A Small House but a Big Heart

On Friday we had the priviledge of meeting a lovely young woman named Janet who works for a small NGO in Old Delhi called Sahara House. I have read a little about the work here and it's beginnings through my readings on Urban Mission. It was started as a Christian Therapeutic Community in the 1970's by a couple of Christian hippies who were living in India at the time, and exploring ideas about Urban Mission and Radical Discipleship (www.daveandrews.com.au)

Sahara House is now a therapeutic communitiy which supports people who are Injecting Drug Users, as well as people living with HIV/AIDS and their families. I was lucky enough (maybe divine intervention!?) to meet a woman at our church who had been working at Sahara House and had just returned to AUstralia, not long before we left for India. She gave us Janet's contact details, and arranged for us to be able to visit Sahara (www.saharahouse.org). Our visit began at the Crisis Centre, which provides accommodation and detox for about 20 blokes for up to 15 days. We spent some time with Kumar, a weathered program manager whose tired look gave him credo as someone used to a long life of grassroots work with the marginalised. Kumar lives at the Crisis Care Centre with a number of other staff. The crisis care centre is open 24/7/365 for people to come and go as they please - a high calling! They have a strong Harm Minimisation and educational approach, and see many relapses as a natural part of the recovery process. The crisis centre also houses and cares for children of injecting drug users while their parents are going through rehab. The children were out having fun at the annual Winter Olympics on Friday! Sahara House also runs a separate rehab centre for women with the same issues. On a Friday evening they run a coffee night where the men and women and children can get together and they have games and music and coffee with anyone involved with Sahara. This is a chance for the families to reunite regularly while rehab is happening. Janet also works doing advocacy counselling and education work with commercial sex workers, as well as working in the outreach centre.

We visited the outreach centre also. This consisted of a doctor sitting at a card table by the river with a number of frail looking men sitting around him. The doctor was dispensing clean syringes (this was their Needle and Syringe Exchange Program). They also see 35-40 clients between 2 and 4:30 each day to dress nasty abcesses which come about as a result of injecting diazepam, a very thick oily substance which is particularly bad for your veins. Of all the staff at Sahara, 80% were Injecting drug users in recovery - an impressive figure. We met a guy who was a counsellor at the home for people living with HIV/AIDS, who was in recovery from injecting drug use himself. Later, at the outreach centre, we met a guy who was now a peer educator with Sahara, not long since beginning his recovery process! They also have a strong volunteer base, mainly made up of recovering users, as a way of maintaining the support and providing meaningful work which is significant for confidence and self-esteem. They were particularly keen that this work needed to be work which harnessed the gifts and passions of people. Unfortunately, they are beginning to reach saturation point in terms of the amount of this type of work which can be offered to people.

I was struck by the simplicity of it all - they manage to provide so much with very basic and simple resources - a doctor at a card table by a river giving out clean syringes. It's easy to forget how simple it can be to support people.
Janet took us back to her small, simple home for a meal later, in South Delhi. Her home is just one small room with a small kitchen (about the size of your pantry) and a small bathroom outside. We really appreciated and enjoyed her hospitality, and she assured us that if we were ever to come to stay in Delhi again we must stay at her house - "I have a small house but a big heart". This sums up the essence of Christian hospitality for me, which was demonstrated both through the work of Sahara House and through Janet's hospitality - no matter how little you have, as long as you have a big heart it will go far.