My Viva Equip trip to India

There’s nothing quite like your first experience of India. The combination of muggy heat, exotic spices and petrol fumes hit me almost as soon as I stepped off the plane a few weeks ago. It was my first trip to India, and I didn’t quite know what to expect.

I had travelled out to Delhi to teach the co-ordinators of three of our city-wide networks (in Delhi, Dehradun and Hyderabad) how to run Viva Equip Projects in their respective cities, using Viva’s Quality Improvement System.

I was a little intimidated before we began, as I was training five men, but they were such a lovely group that after about five minutes I felt completely at home with them. Our time flew by, and their enthusiasm was so encouraging - there seems such a hunger and thirst for quality care in India.

Running for Their Lives

Remember this? “Imagine walking down an alley in the red light district of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city – filled with brothels, karaoke bars and massage parlours. Lined up on each doorstep are countless pairs of shoes belonging to the women forced to work inside. Looking closer you can see that a sickening number of these shoes are very small, belonging to the little girls who are either being raised by prostitutes or have been forced to become sex workers themselves.”

Viva posted that back in May. But long before that my heart was broken by the hundreds of thousands of girls in Cambodia who are in this exact situation. I don’t even want to imagine it. But child sexual exploitation in Cambodia is something the world can’t avoid imagining. We need to be confronted with it, address it, end it, and then help to heal the girls who have gone through it.

You voted for it: Raising the Status of India's Girls

It's official... educating Indian women is the best way to release them from the dangers and discrimination that accompany their low status.  At least, that's the popular choice of our readers:

93% voted for educating women,

7% thought creating quotas in the workplace would raise their status,

And none of our clever readers thought banning the dowry would do much at all.

You're right.  The dowry - a bride price, paid by the bride's family to the groom or his parents, often extracted through blackmail just before the wedding - has been banned in India for years.  But it's still a widespread practice, entrenching the societal belief that girls are just burdens to be born (or killed before birth).  Read our blog on the topic for more information.  The problem is so bad that more than 5000 women are killed by their husbands or in-laws every year, because the bride's family can no longer afford to pay them off.

Growing Girls in India

Growing up in India can be hard, especially if you’re part of a large family. But in my experience, it’s nearly impossible for girls growing up in India to become the women they want to be. I was born and raised in Andhra Pradesh, a state on the south eastern coast of India. My family was Catholic – in a state where 90% of the people are Hindu and 8% are Muslim! But the culture of mistreating girls pervades everywhere in India, even into Catholic homes.

I know that if I hadn’t fought hard for my education, I would have ended up married off right after secondary school, living in a village in Andhra Pradesh with a husband I didn’t love. This is real life for the vast majority of Indian women. In fact, in India today nearly half of the women who are now between 20 and 24 years old were married before they turned 18. That’s our modern generation!

MDG's Part 4: Gender Equality

If I’m totally honest, I’ve often thought of gender equality with a yawn and a roll of my eyes. (I’m a woman, so that’s kind of allowed!) It reminds me of militant bra-waving feminism, and in my own experience I’ve never been discriminated against for my gender, so it’s just never been an issue. But as I’ve looked into it further, I’ve discovered that ‘Promoting Gender Equality and Empowering Women’ is actually a one of the most important Millennium Development Goals to strive for.

In western nations women are pretty much free from oppression. But if you take a look at countries such as India and Nepal, or throughout the Middle East, you see that there is still much work to be done. In India for example the culture of paying a dowry still exists (a ‘bride-price’ paid to the groom by the girl’s family, either money or goods) and it is taking the lives of thousands of women each year – millions if you count unborn girls.