The Other Railway Children, Chapter 11 (extract) "The S.E.Asia Tsunami"

At the end of the year, on Boxing Day 2004, South East Asia was hit by the massive tsunami triggered by an underwater volcano off the Sumatra coast, 9.3 on the Richter scale. Whilst the worst of the damage and the highest number of fatalities occurred in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the Indian coast of Tamil Nadu and parts of Andhra Pradesh and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands were badly hit too and fatalities ran into tens of thousands, with many coastal fishing villages being wiped out and families disrupted leading to a risk of orphaned and frightened children taking to the street.

Several of our partner organisations reacted to try to help and street children in Delhi at our partner ‘Butterflies’ made a collection for the children affected by the tsunami and raised 2,000 rupees (£26) from their own efforts. Half a dozen of our partners offered to go to the stricken areas and give initial help to retain vulnerable children at risk of becoming lost or even trafficked in the subsequent confusion. Advice from our Railway Children office in Bombay was that much initial international aid would go during the emergency, but that there would be ongoing work needed to address the trauma and loss that many children would have experienced over a much longer timescale. We approached Comic Relief with this advice and information that, given funding, three of our partners could make a significant difference over a 2-3 year timescale.

A grant of £250,000 was awarded by Comic Relief for New Hope, one of our Tamil Nadu partners, TNTDS (Tamil Nadu Tribal Development Society), and Prayas from Delhi who offered to work in the swamped Andaman Islands. In fact we found that the fishing villages affected were close-knit communities and as long as they could get support to rebuild their villages and boats and nets, they were very protective of their children and the emergence of large numbers of street children that followed disasters like Hurricane Mitch in Central America did not happen in India. The two NGOs working in Tamil Nadu were each given ten village communities to support and work continued for several months.

Railway Children involved ‘Dreamcatchers’, a small Bombay consultancy working with traumatised children and we wanted to use their therapeutic skills in dealing with the biggest need - conquering the children’s fears and traumatic experiences of loss that had suddenly hit their whole communities. ’BBC Sport Relief 2006’ filmed a visit by the English Test cricket team in Bombay, with Andrew Flintoff playing alley cricket with some of the boys at our partner Saathi’s project, and a celebrity cricket team visited the tsunami affected areas and played cricket with the kids on the beach, part of the therapy to persuade children back to play by the sea.

One of the major thrusts of our Comic Relief programme was a drive towards reintegration of runaway children with their families and wider communities. We had always believed that a child’s best place was in its own family provided that family was not abusive and was willing to receive the child back - and, of course, that the child was willing to go. Success was erratic and often families were long distances away or difficult to trace. Follow up, even if a child was chaperoned home, was often non-existent.

Sometimes there were spectacular successes. I remember one lad I met during a visit to our partner Sarjan programme in Ahmedabad. The boy’s name was Pintesh and he was eleven years old and living in a slum home on the outskirts of the city when I was taken to greet him and his family. When he was nine, his unemployed father, an alcoholic with terminal TB, removed him from school and sent him to work for a local tea stallholder to earn money to buy his drink.
One day Pintesh dropped and broke something and his boss grabbed the nearest thing lying on the red hot stove and burned the boy badly as a punishment. The lad ran away and was found by a social worker at the main railway station.

After a couple of days getting to know the boy and obtaining his trust, Pintesh admitted to the Sarjan worker that he missed his mum, but was scared to go back home for fear of what his father would do. The social worker found his lean-to in the slum and arranged a visit to the mother when the father was out or too drunk to notice. After a couple of months the social worker negotiated with the father for the boy’s permanent return, schooling in the morning and work with a reliable stallholder in the afternoon. This worked so well that the father was impressed and gave up alcohol! Later, after the earthquake disaster that was epi-centred on Bhuj but affected Ahmedabad badly too, Pintesh’s mother, although nearly destitute, spent over ten weeks working as a volunteer at the relief camp for those who lost their homes as a thanksgiving for her son’s return and her husband’s restoration. Unfortunately not all homecomings are as successful as this one.

One of our partners, Sathi, which had outreach workers on the platforms of a number of stations - mainly on the Mumbai CST - Bangalore route - had developed a particular type of intervention to reunite children with their families and claimed an 80% success rate. The first priority was to contact runaway children within hours of their arrival and often home repatriation would be achieved fairly simply once parents were contacted and the cause of running away was addressed. However, for children who had been gone from home for months or even years it was harder. Sathi developed a model intervention for these boys which involved taking a group to a 4-week camp in the countryside away from the temptations of railway and city.

The first week would be spent in acclimatisation and games, fun. In the second week the leaders explored with the children their experiences on the street, the hardships and privations, the dangers and risks, disease and rejection. In the third week they began to talk to the children about the families they’d left, the positives and gradually remind the children of what they’d lost. In the final week they identified those children that had elected to return home and began to explore with them what needed to be put right for them to remain at home. Each child going home would be accompanied and negotiations with the family and the wider community would take place to try to overcome the reasons for the child running in the first place. A public ceremony would take place in front of the village community so that all felt a responsibility to watch and care for the child. Their follow up checks revealed that a high proportion of these children were still living with their families a year later.

Railway Children asked Sathi’s founder and Director, Pramod Kulkarni, to present his methodology to the Railway Children partners and many of them, some with Pramod’s involvement, took up the process. In the last couple of years around a quarter of the children contacted by Railway Children’s partners in India have successfully been reunited with their families - that is around 4,000 a year. It is still difficult to follow up all the children as often as we would like, because of the distance that so many live away from the locations where they were found. This is an issue that needs strengthening in future work, linking where possible with NGOs working in the communities that the children come from or with the increasing number of state appointed Child Welfare Committees.