It is that time, the time when one sits back and takes account of all that did and did not happen in the year – and for me, there is a lot to remember! A year ago at this time, HHI was ridiculously poor. Each month between November and May the Board discussed whether I would receive a living stipend, or if I would have to earn my mortgage payment elsewhere – stressful! At the same time, HHI’s bookkeeper stole my personal identity to apply for corporate gold cards, business loans, etc., which was ridiculously stressful and the damage difficult to repair. After months of discussion and finally composing a 26 page proposal for a 3 year fellowship with the Draper Richards Foundation, I was told my plan was just not going to grow fast enough. This was crushing, as it appeared to line up with what I did and did not see in India, where we did not appear to making great progress. The trainings were trickling out and after 6 months of not hearing back from the Indian gov’t, I had all but given up on the partnership with ICDS.

This all was taking a toll on my already minimal social life and worse, it began to impact my health. A friend commented, “This is kicking your ass” and asked, “How much are you going to sacrifice and for how long?” Well noted. I quietly promised myself to “do everything in my power” between December ’06 and June ’07. If there wasn’t a radical turn of events recognizable by anyone on this planet, then on June 30th HHI would go on a shelf and I would get a real job. I realized that HHI was not suffering because I wasn’t working hard enough, but perhaps it was that there needed to be room for others to step in and act. So, I kept going, doing whatever I could to bring HHI into the world, and accepting that as one person, I could only do so much.

Well, here are a few things that came about during those tenuous 6 months:

• HHI was featured in the Skoll Foundation Report 2007, “Growing Opportunity: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems”.
• An Indian holy man told me to give bananas to elephants for “special blessings” – I fed as many bananas to as many elephants as I could!
• The Indian gov’t signed a year contract for HHI to train ICDS teachers – the world’s largest early childhood development program supported by UNICEF and the World Bank.
• The James R. Greenbaum Jr., Family Foundation stepped in with a smart grant, offering HHI $50,000 if we could raise $50,000 in two months time! People all over the US rallied, and we even reached our goal about 5 days early! The grant period ended on June 30th – WE EXCEEDED THIS GRANT!!!

The universe had spoken! These did qualify as a “radical turn of events recognizable by anyone on the planet”. On June 30th I packed my bags and returned to India to successfully launch our third site.

2007 – the year I didn’t quit – was record breaking on every front! I had projected that we would offer 25 Trainings / 390 Women / 1,950 Children. We doubled those numbers. Our local HHI Trainers provided 46 trainings to 562 women offering more nurturing care to 6,088 orphaned and vulnerable children! And we accomplished all of this with 1/2 our projected budget. Those numbers speak for themselves, but also take into account what the 562 women are saying. Here is an excerpt from an Oct. 2007 training of ICDS teachers, End of Training Questionnaire:

What is the most important thing you learned in HHI’s training?

· How much you should love the children and meet their needs.
· Understand more about the development of physical, social, language and cognitive skills
· Understand the importance of giving lots of positive attention and stimulation to develop their various skills.
· How to give security to a child
· How to manage the child that is delayed in their milestones and how we can bring them to normal levels.
· How to care for the children and how to interact with them. (repeated by several women)
· To pay more attention to the child’s cues and how to respond to these
· Importance of observing children from the very beginning stage
· How much you should love the children and meet the needs of the children.

Because of this training, how will you change how you work with children and/or their parents?

· To give awareness class to Teenagers and Mother’s about the child’s development, emotions and growth (Repeated)
· Conduct house visits and give awareness to mothers about child’s
development
· Love the children like her own children and encourage them in whatever they do and she will respond to them when they ask for her.
· Help my students to explore the environment
· Will observe them regularly to promote their developments
· Will treat children by understanding their needs and feelings
· Spend more time playing with the children, pay more attention to them, help them to do more
· The ways to help children to attain various skills (Repeated)

I’m glad I didn’t quit. I am grateful to all those who stood up and joined HHI. And I am inspired by the beautiful dent we are making (together) in this universe. Thank you.

This summer has been a whirlwind of activity for HHI – with demand growing and our capacities expanding to meet these. Recently HHI’s lead trainer, Sujatha, led a training for 29 women who work as caregivers, foster mothers and hospice workers for almost 200 orphaned and vulnerable children. All of these women and children are a part of a wonderful organization called Reaching the Unreachable (RTU). The training was such a hit, that it was featured in RTU’s recent newsletter.

Here is what they wrote:
One of the important programmes of this summer was by “Hands to Hearts”. The resource person Mrs. Sujatha Balaji gave training to our staff and trained Foster Mothers on cognitive skills, language development, therapeutic massage, songs & story telling, with focuses on children. The trained people are expected to disseminate the learnt skills to others. We also requested the regular support of this organization. During the programme Brother asked me to rush to the training hall; when I entered I was surprised seeing small children lying on mats and the mothers massaging their legs, the children were enjoying it by half close their eyes. During this training we could hear the joyful shouting of the children and mothers from the training hall. This was one of the joyful events of this month; we expect good results from coming months onwards.

Pictures from the training -

Women working in groups – learning about a baby’s cues of engagement and disengagement.

Who doesn’t love massage?

 

The women and children enjoy the Puppet Show as part of learning about language development.

