By Joydeep Gupta, IANS
New Delhi : Albina du Boisrouvray dreams big. The head of the only international NGO that works in all 35 states and union territories in India now wants to set up five villages across the country, where 2,000 children orphaned by AIDS will find shelter.
The NGO Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) was set up in memory of Boisrouvray’s son, a helicopter pilot who died during a rescue mission. “In that spirit of rescue, we’re stitching together a safety net for AIDS orphans around the world,” Alvina told IANS Saturday.
Boisrouvray was in the national capital as part of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s delegation and gushed about the “wonderful Republic Day parade” she had seen Saturday morning.
Straight from the parade, she rushed to Sanjay Colony, a slum in a corner of the capital’s diplomatic enclave Chanakyapuri, where FXB runs one of its earliest projects in India.
A small computer centre that the NGO set up there has led to some of the slum children getting jobs. Boisrouvray was just as admiring of them as she was of the parade.
Since starting in Goa in 1990, FXB works in many areas in India, but helping orphans, especially those orphaned by the AIDS epidemic, is closest to Boisrouvray’s heart.
“We work at the grassroots,” Boisrouvray said. “So we know the problems. And the worst problem is the situation faced by those orphaned due to AIDS. Many of them are HIV positive themselves.
“All of them face huge discrimination, as the stigma associated with AIDS is still very prevalent in this country. Very few of them get a chance to go to school. These are the children we try to help.”
The NGO does that through a model developed by Boisrouvray in Uganda. “We set up FXB houses,” she explained. “Each house has (foster) parents, maybe grandparents and some orphans they take in with our help.
“Then we extend this into an FXB village. We help start income-generating activities. We set up some education programmes so that the children are able to get into schools. We provide healthcare support and access to basic needs for the first three years. We have found that in 86 percent cases, people are able to look after themselves by the fourth year.”
In each “FXB village” in India, about 80 families would look after an average of five AIDS orphans each, Boisrouvray said. That would mean 2,000 orphans would live in five villages.
The India office of FXB has not yet finalised the states in which the five villages would be set up, but Boisrouvray said they were likely to include West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Mizoram and Manipur.
“Then in the second phase, we shall set up villages in Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Bihar and at Noida in Uttar Pradesh,” she added.
The NGO’s India budget for the 2008 calendar year is $1.3 million, and much more will be needed to transform this dream into reality. But lack of money has never deterred the FXB head. Apart from starting the organisation with her own money, she has raised funds from all over the world, including Indian corporate houses.
Taking advantage of being part of the Sarkozy delegation, Boisrouvray was busy telling fellow delegates from French industry that they should help this project as soon as they sign contracts with their Indian counterparts. “I keep pointing out how it will be good public relations for them.”
(Joydeep Gupta can be contacted at [email protected])