Catholic Relief Services is distributing aid items to flood victims. The aid packages include kitchenware like pots and plates; sleeping mats and blankets; soap, detergent, and water purification tablets. Photo by Laura Sheahen/CRS

Sixteen-year-old Renuka works twelve hours a day in a garbage dump in southern India, sorting cans, bottles, and glass. Each day she earns about 80 cents, enough to bring a few pounds of rice home to her family’s house in a slum area of the city of Adoni. Her parents don’t work, so she and her sister support the family by working at the dump. She sifts through a lot of trash, but says the needles don’t poke her.

Renuka could take Sunday off if she didn’t need the money, but she does—so she works every day. She took the day off on Tuesday this week, however, to travel two and a half hours to receive a package of aid items from CRS. Most of the beneficiaries live closer to the CRS distribution site, but Renuka and others from Adoni were added to the beneficiary list: not only is she HIV-positive, but her family’s home was destroyed in a devastating flood that hit India a few weeks ago.

It’s a triple whammy of crushing misfortune: impoverished, sick, and now virtually homeless, this teenager’s life seems impossibly grim. Renuka has someone on her side, though: a short, determined woman named Sister Lilly Lobo.
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Flood survivors in southeast India stand in front of their destroyed home. Photo by Father Jijo Murthanatt for CRS

“When the flood hit, the water rose from my feet to my waist in five minutes,” says Kasturi, a 20-year-old mother who is nine months pregnant. “My husband put our two daughters on his shoulders, one on each side. We walked about a mile in the water.”

Like tens of thousands of impoverished villagers in Andhra Pradesh, an area in southeastern India, Kasturi and her family escaped the flood with their lives and nothing else. Most people from Kasturi’s village went to a railway platform that stood above the floodwaters in a neighboring district, sleeping there until the waters receded.
When they went back after three days, there was little to salvage. “Our house is mud now,” says 20-year-old Adam, another villager. “Just completely filled with mud.” Some managed to dig up a few pots, pans or the jute sifters they need to sift rice.
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As a series of natural disasters continues to pummel Asia, CRS is helping impoverished victims of severe flooding that hit south India on October 2 and only receded several days later.

“I’ve never seen a tidal wave, but this is the kind of damage I imagine a tidal wave would look like,” says CRS’ Katherine Cunliffe of the damage in Andhra Pradesh. “Flood waters rose up to 14 feet in some areas. Houses have been destroyed and there is mud and silt everywhere.”
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From Patrick Nicholson, Caritas communications officer:

Over 2.5 million people have been forced from their homes due to heavy rains and flooding in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in South India.

Caritas India fears the worse is still to come with more rains forecast, threatening to burst river banks and dams and inundate vast areas.
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A group of students from Austin, TX, recently visited CRS’ HIV and AIDS program in India. Liza Manjarrez, a campus minister who accompanied them, reflects on the trip:

For over a year, I had been planning an international immersion trip to India. The trip, for students, would focus on building community, doing justice, living simply, and engaging spiritually.
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Thousands of people across Assam, India are dealing with flooding brought on by incessant rainfall that began in late June. In some areas, rivers continue to rise above danger levels, according to CRS staff reports.

In response, Catholic Relief Services and our local partners are currently assisting 600 families with water purifying tablets, hygiene kits and information on healthy sanitation practices. Food, potable water and medical attention are among the immediate needs of residents, according to CRS staff.
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On Monday, CRS Communications Officer Liz O’Neill asked Jennifer Poidatz, CRS Country Representative for India, to comment on the film Slumdog Millionaire. Poidatz said that, whatever the films merits or drawbacks, it accurately portrays Mumbai slums.

A very large slum area where families sort through garbage and recycle everything from glass to plastic to wire, to paper. Photo by Karl Grobl/CRS

In an article in Republican American (please note, article contains graphic discussion of treatment of child beggars), CRS India staffer Deepa Sundara Rajan, concurs with Poidatz assessment.

From the article: “The film, ‘is a pretty realistic presentation of the way the slums are,’ Deepa Sundara Rajan, of Catholic Relief Services in India, told me. The slums of Mumbai take up about 50,000 acres and most of those who live there are migrants, driven from their impoverished villages to the city of a million dreams.”

“Both Catholic Relief Services and Save the Children have posts in India, where its workers do not deny the obvious, but strive, as ‘Slumdog’s’ critics might, to improve the life of India’s estimated 200,000 child beggars, who make our recession look like a day on Easy Street.”

India is a fascinating mix of amazing facts and contradictions. Despite the many benefits that India’s privileged classes have secured after a decade of impressive economic growth, the lives of hundreds of millions of poor and marginalized continue to stagnate in poverty and malnutrition, many of them in the slums depicted in the Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionnaire.”

CRS Communications Officer Liz O’Neill asked Jennifer Poidatz, CRS Country Representative for India, to comment on the film.

Liz
There has been so much talk here in the United States about degree and magnitude of poverty portrayed in the film. Are the slums of Mumbai accurately depicted in the movie?
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