Gray handing out a bedkit.
From Chennai 2008 Photo Album

What Does a Bedkit Mean?

Gray Cavanagh — Newmarket, ON

There were three SCAW teams in India this year—Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. In Chennai alone during the first half of February, the SCAW team delivered 6,000 bedkits. At the time of the transfer of funds from SCAW to the Chennai Rotarians, one Canadian dollar was worth about 40 Rupees. The $30.00 bedkit provided each child with not only eight sleeping items including a mattress and mosquito net, but also five garments, two towels, five school supply items, and a lunch box. This astonishing kit is achieved through the higher value of the Canadian currency.

What then does a bedkit mean?

A bedkit means a good night’s sleep for a poor child from the home of an impoverished family. India, as a developing country with great numbers of its 1.2 billion people existing below the poverty line, has far too many badly deprived children.

For 6,000 children feeling hopeless in the face of a bleak future the bedkit delivers a new sense of hope, as they realize there are people in this world who care enough about them to help. The amazing array of practical goods represented by the bedkit to the children and their parents is overwhelming amidst the poverty of their meagre personal possessions.

The bedkit means employment for dozens of people in India who make and assemble the bedkits. The transfer of Canadian dollars to the Chennai Rotarians to pay the cost of the bedkits, translates into about 7,200,000 Rupees, a surprisingly large amount of money in India.

The bedkit means the citizens and leaders of Chennai and area, who are members of the Rotary Clubs involved, are powerfully encouraged by the SCAW funding to work hard at the task of improving the lot of the poor in their society. The members of the many Rotary Clubs across the region around Chennai spend several months in preparation of the kits and identification of eligible children.

Bedkits mean that the SCAW overseas efforts contribute enormously to goodwill and friendship between the two great countries of India and Canada. The personal contacts made during all the necessary collaborative efforts to accomplish the bedkit distributions and the perceptible impact of so many bedkits given during 22 years—50,500 in Chennai and the surrounding area, create a strong feeling of mutual respect and appreciation.

A bedkit distribution means that the Chennai Rotarians themselves, in the process of identifying poor children who meet the qualification criteria for a SCAW bedkit, become more aware of how huge the problem of poverty is in their own country. The experience steels their resolve to work harder to raise the standard of living for poor families with additional educational and medical initiatives.

A bedkit means that the overseas volunteers and the Administrative Volunteers in Toronto become better ambassadors for SCAW. Their personal experience and increased knowledge about conditions in poverty-stricken Indian homes and communities enable them to speak more convincingly about the desperate needs of children and families.

Each distribution means that the number of bedkits distributed in developing countries where SCAW works to improve the lot of poor children and their families continues to grow year after year. Through word of mouth and personal contacts, an increasing number of people become involved and give donations.

Each bedkit means that the donors in Canada and other countries, when they get the photograph of the child who received the bedkit for which they contributed $30, experience a feeling of gratification. As well as individual donations, increasingly donors are giving to honour friends at Christmas and in memory of loved ones, and the number of donations from school children, civic-minded service clubs, and the staff of caring organizations is also growing.

A bedkit means that the suffering that Murray Dryden experienced, sleeping outside as a young and poor adult “trying to make it” during the Great Depression, was not in vain. Out of that bitter experience and his trauma at seeing poor children sleeping outside on the hard ground of Mumbai, Murray’s heart was touched and his compassion ignited a dream to give one million bedkits to extremely poor children in his lifetime.

A bedkit means that Murray’s goal will be reached in honour of his memory by those who follow in his footsteps. Murray passed on to his eternal reward in 2003, but by February of 2008 the total number of bedkits distributed by Sleeping Children Around The World exceeded 900,000.