Ahmedabad, India

June 30, 2009

My struggle to balance what I want to find and what I actually find continued today. Again I went out into the field, hoping that I would find the magical interview that would show women why they needed to make the tough decision to put something away now for a distant future. Needless to say, I did not find that interview and I still lack the right spin for a Pension platform (if any readers have any ideas, pray tell! But seriously… please?)

So off my translator, Rashmi, and I went in a rickshaw away from SEWA Bank. We did not have a SEWA worker with us today because our first stop would be a smaller SEWA branch established on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. As SEWA membership grew they opened small branches far away from the main one to better reach out to people in poor communities who could not travel all the way into the city. At this branch we picked up a SEWA employee who worked directly with this community. Out we went to our first home of the day.

I, of course, did not find the magical interview, but I did find four very interesting stories, all of which gave me a richer and deeper understanding of the culture of the poor in India and the capabilities of microfinance.

We enter the home and sit on the floor. A girl in her early twenties is already sitting there with a baby in her arms. The mother of the house, Heera, comes in and sits down with us. Heera and her daughter-in-law make simple stoves out of tin. It takes her one day to make the stove. The raw material for one stove costs 40 rupees and then she sells them to someone that comes to collect them for 50 rupees. I am appalled that she could be getting so little for a day’s work of labor. I ask her if that is a fair price and she says she can get an additional five or ten rupees per stove if she sells them at the Sunday market. However, in an effort not to let the stoves build up and to get the money quickly, she often sells them to the middleman when he comes by.

Heera makes so little selling her stoves I question how she can survive and save anything. Her sons are carpenters, she explains, they receive decent wages. Heera says she likes to save with SEWA rather than keeping the money around the house because it keeps her family from taking it to spend on trivial things. It sounds to me like she knows something about financial planning, so does she have a pension account to plan for her future.

She says no, she doesn’t think she needs one because she does not want to stop working. She is adamant in that she would not want to just sit around and not contribute. I ask what will happen if she gets sick or too weak to work. She looks around at the large family that has filtered into the small room to watch the interview. Then I have my children to take care of me she says.

Heera says she has been with SEWA for 20 years but in those years she has only taken out one loan. I find this strange since many of the woman I have talked to have been with SEWA for much less time but have taken out up to 7 loans over the years. When she tells me that she could make the stoves much more quickly if she had the proper tools I am surprised. Isn’t that what SEWA loans are supposed to be for? To be invested in things like equipment, so that someone living in poverty can maximize the returns on their labor and climb out of poverty? “Why don’t you take out another loan to buy the materials? I asked. She told me she is trying to save now because she needs to have more in her savings account before she can take out a large loan for the tools. I write this down with a bit of frustration – I didn’t think this was the way microfinance was supposed to work, is this a SEWA thing? Something that happens when a microfinance bank gets large? A microfinance thing in general?

From Heera I walk away having a firmer understanding of the importance of family in the Indian culture, as well as a question or two about microfinance and SEWA. It may not be the interview I was looking for, but I am sure glad I didn’t cut it short.

The next home we go to is bigger, but as I soon found out, it had to be in order to accommodate the 16 people living there. Minakshi comes out into the front room to talk to us. Her slight frame is dressed in a simple salwar, she is 23 years old and a member of SEWA Bank. Behind her I notice two slightly older women. They stand out to me because unlike Minakshi they both have sheer scarves that they drape over their head and face. One of the women lifts her the scarf up a bit but does not remove it as she tries to encourage two toddlers to eat their food.

Minakshi sits down on the floor with us and begins to tell us about her large family. She stitches chindi blankets, as do some of the other women, her brother is a computer operator, and her father and uncle work as laborers for daily wages. Though there are a lot of mouths to feed, they are all doing something so they are able to save. Minakshi opened her pension account three years ago when SEWA first started offering it. She saves regularly and is excited to have the money as a cushion when she is older.

As she talks about the work she does as a chindi stitcher, it comes out that she went to nursing school and she used to have a job in a private hospital for 3 months. When I ask why her first response is that girls don’t work out of the house in her family so her mother made her stop. I am confused as to why she was allowed to for awhile and then had to stop. I wonder if it has something to do with a husband so I ask if she is married. She is married but for the time being she only sees him during Diwali. After two years of marriage she will go to live with his family. Then it will be up to her mother-in-law whether she can work out of the house.

