Genisis Of Calcutta Kids


1999 - 2001

2002 - 2004

2005 - 2008


1999-2001 (In the words of Noah Levinson, Co-Founder of Calcutta Kids)

When it became time for me to apply to colleges in 1999, I remember looking over my transcript and thinking that I would have a hard time respecting any institution that would accept me.  So I decided to take a post-graduate year at Northfield Mount Hermon in Western Mass.  While there, I met Sohrab, an Iranian Muslim student who told me about his experiences working at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitutes in Calcutta.  I was moved by Sohrab’s accounts of the poorest of the poor, and the grace he seemed to experience in sharing with others the last days of their lives.  I decided that my next trip would be to Calcutta. When I told him, he said, “If you’re going, then I’m going also”.


Calcutta is one crazy city.  Upon his return from Calcutta, Mark Twain said, “I’m glad I went, and I’m glad I never have to go back”.  A representative from an international NGO said, “We have not seen human degradation on a comparable scale in any other city in the world.  This is a matter of one of the greatest urban concentrations in existence rapidly approaching the point of breakdown in terms of its economy, housing, sanitation, transport, and the essential amenities of life.” Calcutta: once the British capital of India, once the second capital of the entire British empire, still considered the intellectual capital of India, a city with stunning architecture, the city that gave us Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray, the city which Amartya Sen and Ravi Shankar call home.


In Calcutta, one doesn’t have to search for poverty.  Poverty reigns, and yet somehow…somehow people are always smiling. Calcutta is the most magical place I have ever been, and what makes it so magical is that it is so human.


Sohrab and I went to work in Nirmal Hridoy which, in Bengali, means Pure Heart… Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitutes.  The setting is an elegant old building adjacent to the Kali Temple—one of India’s most sacred sites. Nirmal Hridoy, over time, seems to radiate its own aura of peace and tranquility. Yet, entering it the first time, I was exposed to a shocking reality – one reminiscent at first of one of the horrific scenes from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Before me were 100 men and women, most of them nothing more than skeletons with a thin layer of flesh covering their bones.  They had nothing in the way of physical possessions, but, as quickly became apparent, what they craved most was the love which Mother Teresa and her workers were there to give.  Sohrab and I spent nearly 6 weeks at Nirmal Hridoy and I was blessed with the opportunity to be with other human beings as they made their journeys from life into death.  Never before had I felt so close to God.  Never before had I felt I was experiencing the face of God.


As some of you who knew me as a first year college student can attest, my return to the U.S. was difficult. After 6 weeks in Calcutta, my body was here, but my heart and my soul were still in India.  I had found a place which resonated deeply with me on a spiritual level, and it was difficult not to be there.


During that first year of college I did more reading about Mother Teresa and the work of the Missionaries of Charity.  I was angered by the criticisms I read and was sure that Christopher Hitchens and others had simply missed the point about Mother Teresa’s vision and mission.  Her work was based solely on love and her greatest fear was to come before God and be introduced to those whom she had not treated with enough love.  She never claimed to run a hospital, she never claimed to rehabilitate…what she did was to give love to those who had none; she gave dignity to the dying.  That seemed more than enough for me.


During my second summer with Mother Teresa’s order, however, when I saw Sudip, a young man of my own age lying on one of those cots at Nirmal Hridoy, my understandings suddenly changed. Recognizing Sudip, took my breath away.


Sudip had been a beggar on the other side of the Ganges River.  Every Sunday, street children from that side of the river are invited to the headquarters of a local organization to receive a meal, have a clean place to bathe, and get bandages for their sores and cuts -  all of this plus an afternoon of games and songs.  I had gone one day the previous summer to volunteer with this program and was put in charge of distributing the bandages and dressing the wounds. On that day there were over 150 children, many of whom needed medical attention.  For over 3 hours I was dressing small wounds and distributing medicines.  But after seeing fewer than half of the children, we’d run out of supplies, and the remaining children were told to come back the following week. 


