Crossing the Street in India

Knowing little about the plight of these slum women, I asked Minal to enlighten me as we settled in for a chat over chai. For the next two hours, I got a whirlwind lesson on the culture of violence against impoverished Indian women until my vision was blurry and I thought the room was tilting.

According to Minal, between India’s high cultural preference for boys and its low social value of girls, life was working against these women from the moment they were conceived. For many poor people, the mere thought of raising a daughter has led to selective abortions of millions of female fetuses. Millions more baby girls who weren’t aborted were killed or abandoned at birth. The “lucky” girls who survived could look forward to growing up in a slum, where by middle school they’d become encouraged to drop out and work as full-time domestic servants to ease the financial burden on the family.

No wonder Minal was stressed. I was exhausted just listening to her.

While ASHA’s mission was to help impoverished slum-women fight uphill legal battles against domestic abuse ranging from bride burning to dowry death, I couldn’t help but wonder how knowing their rights could help them when their lives were already an entrenched mess. Between illiteracy, poverty, fear, low self-esteem, and child-rearing, these women had few options.

When Minal finally mentioned ASHA’s fledgling youth program— the Better Life Education Program— I began to perk up a little bit. The program encouraged these women’s daughters to stay in school beyond 6th grade. It trained them to understand basic health care, to think for themselves, and ultimately, to avoid turning into another generation of their mothers. For the 25 girls in the program, ASHA encouraged them to dream for something bigger to create better lives for themselves.

So, if my math was correct, out tens of millions of slum-dwelling girls in India, there were a whopping 25 enrolled in a program that would help them avoid becoming the next grim statistic. It didn’t sound like much, but at least it was a start.

Until it wasn’t.

Unfortunately, Minal followed up by explaining that ASHA’s overstretched/underfunded budget had to make hard cuts. Thus, the girls’ program was hitting the chopping block before it barely got off the ground. Their goodbye gathering was tomorrow.

Such a shame, I thought. But what can you do, right?

Minal said if I wanted to come to their final meeting, I was welcome. I figured, why not.

The next day my auto rickshaw dropped me at the entrance to the slum, ready to track down the clubhouse where The Better Life Education Program held their meetings. After walking past the stinky, litter-filled canal where clothes, dishes, and children were being scrubbed, and weaving through the honeycomb maze of shacks stacked like a house of cards, the houses became squeezed together until they became one big, clumpy blanket of rust. Narrow passageways— like cracks in a wall— led deeper into this mysterious world of statistics sprawling up the hillside. Although these houses had no addresses, they were home to a population of millions.

I met up with Minal outside a rusty metal shed painted bright blue. Stepping inside, wall to wall girls wearing festive, colorful saris and glittery nose rings, and eyes bright enough to illuminate the darkest corner of the world were scrunched together on the dirt floor for the farewell meeting of their short-lived, youth club.

They had me at namaste.

Over the next hour, we talked, laughed, took selfies, and became friends. On the outside it looked like any other slum sorority meeting, but on the inside it felt like these “statistics” were about to change.

The thing is, something weird happens when you hug a statistic. They not only start to become real, they become a part of you. When you hug a statistic, you suddenly realize there isn’t much difference between a vulnerable girl in an Indian slum and a vulnerable kid in your own family. You see each as the world’s future inventor, artist, explorer, teacher, scientist— or the world’s burden. Before you know it, you find yourself whispering questions about annual program costs while doing mental calculations on whether giving up manicures for a year might cover it.

But the next thing you know, you begin to panic. You desperately try to convince yourself that it’s not your responsibility to get involved. You remind yourself that saving one measly youth program isn’t going to solve Third World poverty. You begin arguing with yourself that offering to fund the program would be like throwing away money— absurd— until someone suddenly screams “I’LL FUND THE PROGRAM!!” and you realize it was you.

Finally, you gasp and bury your face in your hands wondering what you have just committed to while two-dozen, adorable statistics erupt into cheers.

***

In retrospect, at the time the question on my mind wasn’t whether I could help keep the program alive financially for another year. (I could.) The question was, “How can anyone imagine a better life when they wake up every day in a SLUM?!” (I couldn’t.)

The whole flight home I obsessed over my next steps. I knew that I could easily throw together a fundraiser for the $2,500 needed, but I also knew that money wasn’t the solution. Sure, keeping The Better Life Program open would cost money, but these girls needed MORE than weekly meetings in a tin shed to create a better life. They needed more than education even. They needed to feel IMPORTANT. But how could they feel important when everyone around them agreed they were useless? To discover a better life, these girls needed to stretch their worldview. They needed new input and experiences. They needed to see what possibilities for life existed outside the slum.

But how?

Luckily, Freedom Writers (my in-flight movie on the way home) dangled a creative idea to co-opt. If Erin Gruwell could take 25 inner-city, LA gang teens to the Holocaust Museum to stretch their minds, perhaps I could take the ASHA girls on a mind-stretching adventure of their own.

