… and who better than these beaming faces to wish you all a peaceful and happy festive season?
This lovely photo also features on the official Christmas card, which you can view here.
(If you want to hear them as well, check out this YouTube clip of the children carol singing in Goa last week; I can promise you it’s “Jingle Bells” like you’ve never heard it before!)
Educators’ Trust India have just sent me this photo – isn’t it wonderful?
It shows the ETI team distributing the children’s flip-flops which (fellow volunteer) Natasha and I bought a few days before I left Goa. We went to the local (non-touristy) market and, with the help of our lovely taxi driver Satish, negotiated a good price for 20 pairs of sturdy, rigid soled flip-flops in assorted sizes, from ages 3 to 12.
They worked out at around £1 per pair; we could have paid less, but we wanted to get the better quality flip-flops so that they stood up to the wear and tear of life in the rural slum and on the beach.
So here are the children trying on the flip-flops for size – don’t their parents look proud and happy? The mums are looking on and smiling, the dads are helping to fit the shoes to the feet.
And here’s a group shot of all the kids with, for some of them, their first ever pair of shoes.
I just love seeing how much difference a tiny amount of money can make to these children’s lives. While I was away, my very wonderful friend Liz saw my Facebook updates about ETI and e-banked me £20, simply saying: “spend it how you see fit.”
That £20 bought milk for the children and mums in the field for a month.
£10 will buy 10 pairs of children’s flip-flops and help to protect the feet of girls like Jyoti.
£10 also enables the teachers and children at one of the charity’s schools to have rice for their lunch for a month.
£5 will buy apples and bananas for 30 children.
Small potatoes for us – big impact for these kids.
I’m gradually building a fabulous collection of photos featuring Educators’ Trust India and their work and I’ll post a link to my online album once I get it set up.
- and if poverty is a fabric, it’s plastic.
I’ve had a lot of emails and texts over the last few weeks, asking for more details of what I’ve been doing in Goa with the good folk from the charity Educators’ Trust India (ETI). The short answer about their work can be found via this link to my freelance writing site at Collaborative Lines, where I share some of the copy that I’ve written for the charity’s soon to be launched website.
And here’s the long answer … part one of my report on the wonderful work done by this tiny yet passionate charity.
If you’ve ever been to Goa, or perhaps to any beach resort in Asia, you will probably have been approached by beggars and/or beach sellers – usually women and children (I’ve blogged about it before). They sell all manner of things (here’s a list which I made last year) and are extremely persistent in getting you to buy their jewellery, sarongs, peanuts and pedicures. What had never ever occurred to me was where these people actually … lived. I knew that in many cases they travelled to Goa each autumn for the start of the tourist season in October and that they arrived there from other Indian states such as Karnataka. But where do they live when in Goa?
It was only when I met the ETI team and they invited me to join them on one of their regular visits to a slum settlement that I really started to give thought as to housing. Take a look at my photo – it shows an idyllic rural scene, doesn’t it? This field, a currently dry rice paddy, is located about 1.5 miles inland from the popular tourist resort of Calangute. But, as the camera pans back a bit, you can see a woman doing laundry in a muddy stream. Zoom back a bit more and you can see that the field is actually full of shacks made from blue plastic; basically, tents, improvised with plastic and using tree trunks as supports. 
This field is home to around 100 adults and children ( a figure which will increase as the season progresses) from the eastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, who travel by train (it takes three days) each October to work and beg in the Goan beach resorts. I have visited urban slums before but have never seen anything like this; this field is where you live when you have nothing other than what you can carry or wear. There’s no electricity. No running water. Certainly no sanitation. No way of cooking other than in a pot over an open fire.
(Some of the Goans complain about this influx of economic migrants and say that, well, it serves them right that they live like this – perhaps they should stay put in their home states? To which my reply is – I think it’s safe to assume that they’re not leaving comfortable and luxurious home behind in order to travel across the sub-continent and then camp in this field; this is an act of the impoverished and desperate …)
The first thing that hit me when we arrived at the field was the smell. Without labouring the point, when the weather is 30-something Celsius and you’ve got humans, cows, dogs, chickens and pigs all using the great outdoors as their al-fresco bathroom … yeah. The field does have a fresh water spring and the residents use that for drinking water and the muddy stream on the other side of the field for bathing, laundry and everything else. However, this obviously doesn’t work all the time and dirty water does get into the kids, as we witnessed with the poor child who I visited in the hospital in Panjim a few weeks ago. She is now suffering from severe kidney failure, brought about by drinking unclean water. ETI are paying for her treatment, visiting her every day and giving her parents money for food so that they can stay with her in the hospital.
