Me

. . . The place was a dream. When I finished my tour, I said to my friend, “What you have here is a Disney World for girls!”
    My friend founded a fantastic institution that offers care and education to helpless girls in Calcutta. The work he has done there is incredible and completely inspiring. He is dedicated to rescuing girls from the most dangerous streets in the city and offers them a place to live, an alternative to their way of life.
    My friend didn’t care that I had just arrived, that I might be tired and have a case of jet lag: He immediately asked if I wanted to come with him to go rescue more girls from the street. And even though I didn’t really understand how we were going to do it, I of course accepted.
    We set out to explore the streets. We went to all the corners of Calcutta’s poorest neighborhoods, and we walked through long and dirty streets, moving through the throngs, looking for abandoned girls, or worse. It was shocking to see the places where they tend to live. In the slums of Calcutta, four branches and a piece of plastic are a house, and you are lucky if you have the piece of plastic to shelter you from the rain. Many people don’t. I asked my friend, “Why do you only rescue girls? Why does the center only have girls, and not boys? Don’t boys need help, too?”
    “For better or worse, the boys of Calcutta survive,” my friend explained to me. “They beg or work or figure out a way to survive one way or another. The girls are also strong and resourceful, but they are often forced into prostitution, which is what I am trying to avoid.”
    “But how can it be?” I asked him. “We’re talking about girls who are no more than four or six years old. . . . How can it be?”
    “Unfortunately, that’s how it is,” he responded. “It’s horrible, but the reality is that it happens all the time. There are men who are willing to pay in order to rape a four-year-old girl.”
    He didn’t have to say another word.
    We combed those neighborhoods until we found a group of beggars, exactly the type of girls who were at risk of falling into child prostitution. There were three girls and their mother. They lived under a plastic bag that was nailed to a concrete wall, and the other side was tied to a tree. It was raining and there, under that tiny improvised roof, were the mother and her three daughters, one of whom was very ill. There was no time to lose. With the help of a boy who translated everything into Bengali, we explained the situation to the mother: why we believed that her daughters were at risk, what might happen, and the alternative we could offer through the foundation. She understood and agreed, so we took the mother and the three daughters with us—including the one who was sick—and we quickly rushed them back to my hotel.
    But when we arrived, people looked at us with disgusted looks on their faces. Of course, it was an elegant hotel and it bothered them to see at least ten Westerners walk into this refined atmosphere with a group of beggars. But I was so worried about them that I didn’t care about the stares as I walked in holding two girls in my arms, with the mother behind me carrying the little girl who was sick. A girl who also worked as a volunteer at the orphanage, and who later became a very close friend, said to them, “They are my guests,” and that would have to do.
    The hotel staff obviously did not like it at all that I was taking them to my room, but I think that because of a mixture of hospitality and respect, their only option was to let me do as I pleased. Upon arriving at my room, we called for the hotel doctor, who came up right away. But when the man entered my room and saw who his patients were, he said, “Dear Lord! What is this?”
    “Well,” I said, “these are three girls and their mother, and one of them needs your help—she is very sick.”
    The three girls were all bitten up by rats. The two older ones were dirty and very thin, but they were in relatively good shape. However, the little one, who was approximately four or five years old, looked like she was on the brink of death. Her eyes would roll back and she was as limp as a rag doll.
    I looked at the doctor.
    “We have to give the little one something,” I said to him. “I don’t know what she has, but please do something.”
    The doctor wouldn’t even get close to the little girl.
    “Okay,” he said, pointing at a nearby napkin, “please take that rag and clean her