Help create a better life for kids like Kajal

KAJAL is nine. She lives in an urban slum in northwest India. There is no running water or sewerage where she lives, and she shares her home with pigs, stray dogs, cows and sheep. Garbage and poo are everywhere you turn.

At 5 am, six days a week, Kajal gets up to collect rubbish on the city streets. This work is called 'rag-picking'. Breakfast is a single cup of tea. Kajal picks up rubbish with her bare hands, and pigs, dogs, cows and monkeys also scavenge with her in the mornings, looking for food in the filthy rubbish heaps.

When Kajal gets home she cooks and does the washing by hand, then goes out to collect firewood with her sister. And when all those chores are done, she sorts through the day’s rubbish looking for things she can sell, like glass, plastic and metal.

Kajal usually earns 5 to 6 rupees (15 cents) a day, which is just enough to buy food for her family. If she doesn't work, her family doesn't eat.

Kajal's family is one of the poorest families living in the slum. After her mother died from tuberculosis (TB), she had to leave school to work and take care of her younger brother and sister.

For all children, working on the streets can be very dangerous. One day Kajal was hit by a car and had to have stitches in her head. Another time someone threw a brick at her. She also gets painful blisters on her fingers and they often get infected.

Kajal says she would love to go back to school, but in the slum where she lives almost everyone is illiterate and most people don't understand the importance of education. Only two boys in her entire neighbourhood go to school. The rest are rag-pickers, just like Kajal.

The 40 Hour Famine is a community education and fundraising initiative of World Vision Australia.