This next photo shows the rather clever use of sari fabric as improvised baby slings; each harness contains a six month old baby. 
They are twins, born to a 15 year old girl, who leaves them in the care of the older women while she works on the beach, undertaking manicures and pedicures (in reality, a nail shape and paint, for which she charges c. £2). She told me all this in really excellent English, which she has learned from tourists – and yet she can neither read nor write.
So, what do the ETI team do to help these field dwellers? Well, firstly, they set up an impromptu school a few times a week, where the children sit down and have a very basic “lesson” with picture books, crayons and paper. They are taught to write their names in English and to count to 10, to say please and thank you. This is the most basic of educational approaches but, for some children, the simple discipline of learning to sit quietly, to not fight or play but to listen, is in itself a learning opportunity. These are kids who would otherwise be working on a beach, selling peanuts or doing a little dance to the beat of a drum and then asking for money, so in some respects, just having them available to sit down and mess about with paper and crayons feels like an achievement. The ETI team also work hard to get the parents involved; they arrived with a basic medical kit and will treat, where possible, small injuries – usually foot related, like Jyoti from last month’s
blog entry – but only with permission from the parents. This photo shows Jacob, one of ETI’s wonderful volunteers, showing a few of the men how to write their names – the team really encourages participation and involvement from anyone, not just the kids.
At the end of each hour long lesson, ETI hand out fresh fruit to the children; I paid for this one week and for £7 we bought enough fruit for each child at the settlement to get an apple and a banana each. Diego, the charity’s Goan founder, insists that each child washes their hands prior to receiving the fruit and so we saw a line set up whereby the children queued up to wash their hands and then queued again to receive the fruit – all administered by the mums.
The gender divide is so marked at this settlement. It’s really not overstating the case to suggest that the women work (on the beach, at the camp – cooking, washing, sweeping up, taking care of the children) and the men drink and gamble. The local Goan hooch is a spirit called feni, made from distilled cashew nuts, and a 60 ml shot of it costs about 10p. When we arrived at the camp at 9.30am, there were men lying on the ground in a drunken stupor, or lurching around, shouting and fighting with each other. And they absolutely reeked of booze; the smell oozed from every pore. Diego told me that many of the men are addicted to feni and that any money earned by the women and children goes straight into the coffers of the local bars or is gambled away in complicated card games played between a group of the men in one corner of the field.
One of the charity’s key aims is to get the children out of the cycle of working, not being educated, and thus marrying young (the 
average woman at the camp is aged 25 and usually has five children by this stage; I certainly observed that the amount of alcohol consumed by the men in no way seemed to either impede sexual performance or affect fertility …). It seemed clear that the responsibility for bringing money into the family coffers lies very much with the women and children, and that’s why getting the buy-in from the mums is so vital to the success of this project; if we can persuade the women to allow their children to stop working and to instead attend one of the ETI’s two local schools, then there is hope for the next generation, who will be both educated and have ambitions for a life of more than selling peanuts and t-shirts on Baga beach.
Last week, I had this conversation with Jyoti’s mum, Seevarna; I asked her if she would allow Jyoti to go to one of the schools and she replied that she would love to, but that because her husband was a brandy drinking alcoholic, they needed income from both Seevarna and her two daughters in order to buy enough money to live – and so Jyoti could not be spared from her duties at the beach.
These women lead hard, hard lives; yes, education is the answer in many cases, but I do now see how tough it must be to decide that when your 11 year old daughter can perhaps earn £1 or so per day for the family coffers – and if that £1 makes the difference between being hungry (or getting a black eye from your husband when you return home with insufficient money for his brandy …) – that allowing her to stop work and go to school may not be an option.
In a future post, I’ll write about the two schools run by Educators’ Trust India and how they benefit the children who have broken out of the child labour trap.
Please follow us on Twitter at EducatorsTrust – and ask your friends to do the same – thank you!
Another brief update, typed in haste before the wi-fi drops out …
So, I have learned to survive without my Kindle, although I did have heart failure last Saturday when, for eight nail biting hours, I had no laptop either.
(Long story. Temporary hard disk fail. Say. No. More).
