Our safe house has been operating since 2012. We have 16 girls receiving 24/7 care. They come from one of the very biggest source sex-trafficking districts in India - Murshidabad, West Bengal. We have just accepted a further 6 girls which has meant that we have had to rearrange our whole budget! Because of the poverty from which they have come, we are working hard to offer quality food. Hence we are seeking support specifically for nutritious/clean food for our girls for a full 12-month period.
Our girls come from villages where there is no viable work and none that is full-time. They want to help their families, but how can they? Traffickers know this and travel to their villages tricking them into moving to Kolkata where they are cruelly sold into prostitution. Our girls are poor - mud houses, no toilets, cramped conditions and studying at backward schools. Their rice fields are owned by city dwellers who charge their families a rental fee of 2/3's of their rice harvest.
Within a nurturing family environment, our girls have the opportunity to graduate high school and move on into tertiary/university training. From there, we will assist them right up until they have successfully found good and safe employment. Now we observe that our girls no longer wish to marry young and are becoming more confident with a wider worldview. They have aspirations of making real incomes where they can really help their families get out of intergenerational debt to the moneylenders.
Over the next few years, we expect to have at least 30 girls receiving 24/7 care. We also hope to start a junior school so that we can provide real and meaningful employment for our older girls. They will then be able to economically help their own families. We know that when women have access to education and work within the frame of gender equality, that a family, and then a community and finally a country may economically develop. We are seeing this occur in neighboring Bangladesh.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
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