A Second Chance CRS Support Gives New Opportunities to Orphans

Within minutes of meeting Ashish Singh, it’s likely you’ll have a photo album in your hands. The first photo is one of Ashish, bare-chested, sitting on a motorcycle. The next is one of him posing beside a famous Bollywood actor – his idol, Salman Khan. The photos are not really him – but rather his head superimposed on the bodies of actors. Bollywood is his dream. And though he is a bit shy today with visitors from Catholic Relief Services, you get the sense Ashish Singh is anything but shy.

“He doesn’t have a lot of finds his own age,” Ashish’s aunt Renu says. “He makes friends with construction workers doing work around here, or shop keepers – with anybody.”

Here is the impoverished community of Nalasopara in western India, where Ashish and his older brother live with their aunt and uncle. Now 15 years old, Ashish lost his mother to AIDS when he was only three. His father died five years later, also of AIDS.

“He used to work as a carpenter, and he was still able to care for his family,” Renu Singh said of her brother-in-law, Ashish’s father. “Slowly he stopped working because of his illness, then we started looking after Ashish because we were living in the same house.”

With a child of her own, bearing that responsibility has been hard for Renu and her husband, who is a laborer at a nearby factory.

“I do a little work at home, like stitching, so I make a little money,” Renu said. “That does help, but we are not able to sustain it.”

The hardships were compounded as Ashish himself began suffering the affects of HIV, passed on to him by his mother at birth. He began losing weight, and within a year of his father’s death, the periods between his own bouts of illness began getting shorter.

“He studied up until third standard, then he stopped going because he was falling too ill,” Renu said.

Though his parents passed on the virus to Ashish, they left something else behind as well – a connection to CRS partner agency Kripa Foundation, which is working in Vasai to provide care and support for more than 1,200 people living with HIV. Through an offshoot to Kripa Foundation called the Vasai Region AIDS Control Society – VRACS – Kripa Foundation had been providing care and support to both of Ashish’s parents. As he got more ill, Renu knew where to turn for help.

In 2003, Ashish and his brother started receiving monthly rations of food, provided by VRACS as part of their regular nutrition program. The family also received an electric light and a water drum – both much needed in the tiny two room home they share with five other relatives, bringing to ten the number of people crowding the small space.

Through VRACS, Ashish’s older brother, now 17, is receiving educational support, He is currently enrolled in a computer class paid for by VRACS, and has plans to go to university next year. With additional nutritional support provided through CRS by the Clinton Foundation, the family now has enough to cover their basic needs.

“Last month we didn’t have to buy any food,” Renu said. “Whatever money was remaining we were able to save that.”

It is much needed support. Though 15, Ashish weighs only 44 pounds, his growth seriously stunted by the combined effects of HIV and years of poor nutrition as a child. Through VRACS, Ashish was also able to access the services of a government hospital that provided him with free anti-retroviral medications, the effects of which, combined with the nutritional support, were immediate.

“It has helped him tremendously,” Renu said. “People were saying he would not live very long, but since starting the ARV’s he has really put on weight.”

Out of school now for seven years, Ashish still faces serious challenges. VRACS has provided him with school supplies, and plans to try to enroll him in special schooling so he can eventually reintegrate into the regular school system. It will be a challenge – he will have to start again at the third grade level as a teenager – but Ashish as always is eager, hopeful one day perhaps to become one of the Bollywood actors he idolizes.

“I would like to go back to school,” Ashish Singh. “I would like to study everything.”