Admitting Sabu to school was not easy, as he had been a dropout for two years. However, with SEED's efforts, he succeeded! He successfully enrolled in school, and in February 2021, he joined the Boys Dream Home.
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Growing up in the Salt Lake slum, Jahar's journey started with challenges that would test the spirit of any young soul. Born into a family facing economic hardships, his early years were marked by the absence of education and the weight of poverty.
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The goal of SEED is to take people out of survival mode so they can begin to heal their communities from within. So, in addition to the children, SEED Society also does some significant work in helping the family unit by working with moms.
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Imagine this: three girls, once bound by the chains of generational poverty, finding their wings and taking off. They have each been enrolled in a 12-month training program at none other than the Kolkata airport! Upon completion, these three ladies will start their first jobs in Hospitality, Travel & Customer Service. How's that for an incredible transformation?
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Somnath's journey from a childhood marked by poverty and neglect to becoming a valued member of our organization is a powerful example of the impact that you're making in the lives of these children!
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He became healthier because he was receiving regular meals, and happier because he had a safe home and a bed to sleep in.
Also - he got to get an education!
After completing his board exams, Samar attended automobile engineering training and as of February 2023, he accepted a job at the Suzuki company after a job fair interview at his school!
We are THRILLED at this news. This is just a testament to what can happen through the dedicated staff at SEED AND through gifts from supporters of Seed India.
Generational poverty ends with Samar!
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After being forced into an arranged marriage, Barsha was abused by her in-laws and new husband. The Girls Dream Home changed her life. Listen to her whole story now!
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Rinki was born in the Khalpar slum to a very poor family. She is the only child of her parents and has spent all of her young life being raised among the tin and tarp shanties in the slum. They struggle to afford food and even the most basic of resources. Rinki, even at the young age of 10, knows what her life in the slum will be if she stays. She’s also seen what life could look like in the Dream Home after watching a lot of her peers leave to live there…
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Today, we introduce you to Sonia Saha.
Sonia was one of the first 16 girls that moved into the Girls Dream Home in 2016. If you’ve visited Kolkata in the last few years, you probably recognize Sonia’s face and you’ve probably met her. Her dream is to be a teacher. Math is not her favorite subject but she is working hard to overcome that. She’s working hard. Her story is heavy. She had to endure more than a young girl should, but her story is also full of hope. God, through the work of SEED and safety of the Dream Home, has changed the trajectory of our sweet Sonia’s life.
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Ambika and Laxmi are two sisters who are living in the Girls Dream Home. Laxmi moved in 2016 when the girls home first opened and Ambika joined her in 2020.
The girls are from the Khalpar slum and belong to parents who work as a rickshaw puller and a maid servant. They also have one other sister, Sujata, who is a little older than Laxmi. When Ambika was born, Sujata was pulled from school to care for her newborn sister. At that time, the family sent Laxmi to live at her aunt’s house. The conditions were not great and she was often neglected, abused and denied food.
Her little sister joined her in 2020 after life in the slum worsened for the Sarkar family…
Bishal Barick moved into the Boys Dream Home in 2018, before construction was complete. He was in the first class of 17 boys to move in. He’s 19 now and studying in what is equivalent to 10th grade in the United States.
Bishal was born with an illness that makes his left side weaker than his right. Right away, his birth mother saw that he had some special needs. We believe that she was probably not married and when she realized he was ill, she decided to abandon her baby in the hospital.
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Monika is 16-years-old and has lived in the Girls Dream Home since it first opened in October of 2016. Her mother is a cook and her father is a sweeper at a local eye hospital in Kolkata. Her father is also married to another woman, who he currently lives with, and does not provide any support to Monika’s mother and family…
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It’s been 592 days since my feet stepped off of Indian soil. It’s the longest I’ve spent away from our friends in Kolkata since they first came into my life so many years ago. None of us knew in February of 2020 how much COVID-19 would ravage the world and bring everything to a grinding halt. We really had no idea that it would prevent us from being together for so long. It’s been 592 days and we still don’t have an idea of when we will get to go back.
It’s a complicated emotion to process; missing people that you really have only spent a cumulative 30 days with over the last 3 and a half years, but I do— I miss them terribly.
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…The people I met in Kolkata know unimaginable pain, but also undeniable purpose. Their lives may be messy, but they are meaningful. They are all too familiar with tragedy, but praise God they are now familiar with His truth as well. Indeed, Kolkata is a place of opposites and extremes. My heart hung in a paradox of simultaneously full and broken during the eight days I spent there…
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One of the questions we are often asked is, “How do you pick which kids go to the Dream Homes?”
It’s not an easy question to answer, mostly because there are SO many kids that would benefit from living in the Dream Homes who deserve to be rescued out of the trauma and tragic living situation they are in. The best way to summarize the “how” is that SEED tries to rescue the worst case scenarios. The kids who are severely abused or the families that are in dangerous poverty.
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We first met Brishapati when she was a baby, playing in the trash of the Kalphar Slum. Her parents work as a rickshaw puller and housekeeper. Her father, Raju, had been married previously, and had two sons, but when that woman died, he met and married Kalpana (her mom). Together, they had Brishapati and her two younger sisters. As with many of the families we have shared with you from the slum, her father was an alcoholic and her mother had to work more to feed her children, ultimately leaving her girls to fend for themselves…
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Anjali is a 10-year-old girl from the Khalpar Slum who came to live in the Dream Home in January of 2020. Anjali’s mother, Balika, ran away when she was 15 years old and got married. Her husband, Bapi, would abuse her badly…
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Biswajit was born and brought up in a very poor family in the Khalpar Slum. His parents earn very meager wages as a water deliverer and a house maid. The eldest of five children, all of whom are living in the Dream Homes, we have really watched Biswajit grow into the caring, responsible and compassionate young man that he is today. Quite different than the boy that we first met. As he grew up in the slum, Biswajit was involved in tobacco, drugs, street gambling and a sexual relationship with a girl in the slum. All of his friends were drop outs and were illiterate.
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Sayanti is from the Nalpur slum. She is an eight-year-old girl who lost her father when she was four, then her mother right before her seventh birthday. Both parents suffered from severe jaundice, which lead to kidney failure. Because of the lack of medical care and financial resources, there was nothing that could be done to treat it.
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Raja (12) has lived in the Khalpar slum all of his life. His father was a hardcore alcoholic that regularly abused Raja, his mother, and Raja’s older brother and sister.
His father was in an accident that caused him to be bedridden, and then a few months later, he was murdered.
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