By Anabelle Wong, Class of 2026 and Elizabeth Chan, Class of 2027

As members of one of the youngest Overseas Community Involvement Programmes in LKCMedicine, Anabelle Wong and Elizabeth Chan seek to improve health literacy and impact the lives of the affected women and their families.

Modern-day slavery is a reality for many women and girls in Kolkata, West Bengal. According to the Hindustan Times, in 2016, Kolkata alone accounted for 44 per cent of human trafficking cases in India. Girls as young as 12 years old are often deceived by the promise of finding good jobs or false romantic relationships - some are even sold by their own families. They eventually enter the sex trade, from which it is extremely difficult to exit due to poverty and the fear of stigmatisation by those in their communities.

It is with a heart to help this vulnerable, often forgotten, population that Project Kolkata was established in 2018. Despite being one of the youngest Overseas Community Involvement Programmes in LKCMedicine, consecutive batches of students have continued the consistent efforts to improve the livelihoods of former and current sex-trafficked women and their families.

When the global pandemic put a hold on our annual trips to Kolkata, we sought ways to continue reaching out to our beneficiaries despite the distance. With the understanding that the socioeconomic repercussions of the pandemic would make it even harder for some women to leave the sex trade, we strived to improve their quality of life and health literacy. Some women under the care of our partner NGO, TouchNature, expressed hopes for their children to have better education and employment opportunities in the future. As such, in mid-2022, we began our bi-weekly sessions of English tuition for their children.

Conducted via Zoom, the children are split into different groups based on their proficiency levels. Our members prepare and curate lesson materials for each level, allowing the children to practise English through reading and conversing. These sessions have become fortnightly highlights for us as we observe the children’s dynamic interactions with us and their efforts to learn and apply the language to their lives.

To encourage their efforts, Project Kolkata held our first ever book donation drive in September, appealing to staff and students to donate children’s books. Over two weeks, we received more than 100 books spanning a wide range of genres, which were mailed to TouchNature in India. We are extremely grateful for the generous donations from the LKCMedicine community!

As the year draws to a close, Project Kolkata kicked off our annual fundraiser to celebrate the festive spirit by selling, among others, candles and air fresheners made by our beneficiaries employed at TouchNature, some of whom were former victims of the sex trafficking industry. Fondly called “A Kolkata Khristmas”, our annual fundraiser helps us raise funds to procure essential resources for our beneficiaries and raises awareness of our cause. The overwhelming response from the LKCMedicine staff and students saw our candles and air fresheners being sold out rapidly, which touched all of us greatly.

As we look ahead to the new semester, Project Kolkata is preparing for an exciting chapter with plans to resume our overseas trip in 2023. With travel borders open again, we are building upon our takeaways from previous efforts and are reaching out to people and organisations who share our vision of helping the women and their families in Kolkata as we plan for our trip.

Along with basic health screening, we are preparing to conduct health seminars such as the one we organised for girls from Pertapis Centre for Women and Girls last November, during the peak of COVID. It was an interactive session over Zoom joined by Dr Rukshini Puvanendran from KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital where we shared about menstrual health, substance abuse, mental health, and nutrition. We were heartened to see how engaged the girls were as they shared their experiences via Zoom and were also able to direct them to helpful resources.

Being a part of Project Kolkata has given all of us the unique opportunity to interact with people living in a vastly different reality. The more we speak to our partner NGOs and find out about the situation in Kolkata, the more we realise that it is in doing the little things that make the greatest difference. To say we are excited for what is to come ahead would be an understatement.

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