The Association of Women with Disabilities was established in 2002 by its current Director, Kuhu Das, who herself suffered from polio as a child. She founded the organisation by herself in a small village outside Kolkata called Subhi, with no external funding, no electricity, a small hut, no nearby toilet and initially not even a bed (she used the table as her bed). She tells me that she has quite a few stories from this time, which I can well believe. (Some of them include rats and snakes so I won’t cover them at the moment.) The focus of the organisation was on supporting disabled women, particularly helping them to access the services that they needed. This project continued to expand and obtained foreign funding.
Three years ago she moved back to Kolkata to start a project for disabled women in the slums, and a project running national and international leadership training programmes for women with disabilities. Both projects have a rights based approach: as I mentioned in a previous article disabled women are among the most powerless people in India due to the discrimination they face for being female, disabled and poor. They and their families and communities are often completely unaware that they have rights and responsibilities; they are more often considered a drain on resources and incapable of an education, earning money, or being a wife and a mother. Nearly all the girls I have talked to so far on my trips to the slums have said that they suffer from teasing and harassment when they step outside the house. Because poor disabled women suffer from such prejudice and discrimination they have been almost invisible in both the development agenda and to government policy. Until disabled women join together with a unified voice to raise their profile and claim their rights there will be no substantive change. Therefore AWWD works at the local, national and international levels to address these issues and to provide disabled women with a voice.
At the local level AWWD identifies women with disabilities, and helps them understand their rights and fulfil their capabilities. For example AWWD field workers help take disabled women to get a disability card: this enables the women to travel on public transport for reduced cost. AWWD provides loans to enable the women to start up a business: this not only provides them with some extra income, but also builds their self confidence and self esteem. AWWD workers also form self help groups so that women can come together to talk about their problems and to recognise that they are not alone. This is a major step: the vast majority of women said unprompted during a survey that since the intervention of AWWD they feel more confident and happier mixing with new people and going to new places.
And from these women AWWD identifies those with leadership potential, and runs national level leadership training programmes, to enable women to come together to work towards a common cause, to explain their rights and to give them tools to claim their rights. These women then go back to their communities to advocate locally on behalf of disabled women, but also they are part of networks to influence policy on a larger scale. And also AWWD has run regional training programmes for disabled women from countries across South Asia. They have also participated in international conferences (concerning the Conference on the Elimination of Discrimination towards Women, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) to make sure that the needs of women with disabilities in South Asia are heard.
You may well be wondering what my role in AWWD is, as I am ashamed to admit that my job has hitherto not made an appearance on my blog. I am not relaxing and enjoying the general ambience of Kolkata, I am a Knowledge and Information Management Advisor. Yes, it is not the most exciting of job titles, but add the spice of working in India and there is never a dull moment. Take, for example, the relatively simple task of buying some hanging files to go into a filing cabinet. Given the fact that we already had a filing cabinet, I assumed that buying files for it would be a relatively simple task. Hah! After two weeks of searching for them from within the huge western style shopping malls, to the ramshackle old buildings piled high with books, notepaper and ring binders on College Street, to trawling through hundreds of internet sites, I finally admitted defeat. This painful occurrence took place after a couple of hours of wandering from ramshackle old building to ramshackle old building on College Street, hopelessly waving my picture of a file to a vendor surrounded by tottering piles of folders, waiting while he makes frantic phone calls to his stockist and then moving miserably on when he shakes his head.
It seems that India has jumped across the stage of using cardboard files right onto plastic. Anyway, I compromised onto the next best thing, and fingers crossed that is currently working OK.
And language is also another, shall we say, entertaining challenge? AWWD routinely works in three (and sometimes four) languages. All written reports for donors are in English. Bengali (or Bangla) is the mother tongue of some of the community workers, and they cannot speak much English. But the mother tongue of the Muslim community workers is Hindi - they often studied in Urdu medium schools, cannot speak much English either, and to complicate matters further some of them seem not to be very confident in Bengali. And, to pile on the confusion, some of the Muslim girls are happiest writing in Urdu and not Hindi (they have different scripts). So before team meetings there have been intense discussions about what language the meeting will be conducted in. It is helpful for me that some of the girls are happiest speaking Hindi because it means I can communicate a little with them and practice my Hindi. But when it comes to talking about information management I am definitely in need of an interpreter. And my very limited language skills have proved problematic at times as the girls speak so fast I can’t understand what they are saying. Last week I was talking to one girl and I think she said that her father had died, but I couldn’t be sure – it was a horrible situation and I didn’t really know what to say (even in English, let alone in Hindi).
As to other news: there was a flying cockroach in my room the other day. I am sure it was a flying cockroach, I will have to google it to check that there are actually such things. Anyway, I sprayed it liberally with poison, which turned out to be a slight mistake, as the poison rendered my room uninhabitable for the next half an hour. And on stepping outside I spied a rat scampering its way down my drain, and at that precise moment the electricity cut out, due to a monumental thunderstorm. Not such a great combination of events really: no light, a rat on the loose, a room full of poison and heavy rain. I therefore shut and bolted my door closest to the rat, and sat on my bed with a torch at the ready, every so often stepping outside to breathe in deep refreshing breaths of fresh air. Thankfully the power cut didn’t last very long. Nerves were in a little bit of a frazzled state after that, and I lay for a while on my bed thinking happy thoughts about beaches and sunshine and flowers.
