Irish aid provided through the Cork-based Hope Foundation is working small miracles in the slums of Calcutta.
In the classroom, the ragged children sang We Shall Overcome and cheered when the familiar faces of the foundation appeared at the door. They had led the way through the network of alleyways, open sewers and filth of the Basanti settlement at Utradanga on the outskirts of Calcutta, one of the places where money donated by Irish people is working small miracles but miracles nevertheless.
If Utradanga is unpleasant for the visitor, one can only imagine what it must be like for the 5,000 men, women and children who live there. In June 2000, the vast settlement, then an unofficial one, was razed. Now rebuilt, it has official status, although that means nothing to the families who scrounge in the foetid surroundings for the bits and pieces that sustain them.
Utradanga is a warren of darkened alleys by night where people massed together in unspeakable conditions, literally, in the gutter, struggle as best they can. By day, it is a pitiful sight because its true awfulness is revealed.
The stench rises up to greet you long before the reality of this terrible place does. It is not an exaggeration to say that it makes the slums of South Africa's Soweto at the height of apartheid look almost palatial. Pigs and rats rummage in the filth as the flies converge on what is in effect at once a rubbish dump and a dumping ground for humans. Disease is rampant.
Children with distended bellies caused by worms, with open sores on their emaciated bodies, play in the same filth and don't notice because they have never known anything else. Most of them never will. Their parents, especially the mothers, show all the signs of the lifelong struggle. Yet it is both a moving experience and a privilege to sit in a makeshift classroom in the midst of the smells and excrement, human and animal, and hear the tiny tots sing We Shall Overcome. It is their anthem.
The children positively shine with delight when they belt it out. In this setting, in the choking dust and dirt, the heat and clawing odours that make you want to run to the nearest hotel shower, the words are given an entirely new meaning.
The children are in the classroom because Irish aid, provided through the foundation, enables the Indian NGOs with whom they work to staff the little school which acts as an introduction to education for the young ones who go there.
Hope and the NGOs have persuaded their mothers that even the most basic education might mean a ticket out of this hell if they are lucky. The fathers, who play very little part in the process, secure their tickets out through home brew and drugs.
In reality, these children are cherished, not for what they might make of their lives, but for what they can contribute as child labourers, beggars, rubbish sifters and prostitutes - or sex workers as they prefer to call them in Calcutta.
What Hope is doing is tangible and real. The contributions of Irish people are getting through to the children and every penny is making a difference. In the cane and wattle classroom of Utradanga, a list shows the names of students who have gone on to enter mainstream education in the past year.
When they do, Hope and the NGO staffers, usually young people who bring the qualities of a vocation to what they do, follow up on their progress and provide support to ensure they remain at school. The long-term benefits of education are not easily explained or understood in Utradanga so that each name on the list represents a small but very important victory.
With Hope funds collected in Ireland through charitable donations and other fund-raising efforts, one of the Indian NGOs, SPAN, has become the driving force on the ground at Utradanga.
It is vital, according to Hope's Maureen Forrest and Celina Daly, that the foundation is not seen as another colonial presence but that it is a partnership with Indian volunteers who have a deeper understanding of the nature of poverty in their country.
Watching the youthful teachers at work in the classroom with youngsters ranging in age from six to 14 is the best proof of what the aid can do. SPAN also provides basic medical care, two drop-in centres, counselling for the mothers, and fathers if they will have it, and above all, of course, the glimmer of hope that something better for these children might lie ahead.
The 85 mostly barefoot and bedraggled youngsters who are attending the school this year are but a fraction of the number swarming around the abject site, but word is spreading and other mothers want their children to have the same. "You want to help them all but you have to focus on helping those you can," Ms Forrest said.
The settlement is located at the edge of a railway track where unknown numbers of the smaller children have died under the wheels of oncoming trains.
There is one public toilet, no privacy in the adjoining hovels, primitive cooking facilities, open sewers that criss-cross the alleyways, and in the rainy season, the muck and disease-carrying ooze flows in rivers through the entire encampment.
Despite their plight, the people maintain a dignity that is almost disquieting. Another Hope-funded school in the Howrah area of the city offers non-formal education to the child labourers known as the cement children.
They steal cement from the nearby railway siding and bag it for their black market masters who pay them 15 rupees, or a little over 38 cents a day. The children are at their trade as early as 4.30 a.m. When they are finished their work, they come to school, jaded but clearly happy to be there.
The NGO in this case is SEED which operates a preparatory centre for some 250 children at Howrah Station, a half-way home, and a shelter for the railway children who live rough on the platform of this vast station which links all parts of India.
They are preyed upon by everyone from police to railway porters and transport workers. These children live from hand to mouth, hoping to beg or steal enough money to feed themselves for the day. Without SEED and the Hope funding, they would have no chance of rescue.
In the sinister seedy lanes of Kalighat, the red light district of Calcutta run by the Indian mafia, another Hope Foundation school is operated by the NGO known as PBKOJP. The director, Mr Deepak Biswas, knows his way around the labyrinthine alleyways.
The youngsters in the school, like the others, are experiencing for the first time in their lives, a caring attitude from adults who want to help. There is no hidden agenda, no payback of any kind.
The difference between these children and the others who have been brought into the basic education system, is that their mothers are sex workers and when they are entertaining clients, the youngsters have to hide in the same room until the client has left. The night school, at least, shelters some of them from that ordeal.
The organisation has also developed a programme for women, some still in their early teens, who no longer want to continue in the sex industry. They are pursuing crafts and tailoring in an attempt to earn money for themselves and break free from prostitution.
While Hope and the NGO are fighting an uphill struggle, before their arrival there was no classroom, no teachers, no help from anywhere.
Hope is also responsible for funding Hive India, providing twice-weekly health clinics for more than 200 children, and the All Bengal Women's Union, a sheltered home and vocational training unit for women and children from the streets and prisons.
It also funds the West Bengal Council for Child Welfare, which supports mentally ill women and child labourers. Irish Embassy funding made it possible for one floor of the house to be completed, Hope funding another. Some 200 children are being helped. Hope has also been there during much publicised tragedies such as the earthquake in Gujarat in 2001.
Hope's flagship presence in Calcutta is the home at Panditya Place in the city where young girls have been brought into aloving environment where the opportunity for education, good food and the nearest thing they will ever get to a family environment awaits them.
The house has been running for three years and has had great successes. One girl who went on to formal education through the home is now a hotel manageress in Bombay. Others, up to 20 at any time, live there and are loved and cared for. Once they have completed their formal education, they are placed in suitable outside accommodation and jobs.
Irish people who give so generously might well ask what the Indian government does for its own poor. This nuclear power places endemic poverty very low on its list of priorities, yet there are signs that agencies such as Hope are forcing the issue up the agenda.
Recently at a Hope function, the governor of West Bengal, Shri Viren J. Saha, conceded that the number of street children in Calcutta was in the region of 200,000 and welcomed the work of the Cork-based organisation.
In three years, through Irish Government aid and public donations, it has raised and spent almost €2 million. They money is making a difference, even in Utradanga, where the waifs are beginning to believe that they too can overcome.
The Hope Foundation can be contacted at 1 Clover Lawn, Skehard Road, Cork.