Send Child beggars to School in Bodhgaya India

I am Deepak Kumar and I am Chairman of People First here in Bodhgaya.

In the past there were literally hundreds of child beggars in Bodhgaya   especially in the winter season but the situation due to your help as improved significantly.

We still have much work to do and the appeal is still live because of the great success of the project but we were encouraged when a group of foreigners visited Rescue Junction they mentioned the fact that they had not seen any child beggars, in contrast to previous years when there were many.

 Our own surveys have shown over a sustained period the number of child beggars around the temple area has been reduced by over 80% and we have resettled many children into mainstream education, but we are not claiming here we have solved the problem of childI begging in Bodhgaya in its entirety, far from it, with your help we aim to ensure our continuing vigilance and action regarding this problem.  But we have made a huge difference. 

Because we have our Children’s centre (Rescue Junction) our experienced staff have been able to resettle over 100 child beggars in mainstream education this year alone.

Here what Pinto (name changed) has to say,

“People thought when they gave us money that they were helping us, in fact they were given a reason to stay away from school. It wasn’t as if we got to keep all the money, most of it went to the agent who had brought us all from the village for the purpose of begging. Now with the help of People First I am back in school, and I no longer have the long days of begging, with a beating at the end from the agent if I didn’t make enough money, Thank you so much!”

The appeal is still live and on March 16^th Global Giving will be matching donations.

Thank you all for your help and support, keep in touch with all our work on Facebook the link is in this report,

Deepak

Links:

• our Facebook page