Sudip was one of the kids still in line when the medicine and bandages ran out. I remember watching him and feeling particularly bad about his unattended injury. He had bumped his forehead against the head of a rusty nail just days before and urgently needed treatment. And now, a year later, here was Sudip, dying of that head injury and lying on a cot at the Home for Dying Destitutes. I was with Sudip constantly thereafter, until, the following day, when he died in my arms.


Love actually hadn’t been enough.


In a city with more than 12 million people, it was difficult to consider it mere happenstance that Sudip and I had met again…this to me was a message telling me that I needed to do more.


While walking to and from Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitutes, Sohrab and I always were struck by the countless street children who filled the streets with their energy which we found life affirming despite, or perhaps because of their desperate straits.  We had befriended a number of these children and would stop from time to time to play cards with them, share a meal, or have them teach me Bengali slang.  It also became clear from our conversations that, for most of these children, health care was simply non-existent. These kids quickly became the “more” that we needed to do. The idea was simple in conception yet fiendishly difficult to bring to fruition. We wanted to establish a mobile health clinic which would drive around the poorest slums in and around Calcutta, providing medical treatment to street children in need.


Sohrab and I returned to this country and sent out fund raising letters to every person we knew, asking these persons also to pass along our request. Understandably the idea was met with a considerable amount of skepticism—even some cynicism. While admitting that such concerns might very well be legitimate, the spiritual and emotional pull was strong enough to allow us to move ahead in spite of them. In fact, enough people either subscribed to or humored me about the outlandish idea that within two months we were financially equipped to initiate the project. 


2002-2004        Top


With the money Sohrab and Noah collected, they teamed up with Don Bosco Ashalayam, a well-respected organization working with street children in Kolkata and its twin city of Howrah. For three years, what became known as the Ashalyam mobile health clinic provided full medical care which included monthly checkups, free medicines, hospitalization, surgery, and rehabilitation to 650 non-formal school-going street children was administered by Sohrab and Noah and was run with a wonderful Indian staff.


Before long, it became clear for Noah that this work was a calling of sorts. It was decided to expand the organization independently and in 2004 with the legal assistance of friend, Jeremy Schuster Esq., Calcutta Kids Inc. was born—a not-for-profit organization committed to the health care needs of poor children in and around Kolkata India. Within a few short months, Calcutta Kids received its tax-exemption status from the United States Internal Revenue Service.


Later on that same year, some shocking and upsetting findings began to appear in the data Noah was collecting and analyzing through the Ashalayam Mobile Health: the health status of the street children being served in the non-formal schools through the Mobile Health Clinic, was not changing. Yes, children and their parents (if they had any) were happy to have access to free health care, and yes, these children were recovering from illnesses which plagued them. But the illness incidence among these kids remained and the same illnesses which plagued them months before and for which they were treated, were coming up again and again. In essence, it seemed as if the Mobile Health Clinic was serving as nothing more than a band aid solution to these children's health problems.


The combination of this finding and of Noah’s undergraduate thesis from Marlboro College, India’s Public Health Challenges: Historical Evolution and a Kolkata Case Study, proved to be the catalyst in moving Calcutta Kids in the direction of maternal and child health care—away from a curative medical approach toward a preventive approach.


What Noah did in this undergraduate study was to conduct an informal survey of twenty-six Indian and international health professionals asking them what they considered were the most pressing public health issues facing India today (2004). From that survey, he came up with a list of nine major issues and then examined the progress made on each of these since India’s independence in 1947. The nine issues examined were: caste and class, inequity, sanitation and safe water supply, maternal mortality and gender inequality, child malnutrition, communicable diseases, the curative vs. preventive approach to health care, the lack of government commitment, and the unregulated private health sector.


