Forty-year-old Grace John is the mother of an 18-year-old son. However, Grace is addressed as ‘mummy’ by nearly 1,500 children.
Grace is a savior to the hundreds of abandoned or orphaned street children, who call the various railway stations across the central and western lines their home.
She earns just Rs10,000 a month but still manages to support the street. An outreach supervisor at Shelter Don Bosco, Grace seems to have lost the count of the number of children she healed on the streets or brought to the shelter for rehabilitation.
Grace is least regretful being born to her parents in the slums of Dharavi. She counts herself lucky to at least have had a family to fall back on. “Thank God I had a family otherwise life of the street children is worse than a dog’s. Whenever I used to see kids on the streets picking rags, doing drugs I got disturbed. I always wanted to give them the required love and medical care. So, soon after finishing my tenth in 1987, I started working part time for NGOs”, said Grace.
Having done her 12th standard through a correspondence course Grace completed a six months para-professional course in social work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 1990 and has been associated with Shelter Don Bosco for over a decade.
The outreach staff mainly monitors stations between Kalyan and CST and Churchgate to Virar. They provide medical care to the street children or get them to the shelter if they are willing to be rehabilitated.
“A number of times the team has also traced children who ran away or went missing from their homes,” added Grace.
“I can never leave. Even when police catch some of children they say, 'we are not alone, we have a mummy in Mumbai'," concluded a clearly satisfied Grace.
