The healing power of trash

A home near Delhi is using discarded newspapers, plastic bottles and scrap textiles to turn children at risk into confident, creative individuals

Five years ago, Shabila was a quiet girl who covered her head and lived with her conservative family in an east Delhi slum. Her parents encouraged her to stay at home, worried about her safety. Today, she is a confident, jean-clad owner of a beauty salon. She supports her family and has trained two batches of village women to be beauticians.

Pooja and Deepak were seven and six, respectively, when their family found they couldn’t afford to keep them or their two younger siblings. Today, Pooja is a warden in a girl’s hostel, taking care of her siblings’ education and her aged mother. Deepak is studying fine arts at Modi Institute of Art.

Shyamwati from Khedi village in Faridabad discovered too late that her husband was jobless and an alcoholic. Having produced four children in quick succession, there wasn’t enough money to even feed them. Today, she’s functionally literate, her children are graduates and she lives in a house she’s built with her money.

The common factor that Shabila, Pooja, Deepak and Shyamwati share is Karm Marg, a non-profit home in Faridabad. Home to 60 children from high-risk, low income backgrounds, Karm Marg’s no-fuss nurturing has created many self-confident, creative individuals. “As our name suggests,” says Veena Lal, Karm Marg’s constantly overworked founder-director, “our aim is to enable these children to live in a secure family environment even as they learn to fend for themselves.” This isn’t always easy: the children at Karm Marg often come from situations so difficult that their path towards self-reliance and action is fraught with obstacles. Some have never been to school; others are too fragile for it. Some have been abused, physically and worse, while others have lived on the streets.

“That’s why our approach is to heal them with love and acceptance. At KarmGaon, our Faridabad home, the children end up looking after each other and forming close bonds,” says she. Together they nurture the myriad animals on campus — dogs, cats, roosters, ducks, even a sexually-abused goat (Lal, a diminutive 40-something, pulled a bunch of Haryana villagers off the animal and brought her to safety). I see the lush organic vegetable garden that supplies the kitchen of KarmGaon with most of its fresh vegetables. “To care for animals and each other, watch vegetables grow and experience the excitement of creating new things has a lot of therapeutic value,” says Lal.

But it is the creative buzz of Jugaad that has transformed life in KarmGaon. “We started Jugaad, our income generation project, because we didn’t want to be dependent on donations,” says Lal. Initially, Lal and a group of street kids used to make bags from newspapers discarded at the railway station.