When the new Vision Builders Board in NJ asked Katie about the beginnings of Vision Builders, this is what she shared with us:

“… As we walked through Kathmandu and Nepal and the cities computer science homework help of India, the street children all come around you with their hands out, and my seven-year-old would look at me and she’d say ‘Mom, do these children have a home? Mom, look how dirty they are. Mom, they want food.’ I was watching other tourists deal with this and most people would just continue walking, making no eye contact… acting as if no one was begging in front of them.  That is one way that people deal with this issue, but as a parent I couldn’t really say to my seven-year old daughter ‘Oh, pretend you don’t care about these begging children. Don’t look.’ That’s the strategy that a lot of people who go there, especially as tourists, adopt in order to deal with these masses of begging children.

…I think that most of us come from cultures where there’s a homeless shelter, where there are organizations providing food, or there’s some way that help is being provided. But that is not true in this part of the world. So it presented a little bit of a problem when we’d have these conversations and my daughter kept saying ‘Well, what can we do? What can we do?’

…we went into the hotel and I asked them to make 60 hard-boiled eggs. We would buy 60 hard-boiled eggs from the kitchen and we would go out and hand the children hard-boiled eggs. It was something nutritious that we could just put in their hands, they were thrilled! That might be the only food they had that day.

…I had brought along a bottle of chewable vitamins for my daughter. And she said, ‘I don’t really need vitamins because I have plenty of good food. So, can we give the vitamins to the children?’ So we started handing out chewable vitamins to the children. Increasingly it was just an issue of – we can’t look away. We’re not the kind of people who can look away. We were so touched by the situation and the circumstance, and what we learned over time is that just putting your hand in the child’s hand and giving them a smile was even enough. Just acknowledgement. ‘Yes, I see you. You exist and I don’t have anything on my person to give you but I can give you this moment where we connect and I care about you.’ So personally, I found that really moving. And I came back and decided I had to do something, because I couldn’t do nothing.”

When asked if she thought that apathy is the hardest thing to overcome in these situations, Katie replied that, she doesn’t think it’s so much apathy as it is being overwhelmed. “I think when people go to India and they see the level of poverty, they just think ‘Well how could I possibly have an impact on it?’.” The project that Vision Builders is currently working with is called “Kutumb”. It’s in Varanasi, India, which is the most ancient consistently-inhabited city in the world. Katie describes it as being “so beautiful in so many ways, and so ugly in so many other ways” – 40% of the millions of people in Varanasi live in abject poverty.

“…There are just huge areas, everywhere you look, people are living in slum conditions. They’re making makeshift houses out of pieces of cardboard or plastic tarps. They’re making a living by collecting trash. They pile it up on a bicycle, 8 feet high, tying it with ropes and bringing it back into the area where they live, to burn it. So there’s just burning trash everywhere. There’s broken metal and pieces of glass – it’s just really shocking. I have taken two of my friends, who work for Vision Builders, to Varanasi on my annual trip. And, as much as I’ve told them about the area where the project is, they still get off the plane and say, ‘I had no idea. Oh my gosh, I had no idea’. From a Western perspective, it is mind-boggling. The size of the slum area, and the sheer number of people living in these conditions are enormous. So I don’t think it’s apathy, because most people who see those conditions would want to do something to help, but there’s so many challenges.

…You also want to make sure that you are actually being helpful rather than creating new problems. I’m reminded of Oprah talking about founding her school in Africa, and one of the first things she did is give the children extravagant gifts, like Nike shoes or iPods or whatever. But she came to understand that this was a mistake. That’s not what they really need, and it just causes them to become materialistic when they’ve never been materialistic before. So you really want to make sure that whatever money you’re giving is having a positive impact. You want to make sure it is going to a person who really knows what the problems are, and has ideas and actual solutions for those problems. You need a person of integrity, a person you can really count on, and my experience is that that is rare and hard-to-find.”

Katie says that they started small, and learned over the years what works and what doesn’t.

“Really, what works is food, education, healthcare and women’s empowerment. Women’s empowerment is an important factor in these circumstances because if you teach a woman to read she will teach her children. If you teach a man to read, he may be able to get a little better job, but he won’t teach his children. I don’t quite understand it myself, but I’ve been reading about this a lot. I see the fathers in this area, and most of them are very caring and involved with their children. But statistic shows that empowering women is what makes an impact.

…Dr. Ashish, my partner in India who runs Kutumb, incorporated a women’s empowerment program into their work. The program includes activities like taking the women to the post office and explaining to them how the post office works. Or, taking them to the bank and explaining how bank accounts work and how they can set up a bank account. Very basic things, to us, but this is the beginning of what makes it possible for them to start very small businesses – making and selling teddy bears, for example, in the open market. With these basic skills they can make even just a small amount of money to support their families. He [Dr. Ashish] has all kinds of programs for women, teaching them to read if they’re interested in reading, teaching them to cut hair… Most of the women, prior to attending his programs, have never left the slum area where they live. They’ve never gone outside of it because of fear, so their lives are very small. And by having these women’s empowerment programs, it opens up their lives and also their possibilities.”

