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GIVING SELFLESSLY WITH THE LEFT HAND
MARCH 9, 2008: First the maulanas mistook him for a missionary. Then the politicos assumed he was one of them. But Gene D’Silva was neither preaching the Gospel nor promoting himself in the indigent streets of Cheetah Camp, home to about 1,60,000 of Chembur’s poor. All he was doing, way back in 1998, was assisting, monetarily and socially, a woman infected with HIV. Having contracted the virus from her husband, she was grappling with the consequences.
“I learnt of her through an infected eunuch at Asha Daan, the relief centre I volunteered at. She was an untouchable to all in the area. After her husband’s death they sprinkled phenyl down the lane,’’ he remembers. And so Gene began the long haul to Chembur every day, taking his friend food he cooked himself. On the way, he would cater home-cooked meals to the starving slums of Reay Road and Wadi Bunder.
The ailing woman’s astonished neighbours watched him eat out of her plates and play with her children and wondered how he hadn’t yet contracted HIV. They asked, he explained, and thus began his vocation in community development at Cheetah Camp.
Gene’s enrolment into community services was the consequence of a personal battle. A right arm stricken with palsy denied Gene—a strapping athlete otherwise—a steady job and a place in corporate football teams. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was his rejection to the Olympics for the differently abled in 1984. He slid down the drug and alcohol slope. It took him two years to reform. “My mother never stopped praying and urging me to get out of it,’’ he recalls. He credits his turnaround to his morning visits to the church.
In volunteering at Asha Daan and Salvation Army in the incipient years, accepting all natures of chores and service, communing with all types of afflicted, Gene knew this was the ground he would set up camp. He gave himself to social work and his frugal returns from past investments covered his outgoings and meals. He was known among his lot simply as the long-haired man in shorts. “Gene-baba’’ later became his new sobriquet.
“I don’t just want to mend one problem and go away but, like UNICEF, approach all associated issues in an area,’’ he says. “You can’t sustain welfare without development.’’ He began with AIDS awareness and went on to children’s education by renting a boxy room, hiring three local teachers and gathering a student body of 90. Support, in money and kind, initially funnelled in through the Archdiocese of Bombay and the individuals Gene approached.
Gradually, as his scope expanded, his beneficiaries grew. And while fighting drug abuse, alcoholism, unemployment, women’s oppression, crimeprone youth, he realised he needed other hands. “You need to work with affiliated organisations to do so much,’’ he says. So World Vision, Sankalp Rehabilitation Trust, Salvation Army and Don Bosco Shelter brought their own expertise to Cheetah Camp. In 2005, he formalised his activities through Jeevan Dhara, an organisation he founded that sought sponsors in P N Writer, Lotus Trust, HDFC Bank, Don Bosco, Kripa Foundation and several individuals. Even his sister in Canada raises charity for Cheetah Camp but she tries to downplay the name; its reputation for schooling terrorism has evidently travelled.
The politicians, who worried that he was coaxing a vote bank through services, now allow him use of a large community hall and transform its space alternately for women’s improvement cells, jumble sales, vocational training and adult literacy programmes. “We realised unemployment was rife, so we set up classes in mehndi design, mobile repairing, tailoring, retail marketing and even fashion designing,’’ he says. And for youth who invariably found their way to the “college of pickpockets’’, a sports academy for football and cricket was set up.
Although his locus remains Cheetah Camp, he is also seen showing drug abusers at Dockyard Station the way to Kripa’s rehab centre. “But, every time they come out clean, they’re lured back in by touts on the streets,’’ he says. And, every time, eyes dull with dope, they return and ask for another chance. As he searches for a permanent solution, he continues to offer them the interim aid of leading them to the rehab. “I have to,’’ he says simply, as if contracting his life’s mission into that pithy defence. (Times of India)
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