I sometimes think of my role as something akin to being a wick; often I don’t really have to do anything but exist in order to facilitate the transfer of skills and knowledge to and from Hunar Ghar. The eye-test people coming is one example, merely because I am at Hunar Ghar and me, as opposed to being one of my teachers alone at the hospital, things happened where otherwise they would not have. Why is this? The end benefit is the same thing for the same children with no benefit to me, but the it’s likelihood of happening is drastically enhanced by my being a party to it.

My being white in a place where there are few to no white Caucasians made me get the attention of someone in the the same category, Stephen the doctor. The my and Ash speaking English allowed for easy communication and thus immediately we had a few points of common interest, a familiarity with one another’s way of being, and so the relationship could build. Next Ash and I can speak very clearly about Hunar Ghar which means people have clean access to the kind of information they need to understand it a little and think it is good, the fact that it is Ash and I run it and we are clear speaking English me perhaps adds confidence to the listener.

Everything necessary for the event to happen existed without me and Ash, the people with the need and the people with the solution and kindness to do it, but t would probably never have happened without us. It shows perhaps how certain people with certain abilities and background command special privileges over others. The access to these privileges isn’t governed by the kindness or willingness of the provider or the need of the recipient, not the providers conditions limiting it nor the recipients ability to meet those conditions, only largely unrelated third-party conditions.

Ash and I started Educate for Life with this in mind. Charity is nothing if it is just all about giving money, which is what a lot of it has come to be with guilt laden Oxfam adverts of the nineties developing into ‘fun’ ways to give money – such as buying a goat for a village – and the prominence of direct-debit-aquiring focussed fundraising, epitomised by the ‘chuggers’, charity-muggers, that swarm Totenham Court Road and high streets around the country.

The fact is that actually a lot of the skills to make things happen already exist in people with willingness to use those skills in return for non-financial value, and there are people and places that require them, but those two worlds never collide. Educate for Life acts as a portal in some respects, a door-way in the world of Bakhel and a door-way in the world of the eye doctors, or MGIS and many others, through which each can step into the other’s existence. Each world is has been carrying on parallel for a long time but the exchange is never made, we make that exchange possible.