Three years ago she moved back to Kolkata to start a project for disabled women in the slums, and a project running national and international leadership training programmes for women with disabilities. Both projects have a rights based approach: as I mentioned in a previous article disabled women are among the most powerless people in India due to the discrimination they face for being female, disabled and poor. They and their families and communities are often completely unaware that they have rights and responsibilities; they are more often considered a drain on resources and incapable of an education, earning money, or being a wife and a mother. Nearly all the girls I have talked to so far on my trips to the slums have said that they suffer from teasing and harassment when they step outside the house. Because poor disabled women suffer from such prejudice and discrimination they have been almost invisible in both the development agenda and to government policy. Until disabled women join together with a unified voice to raise their profile and claim their rights there will be no substantive change. Therefore AWWD works at the local, national and international levels to address these issues and to provide disabled women with a voice.
At the local level AWWD identifies women with disabilities, and helps them understand their rights and fulfil their capabilities. For example AWWD field workers help take disabled women to get a disability card: this enables the women to travel on public transport for reduced cost. AWWD provides loans to enable the women to start up a business: this not only provides them with some extra income, but also builds their self confidence and self esteem. AWWD workers also form self help groups so that women can come together to talk about their problems and to recognise that they are not alone. This is a major step: the vast majority of women said unprompted during a survey that since the intervention of AWWD they feel more confident and happier mixing with new people and going to new places.
And from these women AWWD identifies those with leadership potential, and runs national level leadership training programmes, to enable women to come together to work towards a common cause, to explain their rights and to give them tools to claim their rights. These women then go back to their communities to advocate locally on behalf of disabled women, but also they are part of networks to influence policy on a larger scale. And also AWWD has run regional training programmes for disabled women from countries across South Asia. They have also participated in international conferences (concerning the Conference on the Elimination of Discrimination towards Women, and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities) to make sure that the needs of women with disabilities in South Asia are heard.
You may well be wondering what my role in AWWD is, as I am ashamed to admit that my job has hitherto not made an appearance on my blog. I am not relaxing and enjoying the general ambience of Kolkata, I am a Knowledge and Information Management Advisor. Yes, it is not the most exciting of job titles, but add the spice of working in India and there is never a dull moment. Take, for example, the relatively simple task of buying some hanging files to go into a filing cabinet. Given the fact that we already had a filing cabinet, I assumed that buying files for it would be a relatively simple task. Hah! After two weeks of searching for them from within the huge western style shopping malls, to the ramshackle old buildings piled high with books, notepaper and ring binders on College Street, to trawling through hundreds of internet sites, I finally admitted defeat. This painful occurrence took place after a couple of hours of wandering from ramshackle old building to ramshackle old building on College Street, hopelessly waving my picture of a file to a vendor surrounded by tottering piles of folders, waiting while he makes frantic phone calls to his stockist and then moving miserably on when he shakes his head.
It seems that India has jumped across the stage of using cardboard files right onto plastic. Anyway, I compromised onto the next best thing, and fingers crossed that is currently working OK.And language is also another, shall we say, entertaining challenge? AWWD routinely works in three (and sometimes four) languages. All written reports for donors are in English. Bengali (or Bangla) is the mother tongue of some of the community workers, and they cannot speak much English. But the mother tongue of the Muslim community workers is Hindi - they often studied in Urdu medium schools, cannot speak much English either, and to complicate matters further some of them seem not to be very confident in Bengali. And, to pile on the confusion, some of the Muslim girls are happiest writing in Urdu and not Hindi (they have different scripts). So before team meetings there have been intense discussions about what language the meeting will be conducted in. It is helpful for me that some of the girls are happiest speaking Hindi because it means I can communicate a little with them and practice my Hindi. But when it comes to talking about information management I am definitely in need of an interpreter. And my very limited language skills have proved problematic at times as the girls speak so fast I can’t understand what they are saying. Last week I was talking to one girl and I think she said that her father had died, but I couldn’t be sure – it was a horrible situation and I didn’t really know what to say (even in English, let alone in Hindi).
As to other news: there was a flying cockroach in my room the other day. I am sure it was a flying cockroach, I will have to google it to check that there are actually such things. Anyway, I sprayed it liberally with poison, which turned out to be a slight mistake, as the poison rendered my room uninhabitable for the next half an hour. And on stepping outside I spied a rat scampering its way down my drain, and at that precise moment the electricity cut out, due to a monumental thunderstorm. Not such a great combination of events really: no light, a rat on the loose, a room full of poison and heavy rain. I therefore shut and bolted my door closest to the rat, and sat on my bed with a torch at the ready, every so often stepping outside to breathe in deep refreshing breaths of fresh air. Thankfully the power cut didn’t last very long. Nerves were in a little bit of a frazzled state after that, and I lay for a while on my bed thinking happy thoughts about beaches and sunshine and flowers.
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