Final Impressions, April 2009
Ms. Corinne Rose


Only at the end of my four-month stay here at Sambhali did I realise about the true importance of the Sambhali girls’ lives through being here.

I was taking some very simple business training sessions with ten girls that are about to graduate in the summer. They have been here for two years now and have had a variety of different workshops, have been taught by many volunteers with so many different skills, enjoyed lots of activities as well as being taught the main subjects of English and Arts and Crafts. We hope that these girls who are about to graduate, are going to work in a couple of sewing centres that Sambhali Trust will set-up in the summer. From there, the girls will be able to sew, make clothes such as salwaar kameez and Rajasthani dresses for their local community as well as producing items for the Sambhali India shop, thereby providing them with the potential of earning a living for themselves.

I knew that it was going to be a change for them to go from coming to the Sambhali Centre every day, after being with their friends and enjoying the atmosphere of the school and what they are learning here and taking part in the different activities such as the different projects, the sports days, practising traditional folk-dancing and educational visits such as to the Trade Fair.

I also thought that trying to suddenly think of working in a shop environment would be strange for them; the (much) longer hours, the need to get things finished to deadlines, the need to work together and distribute the work amongst each other accordingly and the commitment required to make these centres successful and self-sustainable. But I soon realised after talking to them (albeit through Tamanna, the Arts and Crafts teacher), that after initially them wondering what I was going to talk about, they soon tuned into the thought of working in the sewing centres and all came up with such positive answers. I asked “What do you think your working hours would be?” and Usha replied, “9am-8pm” – this later changed by general consent to 10am-7pm, but they had understood the need to work longer hours than they were doing at present. “When would you take a day off?” - “On Sunday” which then changed to one Sunday per month. I asked “Would your families still want you to do the housework?” - “Yes”, the reply came, “ but we would do it before we came to work!” - “Wouldn’t you feel tired” I said, “ having to do all this work and your housework on top of this?” - “No!” the answer came, “we will take iron tablets!” I was suddenly struck by their resolve. I carried on asking questions: “If you all arrived at 10am and one of you came at 12noon, what would you do?” - “ Ask that person to work 2 hours extra and stay until 9pm!” - “What if someone was sick?” – “We would all do the work for her, if someone was sick.” - “What if everyone was busy with orders”, I asked Meera, one of the supervisors, “who would you give the next order to?” – “I would take it on myself” came the reply, “and if I was busy, I would do the cutting-out and I would ask each person to do part of the sewing to get it finished”. Every question I came up with, they had a positive reply. Not once did they say, “I’m not sure”, “we’ll wait until she comes back from being sick”, or “I need to get home on time” or they wouldn’t be able to get the work done to a specific deadline. I asked them how many items they could make in a day, or how long a salwaar kameez would take to make. They had an answer for everything. I even asked them how they would sort out who does the chores in the shop, like tidying the room, making the chai, sorting out the equipment etc. and they said they would all do it together and work it out for themselves. At that point, I knew they would do….I had seen them at Sambhali just getting on with clearing things away and tidying up before and after classes and they didn’t have to be asked to do it, they just got on with it, so I realised that these girls would just co-operate easily with each other and joke with each other at the same time, whilst organizing what needed to be done. Infact they wouldn’t really discuss it – they would just do it!

I also realised at this point that the girls have formed a strong united bond with each other over the time they’ve been here, that all the time they’ve been joking and having fun and talking to each other, they have formed a way of working with each other that doesn’t need spelling out to them, because they’ll instinctively do it anyway. Of course, they’ll still need some training in specifics such as finance and book-keeping and how to calculate costs etc., but being at Sambhali has helped them become a unit and a very strong one and a resource that they can always rely on, an inner strength knowing that they can achieve more in life if given the opportunity to do so.

Never have I been or worked anywhere which I have found so rewarding. Whatever small thing I found I could do to help, somehow I found I got double the enjoyment back from doing it – to see the girls be motivated by a competition; sharing their tiffin box at lunchtime on the classroom floor; watching their expressions as they were being transformed for a fashion-shoot; how proud they were to finish an item for the market stall and how they rapidly got stuck into a week-long project.

How I understood also, some of the individual lives they lead and how difficult it is to live on such a meagre income with all the household expenses and the ongoing medical care to be paid for, for one member of their family; having no father and trying to live what we might call a normal life, which in Rajasthani society is so difficult, when women are hardly allowed to go out on their own, especially in the evening; when they are usually tied to the house and housework and have no other future to look forward to; suffering the abuse maybe of an alcoholic husband and not knowing how to deal with it. Sambhali has been able to give them the support mechanism which has given them a vision of the future and however their lives progress, they surely have a steadfast grounding from which to have a better life.

My time at Sambhali has been so full and varied, from working on a presentation, to setting-up and running a regular market stall, to co-ordinating health camps and seminars in Jodhpur and Setrawa, helping to co-ordinate the volunteers and even having some input in making a film and that’s apart from helping Govind with writing numerous reports! I couldn’t have asked for more if I’d planned it and so for me it has been one of the most enriching experiences of my life and I hope the spirit of Sambhali continues to thrive, as it deserves to, for all those associated with it.