However, thanks to the wonderful work of Digital World in Calangute (who, should The Great Goan Novel ever get published, will definitely be thanked in the acknowledgements bit at the front), all was restored by 6pm and so I could breathe again.
Those of you who follow me on Facebook and Twitter may have seen my frequent references over the last week to a small, local charity called Educators’ Trust India. I met one of their founders quite by chance last Tuesday and he invited me to visit one of the free schools which they run here for the children of impoverished migrant workers. I ended up spending a day at the school (more on this to follow), joining them when they visited an extremely sick child with kidney failure in the Panjim hospital, spending time with the children at the beach one afternoon (here I am with the girls!) 
and also tagging along when they visited a slum settlement to give a basic literacy lesson and provide fruit to the children there (more on that too).
It’s almost impossible to believe how much great work these guys do for the children on virtually no money at all; they are staffed almost entirely by volunteers from around the world and their core team includes a retired British GP and a former headmaster from a tough school in Halifax. Their faith in the power of education to overcome illiteracy, child labour and poverty is unshakable and I am so impressed with their passion and love for these forgotten children that I’ve offered my services to help with their new website (hence no URL provided here – yet) and their media campaign.
Here’s a few words from one of their board members, Dr Mistry, from a email I received from him yesterday:
Namaste from a hot and sticky Goa; I arrived a week ago to torrential rainstorms, with flooded roads, fallen trees and bolts of lightning ripping across the sky – and so feared a repeat of last year’s cyclone. But it seemed to blow through overnight and since then we have enjoyed hot, dry days, all day, every day.
My time seems to be shaping up and finding its own rhythm. In the mornings I do some yoga on my balcony and then sit down to work on my novel. At around noon I wander out and find some brunch – a masala omelette, or a bhaji puri (seen here: puffed up flat breads served with a mild vegetable curry).
Other “menue” (sic) options available to me include:
Musile with milk
Fried eggs on toasts
Fried eggs on toasts w. bacons
Conflakes w. banana milk
Portion sassage
Heinz bakked beans, on toasts
I then spend the rest of the afternoon on the beach, reading, observing and making notes on things as they occur to me. It’s been lovely to see so many old friends again, including Mama, my favourite fruit seller. I’ve now started buying up about half of her basket’s worth of fruit and then giving it away (instead of money, obviously) to the many children who work and beg on the beach.
My reading has, ironically, been somewhat disrupted by my use of a Kindle; I bought one in September, thinking that it would be THE perfect device for a bookworm who loves to travel and who usually has to take along an extra suitcase just to carry her reading material. And so, in that regard, it has proved to be; although it felt really quite odd to be packing for a month-long trip and not taking c. 30 paperbacks with me, the lightness and ease of use of the Kindle has proved to be a wonderful thing.
What I hadn’t bargained for, however, was the keen level of interest shown by the locals in this new appliance – they all want to know what it is, what it does, how it works, does it play music too, how much does it cost (my answer of “about 10,000 rupees” is always followed by a gasp of horror and a reappraisal of me as a particularly rich and extremely mad foreigner). I’ve found myself using analogies such as: “it’s like an iPod for books” and “the words come in here [tap] like an SMS comes to your phone” in order to explain how books magically appear in this tiny, light, device. But mostly they seem amazed that someone would want to read so much that they’d spend that much money on a gizmo to enable them to do so. A few days ago, I had about 20 people crouching around my sun lounger, passing the Kindle around between themselves, shaking and tapping it, chattering, laughing, asking me questions and generally looking amazed.
So I think I can be known as the first person to Kindle-ise this part of Goa.
Unfortunately, I haven’t managed to see Renuka yet; I went over to Rainbow House on the day after I arrived and the road was blocked, so we had to turn back. We then had another attempt a few days later and I arrived there, only to discover that the home was locked and bolted, with not a child in sight. I enquired of a passing lady and she managed to communicate via her tiny bit of English and my pidgin Hindi, that all the children were “at a programme in Panjim” – what that means, I’m not sure. So I’ll have another go later this week.
And now – back to chapter 4. More here next time I can get on-line, which has proved to be far more difficult than on my previous trips.
(c) The Observer
Lots of stuff in the media about India this week, primarily in the wake of the Obamas’ visit to Mumbai and Delhi.
Two wildly different stories caught my eye and reminded me of the contrasts which exist in this huge, disparate country.
