May 7th, 11:42 am
The trip from mumbai to jamkhed was a relatively simple though it was long (about 7 hours). My first morning, I was chatting with some of the staff when I was pulled into an adolescent girls program.
The purposes of these groups are to bring girls at still an impressionable age for morale building, health / life instruction, and socializing with others from their village in an outside setting (CRHP campus). The day's topic was gender roles. During the course of the 7 hour day, they have approx 6 - 8 activity/lesson plan with the goal of getting the point across. One activity involved bringing an "alien" to the group called Jadoo who comes to earth wanting to learn, "What are males?" and "What are females" and what do each respective group do? The girl running the course thought this would be a good time to bring me in, so she gave me some big sunglasses and headphones (think hipster jadoo) and sent me in. There were some snickers, but i honestly think the girls were more scared as i probably look close to jadoo anyways. They then role played what each gender did therefore some of the girls were males and were miming farming and playing cricket, while others were females and were sweeping, cooking, and cutting crops. The class went on and the girls were essentially challenged whether doing this traditional roles was the only option for them.
They were then provided stories of strong women in history including Chand Bibi and Ahilyabai Holkar. (worth looking up as I had no idea of their stories)
One exercise involved the girls closing their eyes and thinking, if I were a boy, what would I play? What would I be when I grow up? To the first question, most girls provided sports such as tennis, cricket, field hockey, basketball, soccer, etc. Essentially any and all sports as girls commonly don't play any sport here. Regarding future plans, a mixture of answers were given including police, doctor, lawyer, etc.
To cap it off, the girls sang a song together. The essential gist of the song provided to me by one of the social workers, was that a girl was singing to her mother, and telling her the special relationship they have and that boys and girls are the same, and if anything, girls are even better because they maintain the home AND work in the fields. Wise words indeed.
There are more stories than space to tell about all of them right now, but I'll go ahead and put up the pictures. Most won't make sense, but I'll try explaining with captions.
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