Colette Sheridan meets Cork woman Edith Wilkins who has devoted over 40 years of her life fighting for the street children of India
“Where’s your man in all of this?” This was the question that Edith Wilkins, CEO of the Edith Wilkins Street Children Foundation (EWSCF), would sometimes pose to Mother Teresa as the two women, in their own ways, helped to alleviate the suffering of children (in Edith’s case) and the dying and destitute in Mother Teresa’s case in Kolkata. Where is God amid the devastation of sexually abused trafficked children, Edith wanted to know? But moments of despair gave way to heroic work.
Edith Wilkins: She only intended staying in India for a short time..
Now aged 67 and looking towards retirement in the next few years, Cork humanitarian and nurse, Edith, went to India in 1982 to work with impoverished children. She only intended to stay for a short while but ended up staying for twenty-eight years, dedicating her life to working with some of the poorest and most marginalised children in India. She was the recipient of Rehab International Person of the Year in 2012.
Originally working with GOAL in Kolkata, Edith’s career has taken her to some of the poorest regions on earth, including Sudan. But her heart was in Kolkata. “You know what? Kolkata swallowed me. You either love Kolkata or you hate it. You couldn’t survive there if you didn’t like it. I absolutely fell in love with the city. It’s very overcrowded, absolutely manky and dirty with millions of people living on the streets. There’s a soul in it.” (Edith had to learn to speak Bengali.)
Sophia and Becca with our girls
When she first lived in Kolkata, Edith shared a single folding cot with a nurse friend on the balcony of a family’s home “with mosquitoes everywhere. I hated rice and Indian food. I lived on flatbread, bananas and eggs,” recalls Edith. “But I just went with it.” She came for three months; it would be three years before she left to pay a visit to her family in Douglas, Cork. (At one stage in her career, Edith worked for the Cork-based HOPE Foundation, working in India.)
As well as John O’Shea from GOAL, a significant mentor for Edith was Dr Samir Choudhuri, founder of CINI (Children in Need Institute.) His aim was to train mothers in health matters so that they could treat or prevent diseases in their children. It was helping people to help themselves.
“It was a brilliant idea. Samir had a whole training programme set up. I did some training there and helped set up loads of programmes. We had programmes all over in rural areas outside Kolkata, training health care workers to do immunisation in vaccination clinics.
The journey of EWSCF really started at Sealdah Station in Kolkata. Hundreds of children would come into it every day where there was a school. Sister Cyril Mooney, a Loreto nun, ran the school, ‘Loreto Sealadh’ for thirty-two years. There were paying kids and non-paying kids. Nobody knew which pupils paid fees. Sister Cyril had a kitchen from which rations were given to the children.
“I decided to go to the Sealdah station. I met an old man under a bridge there. He had lost his son who ran away from home, a few years earlier. The old man used to come to the station every morning to try and find his son. He never did but what he did find were children living there by themselves. He would give them bread and bananas. They loved him and called him their granddad. I started going there every day. The old man said about one of the little girls that something was wrong with her. Her eyes were popping out of her head. She looked absolutely mental. She was about five or six.”
It turned out that Shanti (not her real name) had been raped and contracted gonorrhoea and syphilis. “We knew abuse was happening. She was our first case of a child totally destroyed. A group of children used to hang around with Shanti. They kind of looked at me, saying it happens to all of us, boys and girls.” But Shanti, who eventually recovered, was by far the worst case.
“She had a mother and a father and three brothers. The father was an alcoholic. The mother had been so badly abused that she actually left. One of Shanti’s little brothers had run away to Sealdah Station. To save himself, he would get on a train at night, sleep on it and come back on it in the morning. He was about four. The children were so smart; it was unbelievable. They did what they could to survive. Nobody would take Shanti into their homes as they saw her as tainted.”
Music has been so theraputic for our children
Edith realised there was a big problem. “Samir suggested a halfway house. There, the children could be rehabilitated and moved out so we were not left with just one group. That’s how we started the foundation. We opened our first drop-in centre night shelter. It just grew from there. We ended up buying a building. John O’Shea came up trumps. (However, he was not initially happy when it transpired the cost of the building had been under-estimated by €100,000.) He called us ‘f**king eejits.’ But he was brilliant and of course he raised the money. We created eight apartments in the building. I moved into this halfway house. I had kind of created my own family. There were about twenty-five kids that were always with me and had no homes to go to.”
For those children that had parents, the EWSCF was able to reassure them that their kids were being educated and were staying in a boarding school. The foundation would give the parents food rations so they could look after their children during the school holidays.
“It was brilliant. This was in the heart of Kolkata. I was in a flat that I was very proud of. My parents came out to see me. There was a red light district down a narrow lane. There was a butcher who had dead goats with the skin hanging out of them. I heard my father on the phone to one of my brothers saying my flat was in a tenement building and there was a brothel next door. I hadn’t copped that. I made great friends with ordinary people on the street; sex workers, drug addicts. They all looked out for me.”
Now, the EWSCF is based in Darjeeling. Due to the proximity of the city to the borders of Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan, Darjeeling is a route often used by child traffickers when smuggling children into India. To date, over 2,500 children have come through the foundation’s system in Darjeeling. There are over one hundred children directly in the system. Many more have been relocated to their homes.
These days, Edith lives in a council house in Crosshaven, County Cork, from which she runs the foundation, visiting India at least once a year. She adopted two Indian children; Omar and Karishma, now grown up, rearing them on job seekers allowance and some help from her family. (She is the proud grandmother of Ethan.) Edith doesn’t take a salary from the foundation.
“Back in the early 90s, you were being offered $60,000 and a scholarship to Harvard. I could have signed up for two years and would have my own accommodation with everything paid for. I baulked at it. It didn’t seem right.”
Edith says she is in the process of handing over the running of the foundation to another bigger organisation that will supervise the programme. (The EWSCF receives Indian government aid.) “And I will retire. I have a grandson now. But I will always be going to India. It’s home to me.”
Does Edith feel that she sacrificed a lot in the interests of her voluntary work? “No. I had the most amazing time. How many people can say they adore what they do? I love what I do. I have the kids. It’s such an honour for those kids to trust us in the foundation and let me into their lives.
Girls going to school
When Edith asked Shanti why she came with her on the first day she met her to visit a doctor, she replied: “’It was your eyes, mum.’ They all call me ‘mum.’ Shanti said she knew I was ok. She just felt it. Of all my foster kids, only one didn’t make it and is on the streets in Siliguri. But her son is with us in Darjeeling. Recently, four rapists in Darjeeling got twenty years each for raping our kids. We’re at that level now.”
Edith says that “all the children” the foundation deals with want to do what she does. “I say ‘no’!” She is proud of their achievements as they train and take up careers.
Mother Teresa was “an intense woman and tough…It was said she was Bible-pushing. But you know what, I sat on camp beds in which people were dying and these beautiful nuns (from Mother Teresa’s order) were running around, holding their hands and looking after them. A lot of them were skin and bones and couldn’t do anything.”
While Edith has seen the worst of humanity, she acknowledges “an amazing side too.” And indeed she epitomises the best side herself. She has no regrets. “I would do it all over again. There were bloody hard times and amazing times. You learn the whole time.”
Fundraising is what keeps the foundation going. For anyone wishing to donate,
IBAN: IE48AIBK93434821439006. BIC: AIBKIE2D. (Bank account name: Edith Wilkins Foundation.)