I notice that the two women in the back casually pull their scarves back over their face. They had sat down next Minakshi and had let their scarves fall in the presence of just women. I look to the door and realize a man has come in with another woman. From the looks of things the family is not too strict about covering the face, but it is nonetheless something I am conscious of.

The other woman is older and seems to carry more clout than the rest. She is Minakshi’s mother, Nandu. As she sits down she tells us that she was at the school when her husband came and said there was someone from SEWA at her home and she should go talk to them. I assume that she came back because of her affection for SEWA and her desire to help them if they need her, but a small part of me wonders if she also wants to know what her daughter is saying.

Nandu has been a member with SEWA for thirteen years and saves regularly in a pension account. However, as is becoming a familiar answer, when I ask her if she wants to retire she says no. “I want to work, I can help my family more by working, I would be letting them down if I just sat and rested,” she says earnestly.

Then she tells us proudly that she has two daughters who work for SEWA. Now I am confused, why are they aloud to leave the home but Minakshi cannot? When I ask she tells me that no, she is not that rigid with her daughters but now that Minakshi is married her husband can call for her at any time. She would have to leave Ahmedabad immediately and that is too much uncertainty for a stable job in a hospital. I decide Nandu isn’t too bad but it is a crazy system for marriage that they have worked out here. I don’t have it all figured out, but lucky for me I am about to learn a least a little bit more.

The next home is much smaller, as is the family size. Sonal, age 25, welcomes us in and shows us the work she and her sister do. There steady work is to make party decorations. They use a sewing machine to sew small shiny triangles of paper onto a string to make that can be hung around a room as party decorations. She says they also do beading and embroidery work when someone comes to them with an order. Sonal’s brother is away from the home but he is earning well in an auto shop so they are able to save some. Her father used to work in a mill but now that they have almost all closed down he works for daily wages in a tailor shop. Her mother sells sweets and bananas right outside the house for extra income. As a family they make enough that they can put away some money in a savings account. The mother says she has no plans to retire, since she works from home she can do this work into her old age and she does not want to just sit around.

I realize that I am not going to find the perfect interview on pensions here but I am not starting to get curious about the marriage question so I ask Sonal if she is married. “I am working on that one now,” chimes in her mother who has come into the house from selling things outside. She tells us that she has already fixed up Sonal’s brother who is 21, but it is with someone who is 16 so they must wait two years till she is at the legal marrying age. As for Sonal, she will also get an arranged marriage, but she will be able to say whether or not she likes the person. My translator calls it “an arranged-love marriage,” but to me it doesn’t seem like their needs to be a lot of love, just not too much hate. I ask how they find someone for her to marry and her mother says they will have friends or relatives of their caste come to them and say they have a son or know a boy and then the families will set up a meeting.

As we leave Sonal’s home I am left to think about the fact that there are still arranged marriages and how closely many people pay attention to caste. Though the idea of the caste system in India is not new to me, I had expected that I would see only its remnants. I thought its effects on the culture today would be similar to the way in which the effects of slavery are still felt in the US. Until coming to India (I am slightly embarrassed to say) I had no idea just how important the caste system still is.

The last home of the day, further highlights present day aspects of (poorer) Indian culture that I had always thought of as being from “a time long ago.” We arrive to find four women, all of different ages, sitting outside their home working. One of the women looks to be quite old, my translator points it out to me. I think she is starting to hope even more than I do that I find the perfect interview so she can go home.

The three younger women, ranging from 18 to about 35 are sitting around a bag of scrap pieces. I quickly realize the scrap to be the rolley wheels of old office chairs. They are breaking apart the plastic wheel with hammers to get at the screws and metal pieces on the inside. As the pieces splinter off I worry for the safety of a three year old boy sitting only a few feet away and playing with a hammer.

I ask the youngest woman first how old she is, my original guess would have put her at about 15 but she says 18. When I ask if she was done with school she tells me she only went to school until fifth grade and then stopped to help work at home. Together the three women will be able to break apart the 30 kg bag of scrap in two days. Their income for this two-day task is 90 rupees (2.5 rupees per 1 kg).

The eldest woman, Ashu, is not breaking apart scrap but making a stove similar to the woman’s at the first home. She is over 60 years old, though she does not know her exact age. She says she has breathing problems, backaches, and pains in her hands from the many years of doing this type of manual labor, and yet she does not think about retiring. She will work for as long as she can, and she does not want to sit around and do nothing. She tells me that she has two sons who are carpenters that will support her if she gets too sick and weak to continue to work.

