LSE beneficiaries, before their street play performance
Handicapped from birth, Radhika’s (name changed) movement is impaired and she walks using crutches. Currently, she is 23 years old and in these 23 years, she has faced so many ups and downs that she is now immune to the happiness and sorrows of life. Since beginning, she didn’t get support from her family members and was in fact often criticized by them for her inability to manage her chores. The family criticism resulted in a low self-esteem – she became shy and stopped talking to people. She lost touch with reality and kept to her own world. She faced difficulties accomplishing tasks on her own and lost out on her decision making power. With few friends to guide or support her, she found a place in the depths of a shell and never truly realized her abilities.
She joined the Life Skills Empowerment (LSE) project of Mumbai Smiles that aims at training the beneficiaries in various aspects of Life skills in order to make them independent and self- sustained. School girls and drop out girls in the adolescent years are the central beneficiaries of this program. Mumbai Smiles’ LSE program aims at promoting their overall development, including focus on improving the nutritional and health checkups of girls and training and equipping them with vocational skills. The program equips them with tools that tools that will enable them to develop their own identity, and encourage them to be agents of change in their communities, families and schools.
For Radhika, this program was the ray of new hope. She enrolled for this program four months back and today she says “I have discovered a new person within me” Since her association with Mumbai Smiles, she feels much more confident because of the training provided to her. She has started taking her own decisions and is much more steadfast about them. In her opinion, the best session was the communication skills since it helped her overcome her problems at work. While working at the clinic, she occasionally used to get annoyed at the patients. Despite her doctor’s remarks, she found it difficult to change her behavior. But after the session, she is trying to become more mature and less impulsive. She is now working on developing her people skills and in fact goes out of the way to help the patients.
In her feedback session, she said, “I still have problems in life but now I also have a trusted place to discuss them.” This story is although just about Radhika, but it speaks for all the girls at the LSE project.
We feel obliged and motivated by such remarks and look forward to continue to impact the lives of many other beneficiaries.
LSE beneficiaries at a session visited by Mr. Daniel Lalande, representative of Give a Hand organization
