Ganga Ram joined Karuna Vihar because his father insisted we hire him and wouldn’t leave till we did. In those days, we were easier to push around. He began as a gatekeeper and his job was to make sure that the children at our activity centre didn’t run out into the street or carry the toys home with them when they left in the evening.

Occasionally we would ask him to run errands, but it was usually easier to do them ourselves. If we asked him to buy milk, he would try and convince us we didn’t really want tea. If we asked him to buy matches, he would insist that the shop didn’t sell them.

We persisted, however, and gradually he became less reluctant to help. We discovered that his refusals were based more on uncertainty than unwillingness. Ganga Ram is from Nepal and when we hired him, he had only recently arrived in India. Hindi is not his first language and though he has some education, he is functionally illiterate. With time and patience, he developed confidence, learned his way around and became fluent in Hindi.

Gradually, he made himself indispensable in our organization. From the children’s centre, he was promoted to a full-time position in the school where he became a classroom helper, taking children to the toilet and assisting with moving them from one place to the next.

We discovered he had a gift for physiotherapy. He would observe the therapist intently and then invariably ask intelligent questions. Often, he came up with an innovative suggestion to make the therapy more enjoyable and more effective for the child. From classroom helper, this nearly illiterate man became a physiotherapist’s assistant and a trusted guide for parents struggling to help their child to balance, grasp objects or to walk.

That would be good enough, but the story doesn’t end there.

In January, Ganga Ram returned to his village in Nepal to care for his elderly mother, who had suffered a stroke. At the government hospital the doctor told him that he should bring her thrice weekly for physiotherapy. “I can do that myself” he told the doctor. “You? What do you know?” the doctor asked, amused. Ganga Ram proceeded to explain which exercises his mother needed and why. Stunned, the doctor asked him what he would do for another patient in the ward who had also had a stroke. Ganga Ram did an assessment and prescribed a series of innovative mouth exercises to help him regain motor function. “Well, can you do them?” the doctor asked, amazed.

Ganga Ram agreed and for the next week, he worked with the man every day. When the time came for him to leave, the doctor begged him to stay, offering him a job at almost double what he makes at Karuna Vihar.