On the one hand, we have the fabulously charismatic Michelle Obama (for once, with those great arms all covered up) meeting street children in Mumbai, dancing and playing hopscotch. I defy anyone to look at this filmed footage of her dancing with the children (see how they’ve really got those Bollywood moves nailed!) and not raise a grin:
… meanwhile, across the country in Bhopal, we learn that:
“Tycoon Rajesh Jethpuria has installed an ATM at his home in Bhopal, India – so his shopalcoholic (sic) wife never runs out of cash …”
I fly to Mumbai a week today – and I am so looking forward to seeing Renuka and the children at Rainbow House for the first time since February.
October was a very busy month for me; I’ve been serving as a judge on the Women in the City awards, booking and planning a trip to India for later this month and returning to work in an office! I’ve joined a major investment bank and am now working full time as an interim diversity consultant, focusing particularly on EMEA corporate communications, benchmarking and networking/affinity groups.
My colleagues at the bank have been very accommodating in allowing me to turn up, learn the ropes and then disappear after three weeks in order to go back to India (Goa and Mumbai) in mid-November – a trip I’d booked in September before I had any idea that I’d be offered this job.
(As an aside, and in case anyone was in any doubt at all as to the continuing tough and brutal state of the job hunting market: I went for NINETY NINE interviews during my period of downtime. It would have been a round one hundred, but I backed out of a scheduled interview upon receipt of my current job offer).
One of the many friends in Goa whom I’m looking forward to seeing again is Bushita (her name means “grace” in Konkani, the Goan language). I had dinner with her on my last night in Goa earlier this year – and this is her story.
* * * * * *
I first met Bushita when I called in to her beauty parlour for a massage one rainy afternoon. After she had soothed and smoothed the knots out of my shoulders, we sat chatting, drinking tea and listening to the rain beat down on her flat roof. Over the weeks of my visit, we became friends and I learned that this shy, petite woman was, in addition to being a skilled masseuse, a very successful businesswoman. Against the odds and with little to help her on her way other than hard work and determination, she has become a property and land owner and is very representative of the female labour force who are fuelling India’s economic boom.
Aged 32, she was born and brought up in Goa, the youngest of six children, and endured a difficult childhood, primarily due to her father dying when Bushita was aged 6.
“I always loved school,” she told me. “And I worked hard to learn English.”
Aged 15, she met her husband Sabbas, a friend of her brother.
“He’s my only boyfriend, nine years older than me, and the only man I’ve ever kissed – and even then I made him wait for a year, because I felt I was too young.”
They married four years later. Finances dictated that they had a small wedding rather than the large Roman Catholic affair she would have preferred, although she hopes to have - “a huge party! You must come to Goa for it, Cleo!” to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary in 2022.
Bushita began training to be a beautician as soon as she left school in 1997; sighing, she told me that she would have loved to “carry on studying and go to university in Panjim”, but her mother needed her to start earning and contribute to the family’s finances. So, taught by a local beauty salon owner, she learned how to do facials and give massages and then sold her wedding jewellery to pay for a college course and improve her skills.
“My mother was horrified that I sold my gold! But I knew that it was the right thing to do and that I had to invest in me. How is it you say – speculate to accumulate? Yes!”
Charter flights full of holiday makers had begun coming to Goa in the mid 1990s and that led to the explosion of tourism as we now see it. Bushita told me that she could see that this influx of western visitors would be good for business, as long as she could learn some new beauty skills so, after she’d qualified at college, she went to work at a larger salon in order to learn how to do manicures and pedicures. Tragically, her first baby, a boy, had died seven months into her pregnancy and her difficulties continued when her second child, Hazel, now aged 11, was also born prematurely in 1999 and was very ill for the first few years of her life.
At about the same time, her mother inherited a piece of land located very close to what was then becoming a popular hotel. By borrowing from family members and using friends and neighbours as labour, Bushita built a tiny shop on the land to one day use as her dream beauty parlour. Because she couldn’t also afford to fit it out as a salon, she rented it to a tenant as a clothes shop in order to get some money for fittings. The shop remained tenanted for the next five years, whilst Bushita worked in a neighbouring salon, biding her time. She then took out a bank loan (underwritten by her mother) and built an upper story extension on to the shop, which she finally started to use as a salon whilst maintaining the clothes shop downstairs. Hazel’s Beauty Parlour, named after her oldest child, finally opened in 2005, a year after Bushita had given birth to her second daughter, Pearl Suezan; she laughed as she told me – “both of my daughters were born in September. I wanted them to be smart girls, born at the beginning of the school year – and this way, I could take my baby leave during the rainy season, when there are no tourists!”
