Badlapur, May 7, 2008, midafternoon

[BLOG WRITTEN IN RETROSPECT]

The first time I saw him, I thought he was a small one year old. With medium brown skin, big brown eyes, and sitting up, Sandeep had thin arms and legs--little more than skin and bone--limply attached to a small torso. Sitting on the bottom mattress of a bunk bed in Jubilee 4--one of four homes in Badlapur where Bombay Teen Challenge houses orphans and children rescued from the streets and/or the red light district--Sandeep looked very tiny and somewhat overwhelmed at the sight of eight white people standing around and looking at him.

Then Timothy--our guide for the day--told us that Sandeep was four and a half years old.

I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around that. When I first saw him, I knew that he was undernourished, but I had no idea by how much until Timothy told us more about him. Four and a half years old, rescued from the streets the previous week, brought to Jubilee 4 just in time to save his life--all of these details silenced me into thought. My heart hurt and my head reeled.

As we got to know the other children at Jubilee 4 over the next week and a half--or so--we found out that the other children at this home ranged from Sandeep's age up to about nine or ten. Both girls and boys live at Jubilee 4, and about half of those children are HIV positive. Some of their mothers were/are prostitutes, and some of them were simply brought to BTC (Bombay Teen Challenge) because their parents had found out that they would be cared for at BTC.

Because of their health concerns, Jubilee 4 has a nurse assigned to them and every night, the children obediently go through nightly medicinal regimes. They receive good healthcare combined with a clean environment, nutritious food prepared by Daniel the cook, filtered water. Educated on site, these children also have daily devotionals where they sing, pray, and study the Bible.

These children put my faith to shame with their intensity and perseverence, but the fact of the matter is, most of these children already have seen the dark side of humanity firsthand. They know that God makes the difference in life, and their faith is rock solid. I am very excited to see how their lives continue to shape up as they grow and mature. They're going to be movers and shakers when, or if, they grow up.

Please, remember these children. They have so much promise, and they are definitely better off than they were, but the fact of the matter is that with half of them HIV positive, we really don't know how long they will live. (There are so many variables with HIV/AIDS.) They are precious, sweet children who love automatically and blessed my heart.