Impacting lives - positively

Slumdog Millionaire might have changed lives for many but when you hear how far and wide it had reached and impacted life in the most extraordinary ways, it comes as a complete surprise!

Erin Zaikis, an American saw Slumdog Millionaire and her life changed forever. She saw people living in the slums and could not believe that people could actually live like that, in such muck and slime. She packed her bags and came down to India. She started working with a Mumbai orphanage. Working for some time, we went back to the US but simply not could settle back down and get back to living the usual material, consumerism world we all live in.

She completed her graduation from University of Michigan and went to rural Thailand. There, she was shocked to see that many children had never ever used a soap and did not even know its existence and basic concepts of hygiene. And when we spoke to her friends in India, she realized even here, many children never use soap and there she had found a reason for her living.

Last year, Erin came back to India and started Sundara, her organization which employs many underprivileged women from slums of Mumbai and recycles soap collected from some 15 hotels nearby. After a lot of leg work and hard work, she found some good partners to work with and now makes new soap bars from used one – one batch in seven minutes flat! Till date, her team has made some 8400 bars of soap, saved some 1000 kgs of waste soap and has impacted some 6000 lives. The soap is distributed to some 30 schools and community centers and thanks to this initiative, people living in unhygienic living conditions are at least adopting basic hygiene principles to make life disease free and healthy. More importantly, it has helped scores of men and women earn a livelihood and a life of respect.