Putting Childhood Back into the Child: Rights & Realities of Children in India, Iowa City, Iowa, September 22, 2015

- [Sandra Morrow] And I thank today's financial sponsors, MidWestOne Bank and Dave, Denise, and Mike Tiffany. Our programs are made possible by the financial support of these sponsors. I'd like to introduce now Mr. Hugh Ferrer. He is IWP associate director, and fall residency program coordinator who will introduce Rochelle to us. - [Hugh Ferrer] Thank you Sandra. As many of you know, the international writing program like the ICFRC strives to foster international understanding. We conduct year round programming in the US online and overseas, but our primary forum is the distinguished fall residency program which brings writers from around the world to the University of Iowa campus for 11 weeks of writing, research, conversation, translation, public engagement, and barn dances. This year we have 34 writers from 33 countries with us, and they've been bringing a staggering array of interests and talents to our public events. I encourage you to follow us on social media, and to look at our website where you can find all the writers' biographies as well as samples of their writings, and a calendar of events. As it happens, we're coming to the end of the first half of our residency. We'll be having a screening this evening. Our Nigerian writer, Samuel Kolawole is curating a screening at 105 Adler. That's the journalism building. That's at 7:30 tonight. The movie is the Nigerian film October 1, and then on Friday we have two filmmakers with us this year. One is Polen Ly from Cambodia and the other is Byamba Zachia from Mongolia. Both wonderful guys. And they're going to be screening their short films at five o'clock on Friday at the Becker Communications Building. The round building right next to the university main library. Then we'll be on hiatus for a week until the Iowa City Book Festival, which is October first through the fourth and I hope you'll come out and see some of the many panels that the International Writing Program writers are going to be on, especially on Saturday October third. This afternoon I'm pleased to introduce a marvelous poet, short story writer, and activist from Mumbai, India. Rochelle Potkar is the author of the story collection The Arithmetic of Breasts and Other Stories and her first poetry collection, My Song Beneath the Sound is due out this December. Her work has also been widely anthologized online, and in print volumes. She's a member of the core team of Poetry Couture, a group that curates open mics and readings in cafes, libraries, and art galleries across India. She's the co-editor of Nisa Magazine, has several short story projects, and though I forget the name of the film is also a budding actress. Please join me in welcoming Rochelle Potkar. - [Rochelle Potkar] Thank you Hugh. And maybe you meant not an activist, but an actress. Good afternoon everybody, and thank you Sandra for this. I would like to thank all of you for being here, and I'm very happy the meal is over because the topic that we're going to be discussing today might not be so easy to digest. All right I must start by saying this, I'm not a social worker but a fiction writer and poet and I must have been interested in children a long time before I became a mother. I was planning to write a novel on children, someday soon, and so when I was presented with this opportunity by Hugh, it happened to be that day when a disturbing image was doing the rounds on the internet. It was of the two year old dead boy on a Turkish beach. His name, Alan Kurdi. The headline read "Humanity Washed Ashore." To me it wasn't the Syrian baby that I saw that day, it wasn't an immigrant baby, it was just a baby and the image made me want to talk of children. Because I come from India, and because of my limited knowledge on the situation of children, I have collated some of it and yet I know that grownups world over have to be accountable for its 2.2 billion children in the world today. The subject of child rights is so vast that I'm not sure from where, I was not sure from where to begin, and as I sat flummoxed in front of my computer I thought that a perpetrator of child abuse wouldn't think like me. They don't ask themselves whether they follow rules, norms, lines, be it the law of the land or the tick of conscience. So why am I thinking so much? So I've scanned reports from CRY, that is Child Rights and You. Human Rights Watch reports, international labor organization world reports, and UN reports to present this to you. What is childhood associated with? Dreams, a toy, the mist and monsoon? The last ray of dawn before it swells yolk yellow? India is home to 430 million children. Roughly one in five of all children under 18 in the world. But from the moment they are born, the challenges many of them face are staggering. At least 1.7 million children die before the age of five every year in India. Malnutrition means that almost half of those that survive are stunted, and 43% are underweight. The government estimates that 40% of India's children are vulnerable to threats such as trafficking, homelessness, forced labor, drug abuse, crime, and are in need of protection. I will quote Frank Warren here who says that "it's the children the world almost breaks "who grow up to save it." And