Providing Disha to these orphaned girls

Khusboo Kantharia is an 18-year-old girl from Surat, Gujarat, she moved to Mumbai at the young age of 16 and was living at a women's shelter.  It is through this experience she learned first hand of the hardships girls from shelters face. Khusboo left her home due to the circumstance that prevailed during that time and that is when she moved in a closed shelter home. “I have seen both the lives and none of them seem appealing,” hesitantly smiles Khusboo.

Khusboo named her venture Disha as it would provide a path to these homeless girls.
Girls have to move out of the shelter at the age of 18 and face the world on their own.  Khusboo claims, “The shelter homes that the girls come from have set routines, run by authorities who are never questioned.  Such girls lack the independence and the capacity to think for themselves, let alone live in a city like Mumbai.”

Khusboo has been taking workshops at St. Catherine Home at Andheri (W) since the last five months. It is through such experiences that Khusboo began taking workshops to help these girls cope with this transition.  She enables this through sessions on life skill activities, such as travelling, supplemented by group discussions and drama therapy. She wants to provide these girls with the capacity to make their own decisions, gain independence and negotiate a world that is foreign to them.

“I realised that each and every girl has a dream that she wants to achieve it in her life and I try to help them get closer to their dream,” she admits. She meets these girls weekly or at times monthly depending upon their schedule to talk to them about their rehabilitation plan (after they move out of the shelter home), personality development and  sex education as girls have been staying in the home and don't have enough knowledge about opposite sex.

The girls enroll themselves in short term courses that would ensure a livelihood for them after they move out of these shelter homes. “Ten years down the line I want to build Disha rehabilitation centre and a Disha self help group, I want this project to go on as long as I am alive; Disha will exist as long as Khusboo is alive,” smiles Khusboo.