After throwing together an Indian-themed fundraiser, six months later I returned to Pune with my friend Lynette— armed with the annual program funds, 26 blank page journals, and an ingenious plan.

With the help of the ASHA directors (who miraculously coaxed, cajoled, and convinced two dozen slum parents and employers to unleash their daughters from servitude for five days), we took the girls on the adventure of their lives. We visited temples, parks, farms, restaurants, and ice cream parlors. We hiked in the mountains and watched hang-gliders sail off cliffs. We did artwork, photography, and even indulged in a “rain dance" (an enclosed courtyard where Bollywood dance music blared from loudspeakers while water sprays out of pipes overhead on screaming, laughing Indian girls in soaking wet saris). We went on a road trip and sang songs while dancing in the aisles of our rented bus. In just five days we ignited their dreams and stretched their imaginations farther and faster than yoga pants on Thanksgiving. They discovered new ways of thinking. Of seeing. Of living. Already they were feeling valued, important, capable.

Five. Days.

But all this was merely the warm up for something much bigger. The larger purpose of the adventure was to prepare these girls to get to know the world from a perspective they never imagined existed.

Their own.

According to Minal, since birth these Indian girls were not asked about what they thought. Nobody cared what their opinions were. In fact, keeping girls a “blank slate” was actually their parents’ way of ensuring their daughters would have a happier life. You see, when a new bride marries into her husband’s family, she’s expected to take care of the needs of her new in-laws. The more she can “go along” with the status quo, the easier she will “get along” in her new life. Going along to get along, many parents intentionally keep their daughters a “blank slate” to be molded by their future in-laws.

This circle of oppression may be vicious, but our plan to disrupt it had some teeth of its own.

On the first day of our week’s adventure, each girl was given her own blank page journal and instructions to write daily. While it may not have been revolutionary on its own, the mere act of putting a pen to an empty, unblemished page begins to unleash our inner rebel. The lack of rules, expectations, or even margins unlocks our imagination. And on the most subconscious levels, the ownership of our ideas begins to legitimize our existence.

It didn’t matter that for several days the pages remained as blank as the minds of the girls. Day by day, these girls slowly began to release their thoughts. Word by word, their ideas began to form. Sentence by sentence, they began to stake their claim in the world.

On the last morning of our adventure, I arrived at our meeting spot to find every girl in the room already hunched over her journal— silently, passionately pouring her deepest thoughts onto the pages.

The seeds had been planted, and a new life force was beginning to form.

Mere ownership of their ideas had created a shift in their subconscious. Already they began to sit straighter and stand taller. They began to walk with purpose, talk as though their ideas had value, laugh without worrying who might be watching.

***

Several weeks later, I received an email from Minal with translated passages from the girls’ journals. Reflecting on their five-day adventure, it was clear they no longer saw the world beyond their slum as a mysterious, intimidating environment where they didn’t belong. It had become an intoxicating place of limitless potential. School was no longer a place to bide their time until being married off. It was now a ticket to independence.

With the steady nurturing of Minal’s team (who continued to convince slum parents that educating daughters would pay out better than a 401K), the girls pushed forward— sprouting up through cracks in the socially cemented institutions of poverty and misogyny like tiny green shoots.

As more girls began attending the Better Life Education Program gatherings, several who had dropped out of school asked for assistance in re-enrolling. Before long, the collective energy of the girls began to magnetize even more opportunities.  An American NGO that had caught wind of the Better Life program offered to implement a tutoring program to further ensure their academic support, as well as cover school supplies and coordinate supplemental healthcare. Another NGO offered to implement a soccer training program for the girls. Meanwhile, the GSD team and I continued to return to Pune periodically, taking even more girls on even more crazy adventures— and conducting more mind-expanding workshops for the new recruits.

As the growing legion of girls continued writing, learning, growing, expanding, and gliding through the cramped confines of the slum with we’re-going-places confidence, younger girls looked up at them with awe. “That could be me.”

And boys looked at them with new reverence. “Why wouldn’t I respect them?”

Several years later, the first group of girls not only graduated from high school, they were heading off to college. (Not only were they the first in their community to go to college, they were the first to make it past 10th grade. Way to break the glass ceiling, girls!) Even with high school diplomas, their part-time salaries dramatically eclipsed the pittance of their parents’ full-time pay as servants and street sweepers.

***

As of this post, more than 50 ASHA girls have graduated college. No longer slaves to their circumstances, they are now working in careers ranging from commerce to medicine to engineering. Hundreds more girls continue to attend ASHA’s Better Life Education Program as they slowly bring purpose into their lives and turn the status quo of the slum upside down. According to Minal, the graduation rate of girls who entered the Better Life program in their formative years (11-12) is nearly 100%.

100%.

How’s that for a new statistic?