this from the Dalai Lama, "look at children, of course they may quarrel, "but generally speaking they do not harbor ill feelings "as much or as long as adults do." "Most adults have the advantage of education over children, "but what is the use of an education "if they show a big smile "while hiding negative feelings behind it? "Children don't usually act in such a manner. "If they feel angry with someone, they express it, "and then it is finished. "They can still play with that person the following day." Let's start with child labor. I must say that these photos are not, they are just representational and they are not in direct connection with what I'm presenting, but these are all photos of child labor. The cases of child labor are too many, so I will pick a recent one that came to light in India when the police and the labor department officials rescued 400 children in a series of raids in the leather tanning and the plastic factories in Hyderabad. The children, mainly boys, hailed from India's Bahar, Uttar Pradesh, and Bengal states. These are India's poorest areas. These children were forced to work for 12 hours in a day without respite in deplorable conditions despite a nationwide ban on child labor. Many of the children were suffering from skin and other diseases as they were forced to work in unhygienic, and unventilated dark rooms. Their employers would monitor them with video cameras, and any child who stopped working would be beaten. The police arrested five men accused of supplying children to the factory owners. They discovered a mafia had brought children from other states to work in hazardous industries. India has laws aimed at fighting child labor by making education compulsory up to the age of 14, and prohibiting their employment in hazardous occupations, but despite the laws, abject poverty still causes children to be pushed into work with factory agents promising wages to their parents. These rescued children will now return to their homes in special trains. There are numerous real life stories and the only other story I picked for this sharing is a story from Tara Projects of 10 year old Amri Firozabad. Her entire family, including her, worked in a bangle making factory. They were involved in various stages of the bangle making process from straightening and designing bangles with fire flames to designing bangles on a grinder to glass blowing and color with paints. She and the other children would be given a black chemical to put on bangles, and when it was baked this chemical looked like gold. She was not sent to a school, but of course she did go in the evenings to this center ran by Tara Projects where she learned math, songs, Hindi, Urdu, and English. The hazards of working in a glass factory range from bronchial asthma, watering of the eyes, skin irritation and diseases, tuberculosis from glass blowing, leg pain and bach aches, because of the long hours of work. The 2011 census found that 4.35 million children between the ages of five and 14 were employed across India. Indian statistics show that 80% of the working children are based on rural areas and three out of the four of these children work in agriculture as cultivators or in household industries, most of which are home based employments. One in every 11 children in India is working. For the global statistics, the global number of children in child labor have declined, thankfully, to 1/3 since the year 2000. It's currently at 168 million children. And more than half of them, that is 85 million children work in hazardous conditions. In case of children, one aspect of their life automatically intrudes into the other aspect of their life because they are not adults to keep this separate. So if they're working for 14 hours in a day, they are out of school and probably they're not even going to night school, and they're too young to take things in their control. The right to education is enshrined in the Indian constitution, but though the situation is improving, there are still 8.1 million out of school children according to the survey done in 2009. Now we come to the subject of education. Again, there are plenty of cases, but I will only talk of the seven year old Guria, who according to her friends and teachers was a very bright student in her third grade of school. Unfortunately she couldn't continue her school after the demise of her father who was the sole breadwinner of the family. She had to choose between her books and starvation, and she decided to help her mother by earning a livelihood and also supporting the education of her younger brother. So her life then included, at a young age, to beg and collect money that is 20 rupees at a road crossing which was the Merili Butterpool crossing. Next she would go to clean dishes at Mrs. Sharma's house, and then she would need dough for the evening meal. I must say this, in India labor is cheap and most of the middle class homes have someone come in to do their floors, their clothes, their dishes. Now child labor in cases of household jobs happens in such a covert way that if a maid is unwell, she will just send her daughter, who might even be 10 years old, to do the dishes. And most Indians rarely find anything wrong with this. 4% of the children in India never start school. 