We arrived in Allahabad this morning by overnight train. We met Reverend Qamar Joy Zaidi, who goes by Joy, at the station, and are going to begin work at SOUP on Monday once we are settled in and rested. He drove us to the home of Kamal Singh, a professor at the University of Allahabad who is renting us a room in her house for the summer.
Our last few days in Kolkata were very interesting. On Monday, there was a pretty terrifying cyclone that went through the city. There was no electricity for the day and several people caught outside in the storm were severely injured or killed. The silver lining was that we got to spend the day inside talking with Ms. Karmakar! She has very strong opinions on the importance of education and how it relates to the role of women in Indian society. In Bengali culture – the culture of most people who live in Kolkata – a woman is expected to marry at a young age and spend her life at home caring for her children and her husband. Women hold very few positions of importance or power, and are less likely to be educated than men. There is just such a gender divide everywhere – men and women even sit apart on the bus, and ride in separate cars on the train. I will never forget sitting on the train ride home from Shrimasrham and looking around the huge car, full of women, most of them with children, and finding one woman, down at the very end, huddled in a corner with a briefcase, a pen, and a paper in her hand.
There is a direct connection between how much education a woman has and how much more important of a role she is able to play in society. I have also found that this is true for men – when a man has received more education, for example, if he has gone on to university, he is more likely to be “modern,” with “modern” ideas of what a wife should be. He is less likely to force his wife to stay home caring for the household while he goes out each day and works. There is also a direct connection between how much education a woman has and her likelihood of being trafficked. However, Ms.Karmakar also brought up the important point with us that poverty is complicated, and that it will take more than just educating all the children to bring about change. As we saw with Shrimashram, people in rural villages have other problems that affect their ability to educate their children. They could be sick, or hungry, or might need their child to stay home from school and work to support their family. You can’t educate your children if there is no health facility to care for them when they are ill, or no way to put food on the table when they are hungry, or no way to find a job that pays enough to take care of them. All of these issues must also be addressed in the context of providing education.
We also got the chance to spend some time with Ms. Karmakar’s nephew, Poon-poon, and her neighbor’s daughter,____________, two children who are both 5 years old. I was very impressed with how much English both of them already knew! They couldn’t speak or understand sentences, but they could read and write just about as many English words as your average American 5-year old. S______ was very proud of how she could wrie the whole alphabet and her numbers up to 10, which she did for us a few times in my notebook. Poon-poon showed us his homework, which was writing, reading, and recognizing several different kinds of colors and numbers. Both of them receive government education, but they also both have fantastic parents, so it’s hard to say which one of those is responsible for what they have already learned! We also met Ms. Karmakar’s ____________, who is actually the perfect example of the influence education can have. He is a very educated man, and he has a daughter who is in her 20s – an age at which most Bengali women should be married – but instead she is living at home with him and has just completed her studies at a university in Kolkata so that she can become a teacher. She is actually the first woman we have met during our time her in Kolkata, other than Ms. Karmakar, who is planning on having a job of her own.
29 MAY 2009