My Viva Equip trip to India

There’s nothing quite like your first experience of India. The combination of muggy heat, exotic spices and petrol fumes hit me almost as soon as I stepped off the plane a few weeks ago. It was my first trip to India, and I didn’t quite know what to expect.

I had travelled out to Delhi to teach the co-ordinators of three of our city-wide networks (in Delhi, Dehradun and Hyderabad) how to run Viva Equip Projects in their respective cities, using Viva’s Quality Improvement System.

I was a little intimidated before we began, as I was training five men, but they were such a lovely group that after about five minutes I felt completely at home with them. Our time flew by, and their enthusiasm was so encouraging - there seems such a hunger and thirst for quality care in India.

Those five guys represent networks that are connecting a total of more than 170 projects, and they are hoping to enrol between 50 and 60 of these to the Viva Equip Projects programme. But those are just numbers, and don’t really convey the heart of what this training will mean in the lives of children. The thing that made me so enthusiastic about starting Viva Equip Projects in India was that I know the kind of transformation that is possible when organisations are not only compassionate but also capable. I’ve seen it happen in other cities around the world as I’ve helped to introduce Viva Equip, and I look forward to seeing it take off here too.

But even on this trip, although the programme is just beginning, I caught a small glimpse of what that might look like here when I spent a fascinating two hours talking to a woman called Sharmla. While Sharmla hasn’t had a chance to do Viva’s Equip training yet, she is involved in our Girl Child initiative helping to mentor young girls in the slum communities of Delhi. She had been working with one girl whose mother was a prostitute, who was really pressurising her daughter to start working with her. They struggled for money, and the girl knew that resigning herself to prostitution would provide much-needed income, yet she was reluctant to end up in her mother’s situation.

Because the Girl Child programme had prepared Sharmla well, she knew how to support and encourage the young girl, helping her to stand up for her rights and fight for a different future. That girl is now in school every day, getting an education that will hopefully prevent her from ending up in the same awful situation as her mother. Other projects in the network are also working together to support the family, and the girl’s mother no longer feels so pressured to use drastic means to bring in money for her family.

This girl’s life has been turned around, and all because Sharmla had the right information and the right skills to help her. Girl Child is focusing on one particular area of need, and Viva Equip will be helping projects working on a variety of issues, but the principle is still the same – transformation is possible when people, and the organisations they belong to, are both willing and able to help children.

I loved my first trip to India, and I hope I get to go back again some day. Not only for the amazing sights, sounds and smells, but to see how Viva Equip Projects is empowering people like Sharmla to bring new hope to their country’s children.

* J from Viva, UK