58% don't complete primary school, and 90% don't complete secondary school. The world statistics are 31 million primary school pupils dropped out of school, and additional 32 million repeated a grade. While girls are less likely to begin school, boys are more likely to repeat grades or drop out. According to a UNESCO report, 61 million primary school age children were not enrolled in school in 2010. Less girls than boys are sent to school, but forget the spiritual or the humane sense. This doesn't even make economic sense. If India enrolled just 1% more girls in secondary school, our gross domestic product would rise by 5.5 billion dollars. Educating girls can break the vicious cycles in just one generation, yet millions of girls aren't sent to school. This is a picture of the children who get midday meal facility, which takes away the economic burden from their parents who don't have to pay fees because the schooling is free, and even the meals are free so they don't have to worry about that. That is an incentive to send them to school. Child marriages. India has the highest number of child brides in the world. 47% of girls in India are married before their 18th birthday. Currently only 60% of the births from these child brides are even registered. I'll share Mawa's story with you, which is sent by my fiction writer friend John Matthew from Mumbai. Mawa was married when she was nine to a boy who was 10. She hardly spoke a few words to her husband, who died a year later. She became a widow at the age of 10, she was given a white sari to wear and all her jewelry was taken away. She was returned to her family at the age of 11. She was not allowed to remarry, study further, or find a job and realized that living the life of a widow in a Hindu household is hard. She was given food but no money. She couldn't attend weddings and other social functions as she was considered a bad omen, a bringer of bad luck. She holds onto her religious faith as the only source of hope. Mawa sings religious songs and reads the Gita, and does household work like cleaning, sweeping, cooking. She has no position in society and her relatives ignore her and she is resigned to living such a life hereafter. Child marriages still take place in some parts of India in spite of cases like Mawa's. The Indian government has fixed the age of marriage for women at 18. However this rule is ignored by some communities and child marriages are prevalent. This is also a sanctioned form of child sexual abuse that the people practicing it don't think about. The UNICEF report cited 720 million women around the world alive today were married before 18 years. This compared to 156 million male. 1/3 of these are in India, and this brings in issues of early and frequent pregnancies which can have a devastating consequence on a girl's health. It encourages the initiation of sexual activity at an age when the girls' bodies are still developing and when they know little about their reproductive health. Child brides face higher risk of death in childbirth and are particularly vulnerable to pregnancy related injuries. It is extremely difficult for child brides to assert their wishes and needs to their usually older husbands, particularly in negotiating safe sexual practices and the use of family planning methods. They also face pressure, social pressure, to prove their fertility. When a girl marries as a child, the health of her children suffer too. They have a greater risk of infant mortality, morbidity, and still births, and newborn deaths are 50% higher in mothers younger than 20 years of age. The world statistics show that 1/3 of girls in developing countries are married before the age of 18 and one in nine are married before the age of 15. If the present trend continues, 150 million girls will be married before their 18th birthday, and that's an average of 15 million girls each year in the world. We come next to child sexual abuse. When I was reading these reports, they were so disturbing that I had trouble picking the least nightmarish case, and even that is no less a nightmare. Children are sexually abused by relatives at home, by people in their neighborhood, at school and in residential facilities for orphans and by other at-risk children. Most cases are not reported. Many are mistreated a second time by the criminal justice system that often does not want to hear or believe their accounts or take serious action against the perpetrators. I will talk of the case of a government residential facility for girls in Allahabad, the Shivkuti Shishu Grih. This was a home for girls between the ages of six and 12 years of age, and they face sexual abuse by an employee for over 15 years and it was only discovered by chance. Cases from homes in other states of India were studied where alleged abusers were members of the staff, older children, and outside visitors including police officers. At home, it's the rape by fathers, uncles, brothers, or rape by neighbors. What is saddest is that when these cases are reported, the police are so insensitive and they are mostly dominated by male police officers that they are either told not to report such cases in order to save their shame, in order to save them from shame and dishonoring their family, and they are mistreated even further. The treatment meted out by the hospital is worse than the ostracism by the society. This is one nightmare unfurling into the next. Studies suggest that more than 7,200 children, including infants, are raped every year and experts believe that more cases go unreported. The world statistics of 2009 with 65 studies done from 22 countries found a global prevalence of child sexual abuse to be 19% of females and 7% of males. And then we come to child trafficking. I'm just going to read out three cases. 