Chance, destiny, a stroke of luck in the face of so much misfortune, changed the life of little Amin Sheikh, a boy who rebelled against his stepfather’s mistreatment, ran away from home at the age of five and ended up surviving on the streets of Bombay. where he suffered all kinds of abuse, just like the thousands of minors in his same situation. Chance led him to come across two key people and his life took a 180 degree turn. Amin has opened two bookstore cafes in the Indian city, baptized with the name Bombay to Barcelona, ??to provide employment and training to young people who have also subsisted on the ground. His dream is to start an establishment with similar characteristics in the Catalan capital, where he maintains close ties with friends who have helped him materialize his projects.
Amin, 42, recounts his experiences in Life is Life. I am thanks to you, a book that has already sold 32,000 copies and has been published in ten languages. “With the profits from the sales, I can pay part of the rent for the apartments where the boys who work in the cafes live,” says Amin in Reus. In this city he gave the last conference before the summer, number 114 in two months of traveling through different cities.
Amin’s story amazes and arouses admiration. “I was born in a very poor family, my father was an alcoholic and my mother married another man who beat me. She would rather play than go to school and that’s why I was forced to work at the age of five. Every day I went to a beach bar that served tea, but they didn’t treat me well there either. One day my glasses fell, they broke, I was afraid of the consequences and I started to run and run”. He ended up in a Mumbai train station, the refuge of many other children victims of poverty and violence. “It took me six months to learn to protect myself, to beg, to know where I could get food, to sell drugs, to escape attackers…”, he recalls. He went back to his house several times, but his stepfather kept beating him and he always ended up back on the street.
Despite his young age, Amin had managed to survive in the open, he had developed a sixth sense that allowed him to detect those who could cause him harm, which were the majority of subjects he came across on a daily basis. That’s why his heart skipped a beat when one morning he saw his sister Sabira at the train station. So Amin was eight years old and Sabira was only six. The little girl had also run away from the family home to go in search of Amin. If life without a roof was hard for a child, it could be much worse for Sabira, who, according to Amin, was about to fall into the hands of prostitution networks.
The first key person was Sister Seraphine, who took him in at the Snehasadan orphanage, after three years on the street. Amin and Sabira began an uneventful stage at this center. Eustace Fernandes was the second mainstay. He worked as a driver and as a boy for everything for this Indian artist, who ended up treating him like a son. Thanks to Fernandes, he was able to fulfill his dream of traveling to Barcelona, ??the city of some tourists who had gotten into his taxi. In Catalonia he has great friends and collaborators who have helped him start the cafes in Bombay, with whose turnover he pays the salaries of the young employees, many of whom come from the Snehasadan orphanage. The next challenges for this social entrepreneur are to open a cafeteria in Goa and later, when he raises enough money, another in Barcelona, ??to employ the most vulnerable.
