locked away.

11:30 on a Tuesday morning, two friends and I step off a crowded bus and onto a busy street. The noise from the cars and the confusion of the busses and motorbikes honking adds to the crazy scene. Dodging the traffic, we make it to the other side of the road and pass the carts of the street vendors selling fresh fruit, roasted nuts, and other various fried foots. The government sign stands at the gate, listing the various buildings in the complex: home for boys, home for girls, home for the mentally disabled, etc. The Yashodharamma Dasappa Girls Home is our destination. After only a minute of walking down the driveway, the traffic noise is gone, replaced by a peaceful silence and the sound of birds chirping. The true nature of this idyllic setting is only given away by the razor wire strung in circles along the top of the tall stone walls along both sides of the road. A dirty baseball cap is stuck in the wire, and I can’t help but wonder what the story is behind it.


We walk past women in colorful saris carrying loads of wood balanced on their heads, and men urinating along the wall. At the end of the road we turn right and walk up to a large pair of black gates that mark the entrance to an institutional-looking building…this is the girl’s home.



When I say ‘home’, the term is quite loosely used. Prison would be more accurate, but these girls have done nothing wrong. These little ones come from a variety of different backgrounds, some were unwanted by their families, and dropped off there. Some of the girls were trafficked from different areas, and some were simply lost. But they all have one thing in common…there are no other options for them. The girls are locked inside 24 hours a day, and are rarely even brought out for walks around the building. For most of the time, they sit around the building with nothing to do. There are no toys, no furniture, nothing to occupy them. These girls are given some opportunity for education, but the only classes offered are in the local language of Kannada, and many of them do not speak it.


Roughly 60 girls occupy this home, ranging in age from about 5 to 18. For the most part, their only prospect of getting out is being shuttled to another “home” like this or into an arranged marriage when they age out at 18. As you can imagine, these don’t generally turn out well. In India, a girl is “worth” the dowry she brings to the marriage…and these girls only have a tiny sum from the government. In fact, the issue of the dowry tradition is a huge contributor to some of these girls being here in the first place. Many families go broke trying to marry their daughters to respectable men, and thus, a girl baby is viewed as a financial liability and a nuisance – leading many families to abort, give their daughters to homes like this, or to just leave the baby to die.

We wait to be let in by one of the women who work at the home. She greets us as she unlocks the oversized padlock, “hello!” This is one of the only English words she knows, but she is friendly enough, smiling and motioning us to enter. She asks us if we have eaten, not to offer us food, but because that is the only other English phrase that she knows. As we stop to talk at the door, little faces start to peer around the corner – we are the most exciting thing that happens during the day, so our presence is noted quickly.

We talk to a few of the older girls before heading upstairs to our room. With simple phrases and lots of gesturing, we can understand each other passably well. We head up to the room that has been allotted to us. The room is decorated with a few holiday streamers, but is otherwise bare of furniture. About 30 girls have already assembled, waiting for us. They clap and cheer when we walk in, and I immediately feel at home with these little ones. 30 pairs of eyes stare at us expectantly as we discuss the plan for the morning session. Lips are quiet, for now (they tend to get louder by a factor of 100 by the end of the day).

The plan for our work in this place is to develop a curriculum that stresses the 10 basic life skills outlined by the World Health Organization: problem solving, decision making, critical thinking, creative thinking, interpersonal relationships, effective communication, self-awareness, empathy, coping with stress, and coping with emotions. We are to teach these things through games and simple lessons. However, having no translator for most of the time we are with the girls leaves lots of time for games and any other activities we can possibly stretch our imagination to do.

We start with a review of English: spelling out loud HEAD, SHOULDERS, KNEES, TOES (etc.) then a resounding version of the song. A few other songs follow this, then a long game of duck-duck-goose (one of their all-time favorites). We decide to try coloring for the first time, not knowing how the girls will respond. I was unsure what to expect, since these girls have literally nothing. Images of young girls clawing each other for crayons plagued my mind, but as we handed out the sheets, the girls were quit polite. And minus a few tussles over crayon-sharing, the coloring session was a wild success! The black and white pages started bursting with color! I sat on the floor as they colored pondering the untapped creative capacity of these amazing little girls, and just wanted to cry. “Clara-auntie, yellow color?” A little girl named Devayni looked at me with gigantic brown eyes. I couldn’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t want her…any of them, really. This world is unjust. I went looking for a yellow crayon.

Countless challenges face three relatively clueless volunteers in a group of 30-40 little girls who don’t speak their language. And sometimes, the weight of the situation crashes down on us, but we try to celebrate ever baby step in the right direction. Praising then when they share, when they don’t hit each other, when they sit when we ask them to. As overwhelming as it can be, we continually are reminded of the priceless value of each one of these girls. They have been shown to little love in their young lives, and we hope that in this short time we have with them, we can change that…even just a little.

No photos are allowed inside the home, so the following pictures are the only physical evidence of these lovely little girls. Their creativity is astounding, I am continually amazed at their resilience even in a place as hopeless as this.