16 year old Manju was trafficked from Delhi when she was 12. Manju's parents were daily wage laborers with five children and they agreed to send the teenagers to the city after a local agent told them that she could get a good job there. But instead, Manju was taken and sold to a much older man. The deal was 50,000 Indian rupees, which is 800 US dollars. The deal had failed and because of that, the agent demanded more money. That night the agent raped Manju, and because he was very angry with the money he had spent on her traveling, he cursed her and blamed her for the failed deal. The next morning, the agent sold her as a domestic worker for about 3,500 rupees which is 560 US dollars, to a Delhi household. After 11 months, she asked the agent to send her home. Instead he locked her up in the office and raped her again. Almost a year and a half later, Manju was rescued by the New Delhi based NGO called Bachpan Bachao Andolan, Save the Childhood Movement. She is now fighting a legal battle to get the agent convicted for rape and trafficking. The second real life story is of 21 year old Vinita who had lost all hope of ever seeing her family again. She was trafficked from a tea garden in northeast India and sold as a bride to a 50 year old man for 70,000 rupees which is 1,200 US dollars. When a rescue team made up of NGO workers and police found her, almost a year later, she had been held captive and she almost broke down. She said that every attempt of hers to escape had failed, and when they caught her they beat her mercilessly. And then there is the 16 year old Mosami, who was found three months pregnant when she was rescued by her abusive employer's house, from her employer's house. She had been sexually abused and denied contact with anyone. She said that she had to work for 14 to 16 hours in a day and what she got after that was abuse. A year later when she was back at home with her family in her village at Lakhimpur in Assam, Mosami said she had lost the desire to live. She said she almost never left her house, fearful of what people would say about her. Hiding her face behind a veil, she said "I feel very lonely and want to kill myself. "I guess that's the only way out of this misery." For these girls, recovering from the trauma of this horrific past is extremely difficult. Once back in their villages, the girls face silent discrimination from the societies and the villages they are in. Despite being that their rescue comes through huge struggle and a legal battle, the lack of government policies to uphold their fundamental rights, they face the danger of being victimized again. Though children constitute 1/3 of India's population, our country has repeatedly failed to uphold the rights of children and the situation of our children. It remains dismal. At all the child rights relation indicators, that is education, nutrition, health, development, and protection. I would quote Tom Robbins from Still Life with Woodpecker who says that "it's never too late "to have a happy childhood." A lot of work in India has been done in the field. In this field to bring that childhood back, or salvage an adolescent from turning into a fissured, broken adult. There are numerous government departments and ministries, organizations, and NGOs working around children. I would like to talk about a few activists here, and I think you might know many of them because they're very well known. Kailash Satyarthi is an Indian child's rights and education advocate and activist against child labor. He founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan which is Save the Childhood movement in 1980 and has acted to protect the rights of more than 83,000 children from 144 countries. It is largely because of his work and activism that the International Labor Organization adopted convention number 182 on the worst forms of child labor which is now a principle guideline for governments around the world. His work is recognized through various national and international honors and awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize of 2014 which he shared with Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan. Om Prakash Gurjar is a former child laborer from Rajasthan who won the International Children's Peace Prize for 2006. At the age of five, he was taken away from his parents and for three years he worked in the fields. He was rescued by the activists of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan. After completing his education, he helped to set up a network which is known as Child Friendly Villages. These are places where children's rights are respected and child labor is not allowed. He also set up a network that aims to give all children a birth certificate as a way of helping them to protect them from exploitation. He says that registration is the first step towards enshrining children's rights, proving their age, and helping them from slavery, trafficking, forced marriages, or serving as