no-longer-a-slumdog

Chapter SEVEN
Make Your Life Count
Regrets. I’ve had a few in my life. There are times I said to
myself, “If only . . .” or “I wish . . .” Like you, I feel sad for the past
failures, mistakes and sins.
One of my most painful memories has to do with a little girl
named Meena. Meena was a beautiful 5-year-old living in Bombay.
She had the biggest brown eyes. When the social workers
first saw her, she was standing in six inches of sewer water.
Meena was one of the thousands of children who survive by
begging on the streets. No one knows if her parents abandoned
her or simply died. Her life was sustained by the meager sums she
could coax from passersby and the scraps she would often eat out
of the garbage piles just to stay alive.
I saw a photo of Meena, and it’s one I can never forget. Later,
I learned that she began eating sewage-infested dirt off of the
streets. Soon she went into a coma and died.
The sad thing is that there are still children eating dirt to fill
their empty stomachs. They are silent victims of poverty, quietly
passing unnoticed from some of the darkest places on earth.
For Meena it’s too late. My deep regret is that we didn’t have
a GFA Bridge of Hope center in her slum to rescue her.
Children like Meena make it important, critically important,
for us to move from “good intentions” to actions.