It is becoming clear to me that working is a way of life for many of these women. They work for their children and their families till they no longer can and then their children are expected to support them. In the family structures of the poor this works as long as a woman has sons. Sons bring their wives home to their family. Sons and daughters-in-law are responsible for supporting the eldest members of the family if they get to a point where they can no longer work. However, it is worth noting that I have not yet seen any women at that point and all the women I have talked to seem determined to keep working until they physically cannot any longer.

I left the outskirts of Ahmedabad and traveled back into the city with ideas and questions running through my head. Can SEWA be more effective? Will the pension scheme really be able to take hold? How quickly is Indian culture changing? Looking back on my day of interviews I am beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, they were magical after all

Breaking up scrap pieces

Ashu's Stove

June 29, 2009

My work here has not gone quite the way I expected it would, but of course I should have expected this. Throughout the first week I got a taste of SEWA’s many operations but all the while I was itching to know what my project was going to be, how would I be contributing. For this I needed to speak with Jayshree, the head of SEWA Bank. I had come in every day and asked her assistant if she would be available, “maybe in an hour, you wait there” and she would point to the couches. After I realized that it would never be an hour unless I got a confirmation from Jayshree that she would speak with me, I had someone send a note to her. “Dear Jayshreeben, when would be a good time to meet with you to discuss what work you would like from me?” “Ok, 4:00” was her response. It actually ended up being more like 4:30 but I didn’t mind, I was too excited that I finally had a project to work on!

SEWA has a new pension scheme as I had been learning all about, however what they wanted now was a platform for promoting pensions. My job, as Jayshree told me, would be to collect quotes and stories the women and try to create such a platform. The ideas, as I understood it, would be to talk to older, very poor women who had not had the pension scheme available to them. They would say things like “I cannot stop working, how would I live,” or “retirement, what is retirement?” or “I will work till I die, I cannot rest.” I expected to go out into the field and sit across for a tired woman, her back bent over from years of carrying heavy loads, her skin leathered from years in the hot sun. She would rub her feet and tell me sad stories with tired eyes. I would then document all of this in rich, gritty prose. The final message would be along the lines of, “though saving is hard now, your future is in your hands. Open a pension account with SEWA now and reward your body when you are too old to work comfortably.”

Well this was all lovely to think of, and if I meet a woman who fits that description maybe I’ll lift those lines from my blog, but as of now, no such luck. The day after meeting with Jayshree I went out in the field with a woman who was doing some loan and savings collections from some of SEWA’s members. She brought me to a relatively, but by no means extremely, poor Muslim neighborhood. All the women I spoke with were housewives; their husbands earned enough so that their labor services were not needed. They had SEWA pensions and they didn’t have to worry about whether the money that was going into the pension fund might be better spent to feed a hungry mouth. Ok sure, seeing another neighborhood was nice, but it wasn’t what I wanted. It’s only the first day, I told myself, tomorrow will be better.

The next day was Saturday, but since they work on Saturdays, I was in business. Into the bank I went, pen and paper in hand, ready for my fieldwork. Well, turns out no one goes out to do collections on Saturdays, it was ok though, there was a back up plan. Since many members also come into the bank to deposit money and open accounts I would just talk to some of them as they were waiting around. I interviewed over a dozen women, but for the most part they were not what I was looking for. These women were not particularly old and they were all capable of making it to the bank and opening new accounts. [The two most interesting interviews are below]

[Mumtaj is 42. She makes roti at home and sells them to a restaurant; her daily income is about 60 rupees. She has a savings account with SEWA already for herself but she is now opening a pension account for her daughter. Her daughter is 20 years old and the victim of polio. She cannot walk and has no education. The state will not give her handicapped daughter the support she needs so Mumtaj is setting aside money now. When I ask her why she does not open a pension account for herself she says she is working for her daughter, she does not care about her own life as long as her daughter is provided for.

“If I am opening an account in my daughter’s name, must I bring her here? I can’t carry her,” she asks the woman behind the desk at the bank. The woman smiles at her, no we will send a SEWA worker to your home to get her signature and all the details worked out.

