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My sweet friends sat with me for hours to comfort me. Papa Jack read a recovery text to me while I lay still like a wretch. Seane “niced” me, rubbing little circles on my back, so-called because it feels nice, and listened while I sobbed about that man ironing dirty clothes, whose traumatic image kept returning to my mind. I told them about my transformative (though painful at the time) experiences at Shades of Hope, and soon, through fellowship, the downtime became a blessing.

I was reminded once again that I could have serenity in spite of circumstances, in spite of people, places, and things. And I also knew that this despair, too, would pass, despite the impression that everything was hopeless and futile.

I recovered quickly enough to fulfill my obligations in New Delhi and to travel to Jaipur, where Akshay Kumar and I reached out to thousands of truckers with the message of prevention. I was holding it together quite well, in fact, until my very last day in India, when I met a group of homeless children.

Anubhav is an NGO that rescues homeless boys from the railway station, where children end up after they have been abandoned or orphaned or have escaped from abusive families. The outreach workers try to save the girls, too, but the gangs/pimps/traffickers are too slick and usually nab them first. In fact, the director sadly told me they have never once been able to rescue a girl. The boys, some of them just toddlers, scavenge for food along the tracks that run through the grubbiest, nastiest, most gruesome slum I’ve ever seen. The children look like lunatics with their never brushed hair in wild nests around their grimy faces, standing with shoeless feet on garbage heaps and industrial scrap metal piles. The malnutrition was so bad, their hair was two-toned, orange and dull brown. Their homes were rotting sacks stretched on bricks.

The organization, which was started by a group of street children—again, the real experts—runs a drop-in center that provides a safe space where the boys can sleep and spend time during the day. It teaches personal hygiene, feeds them, begins literacy training, and offers spiritual direction. They meditate in the mornings, pray before meals. Some of the boys were AIDS orphans, others ran away from abusive homes. I held a ten-year-old and a four-year-old on my lap, darling little things, and we talked about everything under the sun. Both had escaped abuse, preferring the mean streets to the cruelty at home. The older one had been raped about five times. It was unbelievable that he was so honest with me. (I began to realize some of the gender differences within the sexual exploitation of children. Girls are often kept captive and used chronically; boys are used episodically by occasional predators.) I liked it best when we talked about safe touching. I said one should ask first and remember that everyone has the right to say no, and we should each respect another’s “no.” The little one had been taken in by the center within two days of arriving at the rail station. The older one had been addicted to huffing paint fumes, something common among urban, traumatized youth. Often it’s done initially to ward off hunger, but the high also becomes part of the appeal, a way to numb the pain of reality. Amazingly, I could share some simple concepts with him. After we discussed it, he said he believed he was powerless over huffing, that it made his life unmanageable, and that there was a good and loving God, and he could ask his God for help refraining from huffing, one day at a time. (Of course, I don’t think he’ll be permanently fixed, but maybe it’s a tool that will give him relief from time to time.) I asked them if in honor of the special time we spent together they’d look out for one another after I left. Still on my lap, they beamed at each other, squealed “yes!” and showed me how they were going to hug and hold hands.

I wandered around the neighborhood, going deep into the thicket of provisional dwellings, imagining life