Empower girls like Priti in slums in Pune, India

Shakshi was introduced to me as a girl who loved to dance. She beamed a big smile and began to tell me about school.

"When I used to go to school, I didn't have any friends. The school had really good facilities. Girls from the local hostel used to go there.

Then I made friends with this girl [from the group]. I used to not even have a pen to write, but she used to let me use hers. And then I made some other friends. 

But a lot of girls still used to mock me. They would call me 'baldy'. Sometimes the teacher would hear them and make them say sorry."

Shakshi comes from a difficult family situation. Her mother suffered from mental illness and left the home with her little brother and sister to look for a job in a richer part of the city. Her father is an alcoholic and used to beat her mother. He is currently unemployed. After Shakshi's mother left, her father pulled her out of the school. 

It was some of the girls of one of our groups that joined together and turned up at Shakshi's fathers house to ask why she hadn't been seen at school for months. They insisted that she should go, and her father let her again, as long as they accompanied her to school and back.

"I love school a lot so I'm so grateful to the Green Tara Foundation" she says. 

She attends daily tuition classes with the group, as well as extra-curricular activities they run, which gives her the opportunity to do things such as dance with the other girls.

Shakshi's life is still hard, but thanks to your support she is back and school, and has a group of friends and a place to dance. All of this makes her life very different to how it would otherwise have been.

Thank you for your donations.

This year we have started in some new communities. One such community is a slum of a poor Sikh tribe. Here. according to the elders and their traditions, none of the girls are allowed to study past 8th standard (14 years) when they would normally be married.

We have two main activities in this slum. The first are daily study support classes for the girls so they can actually keep up with what's being caught in their often overcrowded classes. The second is a regular meeting of the girls groups, where the girls learn about their right to education, their situation as young women in India, their constitutional rights, discrimination, violence, and many other things that they would not otherwise be able to have frank conversations about. 

The girls groups help to give the girls confidence, so they can aim for much more than they previously imagined. 

Here we asked, 'who's going to study until 12th standard?' (the equivalent of college or sixth form). All the hands shot up. This wouldn't have been imaginable three months ago. 

But it's going to be a long road ahead. Counselling the parents, working with the teachers, empowering the girls to stand up for themselves, and each other. We've seen from the other slums where we've worked that it's not easy. But it's possible.

I look forward to continuing to update you on our girls. Thank you so much for continuing to help us.