Sima is 30 years old. She does stitching work and earns 1,200 rupees per month. She is divorced so this is her only income. She has a 4-year-old son, and two daughters, one in 8th grade and another in 5th grade. She has a pension account but when I ask her if she plans to retire she shakes her head, “I work for my children, I cannot think about sitting at home.” For her the appeal of the pension account was that she would get more back at the end. She says she is saving for children, for their marriage and education. She did not save before SEWA and she is very glad she is putting aside money now for her children. She saves around 100-300 rupees per month. She is getting some help from her brothers but she can’t say that they will help her daughters. Her ex-husband gives nothing in child support.]

Ok, so I didn’t have what I wanted yet, I was starting to realize field research is not as easy as I thought it was. Patience is not my strong suit and I wanted the results I was expecting. Of course any fool can see the problem with doing research and expecting/wanting specific results, and yet I refused to change my mindset. “Monday had better be better,” I thought to myself as I exited the bank Saturday late afternoon.

Today was Monday, so here begins the recount of today’s fieldwork. “Where are we going today,” I asked my translator as she, the SEWA worker, and I climbed into a rickshaw outside of the bank. “First to see a woman who works as a beautician,” she responded after asking the SEWA worker in Gujarati. As soon as we got there I could tell this wasn’t what I wanted. She was doing quite well for herself and had no problem saving money for a pension account. I could feel myself getting frustrated. Finally we left the beauticians home, and were off to another place.

As we drove through the city, I could see the scenery changing from nice, large stores with glass windows to small shacks. We were definitely getting farther from the center of the city. Then we turned onto a bumpy, sandy road.

The sides of the road were adorned with a thick expanse of garbage. Skinny bare-bottomed children stood on the edge of the piles, perhaps looking with trained eyes for a broken toy or some such hidden treasure. Buffalo and goats were littered around the piles of garbage, looking for something to eat. Ahmedabad has been dry for far too long, the monsoons that should have arrived two weeks ago still haven’t hit. The animals’ skinny haunches and naked ribs cried out for the monsoons that would make things grow again. As we got out of our rickshaw to talk to the women who lived in these parts, I realized these homes would probably quite different than the homes of other SEWA members I had seen to date.

The first woman we saw was Laidu, she is probably about 60 years old. The first thing I noticed about her were her earlobes. Her right earlobe looked as though it had been torn long ago by a heavy earring, two pieces of skin that had once been connected now just dangled off her ear. Her left earlobe, though still intact, had also seen the abuse of heavy jewelry. Her hearing hole was stretched so long that one could now fit half a hand through it. She has not had the easiest life, but once I began talking to her I realized she was probably one of the lucky ones.

Laidu lives with her son, daughter in law, and two grandchildren. She is a chindi stitcher, at the encouragement of her son. Up until 5 years ago she worked as a laborer doing construction work, but as she got older her son told her to stay at home. Her daughter-in-law, Saria introduced her to chindi stitching. The two of them work from home on the sewing machine they own. They buy the scraps of chindi fabric from a tailor in bulk. With one kilogram of chindi they can make one blanket in a day. The tailors sell the chindi for 8 rupees per kilogram. Laidu and Saria then sell their finished work to a middleman who pays 100 rupees for each chindi blanket. I know from reading a history of SEWA that, at least in the past, often the middlemen would give the women a very low price for their work. I ask the Saria if she feels this way and she says no, she is happy enough with the price he gives her because she is able to make a good profit on it and she is able to save.

Laidu and Saria are both SEWA members. They are thankful for SEWA, and have taken 7 loans.  I ask Saria why she likes SEWA. Her answer is simple but telling, “before SEWA if I needed money I had to go to other sources that would charge interest of 6% a month, SEWA charges only 1.5%. With SEWA I have a chance at repayment, with the other money lenders all I could ever do was make enough to pay back the interest charges.”

Though Laidu looks old to me, she says she will work as long as she can. However when she can no longer work she will have the fall back of her family. They are earning well enough to support her in her old age. Though I have yet to find my women who are not supported in their old age, I assume that not every poor woman has this cushion. I enjoyed listening to Laidu and her daughter-in-law, but I still don’t have the story I want, we move on to the next home.

The next few homes do not yield anything interesting. They are for the most part fairly young and able to save. They are getting in on the pension scheme early so they can take advantage when they are older. “I really want to talk to someone that has trouble saving, someone older,” I try to impress upon my translator.

