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.