The Other Railway Children, Chapter 9 (extracts) "Giving Talks"

I had by now amassed sufficient experience to be able to respond to the increasing number of requests I was getting to give talks about the Railway Children. I was also still a member of the Amnesty Children’s Human Rights Network and was listed as a schools speaker on children’s rights, so I found myself increasingly doing assemblies, classroom talks, Amnesty Group talks and visits to churches, clubs, Mothers Unions and Women’s Institutes, Rotary, Probus, Inner Wheel and Soroptimists.

I’d assembled sets of 35mm slides most of which I’d taken myself in India and used these very flexibly to talk about how I’d got involved with Amnesty, the Consortium for Street Children and Railway Children and illustrated the violations of children’s rights and what could be done to support vulnerable children through my experience in all three organisations of working for the rights of street children. I carted around my old 35mm slide projector despite the Railway Children office pressing me to use powerpoint technology, but I have too many experiences of technology not working at the crucial moment and preferred anyway just to talk from pictures without any screened text. Several organisations appreciated the quality of the old slides and the absence of text messages detracting from the talk and the fact that I could respond more easily to the audience, interrupting to answer questions, and omitting or adding slides at the last minute when I gauged how things were going.

Mind you, even my simple technology had its moments. At one Soroptimists’ meeting in Cumbria, as I’d travelled by train, the local secretary had borrowed a sophisticated computer driven projector and whilst it worked, we found we couldn’t control the focus and the photos went in and out of focus in such a way that we were all soon feeling seasick! Unfortunately as the projector was borrowed no-one had a clue how to correct this and frantic calls to husbands were in vain.

On another occasion, I’d slipped and dropped my own projector on an icy footpath and borrowed a very old one that hadn’t been used for years from a neighbour. I set it up in a school hall before 180 9 -11 year olds, the lights went out and I tried to adjust the cartridge to show the first slide when I pressed the wrong button and all the slides fell out onto the floor as I’d not realised that this cartridge was side rather than top loading. Great embarrassment all round!

Also, after assurance that the classroom or hall in which I was to speak had curtains or blinds I would arrive occasionally to find the classroom had been switched or the blinds were broken, so I have learned to bring a standby USB stick for powerpoint if necessary (all schools are equipped these days with that facility - however, as I feared, some school laptops are encoded to reject some imported equipment to prevent virus contamination so it’s not all plain sailing!).

I normally introduce my talks with a brief description of my encounter with the young street girl on Churchgate station in Bombay leading to my involvement with Amnesty and the Consortium for Street Children, and the risk assessment that was the catalyst for the founding of the Railway Children. After talking about a couple of cases of street child torture and murder from Amnesty files, I move to the more positive aspects of work with street children, depicting some scenes of the need - children working and scavenging on the stations, being arrested, hungry and sick - followed by photos taken from our projects showing platform schools, vocational training, sickbays, leisure opportunities, our work in East Africa and the UK as well as India and finish with the stories of some of the children in our care and the positive changes brought about.

Often I speak to quite small groups - perhaps a dozen elderly ladies - and just receive a donation of £15 or £20 for the charity. Early on it was suggested that speaking to such small groups with so little return was a poor use of my time and that I should look for a minimum of £80 to justify me going. We put this argument to bed after a cheque for £20,000 was received one day from a man at a London address who had not been on our database. We contacted him to find out how he knew us and he said he’d had an unexpected windfall in the city he’d not budgeted for and had asked his mother if she knew of any deserving cause. She’d apparently been one of my audience in the village Women’s Institute the previous week! Another group I’d visited apologised for the small donation as they were not well off, but they’d all remember us in their wills!