no-longer-a-slumdog

stolen childhood
If through strength and providence you survived the first few
years of life, at the age of 5 or 6 you might be sold by your parents
into bonded labor to help secure a little desperately needed
money for the family. Otherwise, you probably joined your siblings
sifting through garbage to find rags, plastic bottles, pieces of
metal or anything else that could be sold for a few pennies to help
the family survive. You may have become a beggar or even a thief,
desperately doing whatever you could just to eat.
School It wasn’t even a possibility. Your small contribution
to the family income was needed just to survive. Besides, nobody
in the family had ever been to school anyway.
You think I’m exaggerating. No, I am See what it takes to be a firstgeneration
reader.
not. According to UNICEF, more than
Third-Grade Dropouts
1 billion children around the world are deprived
of one or more of these essentials: ad-
www.nolongeraslumdog.org
equate shelter, food, safe water, sanitation, health care or education—living
in conditions you and I can hardly imagine. 2
Desperate Poverty
As bad as this sounds, millions of children every year experience
a far worse fate. In despair of ever being able to care for you,
your mother might one day have thrust you onto a passing train
bound for Delhi, Bombay or Calcutta. At the end of the run, you
would have been pushed onto the streets of a megacity by a train
employee as you screamed in vain for your mommy. It is hard to
imagine this could really happen—but it does. I heard this very
story told by a girl named Asha. Here’s her tale in her own words:
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