Once upon a time

Why not start this blog with a wonderful story, a great human adventure, filled with meetings, drama and joy, screams and laughs, but mostly full of success. After 12 years of presence in the slums of Gandhi Nagar, this blog would like to trace all the distance we have crossed with those we are privileged to share our day-to-day life.

We also want this blog to be the living memory of our organization, SPEED Trust, and of all its beneficiaries, we want this blog to witness, day after day, this long story of hope and courage.

The blog, launched in July 2011, will regularly go back and forth between the present and the past to better understand the evolution of this community, this area, and the great revolution that we see every day.

And very often, this blog will also be an opportunity for the "voiceless" to express themselves. These "voiceless" are the marginalized from a country in rapid development, yet a rich country of 400 million poor people, the ones nobody sees because no one want to see them, this mass of workers from the shadows and odd jobs in the informal economy, without which India could not have progressed, just a few decades ago, from the age of famines to the age of being a major world power. These "voiceless" too aspire to have decent living conditions, to receive quality health care, to give the best education for their children, just like any other citizen. It is to support them in the process of achieving their aspirations that SPEED Trust was created.

This blog is the story of ordinary people at the bottom of a slum in southern India, who decided one day to take their future in their own hands.