child soldiers. Professor Shantha Sinha is an anti-child labor activist of international reputation. She's the founder of MV Foundation. She headed the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights for two consecutive years, two consecutive terms. She's also won the Padma Shri, and many awards. She's an academic with Hyderabad Central University, and her contribution is phenomenal, especially in the reduction of child labor in nearly 500 villages of Ranga Reddy district in Andhra Pradesh. And then Dr. Sunita Krishnan, social activist and co-founder of Prajwala, an NGO that works for the rehabilitation of sex workers and their children. Her passion for social work became manifested when at the age of eight, she started teaching dance to mentally challenged children. By the age of 12 she was running schools in slums for underprivileged children. At the age of 15 while working on a neo-literacy campaign for the Dalit community, Krishnan was gang raped by eight men. This incident served as the impetus for what she does today. Ms. Krishnan works in the areas of anti-human trafficking, psychiatric rehabilitation, and social policy. She has worked relentlessly to bring about a change in the attitude of India's government for victim friendly policies as well as awareness regarding sex trafficking through political, legal, and media advocacy. Her organization Prajwala has an international reputation, and Ms. Krishnan is regularly consulted not only by the Indian authorities, but by United Nations and the US government. Her bio data, while I was reading I found it is too vast to put into, even to put into four paragraphs but Dr. Sunita drafted recommendations for the rehabilitation for victims of trafficking in Andhra Pradesh, which has now become a state policy. Besides her legal advocacy and media outreach measures and her TED talks, she also uses films as a tool for advocacy. She has scripted 14 documentary films on issues such as youth, HIV AIDS, marriages, incest, prostitution, sex trafficking, communal rights. Krishnan has been physically assaulted 14 times during her work, and she receives regular death threats. And this is what she has to say. "I have this deep rooted belief that my life "is a providence by itself, "and God has brought me in this world to do what I'm doing "and God will allow me to stay in this world "so long as he believes that my mission is not done, "and therefore I do believe that the day "God believes that my work is done, "I will be killed or I will die naturally "or whichever way that is possible." In conclusion, we owe it to our 2.2 billion children of the world in our own ways possible and we owe it fast, before they turn into adolescents which is just a term of a few years. Being a poet incorrigible, I would like to end this presentation with three of my poems that in someway relate to what we are discussing here. Timely. Don't pick a wilted flower. Even graves are dressed in fresh ones. Heart beating petals over dead bone, and you ask me to wait. Have you ever seen a rose red ripe and raw like wine? Does it wait its turn in the bouquet? It's time and place is the morning, when from the blessings of a stem it oozes nectar, life juices strumming from its veins. After that, a bookmark in the pages. Memory aromas in translucent perfume bottles. Don't ask a rose to wait. There is no time in its petal. Only the saga of one sunrise and one sundown. The second poem, Anthropology 2. A human child isn't a gallus gallus they say. To stand up on its feet in a month after birth and feed on worm from earth. A human child has to stumble, procrastinate. Its gestation is more than what's in the womb. For each thought and word to form like limb. It needs to grow, fall, learn, brim and upturn like a cup waiting for use on an empty restaurant table. Hollow as a bell jar. It has to crack and bleed. Powder to brutality. Be given 100 chances to err, a thousand to forgive and even when it grows up the human child is still learning to unlearn, remembering to forget and re-remembering anew with new words. This childhood lasts until old age. In a long journey from self love to self hate to self love, and only when this child achieves enough vulnerability, empathy, more than it can handle it grows old. And an old human cries like a baby with the slightest of a kind touch. And the last poem, Rejoinder. On a late evening, a boy dressed in creased pajamas walks home with his mother. She weaves his frail hand into hers and in a silence that can be heard, destroyed under the dance of the moon. Tomorrow the child will be pulled away again from his bed tucking, bundled into new clothes and sent back to the creche with a rucksack to be bathed, cleaned, and fed. His mother would merge into the morning stream, returning after 1,000 hours of travel, and a 14 hour work shift. This invisible thread between mother and son growing easy, each expecting no more from the other. The son from the creche or the mother from the world that grows larger and longer in front of them. Thank you. - [Sandra Morrow] What solutions could be implemented, and which ones most easily be put into effect and how can the US people help? - [Rochelle Potkar] I mean I would need to really research on what a lot of NGOs are doing and I don't think I would be able to collect these answers right now, but