The next house we go to belongs to a woman who has been having trouble repaying her loans and opened a pension account but does not put savings into it. Her name is Savita and she looks to be about 45, though she like many has no idea what her exact age is. She is a sweepstress, meaning she travels a long way to go to either offices or homes in need of sweeping. She must pay 20 rupees a day to get to work and back because the work is such a long distance from her home in the outskirts of Ahmedabad. She earns 1,500 rupees a month, she probably works a 6 day week and so makes about 60 rupees per day of work; after subtracting her transportation costs she is left with 40 rupees – less than the equivalent of 1 dollar. I ask her whether she saves money. She shakes her head no, “how can we, we have only four people working and 10 mouths to feed,” she says sadly. When asked if she will ever retire she says she will work for “as long as I have my arms and my legs.” Every bit of income is necessary to keep their family afloat.

We leave her home, the money that she owes on her loan has not been collected and no money has gone into savings. Perhaps she does not need the pension program as much as some but I know such programs are meant to help her and I wish there was a way she could take advantage. Savita may be luckier than some because she does have a large family that may be able to support her when she gets very old. Nonetheless it is important to impress upon women the importance of saving for their futures now. I am beginning to wonder if anything I write be able to do such a thing when saving isn’t just hard it’s near impossible. The interviews are starting to come, and yet the work ahead of me seems as tough as ever.

June 26, 2009

As most people reading this can attest to, I am a big city girl. Born and raised in New York City I feel comfortable walking city streets and darting across busy intersections. Or at least that’s what I thought until I got to Ahmedabad. I really thought I knew what traffic looked like, how it sounded, the general feel of it, as you probably know by now, I am about to tell you just how wrong I was.

My first day of work, Mirai and I went in by rickshaw. Without even looking out my open side of the vehicle I could tell it was different. The horns didn’t stop. It was a very terrible symphony of screeching. One group passing in front of you would stop and the ones behind and in front of you would start up. Motorcycles honked as they wove in and out of rickshaws, rickshaws did the same as they wove in and out of bigger cars, and the big cars knowing they were being passed honked to let you know that they were in fact still there and larger than everyone else. “They honk just to let everyone else know they are there,” Mirai told me as I took it all in. I guess that explains the words “horn – please – ok” painted on the backs of many of the trucks and rickshaws in Ahmedabad.

Ok so there are some horns, yeah its bad, but I can manage. What I didn’t realize is that the reason people use the horns so much is because they often don’t follow basic traffic laws. As I have already mentioned, on my first day Mirai sent me across the street in a rickshaw, rather than have me walk it. Since then, I have crossed alone, but seldom without fearing that I will be run over by an onslaught of motorcycles that decide to cross just after a pack of rickshaws have passed in the other direction.

As a native New Yorker I am starting to wonder if my breed has become too complacent in our jaywalking. In New York if you step off the curb at the right time with the right attitude, cars will stop for you. They don’t want to hit you and, perhaps more importantly for my story, they expect you. Sure they may curse at you or mumble rude things to their mothers sitting next to them, but at the end of the day their foot is poised, ready to make the switch to the brake. In Ahmedabad it is a different story because they are not expecting pedestrians.

Though it is a big city, Ahmedabad has very few sidewalks. Where sidewalks do exist they are more commonly used as a street peddlers home than a space for walking. It seems that during the day, the only people that engage in walking around the city are the very poor. Looking at the make-shift shelters that are created on the small bits of sidewalk and in small lots behind or next-to buildings, I wonder if the city government does not build more sidewalks in part because it does not want to create more spaces for the homeless to set up camp.

In my first few days here I began reading a book by the founder of SEWA, Ela Bhatt. She notes that when the rural poor make the trek into the city for employment opportunities the first thing they must contend with is finding a place to sleep. Bhat writes that this is “not an easy feat in cities where even sidewalks are spoken for.” I am still reeling from the implications of this statement.

June 25, 2009

Apparently it is the time of year for annual general meetings. Today it was the childcare cooperative’s turn. This meeting was much smaller than the other two I attended and took place in a large open room in the SEWA building, rather than across the street at the town hall. Rather than sit in chairs, the fifty or so women who run the child care centers of the cooperative sat cross legged in rows facing the front of the room. At the front sat Mirai, and a few of her colleagues. I had the good fortune of sitting next to Mirai, who was able to translate much of the meeting for me.

