Ladli Vocational Center
This semester LCM has decided to focus on hunger as an issue that faces the world and is in our heart as a community. As student leaders, we want to raise awareness within our community and put action into the conversations we have around hunger. When we first decided as leaders to focus on hunger as a justice issue in our community it lead me to reflect on my own experience witnessing hunger and poverty.
I have had the opportunity to travel abroad three times in my collegiate career, I have gone to Thailand, Tanzania, and most recently spent a semester in India. Each country was so different and eye opening. Having just come home from four months in India, my view of hunger and poverty shifted once again. I don’t know that I will ever have the words to describe the look on a child face when they come up to asking for money or food, or the feeling of being a foreigner and not knowing how to respond to anything that you are seeing. The experience of being abroad is both wildly exciting and painfully striking at the same time. I had the chance to meet so many people and to see so many thriving in a world unlike my own.
India is a place with so much complexity from a past filled with so many cultures coming together to be the modern India that it is today. Between the history of the Caste and gender discrimination, as well as the vast difference between the rich and the poor, India can knock an outsider on its face trying to grasp it all. In the midst of all that I was trying to grasp I had some great experiences. In particular my experience volunteering at Ladli Girls Vocational Center. This center teaches girls who have perviously been marked as street children the skills that they can use to make a living. They teach the girls traditional crafts and modern jewelry making skills. The money raise through selling their crafts goes directly back to the children as these centers.. This organization also has a few shelters and provides a number of resources for the kids living on the streets of Jaipur. For six weeks I did crafts with the girls and taught English to a few of the middle schoolers. It was incredible meeting these girls and establishing a relationship with them.
I wanted to introduce the LCM community to this organization with a link to their website for any interested. In the midst of taking action against hunger in Minnesota, I thought our community would like to hear about some of the action being done half way around the world.
Peace,
Allison
Here is the link: http://www.ladli.org/