“I am London in your house.”
That is what an 18-year-old girl name Bhanu said to me after I gave her my address on Monday. She had carefully written her details in English on a piece of paper for me, and so I agreed to do the same. After the swap, she said “I am London in your house” about 30 times, and eventually started asking about a passport. She seemed to know something about needing a passport to get to London, but she didn’t really seem to understand what a passport is, how you get one, and what you do with it. Next thing I know, she hands me a pen and piece of paper and suggests I make her a passport. I did my best to explain the process, but her English is about as good as my Gujarati so … yeah.
Bhanu was one of the 11 students in the Rural Entrepreneurship Development Class I’ve been attending this week. Most of students in the class are very poor, coming from small villages in the surrounding area. The villages aren’t like permanent townships or anything … the houses sometimes don’t even have an address. One other lady gave me her address and it read:
Khambhalia Taluka
Farm Area
Near Shiru Lake, a Hanuman temple, and a handloom farm
So apparently, if I make it into the area, I can just asked for Cami-ben, and I’ll find her. Crazy.
Bhanu and her friend Jignasha come from the same area, and apparently, to get there, one must drive two hours on the main roads, and then another 45 minutes on dirt roads. It’s so deep into the wild that few people go there if they don’t live there.
Life in these villages sounds tough. Yesterday, during a class on Achievement Motivation (designed to build confidence and a drive toward success), we discussed what the girls should do if other villagers give them a hard time when they return from the training. It is outside the norm for a young woman to leave the village to get educated, particularly in an effort to find her own profession. Traditionally, young women are meant to stay home, cooking for their fathers or husbands, helping on minor farm tasks, taking care of younger siblings or children. The teachers indicated to me that it is quite likely some other villagers, particularly mother-in-laws or older ladies, will put these women down. So, we talked a bit about how they can defend themselves and how they must not take that kind of feedback ... that sometimes their “granny's” view of the world is outdated and irrelevant to their lives.
Today, one young girl named Usha explained the difficulty she has faced in her village. Two years ago, she asked her father for a loan so that she could buy an embroidery machine. He didn’t believe she would make proper use of it, so he declined her request. Feeling at a loss of what to do next, she considered going to work in a local shop that sells seafood and grain. That wasn’t possible, however, because the area in which the shop is located is full of alcoholic men that harass young women like her. So, for the last two years, she has been idle. Finally, she heard about the REDP training and decided to take the initiative and attend. Now, she’s learned that she can start an embroidery business manually and work up to buying a machine. Further, she’s learned the mechanics of running a small enterprise, including bookkeeping, selling, sourcing of raw materials, etc.
My job in all this was to observe the class and identify its strengths and weaknesses. For the first few days, I was a little unsure about it because I was only getting rough, rather confusing translations of the lessons, and during the exercises, the students did not always seem to understand what to do. Over the last few days, however, I have gotten a much better translator, and I have witnessed a major change in the students. Many of them have gone from being rather shy and showing a significant lack of confidence to being bold, talkative, engaged, and even excited about business. Today, during the feedback session, it became clear that they may not have gotten everything that was taught, but they certainly learned a lot in the last week … especially considering how little they knew to start.
Who knows how it will all turn out for them? Will they really start new businesses? Will they retain their new-found confidence? Or will they fall back into the traditional patterns of life, and possibly never get out of poverty? To me, it doesn’t really matter: An experience like this changes a person’s life. Even if Bhanu doesn’t become a fashion retailer in her village, it won’t be because she doesn’t know how. She’s experienced the feeling of achievement and has witnessed (in field visits) the success of other women entrepreneurs. At worst, this one girl may feel slightly more empowered … at best, she may become a very successful businesswoman.
Something gained, nothing lost, no matter how you look at it.