about an exciting new initiative using sport to get children off the streets. They have had a huge amount of success particularly with boys of 10 – 14 from slum areas and by engaging them in soccer; cricket and hockey clubs they build self esteem and are able to communicate with them about life skills and education generally. They have found that the children have a huge level of commitment to this type of activity and can then begin to have dreams for their future and start attending school.
It has been another day when we have been amazed and humbled by the work being carried out by Christian organisations in this country. The salaries paid by most of the NGO’s are so poor that a lot of the staff have to rely on family support to allow them to stay in their current jobs.
Tomorrow is our last day in India and we are heading out tonight to find a traditional restaurant (yes, another curry) where we can celebrate our wedding anniversary.
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