ABOUT INDIAN SMILES
Indian Smiles is a French non-profit association ("association loi 1901") created by Michèle Fériaud in 2007. Its main object is to rescue and protect Mumbai street girls. Indian Smiles aims to provide them an accommodation, an access to quality education and some hope for a better future. The children are followed through their entire educational pathway until they find an employment in their country.
"2002: How I met Rekha"
Michèle Fériaud's testimony
Indian Smiles was born a few years after I first met Rekha in front of the Victoria Station in Mumbai.
Rekha was then approximately 12 months old. She was sitting between her two blinds parents who were beggars. Her serious and intense gaze touch me so deeply that, once I returned to France, I decided to do everything possible to change her destiny. It was not my first trip to India and until this moment of great emotion, I had never thought getting involved into humanitarian assistance.
It took me many months to find a person in India who could help me identify and find this family on the streets. The Indians I knew didn't seem stricken about a beggar couple, since there so many of them in the streets. Many people told me that they might not be Rekha's real parents but members of a human trafficking network. With a lot of perseverance and a helping hand from fate, the encounter with Sunil N., Rekha (then suffering from tuberculosis) and her mother Savita were eventually able to leave the sidewalks of Mumbai.
First meeting, December 2002
December 2003, I find Rheka in the same place, the father is no longer there...