I am writing from a very remote village in India, in the Eastern state of Orissa. This area, if famed for anything, is famed for its tribal peoples, who speak more 50-60 different languages, and its profound and prolific poverty and social needs. Though, I am surprised and pleased to report that the poverty here is not as traumatic, at least not for me personally, as I have seen it in the urban areas of India, such as Mumbai. Here things are very simple, even crude, but there are not the masses, writhing on the pavement, clustered under tarps on the sidewalks and roadsides where they eek out any etible item, anything they can for their daily survival and existence.

I am not able to upload pictures from here, but hope to paint you a picture in words.Here there are green rice fields, growing and thriving, covered in the monsoon waters. Men, women and children follow yoked oxen in the fields as they plow and prepare the dirt with a simple piece of wood. The older women are beautifully adored with heavy gold nose rings, some wearing them on both sides of their noses, and others having a large and highly ornamented piece hang from the center of their nose, over their top lip. I attended a meeting of women the other day in a rural village, they were all members of Self Help Groups. They demonstrated the most basic form of micor-finance, that of group savings and investment. Each woman who is a group member must contribute Rs. 20 – 40, the equivalent of $1 – $0.50, per month to their group. After 6 months, the women can then choose how to invest this money, usually in the form of helping a woman open her own business (one woman I met bought a cart and began selling bananas as her business), or helping in family, health or education matters. Whoever recieved the money was to pay it back to the group at the tiny interest rate of 2%. Their resolve and strength was deeply moving. Some of the older women in the group had never had a year of education, but they had been taught to write their names and therefore sign their monthly contributions in and be a part of the group.

The HHI trainings are going well. We are in the midst of our 2nd of 3 trainings here, the process to train a local HHI Trainer to work independently once we leave. Our newest trainer is named Tapaswini, she is 28 years old, has a MA in English, advanced training in Human Rights and was previously a program officer for a local NGO that led rural community health education. Tapaswini has a 4 month old baby girl, who has happily been a part of our daily trainings. Our first 2 groups are women who are day care workers in the rural villages, at the creche centers which allow the local women to work a half day in the fields to earn income for their families. These day care providers though are mostly young women, who have little knowledge and no formal education about early childhood development. They are learning quickly and are enjoying the new information, excited to take it back and share it with all the mothers in their village. Our third training will begin on Saturday at a local orphanage.

I am staying in a very rural area and it is 15km to this small village, which has this one computer for me to write emails from. It is painfully slow, but I am deeply grateful for its presence.

Just over 2 months ago HHI was given a fabulous and daunting opportunity – that was to raise $50,000 and if we could do this, it would be matched! For those of you who don’t know, HHI is run primarily by a one-woman-show (that’s me), supported by a ton of volunteers. To raise this amount of money meant that HHI had the chance to not only support our current operations, to expand to a new site in India, but that we could finally have sufficient operating funds without the Board having the monthly conversation of “can we pay Laura her stipend this month?”

Given the challenge to raise more money in 2 months than we had in the last 2 years, I went into strategy mode and immediately came up with a plan for me and so many volunteers to pull off this phenomenal feat – this looked like an Excel sheet with about 45 To Do items! I also made an appointment to meet with a development officier from a very large and successful non-profit to share my plan and glean any insider tips that I could. When I showed this guy (a professional full-time fundraiser) my 45 point plan he looked at me like I was nuts and told me that to do this was “humanly impossible”. I grinned, knowing that I had already accomplished 80% of my list – this guy had no idea how stubborn I can be and he didn’t seem to get that I didn’t view failure as an option! His “wisdom” was that I should focus the majority of my energies leaning on our benefactor to reach out to all his contacts to match his own contribution. I tried to keep a straight face, but I really couldn’t envision thanking our donor for this $50,000 worth of generosity by asking him to now go out and raise another $50,000 from his friends.

After that amusing meeting, I got back to work, I got back to all of you – those of you who get what HHI is doing and the profound difference it is making in our world. SO many people responded, with donations of time, talent and treasure. Checks came pouring in, from $10 to $5,000 and in just two months time something astounding happened – we raised the funds, we got our first pilot contract with the Indian gov’t and in the month of June HHI trained 63 women who are serving the record number of 625 orphaned and vulnerable children!

It just goes to show… “Never believe that a small group of people can’t change the world…indeed, they are the only ones who do.” – Margaret Meade

Thank you all for making goodness grow in our world.

Hands to Hearts International (HHI) has dedicated itself to two interconnecting problems in the developing world – the plight of orphaned children, laying untouched in cribs, and that of women trapped in a cycle of poverty, without the education or economic opportunity to contribute to their families or communities.

Around the world there are millions of orphaned children – due to AIDS and other diseases, political instability/conflict, the stigma of unwed motherhood, and extreme poverty. Most countries try to deal with orphans by creating orphanages and hundreds of thousands of children (country data varies widely), ages zero to three, are being raised in orphanages. Faced with scarce resources and circumstances of dire poverty, most orphanages have too few caregivers and too many children. Often lying untouched in cribs, the children suffer most directly from these circumstances.

The mission of HHI is founded on two principles: To nurture children and empower women.

unproductive adults.”
World Health Organization – Infant/Caregiver Report

While HHI is not an all-encompassing solution to such a massive and complex issue, it does offers a critical component for healing and a way to shift the systems and community situations that perpetuate this crisis.