Field Site 03
Each encounter here is one conversation with one woman - members of self-help groups in a village in rural Rajasthan, interviewed as part of research on women's micro-enterprise. The stories are not averaged or combined. They are placed beside each other. All names and identifying details have been changed.
Encounters
Participant 01
Cosmetics & variety shop
A shop built into the front room of her house, stocked by season, tracked in a notebook. Her husband drove trucks and was away most of the time. She taught herself everything - the accounts, the online payments, the scooty. For twelve years the village knew her by her father-in-law's name. It no longer does.
Begin ->Participant 03
Clothing shop & self-help group
A shop built rung by rung - Rs 5 of threading work, then blouses, then jewelry, then cloth, then this. Seventeen, eighteen years in a sasural that controlled her food, her books, her body during pregnancies. "Kabhi udaas ho ke nahi baithi." She never sat in sadness. She says it like a fact from a report.
Begin ->Participant 02
Domestic work & tailoring
A rented room, two children, twelve hours of cooking work a day plus blouse stitching at home. Her husband has been gone for eight years. The community organizer found her before that, when there was no money and a child had been burned. Eight years ago she wanted to die. She says it like a fact from a report. And then she says: badhiya hai.
Begin ->Participant 05
Candle-making & loan facilitation
A business named after her daughter, who was one month old at the time of this interview. Of twenty women in the candle-making training, she was the only one who kept going. The day she ran away from Bundi — tenth class, sixteen years old — was the first time she and her husband had ever seen each other in person.
Begin ->Participant 04
Day-care worker & ration supplier
Five years running a daycare for construction workers' children — best record among four centers. Then a savings fraud took four lakhs of her own money and her mother's retirement. A year without leaving the house. Cancer now. She goes to field at seven. "Meri atma gawahi nahi deti." Her conscience will not let her call the debt someone else's.
Begin ->Participant 06
Field work & Nagar Nigam
Five years teaching women in Girwa block. When her organisation was photographing those women for salary records without teaching them anything, she said so — directly, in writing, to everyone. She was let go without a letter, a certificate, or her salary. She goes to Khatu Shyam ji on the eleventh of every month. She has not gone in two months. She is testing God.
Begin ->Participant 07
Embroidery & SHG leadership
Three times she did the work under other people's names — their account, then her hand. The fourth time she registered under her own name. Eight to ten self-help groups, two hundred women, ten meetings a month. Nobody stood by her. She stopped sharing her problems after the first couple of times. It no longer makes any difference to her what anyone says.
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