Reading Homeless Bird Started This Journey...

In 2003 my son Shan, who was in sixth grade at the time, brought home his reading assignment- the book "Homeless Bird" by Gloria Whelan. I was curious about the book because I noticed that it took place in India. I started to read it with him and my other children in the evenings. The story captivated me and I couldn't put it down. It told the story of a 13 year old girl who was forced to marry and then suddenly widowed and dumped by her in-laws in the holy city of Vrindavan...aka "The City of Widows". I was shocked. How could people be so callous. Just because the young girl was a widow she was considered to have no value. The story took place in modern day India, not in the past... when you may expect these kinds of injustices to occur. I wanted to find out if this could really be true, if this kind of thing really happened. I asked Dharan, my husband, who was born and raised in India. He said that he knew that there were many stigmas attached to widowhood, but he did not know about the brutal treatment described in the story. We decided to do a quick check on the Internet. We typed in VRINDAVAN. Up came glorious stories about the thousands of temples. We narrowed our search to WIDOWS OF VRINDAVAN. Then we saw hundreds of articles about the the thousands of widows that are abandoned on the streets of Vrindavan every year. Reading through the articles and news reports made us determined that something should be done. These women were suffering silently. We were certain that if people knew about their plight, then positive change would take place and these cruel practices really would be a thing of the past!