About IAIM

Conception - by Vimala Schneider McClure

In 1973 I found myself working in a little orphanage in India. It was summer, and extremely hot. My money ran out quickly; we barely subsisted on donations solicited door-to-door. Most of my time was spent in survival tasks - washing clothes, drawing water from the well, cooking strange foods over a crude cowdung- heated hearth. The little girls who were our charges were always sick and required a lot of attention. It was hard work from dawn to midnight, and from the moment I arrived, I longed to go home.

Gradually I adapted to the rigours of my new life. The sleepless nights, weeping quietly and missing home, slowly abated. I began to love the children and to find non-verbal ways to communicate with them. The older girls taught me how to cook and how to massage the little ones with mustard oil. I taught them how to bring down a fever and to sing "This Old Man."

We had very little to eat, just some white rice and a few vegetables twice a day. Sometimes we would fast so that the children could eat. Once in a while, we had a special treat of (horrors!) buffalo milk. There were poisonous snakes, scorpions, monkeys, and all manner of insects. There was a food shortage and outside our little house we saw the ration lines growing day by day in the 110 degree heat.

During my last week there, I succumbed to malaria. When I was delirious with fever, all the women in the neighbourhood came to look after me. They massaged my body and sang to me, taking turns until my fever broke. I will never forget the feeling of their hands and hearts touching me.

On my way to the train station after a tearful goodbye at the orphanage, my rickshaw stopped to let a buffalo cart go by. To my right was a shanty - just a few boards and some canvas - where a family lived by the roadside.

A young mother sat in the dirt with her baby across her knees, lovingly massaging him and singing. As I watched her I remember thinking, there is so much more to life than material wealth. She had so little, yet she could offer her baby this beautiful gift of love and security, a gift that would help to make him a compassionate human being.

I thought about all the children I had known there and how loving, warm, and playful they were in spite of their so-called disadvantages. They took care of each other and they accepted responsibility without reservation. Perhaps, I thought, they are able to be so loving, so relaxed and natural because they have been loved like this as infants, and infants have been loved like this in India for thousands of years.

A seed was planted in my mind, and I returned home with both joyful anticipation of the future and sadness for what I had to leave behind.