In 2005 Tanya Pinto started Baal Don, which means “Child Donation” in Hindi. Baal Don is a charity formed to help children in India. Tanya, born in India, took a sabbatical from her high powered Dallas advertising work to volunteer at Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Calcutta.
“The timing was right,” she tells us. “I had no pets, no boyfriend and I wanted to do something important. If I was going to give back, I thought, now’s the time.”
Tanya, also one of the presenters at TEDx SMU, says,
“I really wanted to work in an orphanage. My Grandpa was an orphan. So here I was, an Indian girl who had never lived in India, the country of my birth. So I went to Mother Teresa’s orphanage. There were 300 kids, 27 in a class. I washed nappies, changed diapers and taught.”
Tanya tells us of a people who have so little and yet are happy. She played with street children and got to know them and their names. There are 1 billion people in India and of these, 18 million are street kids and 40 % of the kids in India suffer from malnutrition. The turning point for Tanya was a quote by Mother Teresa that she saw on a wall in a Calcutta classroom, “If you can’t feed 100 people, then feed just one.”
Tanya chose to focus on that on. “I can raise money, I can feed one or two kids, and I can improve conditions.”
Join us and Tanya Pinto at TEDx SMU and hear more about her work.
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Niki Nicastro McCuistion
Executive Producer/Producer the McCuistion Program
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