sseale

Hi, I’m Shelley. Many people ask how I got involved in this work and writing this book. Many people also ask, “Why India?” So I created this page to give a little bit of my background and that of this book project.

I have been involved in nonprofit work and social activism almost all my life - particularly around child advocacy. When I was a young teenager my mother began fostering babies for the Edna Gladney Home in Fort Worth, and through the years we were a foster home to over 50 children. My sister, Katie, was adopted during that time - as she says, she’s always known she was special! So at a young age I was aware of child rights and advocacy issues. It must run in the family because both of my sisters, Amy and Katie, work at a foster agency that provides homes to abused and neglected children.

Left to right: My sister Amy, me, my cousin Jennifer, and sister Katie.

As an adult I began doing a lot of volunteer work here in Texas, with abused and neglected children. I participated in a mentoring program for at-risk teens for several years, and worked with Child Protective Services. In Austin I have been a Guardian Ad Litem through CASA for almost 5 years, in which I act as a court-appointed advocate for children who have been removed from their homes due to abuse or neglect, and have been involved with The Heart Gallery to find forever families for such children.

Then in 2003 I read a story in Tribeza magazine about Caroline Boudreaux’s incredible journey that became The Miracle Foundation. After a trip to India caused Caroline to come face to face with hundreds of children living in hunger and filth in an orphanage, she turned her life upside-down and started the foundation that today supports five orphanages in India. I began sponsoring a child, and in March 2005 traveled with Caroline to India for the first time, to work in the orphanage and meet the children. As trite as it sounds, the experience changed me, too.

Me & Caroline with friends, 2006

I soon came to realize that most of the children living in the homes were not orphaned due to death, but due to poverty. India is home to more than 25 million children living without parental care, and three million more are added each year.* As I learned more about the complex, intertwining issues that make children vulnerable to orphanhood, the sex trade, child labor, HIV, or a life on the streets, I began to come up with the idea for this book. My simple goal is to help give a voice to these invisible children.

In August 2006 I was accepted into a residency at the Julia & David White Artist Colony in Costa Rica, where I began writing the book. I’ve been working on the manuscript for about a year now, and have since been back to India twice. In March 2006 I took my teenage daughter, Chandler. In March 2007 I spent a month in India, traveling all over the country to visit and interview dozens of individuals and nonprofit organizations who are working to change the plight of these children.

My daughter, Chandler, in India March 2006

This July 2007, I travel to Prague where I have been accepted into the Prague Summer Writers Program and the prestigious Gribner Nonfiction Manuscript Workshop, where I will work with a group of other authors, editors and publishers to edit and polish the book.

This topic, and these children, are very near and dear to my heart. For those who ask, why India? my simple answer is, why not? I find most people who ask this question are really asking, why don’t you do something here at home instead of traveling halfway around the world? There are plenty of children here who are suffering and need help. And I do - I donate thousands of hours and dollars each year to children in need right here at home.

But besides that, why India? Because I believe that every life, no matter where it’s lived, has equal value. Because extreme poverty in India is not the same as poverty in the United States. Because there are very little if any safety nets for these children who fall through the cracks. Because the AIDS crisis in South Asia is reaching epidemic proportions and threatens millions of children. Don’t get me wrong - we have vast problems in my home country, including poverty and racism and inequality and child abuse. But millions of children in the U.S. aren’t generally threatened by malaria and tuberculosis, missing out on their entire educations, or trafficked into brothels and factories of inhuman conditions. Today there exists, for the first time in history, the real possibility of ending extreme poverty in developing countries.

And quite simply, because those 25 million children exist.