Following the customs of India, we took off our shoes and entered the house.
“Namaste.
“Namaste.
Eshana has given kisses and hugs to the family, forgetting the customs of India. They get the mimos frightly. “I know they don’t like it too much, but it’s my custom and they accept it.”

Eshana is Catalan, but not a current foreign: He uses the name he received in India, which means “desire” in Sanskrit, and rarely meets with other foreigners; he leaves the white planet and seeks refuge in his Indian family. Eshana Punera came to work in an NGO about six years ago. It was then that she met the family through the founder of the NGO. Since then he has visited them almost every week. I also wanted to meet his Hindu family, and he finally took me.

Lakshmi is the mother, there is no father and three children are up and down. Well, the three don't, the youngest son is still on the ground, forming a Rangoli in front of the house altar. Rangolia is a picture of colored sand on the ground.

And the coffee has come to me, and the questions have come to me. “Why you and I alone? They don’t want coffee and cookies, Eshana?” “Today is fasting, because Navratri is the beginning of the party, so I am drawing Rangolia, and for nine days we will not sit in the chairs, only on the ground,” said the young man who draws in front of the altar, which is Akshay.

I started talking, and I realized that my mother didn't have a child. “And where is it?”, mother “Spain”, “In Donostia!” Eshana, “Hara!”, me. Then the only daughter of the house, Chandra, takes a coconut and starts to decorate it on the altar, “I will make the image of the goddess with the coconut.” These days are celebrated in honor of the goddess Durga and has surprised how the form of Durga has given way to the coconut: first it paints, then it puts its eyes and mouth, then it is clothed, then the earrings… how many filigranas, in some details, and what simplicity in others: Mom has told us “do we eat?”, we “no, quiet” and Mom “is fine.”

And slowly they told me everything: the family came to Pune for work from Karnataka, the state of southern India. Two of the sons who were born here (four in total), had no house and lived on the street. The man drank and generated debts and the mother threw him out of the family. The last of his sons, Akshay, was born too young and told him that he would not survive. Then Uilhas (the missing child), the child, began to go to the foreign cafeterias, asking for money to buy milk for his brother. So one day, Uilhas asked Julen for the money. And Julen gave her something more than money.

Arrival of Uilhas to San Sebastian

Julen is a Donostia and often traveled to India. In 2002 it set up the Asha-Kiran Foundation, the NGO working in Eshana, hit by the situation of street children. And at that time, Julen and Uilhas met. To start with, Julen proposed a trip to Uilhasi and two other children who asked: I wanted to take them to the beach, I wanted to give those street children a holiday. Lakshmik, his mother, despite his resounding rejection, went to Goa to get to know the sea, and his mother spent eight days crying thinking that her son had been stolen. But Uilhas came back, glad.

The Julen Uilhasen family gradually started helping to get a house, money, food and work. The foreigner was increasingly united with the family and then made his second proposal: “Lakshmi, I want to take your son with me.” And the mother said no at first. But Uilhas also wanted to offer himself, to go from the street to a new world. So Uilhas arrived in San Sebastian.
And when the mother cries, in the absence of her son… but Uilhas often comes to the mother’s house, two or three times a year. And the mother is kidding her because she smokes and she's kidding her because she allows Julen to smoke. But Uilhas is happy and healthy, the mother knows it: “If he had not been able to keep going here, his friends are in jail, or are sick with AIDS, or are not…”

Collect and deliver

Lakshmi and his family, in their humble family, lack nothing: “First we had nothing: no money, no house. I worked in construction and won thirty barrels a day (less than 0.5 euros) at most.” Now they have a home and it gives them a place to learn their grandchildren and the kids in the neighborhood at home. Uilhas works at the Asha-Kiran Foundation. Is this not an example of generosity received?