Giving Children a Chance - Part 3

PRAVIN

Pravin is the oldest of them all. He is in his early twenties and has spent nearly five years at this centre. He is now a peer counsellor. (Peer counsellors are reformed drug users who counsel those in rehab about their own bleak personal experiences and their path to recovery.)
Pravin used to smoke smack and one day ran away from his home in Delhi’s Karol Bagh where his family runs a petty garment-making business. The centre pays him Rs 5,000 a month to counsel the boys.
Asked whether he would like to go back to join his family trade, he says he will someday, but even after being five years off drugs he confesses that he feels too weak right now and isn’t sure that he won’t suffer a relapse.  

VIKAS

 This 10-year-old lives in the Nepali Camp in Delhi’s Vasant Vihar and has studied till the sixth standard. One day at school he got into a fight with a student and was expelled.
When he was nine, Vikas started smoking biris and cigarettes and soon also got hooked to ganja and inhalants. He says it was all “dekha dekhi” (watching his friends do it he too decided to start).
His mother and sister then took him to the CWC in Lajpat Nagar, which sent him to this centre. Vikas, who says he wants to resume his studies, has a sound relationship with his parents.  

DINESH SINGH

 Dinesh Singh, a 15-year-old from Chhattisgarh, says he abused alcohol, smoked ganja, drank country liquor and chewed tobacco for three years. His father works for the metro rail as a labourer, and is currently posted at a site in Lucknow. Dinesh has a step father. His mother married thrice. She would constantly mistreat him, and he got no support from his father either. The man is a smack addict.

Dinesh washed utensils at roadside eateries in Lucknow. Of the 3,000 rupees he earned in a month, his father took away 2,000 even though his monthly salary is Rs 15,000. The boy mostly spent the night in a small dhaba to escape the regular beatings that, he says, also caused his younger sister’s death.

It was following his sister’s death that Dinesh decided to run away. In Delhi, where he slept on railway platforms and outside a gurudwara, he was spotted in Samaypur Badli by the staff of an NGO.  
 
“In Delhi I didn’t try to find work,” he says. “Instead I committed petty thefts in trains to buy food to pay for my fix.” 
Then one day as he was looking for vulnerable passengers he was approached by this child helpline group. “They were very nice to me,” says Dinesh. “The man asked for my personal details and whether I took drugs. After I told him of my different addictions he took me to the Child Welfare Committee and later brought me to SPYM.

Dinesh says he is very attached to his maternal grandfather who lives in Chhattisgarh and gets a monthly pension of Rs 15,000. “After I am released I want to go to him. I’ll never go back to my father,” he says.

(Keep watching this blog for more stories from SPYM’s centres)

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