The first part of the meeting was about the accounting and the logistics of the child care centers. SEWA operates 29 centers for 970 poor children in and around Ahmedabad. The children in the centers receive healthy nutrition and are adequately cared for while their parents are at work. Of special note – the municipal government held a “healthy baby” competition and a child from the center got first place. This is truly a testament to the SEWA centers as the young child is from a working poor family and was competing against children from much wealthier households.

SEWA not only works hard to provide for the children of very poor families but it also is engaged in struggles with the government to get them to do more. In India the government must provide 100 days of employment for every person. SEWA has argued that they must also provide day care centers with the employment opportunities to ensure that people, especially working mothers, can take advantage of employment opportunities. SEWA won this fight and the new government is now working on a resolution to provide for more childcare centers. This is not however to say that SEWA’s interactions with the government have always been pleasant. SEWA used to operate almost 100 childcare centers but the government withdrew a large amount of funding and many centers had to be closed down.

SEWA’s fight for childcare centers is ongoing and central to poverty reduction, especially for women. Yesterday, after the meeting Mirai asked me to proofread an unfinished piece she and a colleague wrote on the importance of childcare services.  The reasons are obvious enough and yet governments do very little about it. Even in the U.S. many working class families cannot afford pre-kindergarten care for their children. This often forces the mother to stop working or shuffle children around to various family members. The effects on female employment can be devastating. This is further aggravated in poor countries where often the older children, especially daughters, are kept home from school to care for younger siblings. In the end I probably got more out of proofreading the paper than Mirai, but I did write down few small changes.

So now, in addition to joining up for a SEWA pension scheme I think I am ready to lead the crusade for more childcare centers, now when will I actually get started on the work I thought I was coming here to do?

Tuesday, June 23

While yesterday was the bank’s day to be busy, today was the insurance and health branch of SEWA’s turn. So this morning, rather than go with Mirai to her office I went straight over to the bank. The reasons for this were first, as I mentioned, Mirai was very busy, and second, I am hoping to actually work more closely with the bank operations. Today Maya’s plan was to follow around Pallavi ben (one of the bank’s workers), my plan was to tag along.

As has become somewhat common, I got to the bank and sat around for some time before Maya showed up and then we sat around for a while more until Pallavi was ready for us (note to self always carry a book). It wasn’t too bad, especially once Maya got there. She is going to be a senior in high school so we talked about applying to colleges, she is looking at small liberal arts so of course I raved about Haverford. Small world coincidence: last semester she was at The Mountain School with President Emerson’s daughter, though she didn’t know that Abby’s father was president of Haverford until we spoke about it. Ok, no more college talk, back to the couches in SEWA bank under the fans that make the heat slightly more bearable. So as I was really getting going talking about how much I love Haverford Pallavi came to collect us for our trip out into the field.

“Are we be going to see another presentations on the pension program?” I asked Maya. No we weren’t, we were going with Pallavi and two other women workers from the bank to where the street vendors set up in the middle of the city. The two other women that went with are loan/money collectors. It is often very costly for the women who borrow from SEWA to make the trip into the bank and this eats away at the amount they can pay back and save. Even if the trip would be feasible once a month, most of these women find it easiest to put away 100 rupees a week or even a few rupees a day rather than parting with a large sum at the end of the month. For this reason SEWA instead makes the trip to where the women work and collects from many people every day. Today I was along for the ride.

The street vendors come together to form the market called “Budrah” (this is all by sound, the spelling may be very wrong). Some vendors sold under tarps and umbrellas or in nooks in buildings, which meant there was some shade. Many others only had carts that they had set down where there was some room. One cart sold only safety pins; I wondered how his business was doing. In addition to the tarps and carts, a number of young children walked around with a box of things they were hoping to sell. One young boy tried to sell me stainless steel sponge pads, but, unsurprisingly, I had no use for them and had to decline.

We walked around the vendors and stopped by one every so often to collect an installment of a loan repayment or collect a savings deposit. The vendors all buy their merchandise wholesale and then sell it in Budruh to make a profit. The different vendors sold western clothes, hair clips, nail polish, jewelry, and of course one even sold safety pins. The money from the loans is commonly used to purchase more or better products from the wholesale source so that they can expand their business and increase their profits.

