Arrived back in Delhi at 05:30 and made for the cafe outside the station where we could have a coffee and wake up properly and in my case, watch the families and travellers come and go, admire the saris etc! A couple of men were seated on a table next to ours, one of them asked if we we were part of "something" ministries. We wondered if they had been on a conference in Delhi as they were both Pasters, it transpired. The older chap was Paster and was part of "Everett Mission Charitable Trust" which is based Jharkhand near Calcutta, he gave me his card with all the details which included a family photo, his wife and three children. It turned out that in fact he had nine children, two of them were their birth children and seven they had adopted who had been abandoned. He pointed out one of the children, a little girl, sitting between his other son and daughter. They had found her on a rubbish heap, in a terrible state. He said that he too had been brought up in an orphanage and didn't know who his parents were, now it seems his heart is reaching out to these unwanted ones. I wished I had asked if the other six they had adopted were also girls.
It is a timely story as there has been so much written in the Indian Press about female foeticide and infantacide following india's recent Census. A few days ago I wrote the following paragraph, it seems appropriate to include it here:
The womb, the unsafest place for a baby girl
I saw this headline in one of the National newspapers this week, it caught my eye and I read more of the article. Like us, India held a National Census last week. The results are not good news for girls. In Mumbai, for example there are only 838 girls in the 0-6 age group for every 1,000 boys. The provisonal results for the Census across India are "sounding an alarm over the falling child sex ratio (CSR) Despite several awareness campaigns worth millions run by the state to check dwindling numbers, the results are worse than 10 years ago. Who is committing female foeticide and infantacide? Apparently it is not the poorest and least literate communities, to the contrary the reverse is true.
However, every day there are horrific stories reported about discovered girl foetuses and various descriptions of how newborn girls are killed....not easy reading, but there it all is in graphic detail in the daily newpapers, I'll spare you the knowledge, it will break your heart....
Healthy baby girls are quickly taken home from hospital before they are registered, later pronounced dead.
Injustice, in your face......
It is a timely story as there has been so much written in the Indian Press about female foeticide and infantacide following india's recent Census. A few days ago I wrote the following paragraph, it seems appropriate to include it here:
The womb, the unsafest place for a baby girl
I saw this headline in one of the National newspapers this week, it caught my eye and I read more of the article. Like us, India held a National Census last week. The results are not good news for girls. In Mumbai, for example there are only 838 girls in the 0-6 age group for every 1,000 boys. The provisonal results for the Census across India are "sounding an alarm over the falling child sex ratio (CSR) Despite several awareness campaigns worth millions run by the state to check dwindling numbers, the results are worse than 10 years ago. Who is committing female foeticide and infantacide? Apparently it is not the poorest and least literate communities, to the contrary the reverse is true.
However, every day there are horrific stories reported about discovered girl foetuses and various descriptions of how newborn girls are killed....not easy reading, but there it all is in graphic detail in the daily newpapers, I'll spare you the knowledge, it will break your heart....
Healthy baby girls are quickly taken home from hospital before they are registered, later pronounced dead.
Injustice, in your face......
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