Basic nutrition is, of course, vital. One morning Katie went to a family’s house, made of plywood and tarps, and they were serving breakfast. Each of the children was given the equivalent of a quarter cup cooked lentils. That was their breakfast. Yet everyone was smiling and happy and chattering away. “It was just so shocking to me”, said Katie. “That was breakfast? To you and me that wouldn’t even qualify as a snack for children.”

“…A tiny bowl with a quarter cup of cooked lentils, that was breakfast. So we started a program at Kutumb where any child in the vicinity who wants to come to the shelter is fed breakfast and lunch. Now they can come and they get a balanced meal. They get fruit, they get milk. Most of them are vegetarian, so it’s a vegetarian meal cooked with love. And it’s just been phenomenal to see the children blossom. Children who previously were really sickly and malnourished – they now come to the shelter and they eat two good meals a day, and whatever else their parents can give them. And they are more alive, they are more embodied, they are doing better at school. Because how can you pay attention at school when you’re literally starving and malnourished?”

The project in Kutumb is run by this fellow Dr. Ashish and his wife Puja. They’re both in their early 30s, along with Puja’s younger brother Vivek, and his wife Swati. The four of them basically take care of all of the bookkeeping and the decision-making in the programs and finding the resources.

“…They are amazing people. In the six years that Vision Builders has been involved with them, I can honestly say they’re the people of highest integrity I have ever met. There is nothing suspect about them. I have visited them four times, for two weeks at a stretch. And every time I go, I think ‘I hope we don’t run into any uncomfortable issues about ‘where did this money go?’ or ‘what happened here?’, but there has never been an issue. They keep in touch regularly. I hear from them every week via email and we have phone calls. And sometimes we Skype. They are so positive and so willing. They are 24/7 + 40 more hours that I don’t know where they come from! It’s just wild what they’re able to accomplish. They never stop moving, and doing, and I feel so excited about them because they have a lot of years ahead of them to continue what they’re doing. When I come and we sit down and we look over the books, everything is meticulously organized and laid out. They are always positive, grateful – just so appreciative. But not in a way that is at all obsequious. For example, if I have an idea and they don’t think it will work or they’re not sure it’s a good idea, we’ll have a really honest discussion. They’re not just trying to placate me or please me. And I think that’s such an unusual quality because usually when you’re receiving funds from someone, you feel some sense of obligation to appease them in some way. And I’m so grateful that they don’t do that.”

 

 

 

 

The amazing thing about this project is that, even in the midst of so many challenges, there are success stories coming out of this. The children are getting healthier and going to school, and the women are developing life skills and finding work.

“… the first year that I visited Kutumb, there was a little girl there named Geeta who was nine years old. At that time I was traveling with my younger daughter, who was also nine. Geeta had just arrived a week prior. They found her in a railway station that’s adjacent to the slum. She was sitting on the floor of the railway station, sobbing because her mother had died from a snakebite. They had lived in the railway station, begging. Her mother’s body was hauled away by the city to burn. Geeta had just been left with her younger sister, who was three years old. This nine-year-old had fallen asleep and her sister had disappeared. She was beside herself. Dr. Ashish and Puja found her. Puja goes to the railway station and makes the rounds every day to look for children who have been abandoned, or whose parents have died. And so they found Geeta in the railway station. They took her back to Kutumb, they contacted the police, put up signs, and went around with a group of people asking if anyone had seen this younger sibling, but the little girl was never found. Geeta has lived at Kutumb now for three years. When she first arrived and I first met her, she was very guarded. At one point, I put my hand on her shoulder and she snapped around, and pushed my hand off of her. Clearly, she had been exposed to some really scary things. Her mother was likely a prostitute. It’s possible that she also prostituted Geeta. So she was really fearful. They said she cried every night. She had long crying episodes every day.

When I went back a year later she was smiling, and standing upright, and looking at people in the eye. And then when I went back again last year, she came running down the stairs and gave me a big hug, and was talking to me in English! She had never been to school before she came to Kutumb, and now she is one of the best students in her little private school. The Kutumb Project pays for a lot of children in the slum to go to these little private schools, because the government education is atrocious. So anyway, she came running down and she said ‘I’m so happy you are here!’, and gave me a big hug. And she’s not crying anymore. She has a family, she has a home, she has parents – Dr. Ashish and Puja – who love her and look after her and 29 other children in this little concrete building in the slums. And they are happy and healthy and helpful.

…It is such a joy to go back. Sometimes I go two years in a row, depending on what’s going on. But every other year, to go and just to see the children really blossom, it’s so powerful. And to see the women, with dignity, coming together as a group to talk about family planning or finances or different things. The kind of joy that they have as a result of having these opportunities… it’s just so gratifying. I wish I could take everyone there to see it. Because I feel like anyone who sees it, would do whatever they could to help.”

 

 

 

 

–Katie Kirkpatrick is Vision Builders Co-Founder & active director until she handed over the organization to a new board in New Jersey. She and her husband have spent more than 20 years initiating charity efforts in America and abroad. In 2001, they began supporting charitable projects abroad which led to the founding of Vision Builders. Vision Builders was inspired by the desire to help children marginalized by poverty to access basic health care, nutrition and education.

The Kirkpatricks believe that it is possible for everyone to help in some small way, and that education and access to resources and information are essential to bringing long-term benefit to people in impoverished and unstable regions.