Tuesday and Wednesday we visited the slums. I need to be straight forward with you and reiterate what has been told to me. Our visit to the slums, in this case Kalwa slum, is not slum tourism. We are learning about the move to cities in search of better opportunities and the symptoms of the lack of resources in villages. We are learning about urban poverty and rural poverty, their distress, the root cause and the symptom, and learning about projects that are meant to make lives in Kalwa and other communities less stressful. We are learning about their lives and what they experience daily. 

I write community above because that’s what it is. Slums are illegal communities, and Kalwa has a population of about 1.2 million. The slums swell depending on the time of year, if it out of season for some crops for example.

I have a really hard time understanding slums. Before this trip, I knew nothing about them. I naively thought that slums were maybe a street or two, no more than a block, and it was like a dirty, trashy, rancid smelling tarp covered street with narrow aisles of makeshift residences and full of more people than I could count. Held together with bubble gum and paper clips. I thought walking through them would be quick. After all, it’s only a block at most, right? Wrong. 

1.2 million people in Kalwa slum. You read that correctly. 

Now that I’m on the trip, I’m learning more but I feel like it’s still surface level. This is a learning service trip JDC calls a GRID trip: global response innovative development.

In Kalwa, we visited a school set up by  Gabriel Project Mumbai (GPM). This school is a supplement to their regular studies, so they go in the morning before regular classes. GPM is “a local Indian NGO and a partner of JDC caring for thousands of vulnerable children in the slums and poor rural villages through education hygiene, nutrition and medical programs.”

We played games with the children to help their confidence with English and foreigners. They’re young so our games were simple: counting to 100 in a circle, listing the days of the week, head shoulders knees and toes, chief and my favorite, Raju chacha says (Simon says). 

They had a good time! We had a good time! The class walls are barren compared to an elementary school classroom you’d find in the states. A notable difference you’ll see are toothbrushes lined up on the wall, as part of Humble Smile. 

The projects in partnership with GPM we visited are the water purification and distribution, Sundara, Naya and Masala Mammas. The water goes through five rounds of purification and is either picked up or delivered in 20L bottles to slum dwellers. 

Sundara is a soap recycling program designed to give work to the women in the slum as well as improve the health conditions in it. These women want to work and the schedules are flexible to fit around the home life and children’s school.

Soap recycling? You can do that? How is that sanitary in a health initiative? I’m glad you asked because I did, too! The leftover bars of soap from hotels in Mumbai are collected and taken to Sundara The soaps are scraped all over to remove surface germs and are then shredded or grated down on a cheese grater. 400g of soap is then mixed with a little water to get it to stick together and it is manually compacted in a machine to form a new bar of soap. This bar is cut into eight pieces, 50g each, and is given to families and children in the school. 

Another project is Naya, paper recycling. These women recycle paper from businesses, including the hotels who also give soap to Sundara. They cut it up very small, make it a mush with water and then add a dye. The mush is pushed flat on a screen to drip off excess water and is pressed onto a cotton sheet for further drying. It is then dried fully, the cotton peeled off and cut as needed.

The third initiative is Masala Mammas and helps explain the connection between the school, water and soap. These women use the clean water to make lunch for the school children. Children who are sick, won’t go to school. If they’re hungry, they can’t focus. Give them soap, teach them basic hygiene and prevent simple illnesses. Give them food to keep them healthy, same with clean water. The school provides two hot meals to the school children, both of which are cooked and delivered by the Masala Mammas, who also are taught soap hygiene and safe cooking practices. 

The women made lunch for us both days we were visiting the slums. A woman from GPM worked to create a cookbook of traditional Indian recipes from the area. You better believe I bought it!

All this comes full circle with a free health clinic in the slum. They treat the people of Kalwa, and have relationships with city hospitals to send people with more serious ailments there and GPM helps settle the hospital bill after everything is done. The Kalwa clinic often sees patients with skin concerns and allergies. Soon, there will be a dental chair in the clinic.

Mumbai is dirty. It’s currently the dry season here and there is so much dust and dirt. This contributes to the allergies but there’s also layers upon layers of trash in the slums. It’s everywhere. It’s loose and crushed against the street sides. In other places it’s compacted in layers over time. You have to step on it. Over it. No way to avoid it. I imagined the slums would smell rancid and rotten. And while there were definitely parts that did, it wasn’t an all encompassing odor. There were pigs, lots of pigs, and cows and goats and dogs and cats that roamed freely. They ate the trash, and you had to be on the lookout for poop. Don’t step in the poop. 

Remember, it’s 1.2 million people in Kalwa. 

This post is written and shared a few days late. I’ve been processing it all and figuring out how to best tell the story and way of life as I see it. It may not make sense to you. It hasn’t fully clicked with me. But I want to leave you with this: someone asked a woman who lives in the slums if she wants to leave and why doesn’t she leave? Her answer emphasized community. She said that you can have space, privacy and cleanliness in an apartment in the city. But you could die alone inside those walls and it could take days for someone to get to you. In the slums, you’re always surrounded with people.

The slums are unpleasant, especially to an outsider, but that’s only the surface to what’s inside. 

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position, policies, or opinions of JDC Entwine or Gabriel Project Mumbai.