An effort to support children in rural India with warm clothing, always handmade with love

Today, there are thousands of people, likely more than that, who struggle with finding the warm clothing they need to survive the winter. In fact, 40% of children in rural India do not have adequate clothing to support them in the chilly seasons. While India may seem like a swelteringly hot country most times of the year, during the night, in the winter months, and all year round in certain regions, the temperatures drop dramatically, leaving children and infants at risk of hypothermia and pneumonia. To this day, pneumonia is still one of the largest causes of death in children under five in India, and though these issues can be combatted in many ways, such as medicines, one method is to prevent the diseases from happening in the first place. The reality is that healthcare is not always reliable, and just recently, over 20 children passed away in the Chhindwara, M.P. district due to a contaminated cough syrup. Many can’t even afford this type of healthcare, and there are always doubts that such medicine can be trusted.

My name is Mahi Bijoriya, and I am a junior at Westborough High School. As a person miles away from the problems in India I didn’t think there was much I could do. After all, there was, in fact, little I could do to help the villagers with medicine, but I have the ability to aid them with prevention.  I have had a passion for crochet for many years, so in 2023, I started an initiative that I dubbed Hats for Hope, a project to crochet blankets, and of course, hats for those who needed them the most. What started with me crocheting a few hats every once in a while quickly grew over the following years to become a strong devotion to the project. In the last few years, I have poured well over 250 hours into this project through crocheting more than 30 baby hats and 4 blankets which I have distributed across rural villages in Chhindwara. Just like how the project is no longer just hats, it’s also not just about me any more. In my travels to India as part of the Ekal Yuva Udaan internship, I also taught crochet to the students there, enabling them to grow the project from their own villages.  

Of course, there are only so many people I can reach, and while I was able to hat many children' s heads, there are still those who wear clothing riddled with holes. This is why we require outside support. With additional aid, we can not only provide villages with warm clothing, but by donating, we can tackle hypothermia and pneumonia through medicine as well. By giving people in rural villages access to vaccines, remedies, and most of all, information on how to identify common diseases and alleviate them, we can take a multipronged approach to this issue. 

In addition, by purchasing or bidding for one of my crochet pieces, whether it be a hat or blanket, you can help support this journey, making it so kids don’t have to suffer through winters, and no family has to bear the heartbreak of having their child fight a preventable, but possibly fatal disease.