Rescued Childhoods and Support to Succeed
by Anne Kelleher
Nearly 15 years ago, when Pooja joined a group of girls traveling from the village of Setrawa to Sambhali Trust’s first Boarding Home in Jodhpur, she was in fourth grade but couldn’t read Hindi or English. Today she is the only educated person in her family, and her goal is to be a teacher to help others along the same path. Sambhali Trust now runs three Boarding Homes that allow girls and young women born into poverty to attend quality schools and build bright futures. For some of the girls, the Boarding Homes offer their only chance to have a childhood.
Pooja in Fourth Grade
Pooja today
In the communities that Sambhali serves, many families consider education for girls to be a waste of time and money. Whatever limited resources are available are devoted to educating boys. Even families that want to educate girls hesitate because getting to school often requires long walks on dangerous roads. As a result, only 1 in 10 women in these communities have even a middle school education. Almost three-quarters are illiterate.
Instead, girls often are treated as little adults and put to work helping to feed and care for their families. They work in fields or care for younger siblings, and they are forced into early, arranged marriages. When married, they go to live with in-laws where their roles as caretakers and providers continue and expand. Frequently, they become trapped in abusive situations, never having had the opportunity to develop their talents and choose their futures.
The Sambhali Boarding Home program grew organically from the success of earlier programs. Women who sought vocational training at the Empowerment Centers brought their children, for whom the Primary Education Centers were established. This taste of quality education led parents to seek even more for their daughters—enough that they were willing to entrust them to the first Boarding Home, which opened in 2012 with a second following in 2017.
Priya
Once Priya, the oldest Boarding Home girl, finished secondary school, she asked if she could go on to college, something few girls had even dreamed of doing. When other girls graduated and wanted to follow in her footsteps, a third Boarding Home was established for college and graduate students. The homes for the younger students have a cook and a live-in housemother who is aided in looking after the girls’ emotional and physical health by staff throughout Sambhali’s holistic suite of programs. Six afternoons a week, tutors work with the girls on all their school subjects and address academic challenges.
Workshops on topics such as health and puberty, gender-based violence, legal rights, and self-esteem and leadership are popular with the girls, as are enrichment classes in self-defense, computers, and sewing.
The girls pursuing higher education take care of their own daily needs. Sambhali’s support includes academic and career counseling.
Original Boarding Home girls as college students.
Currently, 72 primary and secondary girls and 14 college and graduate students are in the Boarding Home program. The cost of everything from private school tuition and school supplies to clothes and food breaks down to the equivalent of roughly $1,000 per year per girl—the cost in the U.S. of a modern smartphone.
The younger Boarding Home girls now aspire to follow in Priya’s footsteps and go to college, as do many in the Boarding Home girls’ villages and neighborhoods. There are many more girls who would like to join Sambhali’s Boarding Homes than current funding allows, and many more families who see the power and promise of educating their daughters.
In the Sambhali Boarding Homes, girls dance, they play, they dream, they learn to take care of themselves and others, they study and explore their interests, they make friends who are like sisters, they become responsible, independent adults, but not before first having a childhood.