Noah hadn’t fully realized the enormity of the problems facing mothers and young children in rural areas and in urban slums. Writing the sections on maternal mortality and child malnutrition was both eye opening and upsetting. “I was struck particularly by (1) the staggering number of unnecessary deaths of both mothers and children resulting from lack of adequate antenatal care, (maternal mortality in India is 100 times higher than that of most industrialized nations, and 63 out of every 1000 children born in India die before one year of age - 47% of these in the first week of life); and (2) the fact that this lack of antenatal care and proper health and nutrition care of children under age of two is, in good part, responsible for the health problems Calcutta Kids has been seeking to address in older children. If the mothers of the children we see every day had been given proper antenatal care, and these same children had been kept healthy as young children, much of our health care work with older children would be unnecessary. Roughly 80% of a child’s brain development takes place in the first two years of life, and this also is the most important time for the development of the immune system.”


According to UNICEF in 2004, only 15% of mothers in India receive adequate antenatal care. It only made sense for Calcutta Kids to begin tackling the problem of children’s ill health from its root causes.

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2005-2008        Top


After three important and fruitful years working under the auspices of Don Bosco Ashalayam, Calcutta Kids moved its office to a new location closer to the slum areas in which its new work with pregnant women and children was to start. This move symbolized a philosophical shift of focus in the organization from a charity project with a health component to a health project with a charity component. This new office at 51 Bhairab Dutta Lane in Salkia Howrah started in a small room within a highly respected medical clinic of the area, Udit Nursing Home.


Udit Nursing Home (in India, private medical clinics are known as ‘nursing homes’) and Calcutta Kids had been working together informally since 2002 and, together, had been able to save the lives of many poor children having no access to proper medical treatment. Irshad Ali (LINK TO STORY OF IRSHAD), the young boy who was so badly burned, and who had been left to die at a public hospital was treated by Dr. Utpal Kumar Roy at this nursing home.


The medical expertise, solid infrastructure, and trustworthy reputation of Udit Nursing Home made it an ideal partner in Calcutta Kids’ efforts to provide high-quality medical services to poor pregnant women and children. And this nursing home which already was providing highly discounted rates for poor patients, became enthusiastic about the opportunity to reach larger numbers of slum dwelling mothers and children in need of facility-based treatment.


Since late 2005, Calcutta Kids has been implementing the Maternal and Young Child Health Initiative (MYCHI) an initiative made up of proven technologies to increase health during pregnancy, reduce maternal mortality, improve birth weights and ensure healthy brain and immune system development. The success of this program is firmly based in the employment of local women to serve as community health workers. These women, already established as trustworthy individuals in the slums, are trained to provide counseling to pregnant women and newly married couples. In addition to counseling these women and couples on the need for adequate antenatal care checkups and iron tablets, and on pregnancy danger signs, these community health workers are trained in behavioral change communication (BCC) designed to address common problematic practices during pregnancy. This BCC is addressed not only to the woman but also to her husband and mother in law, who need to support her fully in improved practices including adequate food and rest during the pregnancy.


The community health workers are now monitoring the progress of each of the pregnant women in their “catchment” areas of the slum, and assuring that those under served by ante-natal care receive it at the Udit Nursing Home, contracted by Calcutta Kids for this purpose. For any of these woman identified as having a particularly high-risk pregnancy, Calcutta Kids subsidizes the cost of a facility-based delivery at the nursing home. By assuring high quality care for these cases of “difficult deliveries,” Calcutta Kids is saving the lives of large numbers of women. (The health-related indicator with the highest differential between developing and industrialized countries is maternal mortality – where rates are often 100 times higher in developing countries, and where most of these deaths take place during childbirth.)


The other critical measure of success in this program is in improved birth weights. During the year of 2007, just under 80% of the infants born in Fakir Bagan (one of the slums in which we work) have had birth weights of at least 2.5 kilograms (WHO’s low birth weight cut-off point.) And the average birth weight has increased from a disgraceful 1.8 kilograms at our baseline in late 2005 to 2.8 kilograms.


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