I think United Nations is helping and American organizations are helping a lot of NGOs in India, and a lot of volunteers come from American to India so I think there are a lot of collaborations, but if you want specific details I would need to collect this information which would take me a lot more time. - [Sandra Morrow] What are the major barriers to improving the lives of children? - [Rochelle Potkar] This is a better question, because I can answer it. I think it's... The societal mindset, because in India we don't wince when we see, we don't wince when we see children working. I mean we don't even, we like to beat them up you know as a method of discipline, whereas I think in America you can't touch a child, right? I mean you'll be jailed, but in India we beat them up so although we love them a lot, we do love them a lot, but our love is very different. I'm talking of discipline. So even there we have different ways of how, and different techniques of parenting. But I think generally, talking about the subject of child abuse, it's the mindset of the society which is very closed, like no one really talks about incest and people are coming out now, only now because of the social media because of more articulation and assertion, but for very long nobody knew what was going on because it was just kept quiet and hushed because the parameter that is attached to this is family dishonor. It is not about how fractured you are getting as an individual, but it is looked from the outside as family, don't dishonor your family. So don't talk about this that's happened, just keep quiet. So I think it's the mindset then the missionary, the police missionary and the judicial systems are not very sensitive to, to matters such as these. Whether it be crime against women or against children. First of all, it is believed that the child is lying. They don't believe children because children come from a world of imagination and imaginary friends, so for a long time it's not even believed that they could be saying something meaningful. So I think a lot of mindset needs to shift from not worrying about whether you're going to dishonor your family, okay, or not, and the police, the judicial system, and the society at large because once you are out there and you are abused and you speak that out in public, the society has a very regressive way of looking at you as a marked or branded person, and I think that in itself isolates you. I've always, in India we've always observed that you are raped once, and then you are raped again by the society and you're again, you might be raped again by the media who will not respect your privacy, and even... You know like have your name out, you know. So it doesn't respect anything. So you are raped many more times by these other systems. - [Sandra Morrow] Apart from the activists noted, are there influential religious leaders or celebrities speaking out on this issue? - [Rochelle Potkar] Leaders, like political leaders, I have not, at least to my mind I don't think notably anyone. In fact, I don't know. Some of them have been you know behind these, behind these and some of them have been behind these, so that's a kind of very dark place, but celebrities do speak about, especially the celebrities who have faced child sexual abuse. They now come out and speak about it, and because so many follow them, it's now become, it gives the other people courage. The other victims or survivors courage to speak about it, so yes. But I wish we had much more of that happening. We don't have as much of it happening. - [Sandra Morrow] What is the rate of immigration from India to neighboring countries by children or does such a thing never happen legally? Are there any statistics on illegal immigration to neighboring countries? - [Rochelle Potkar] Well I don't have the statistics on paper, but there's a lot of trafficking going on in the developing countries. I think from Nepal, India, and all the neighboring countries. The basic fact of the matter is that wherever there are families or neighborhoods that are poor, and they have no fixed source of income like or whether they don't have, if they have farmlands and it's not doing well, they don't have fixed jobs, then these people are more likely to sell their children or hand their children over for some money, which they need. That money is like the respite. So and the agents can do anything with the children. In fact, there's also something like not just buying them from parents, and the parents sell them with good faith, but there's also something like a huge mafia of kidnapping where children have just disappeared and they have been found or traced later, many years later, working in factories in very, very deplorable conditions. So yes, in all poor and developing areas, trafficking is I mean, this is prone to trafficking all the time. But I can dig up the statistics. - [Sandra Morrow] Are Saudi abuses as you described allowed to continue in order to maintain the existing social hierarchy? - [Rochelle Potkar] If you mean the social hierarchy with the respect to caste, that too adds to the menace that is already unfolding. In fact it's even worse when, you know they say that there's a totem pole for even victims. The ones who might be abused in a city versus one who might be abused in a rural area. The one who might be