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By Root 1154 0

Would it be letter writing? Simply praying for them? Each had taken hold of my heart in such a special way. It felt powerfully mystical, in a world so crowded with souls, to find my way somehow, through circumstances, coincidences, timing, and fate, to the people I met. I lived halfway around the globe. There were 1.2 billion people in India. How exactly had I ended up in Kausar and Nasreen’s slum, climbing their ladder, sitting on their floor, hearing their stories, finding myself in their preciousness and resilience and vulnerability? Or Neelam’s? I could not walk away without taking with me some kind of responsibility for the meeting by helping out in some tangible way. I wanted to do more than remember them and tell their stories. Too many children—oh, Ouk Srey Leak—had slipped out beyond my reach.

In New Delhi, on the next leg of our journey through India, I found the answer to my prayers.

When we arrived in India’s capital city, the first thing we all noticed were the trees! And then, along the highway, was a large, hilly verge awash in flowers! I squealed. These weren’t just accidental flowers making an evolutionary stab at surviving, it was a proper, planted, cultivated flower garden, and it was a sight for sore eyes. We passed a few families and individuals living on the sidewalks of our leafy hotel neighborhood. They had set up little shelters for themselves, stretching a bit of fabric or plastic or cardboard to make a roof. I saw a few small fires built for cooking, but not many. I later learned that Delhi has a draconian antibegging policy, which has effectively criminalized poverty, pushing it back from the streets where visitors might see it.

There were important people for me to meet here and more media events. But the project I most wanted to visit was a community-based antitrafficking NGO called Apne Aap. When Gloria Steinem heard that I was going to India, she told me that Ruchira Gupta, founder of Apne Aap, was the one person I had to meet who would rock my world, and was she right! In the early 1990s, when Ruchira was a journalist, she exposed a criminal organization that kidnapped Nepali girls and sold them into slavery in India. Her experiences with the trafficking survivors inspired her to establish a small group for women to empower themselves through education, vocational training, and advocacy. Since then, Apne Aap has grown into a network of 150 such antitrafficking self-help groups across the subcontinent, and Ruchira has become one of the world’s most dynamic and authoritative voices for the abolition of sex slavery.

Apne Aap runs a community outreach center right in the heart of Delhi’s red-light district. On the street below, a baby was being bathed by her mother in the street, the water flowing into open drains. Upstairs, the suite of rooms were clean swept and beautiful, with murals painted by members and simple, flat woven mats to sit on. The group has an open-door policy that invites anyone from the ’hood to join for only 10 rupees. Apne Aap uses a holistic approach to empowerment based on “learning, livelihood, and legal protection.” The members teach one another self-reliance, self-efficacy, self-respect, self-love. It can be slow and hard going, but achieving sustainability is a process in the individual’s mind and soul. It is capacity building at the most essential, elemental level. A trained staff offers vocational classes; I ran my hand over the black sewing machines, blessing the steel that helps a girl learn a trade that can save her life. They have English and computer instruction, classes to build social skills. The small self-help groups within the organization access banking and microcredit programs. And they also have lawyers on hand to train them to negotiate for their rights with the police and government bureaucrats.

I had brought a group from PSI, including Seane, to meet Ruchira Gupta at the center. She’s a compact force of nature wrapped in a sari, greeting us with a burst of positive energy that about knocked us over. I could see right away how she could stare