Having worked upstairs for a few years, Bushita then saw her chance to extend again, and she started working from her home whilst converting the original salon into an apartment and guest house. She now presides over two apartments and three bed and breakfast rooms (“all with air conditioning!”), in addition to the salon and the shop, currently occupied by a Kashmiri jewellery business and told me, sighing, that she is very glad that she has diversified, as the beauty business is under threat. There’s lots of competition from the beach, as many former fruit sellers now offer beauty treatments as an easier way of working with the high spending tourist population.
However, her guest house is doing very well and that helps fund the expansion plans and renovations.
“It’s grown via word of mouth and referrals and repeat business – thank goodness!”
I saw the generation gap at work when Bushita explained that her in-laws, with whom she lives, struggle to understand her drive and commitment; “they do still want me to be more traditional, but they’re more accepting now, as they can see the business growing and becoming successful. I earn much more than my husband does [as a taxi driver] and they find this very strange – it’s almost unimaginable in their world. Because we all live together, we have disagreements over domestic ideas. Until recently, they used to nag me constantly about having another baby, ideally a boy, but my husband reminded them that I had nearly died twice and so now they leave me alone. Mostly.”
Luckily Sabbas has always been supportive and understood the need to earn money and do well.
“Over time, I have changed my husband; now we have short holidays alone together and sometimes go out for dinner. The children will grow up and leave to live with their husbands’ families, and we will be old, so it’s important that we are happy together. It’s our life and we must live it.”
What are your hopes for your daughters, I asked?
Deeply religious, Bushita would like her older daughter to be a nun, or perhaps a nurse or a doctor – “she is very caring.” And she hopes that Pearl will take over the business and ultimately run the salon and the guest house. Ahead of either contingency, she’s saving money for them both in order to pay for university or college in some capacity.
Over coffee, she confided that her greatest challenge is family based (“yap yap!”) rather than business focussed.
“The in-laws are so difficult and their weight of expectations are a great burden; if they’re fine, everything else is fine, if not – we all know about it. They are always very unhappy about my building projects when they’re underway, but they cope with it later on. They have a rural background with pigs and chickens and find this way of life to be so strange, still, after all these years.”
She continued, “Thankfully, my mother-in-law does all the cooking so that helps a lot in terms of domestic stuff and childcare. They’re also very good at disciplining the children.”
Once the Goan tourist industry shuts up shop each spring, Bushita goes on seminars in the down season to learn about new treatments (“next time you come, I will be able to do the gel nails”) and she also sells life insurance. She started this three years ago, as a way of earning money in the absence of tourists and has found that she enjoys selling door to door, to the extent that she has won both regional and national sales awards for achieving great sales figures.
“I get bored being a Goan housewife and I love business, so my advice to other women is: stand up for yourselves and speak up. You must always move forwards and don’t look back. You do have talents – yes, there may be barriers to your success, but don’t be afraid.
If you have a great idea – try it, be brave.
No can always become Yes.”
(For previous posts about my trips to Goa, please click on the words Goa and/or India in the “I’m writing about …” tag cloud on the right).
Earlier in the summer, I wrote about the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and how I am supporting them with a number of their projects – particularly those focused on working with women in India.
They have now made the official announcement about this year’s Women Mean Business conference, which will take place in
Mumbai on December 8th. The conference will centre on the power of information and communication technologies as tools for women to start and expand their businesses; there will be a particular focus around mobile services, web-based technology, technological learning such as e-mentoring, and social media for business.
I’ve been finding it so interesting to be in touch with my many fabulous Indian friends and contacts, who have all been very helpful in suggesting speakers and conference participants, as well as updating me on how social media tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter are now being used in India.
You can see from this advertisement for a housing finance scheme aimed exclusively at women that using text based technology to target particular demographics is already very popular in India – and I’m looking forward to learning more about, for example, how increased access to mobile phones can benefit fledgling female entrepreneurs.
