Salaam Baalak Walk

Today I went on a walk for my history class called Cities of Delhi lead by a ex-street kid who talked about life for street kids in Delhi. The walks are organized by a NGO called the Salaam Baalak Trust, which does a variety of cool things for the street kids. Our guide...whose name was Shakar I think...walked us through the New Delhi train station and surrounding neighborhood to show and tell us about the lives of Delhi street kids. He said a lot of the street kids in Delhi are runaways from rural areas, who leave for a variety of reasons: poverty, abuse, boredom, fantasies of city life they've seen on TV, etc. Our guide said he ran away from Bihar at age 12 because he'd gotten himself into gambling and drugs and realized that he was causing a lot of trouble and pain for his parents and didn't know a better way to turn his life around and stop troubling them (respect and love for parents is very profound here). Many kids, like him, show up at the New Delhi train station without much of a plan, but are picked up quickly by other street kids...or if you are a girl, probably kidnapped by a pimp (the number of runaway girls and street girls is a lot lower for this reason). The networking that happens between these children in an effort to get by is amazing. He said they have essentially informal business relationships with the juice vendors at the station: sometimes sleeping on top of their shacks, sometimes using them as a bank of sorts, sometimes giving them some of the spoils of their train car raids. They sometimes take the money stored at the juice vendors' place to pay police officers off so they don't get sent to the government shelter/prison. They sell old magazines to the media stands and know how to act blind and mute to avoid trouble when traveling on trains without tickets. Our guide said a lot of the kids would rather not go to a government shelter or with organizations like Salaam Baalak because the freedom they have on the streets is amazing and shelters make them study at certain times and bathe everyday! (He wouldn't go until he was told there was a TV he could watch; apparently many of the kids are enthralled with Bollywood). Our guide is now 20 and working on his MBA with dreams of being a Bollywood actor and has already been in a few short films. He's now back in touch with his parents and has a very good relationship with them (and they are quite proud that he's fluent in English and working his way through college). Needless to say, the achievements of some of the kids that go through Salaam Baalak are amazing. (We got to say hi to some of the boys at one of the Salaam Baalak shelters, they were enthusiastic and happy...I really wish I knew enough Hindi to talk to them.)
A word about Salaam Baalak:
Salaam Baalak persuades kids on the streets to come to their shelter and lets them choose whether or not they want to stay. Once there, they are first asked if there's any way they'd go home, if that is unsuccessful, they ask them about they dreams and desires and do their best to set them on that track. It's really an amazing organization. If you want to check out their website it's:
http://www.salaambaalaktrust.com/