For those who have no one...
Despite receiving death threats, Israeli-origin Dr Michelle Harrison dedicated her life to providing safe space and a future to orphaned girls.
By SHIVANI GUPTA
With continued bomb
blasts and strikes leading to loss of life, property and basic
resources, the ongoing
conflict between Palestine and Israel
has resulted in the killings and abduction of hundreds of children from both
the countries.
While ceasefire remains a distant
dream, Kolkata-based Dr Michelle
Harrison, who has Israeli origins, says
with anguish, “It is a nightmare for
everybody. In this war, children are
being used as pawns, held hostage,
and ultimately, orphaned.”
A few decades back, Dr Michelle
came to India to adopt a child. Being a
single mother, she only had the option
to do so from either here or Central
America. In India — home to at least
30 million orphans — she saw how
children are subjected to human trafficking and abduction.
This, she noted, was however not a
result of some war but due to the apathy of child welfare organisations.
A former physician, obstetrician and
gynaecologist, the 80-year-old dedicated her life to raising orphaned girls
rejected for adoption. She runs a group
home for abandoned children in
Kolkata called the ‘Childlife Preserve
Shishur Sevay’.
The orphanage, started in 2006,
provides lifetime care for those who
did not get a good start at life. So far,
she says her home has helped 20
underprivileged girls who were either
lost, abducted or dumped to lead an
empowered life of independence.
For those who have no one
Dr Michelle takes her inspiration
from her grandmother, who was a
Jewish immigrant in the USA from
Russia. She was hired by the National
Council of Jewish Women to serve as
an assistant immigrant arrival agent.
While working at Ellis Island in the
US, her grandmother ensured that
young Jewish immigrants went to their
actual relatives instead of falling into a
trafficking ring.
She recounts how her grandma also
used to tell her stories of the starving
children of the Great Chinese Famine
in 1958. “She told me never to forget
them, and when I saw how the Korean
War led to orphans in the country, I
decided to dedicate my life to caring
for these children.
This was an
epiphany for me,” she tells.
While Dr Michelle already had a biological daughter, she adopted another
infant girl from Kolkata in 1984. I
always knew that somewhere there
was a child out there and I was supposed to be raising her,” she says.
Although she raised her children in
the US, she always kept them connected with Indian culture. In 1999, after
getting diagnosed with breast cancer,
she moved to Kolkata to live with her
adopted daughter.
In the following years, she discovered the scams in the adoption industry. “The NGOs weren’t taking in
orphans who lost both their parents
because they had to ‘get rid of’ them
at 18 years of age when the government funding stops. They would prefer
to take only those kids who have a
single parent, which is mostly a mother,” she explains.
“Some orphanages were actually
moonlighting as boarding schools for
the poor; not working for the ones truly in need. They continued calling
themselves orphanages so that they
could rake in donations from benefactors,” she reveals.
“Nobody was thinking about the
children.
It was all about business,
laws, and rules. Nobody had their eyes
on the children and the more I saw
that, the more I felt I had to do something,” she adds.
Furthermore, the orphans without
“connections” were housed in government institutions that lacked adequate
amounts of food, medical care, and
education. “In discussions amongst
people and other NGOs about the
orphaned children, I kept hearing that
nothing could be really done as these
children could never be like our children,” Dr Michelle says. “You can tell
me you don’t care; you can tell me it’s
too expensive; but you can’t tell me
that nothing can be done. They are our
children,” she underscores strongly. In
a bid to help secure the futures of
these girls, Dr Michelle started her
orphanage.
Their new home
A year after its inception, the first 12
girls were transferred from the government orphanage by the order of the
West Bengal Child Welfare Committee.
At this new home, the girls shared living spaces, recreational activities, and
got education. To encourage the girls
to speak in their mother tongue, Dr
Michelle enrolled them in a Bengali
medium school.
“We didn’t start introducing English
learning until Class 5. It was difficult to
find teachers who taught them seriously. After several years, and the girls
taking insults from the teachers, we
started our own school and relied on
the National Institute for Open
Schooling (NIOS) for the board exams,”
she adds. She also established a smart
centre for children which is a free and
inclusive play school for underprivileged children aged between 2 and 4
years in the community. The school
includes play-based and activity-based
learning, focuses on the development
of social skills in preparation for formal
schooling, and a nutritious snack, says
Dr Michelle. The girls live in a warm
and loving home, as opposed to a sterile environment that often embodies a
government structure.
As of now, Shishur Sevay is home to
14 girls who are enrolled in various
vocational courses like practising different forms of art, practising Yoga, tailoring, and jewellery-making.
Of the
total girls, four are with disabilities.
They use speech generating devices
like the Tobii-Dynavox eye tracker to
read stories to the children in the
school. The device is designed for people with conditions such as cerebral
palsy, ALS, Rett syndrome, aphasia or
spinal cord injury to gain access to
computers, to communicate, and to
control their home environment with
just their eyes.
“Our home is meant for permanence,
for long term security, to be a safe
place for those who may eventually
leave, and a permanent home for those
who require full-time care due to their
disabilities,” she adds.
“The home is inclusive, meaning
there are no separate units based on
abilities. Their lives matter and we
intend to be a model of what can be
done. Inclusion made us a home, a
family, not an institution,” she adds.
Over the past 15 years, Dr Michelle
has faced several challenges. Initially,
she had to fight the local men who
wanted a key to the home.
“They saw it as a public property
and were especially angry that a foreigner lived here. There were rumours
that I was raising the girls in order to
sell them for a higher price abroad. I
was given death threats as I refused to
hire people working under a political
umbrella,” she shares.
“I was warned that I was making
people uneasy and that it wasn’t safe
for me. I was told to stop and leave. Of
course, I didn’t. Those criminals were
why I was here,” she says.
Today the octogenarian says that
there is no other place that she would
rather be at. “We have a succession
plan which includes the girls taking a
greater role in the operation of Shishur
Sevay. I love what I’m doing and feel
blessed to be able to do it. India is
now my home,” she adds.
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