For programme updates or to register your interest, please visit: www.cbfwconference.org
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Anita and Jyoti’s story
23 NovOne of the books I’ve read and particularly enjoyed (on my Kindle!) since arriving here in Goa has been Sanjeev Bhaskar’s account of his trip around India in 2007. A second generation British born Indian, Bhaskar had visited the country many times as a child on family holidays, but decided to return (with a BBC film crew in tow) and see the modern India at around the time that the country was celebrating 60 years of independence. He specifically wanted to see the area of the Punjab from where his family had fled at the time of Partition; they were Hindus, living in an Indian village which became, overnight in August 1947, part of the newly created Muslim state of Pakistan and so they left their homes and became part of the Hindu Diaspora migrating to India – passing on their way hundreds of thousands of Muslims making the same journey in reverse.
Other books (I particularly recommend Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex von Tunzelman, which I blogged about here earlier this year) cover the politics and history of this turbulent and tragic period of Indian history in more detail and context, but Bhaskar’s wonderful book provides a human story and brings it alive – he’s a fine writer.
“… those of us born as second generation Indians in England are the children of Partition – it’s odd to think that without that tumultuous moment of upheaval 60 years ago, my family might never made the journey that brought my sister and me into being as the modern Britons we are today.”
A favourite feature of the Kindle is the way in which you can clip and mark sections of your books as you read them, and I did this a lot with Sanjeev Bhaskar’s India. When he described India as:
“ … a country that breaks your heart in a new way every day … fractures you in ways you didn’t even realise you could be broken …”
… it very much resonated with me. I had my heart fractured the other day when I met Jyoti and her friend Anita on the beach. It was about 4.30pm and I was just considering packing up and heading back for a shower, when a shadow fell across my sun lounger. I looked up to see a small girl holding a large basket filled with newspaper wrapped twists of peanuts and packets of crisps. Just as the words “no, thank you” were forming on my lips, she laid the basket down and asked, very politely, if she could please have some water?
(This happens a lot on the beach, and I usually buy an extra bottle of water for the kids whenever I buy one for myself).
Of course, I said and handed it over. To my surprise, she didn’t drink the water, but instead put the bottle down, and removed first a plastic bag and then several layers of grimy, bloodied newspaper from her right foot. She then poured the water all over her foot, and attempted to clean it up with fresh newspaper. When I asked what she had done to her foot, she showed me a deep gash in her sole – a cut which looked dirty and inflamed; a cut which would have any one of us at the doctor, asking for stitches and antibiotics. She had cut her foot on a piece of metal (“I think, from a boat?”) whilst walking on the beach and of course, was unable to keep it either clean or sterile. All she could do was keep it covered with her improvised bandage and hope it healed.
Her name is Jyoti and she is 11 years old. I felt very helpless, but I helped her to first clean her foot with some of my baby wipes and
to then dress it with Savlon from my capacious beach bag. She then re-wrapped it with fresh newspaper and a different plastic bag; I bought her a sandwich and a Fanta, which both disappeared in an instant. Whilst all this was going on, her friend Anita (12) appeared with her matching basket of goods and showed great concern as to the state of poor Jyoti’s foot. At no point did either of them attempt to sell me anything or to ask me for money; they just seemed grateful for the rest in the shade of my beach umbrella and for the food and drink. I bought Anita a Coke and gave them my remaining fruit (scrupulously divided between them both by Anita) and a bottle of water each.
“Do you go to school?” I asked, almost knowing the answer.
“Yes!” said Anita, proudly. “School is good. Better than beach. But in Karnataka, not here. When we are here, we must work.”
Further questioning elicited the fact that they each travel with their families to Goa every October and work on the beach during the season – so until May. They then return to Karnataka and attend school for almost 6 months, before taking a 19 hour bus journey back to Goa, back to the beach.
Jyoti was clearly in some pain at this time, and she curled up on an adjacent sun bed and went to sleep. Anita, older, more confident and chatty, told me the somewhat amazing story that she is one of SEVEN sisters and one younger brother. She, her parents and sisters all travel to Goa to work, but her brother remains at home with an aunt so that he can continue his education.
Further proof of the (lack of) esteem in which girls and their education are held in this huge, bewildering, heartbreaking country. Here’s the last word from Sanjeev:
“India remains a dizzying edifice of extremes. Goddesses are worshipped and women have occupied the most powerful positions in the land, and yet it is a male-dominated society. It is the largest democracy in the world and yet a significant proportion of the population are illiterate. The wealth divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is increasing dramatically as India becomes a global player. The destitute number almost 500 million – and that’s a hell of a lot of ‘have nots’.”
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