Rasoi Ghar Is Not Just About Free Food, It's About Community Building

Ignorance, they say, is bliss. And this cliche, like any other, helps us to continue with our unruffled lives. But what happens to its power when tens and thousands of starving, slouchy childrenin our ever-increasing slumscan no longer be comfortably overlooked? Well, then it's time to grapple with some statistics, like: there is a death every 3.6 seconds in the world and, more alarmingly, 75 per cent of the dead are children. Think for a moment: how much does it take to skip one meal, a meal that could feed a child who hasn't eaten anything for the past two days? Actually, not much.Rasoi Ghar, a World Voices volunteering initiative, is not exactly that, though. In fact, there is more to it than just philanthropic distribution of free food packets. It's about community participation. Modelled on the lines of a soup kitchen, the volunteers, about 12 undergraduate students from Delhi University pursuing courses as diverse as psychology and political science, give up a meal once a week and spend that day with a family in Delhi's Yamuna Pushta. They then seek to be multi-sponsored by family and friends for a sum of Rs 335 per month.More than fulfiling the basic need of food, Rasoi Ghar seeks to create a spirit of community and build relations with families. Says Ranica Barua, one of the volunteers of World Voices: It's a unique initiative where urban youngsters like us are introduced to families living in slums. In Yamuna Pushta, two of us are linked to a particular family for a period of two months and during this period we try to bring about a qualitative change in the lives of those we interact with, however little it may be. It begins with the volunteers taking uncooked food to the families and informing the womenfolk about the importance of nutritive meals. Says project coordinator Anannya Mehta: It is a growth process for me. Living in a cosmopolitan city like Delhi, youngsters like me hardly get a chance to interact with the underprivileged. We are so caught up with the material world that we don't have the time to think about the poor. Ranica puts it better: All of us have a very romantic notion about the way people live in slums. But when you actually get a chance to interact with these people, when you see that joy and the smile on their faces, then you realise how important you are in their lives. Intangible things like these make a lot of difference. It is a two-way processone where you seek to improve their lot and, in the process, learn a lot yourself. These people are exploited and all of us in the group are only trying to make them realise that. Like 35-year-old Kavita. A mother of five, with a drug-addict husband, she's scared of one thingfires in the colony. Hers is probably one of the more affluent families in the slumshe's got a colour TV and a cooler in her pucca jhopdi. Kavita earns about 20 paise for every bangle she makes in about half an hour. Says she: In these two months, we have been able to break the wall between the haves and the have nots. When these girls from such affluent families come to our kitchens and cook for us without any hang-ups, we are also made conscious of the precautions we should take in the kind of food we eat or cook. Now, thanks to these girls and boys, I am determined to send my son to a boarding school and make sure that my daughters finish their studies. In these months there is a definite improvement in the way we live and that is just because of the efforts of these youngsters. And there's another thing the volunteers want the families to understand; they cannot depend on them for free food. Says Ranica: Initially, we started by cooking for about 150 slum-children in a school. Soon we realised that it was a very impersonal method and that we were not getting to know the families at all. We were the givers and the residents were happy being the takers. Nobody says no to free food and it was a very comfortable kind of an arrangement for the residents. It made us do a rethink and we finally struck upon the arrangement of working with one family at a time and try and bring about a change in their lives.Rasoi Ghar can be contacted at 162-A/9, Kishangarh, opposite 220 kva Power Station, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi70. Phone: 011-6139132. n