of a higher caste or well connected, and maybe a Dalit, a Dalit who is of the lowest caste or of the low caste might not even, we might not even hear about their cases and so yes, in that sense, the more powerful get a voice and the other people are not heard and a lot needs to be done about this because that in itself is a discrimination of who gets heard and who gets covered in the papers. Who is closer to the justice system, and who's not. So yes, that social hierarchy is very prevalent and the mindset is that the lower caste, you know you can do anything with them. - [Sandra Morrow] Positive and or negative consequences of Modi's and BJP's rise to power. - [Rochelle Potkar] I just... That's a very heavy question. I, this is not, I would not see this much in terms of child labor or child sexual abuse, of what I've spoken about. I think the BJP or the current political situation has other you know, has connections to do with other things. Lots of other policies, but I think they haven't, I mean they have supported the policies that are happening here. I've not heard of that. I've heard of other religious problems and conflicts and other sorts of things, but not here. So here we are, our children are safe. - [Sandra Morrow] All right, do you think there is a popular or moral framework available to overcome these cycles? Or will change only come through economic arguments such as you cited with education for young women? - [Rochelle Potkar] I want the first part. I wish we could even drive this economic argument down, because when parents sell their children or when they send their children, you know, for some money they do it for an economic reason. So sometimes that is exactly what will work for them to tell them about the economics. Otherwise, if they didn't do that there would have been no need to talk about economics. But I feel we should talk about anything that works. If economics and money works, then that's what has to be told to save a child, but otherwise if we don't talk about economics I think this is going to take a long time. There are a lot of NGOs and a lot of social workers working on the field, and there is change but that happens very slowly. It's like for every one child saved, there are five children, 10 children in difficulty and so many of the cases don't get reported. So I think it's a mindset shift that needs to occur and that is going to take time. I think that is going to take repetition, that is going to take literature and films and talking about this in the common rooms, in the dining rooms. Talking about this everywhere. This is not going to happen overnight, because as I said child labor is even so covert that in India, we have so many children working as domestic help, and we don't even think twice about it. So we need to question it at a very basic level about where all you're seeing this. In some places it's almost invisible, but I feel the social mindset will be what will work at a macro level and which needs a lot of work, and regular repetition through films, art, movie, books, literature, what have you, and if that doesn't work, then sell the economic concept because when a parent is at that edge, and nothing else works then it's only the money that will talk and that's why we have you know support, monetary support so that the children go to school. Because that's what cuts the deal. - [Sandra Morrow] Thank you, we are down to our last question and hopefully this is a lighthearted one. How and why did you choose to become a poet? - [Rochelle Potkar] Wow, thank you for that. That is easy, thank you thank you. No, all the questions were interesting but this on was the best, okay. So I didn't choose to be a poet, but I think poetry chose me and I will say this because I always wanted to, always thought of myself as a short story writer and if you wake me up in sleep or you'd throw water on me, and say introduce yourself I'd say I'm a short story writer. Yeah, so I will not even say a novelist. I will not say an actress. I will not say anything, I will say a short story writer because I love that form, and I didn't, I don't think eight years before this I could even tolerate poetry. I was very impatient about this, and it was only when I ate a lot of fiction and produced a lot of short stories and fiction that I realized there was a lot of food but there was no water, and where is the water? And I started searching for water, and I think poetry was searching for me then and poetry is water. So I think we both found each other and I found poetry in 2013. So it's my new love. Thank you very much. - [Sandra Morrow] We now conclude our program. On behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, I give a big thank you to Rochelle Potkar for her presentation. I also thank our sponsors, the University of Iowa's International Programs, and the University of Iowa's Honors Program and the Stanley UI Foundation Support Organization for their generous support. Again, we also thank today's financial sponsors MidWestOne Bank and Dave, Denise, and Mike Tiffany. Rochelle, as a small token of our appreciation, we would like to thank you with the very coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug. - [Rochelle Potkar] Thank you, I'll have my first coffee in this. - [Sandra Morrow] Thank you again for joining us. We are adjourned.