About 75% of SEWA’s members work as street vendors. The members have formed 108 active SEWA cooperatives. The cooperative maybe the vegetable vendor cooperative, a milk producers cooperative, and there is even a rag pickers or chindi stitcher cooperative. The last one I wasn’t sure about so I asked Maya (THANK YOU MAYA). In case you were wondering too, a rag picker is much as it sounds. The rag picker goes into heaps of garbage and finds bits and pieces of fabric. Then either the picker or a chindi sticher (I get the sense the it is the same person but I could be wrong) stitches all the small scraps of fabric into a chindi (type of scarf or shawl). I have not yet seen a chindi but I am hoping to. However knowing where it comes from makes me less likely to ever actually wear one.

From Budruh we took a rickshaw to Manekchok, another collection of street vendors. Unlike Budruh, Manekchok has vendors that sell vegetables, spices, and other edibles. Manekchok is also older and sells more traditional clothes and jewelry. A number of years ago, before Budruh was even in existence, the vendors at Manekchok were badly harassed by the police. Though the vendors had been selling there forever, the police were suddenly requiring that they have permits to sell their goods. SEWA got involved in the fight and thought it took many years and lots of paperwork, SEWA eventually got the vendors permits to sell there.

Both Budruh and Manekchok were very interesting but I was ready to go by the time we got in a rickshaw to head back to the bank. An hour of walking around in the noon day sun meant that I had already finished a liter of water and I had had beads of sweat trickling down my back practically since I stepped out of the bank. I have become a big fan of the rickshaw rides because their open nature means you get a decent breeze as you drive around at a speed that probably shouldn’t be legal considering the traffic.

Once back at SEWA Bank we stepped into an air-conditioned (yes I would like to draw attention the air-conditioned nature of the office) office to eat lunch. I have ordered my lunches to the bank, which means a lady cooks them at home and then someone else brings it in a tiffon (a type of lunch container) to the bank around 2. Lunch so far (the past 2 days) has been more roti (bread) than I can eat, dal, some sort of vegetable dish, and either rice or some yogurt. The yogurt today was the most sour yogurt I’ve ever had, I couldn’t have more than a small bite and I wonder if it is made directly from their cows milk. This however is just a small amount of what I will write about the food because as it is this post is getting rather long and Indian food deserves its own special post.

After lunch we sat around for a long time and the women talked so I didn’t understand anything. Maya translated bits and pieces but none of it was of particular importance and I didn’t want to press her to translate too much. She said they talked a lot about food or clothes with some bits of work talk mixed in. I also asked her for a list of some Gujarati words that I could learn just for every day use, I’m working on them now. Pani is water, that’s an important one for me because I go through the stuff quite quickly.

Eventually Pallavi, who had left the office after we ate, came back in to take us over to the town hall to see a bit of the insurance branch’s meeting. I don’t have too much to say about it in part because it was a smaller affair than yesterday’s, but more importantly because I didn’t have Mirai translating everything for me. Mirai of course was on stage at the center of everything. Hopefully I will talk to Mirai some tonight and ask her what exactly was going.

After everyone spoke I waited around some for Mirai to find out where I should go next, by this point it was about 5 pm. She said I could either go back to her office with her and wait about an hour to go home, or I could go back to her house with Maji, an old women who stays with her. Maji worked for Mirai when her twins were babies and she needed extra help with them. Now Maji still comes and stays the night at Mirai’s because it is more comfortable than her own home. She does some small chores like dishes and ironing but mostly I think it is Mirai’s kindness and compassion that keep Maji in the house.

I chose to go back with Maji by rickshaw rather than wait around. I hadn’t brought my book today or my computer because I knew I was going into the field, waiting around with nothing to do seemed less than appealing. Maji stopped a number of rickshaw drivers and asked their price and waved her hands in disgust at all of them. Maji speaks only Gujarati but I could infer what she was saying from her actions. When I tried to ask how much she held up her fingers, I think she was saying 10 or 15 rupees (which is about the price it should have been according to Mirai). All I could think of was getting back to the house and taking off my pants in favor of sorts. I of course was fine paying 10 or 15 rupees (about 15 cents) to get us home, Maji however would have none of it. We walked to the bus stop instead. My protests of “rickshaw, rickshaw” were futile, but in the end it was not a terrible experience and one worth having. Though a bit less convenient and comfortable than a rickshaw it was relatively painless. Before long I was back in Mirai’s home, in shorts, and with a fresh bottle of pani.

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