The Boy the Jungle Kept Hidden

The boy lives in a village, deep inside the forests of Sukma, Chhattisgarh. It sits beyond Jagdalpur, past the point where roads stop existing, in a region that the rest of the country known mainly as a Naxalite-affected area and otherwise forgets entirely.

When the monsoon arrives, the jungle floods. The paths that connect the village to the nearest town disappear under water. For weeks at a time, the village is simply unreachable. No vehicles come in. No one goes out.

Midiyam Nanda has lived his entire seven years inside that jungle. He has never known anything else.

What He Was Born With

Nanda was born with a congenital bilateral cleft lip, a split running through both sides of his upper lip and into his nose. He was also born with lower eyelid ectropion, a condition where the lower eyelids turn outward, leaving his eyes constantly exposed and vulnerable.

Both conditions have been there since his very first day. Both are visible. Both have quietly shaped every single experience of his seven years.

What Every Meal Costs Him

Eating is difficult. The cleft means food and water do not stay where they should. Drinking requires effort that most people never have to think about.

For Nanda, every meal is a negotiation. Every sip of water is a small struggle. He has done this every single day of his life, and because he has never known anything different, he simply adapted. He did not complain. He did not know there was something to complain about.

His family did not know either. No doctor had ever come to the village to explain what they were looking at. No one had told them that what their son was living with had a name, a cause, and a solution.

For seven years, that was the whole story.

A Father Who Has Never Left the Forest

Midiyam Deva, Nanda's father, farms the land around the village. The forest is his livelihood, his boundary, and his entire world. He grows what the family eats. What little income exists comes from the land and the season, and neither is ever predictable.

The family does not speak Hindi. The language of hospitals, of medical paperwork, of fundraising campaigns, is entirely foreign to them. When Mitaan's team first reached them, communication itself was a challenge.

They had no framework for understanding treatment. No experience with hospitals. No concept of what surgery meant or what it could do. Even the idea that Nanda's face could look different, that his difficulties could be fixed, was entirely new information.

They had not kept him from treatment out of neglect. They had kept him from treatment because treatment had never reached them.

The Day Someone Finally Came

When Mitaan's team made it to the location, passed the flooded paths and the unmarked jungle tracks, they found Nanda with his younger sister. He was quiet. Watchful. The kind of child who has learned to observe the world carefully because the world has not always been kind about observing him back.

They watched him try to eat. They watched him try to drink water. They saw what seven years of adaptation looks like in a child's body, and they understood that what felt normal to this family was something that could be changed.

What the Doctors Say

The doctors at SK Care Hospital, Raipur have reviewed his case. Nanda needs multi-stage surgery, a carefully sequenced set of procedures to repair the bilateral cleft lip, correct the nasal structure, and address the eyelid ectropion that has left his eyes exposed for seven years.

He will need to be in hospital for 25 to 35 days.

The surgery is not simple, but it is possible. The outcome, if treatment happens, is a face that works the way it was meant to. A mouth that can eat without effort. Eyes that close properly. A childhood, however much of it remains, that does not carry this weight.

The total cost of his treatment is Rs. 8,54,500.

Seven Years of Getting Used to It

Nanda is seven years old. He should be in school. He should be running through those jungle paths with other children, getting muddy, coming home hungry, eating without thinking about it.

Instead he has spent seven years in a body that makes eating an effort. Seven years in a place so remote that the basic medical knowledge most Indian families take for granted never reached him or his parents. Seven years being used to something that no child should have to be used to.

His father farms the same jungle that has always surrounded them. His little sister follows him around the way younger sisters do. This is a family with love, with each other, and with almost nothing else.

Rs. 8,54,500 is not a large number in most contexts. For Midiyam Deva, farming land that floods every monsoon in a village with no road, is an impossibility.

The Jungle Found Him. Now He Needs Us to Find Him Back.

Mitaan found Nanda because someone was willing to travel past the point where roads end. But finding him was only the first step.

He is seven years old. He has a younger sister who looks up to him. He has a father who works the land every day and a mother who has watched her son struggle with every meal for seven years without knowing there was another way.

He has a whole childhood still ahead of him, if we make sure the surgery happens.

Please donate. Please share. A boy in a jungle that the world forgot has finally been found. Help make sure that finding him actually changes something.