By Kate Wallace, 1/21/2015. When I went to interview Kristin Braddock, founder of NGO Sew New Futures, I was prepared with a list of questions to ask her in my notebook. But I knew exactly what I wanted to ask first: How on earth did a girl who grew up in the middle of Manhattan end up working full time in a rural area in India for 5 years? When I heard about Kristin I was very interested in her story and her work with the Perna caste in a rural area outside of Delhi. I have seen many foreigners coming to India for business purposes and to find themselves, but this is the first person I’ve met who moved here to do good for the Indian local people. Within the first five minutes Kristin clarified that she is “not here to white saviour this country,” but rather hopes to empower the Indian women she works with. Her goal with Sew New Futures is to create a self sustaining program run by Indian people for Indian people. Sew New Futures is an NGO that teaches women who are forced into prostitution by their in-laws how to sew so they have other means to support their family. Kristin takes the women’s sewing work and sells it in New York, and then brings the money back to the women.
Sew New Futures works primarily with the Perna caste in a village in Harriana. This caste is at the bottom of the bottom; they are very poor. When development happened their livelihood disappeared and they had to find a new means of supporting their family. The women are married off at 14-15 years old for 50,000 to 300,000 rupees. After they have their first child at 15 or 16 they are then forced to work the money off through prostitution. The husbands act as their pimps, bringing them to other areas to meet with clients. Additional research told me that women will sleep with up to 5 johns a night on a good night, for as little as 3 dollars a person. Kristin says that back at the village the men assume the traditional husband role, and are very protective over their women.
Sew New Futures is responsive to what the community needs. The centre gives the women 2500 rupees during training so they have enough money to give to their families. They also give them commission on every sellable item they produce. The women are able to bring their children to the centre where the children receive an informal education so that they don’t have to grow up to be prostitutes. Further research told me that unless the children are equipped with alternate ways of making money, traditionally will have to marry at a young age and become prostitutes. The women have expressed that they do not want their daughters to have to become prostitutes, but the same time do not put a priority on education because they have other things to worry about. Between the program giving women a new form of income and pushing education on the kids, they hope to break the vicious cycle in this caste.
Kristin was working unhappily at a desk job in New York, doing the same thing every day. Wake up, go to work, go to the gym, go home to boyfriend, go to bed, repeat. She decided to take a year off and (despite her parents disapproval) go to Africa to work with an NGO there, but decided to go to India for 6 months before the program started. 5 years later and she is still here. She started working with an unnamed NGO in India that ran a very similar program to Sew New Futures. The only difference: the women weren’t really getting any of the money. This is a common story I’ve heard from people working at NGO’s in India. The system is very corrupt and the money never ends up where it’s supposed to. When Kristin worked here she had to drag women out of the house to come and be a part of the program because while the women were learning how to sew for their families, it didn’t help them at all financially. Now at Sew New Futures Kristin has a long waiting list and women are getting the money they have worked for.
When asked about the effects of globalization on India Kristin gave me a very different perspective from previous people I’ve interviewed. I usually hear the story that increased tourism and global business moving to India is positive for the Indian local people because it brings needed social change and money to the country. Kristin says she has seen a huge increase in foreigners in India in the last 5 years and has some strong opinions about gentrification in India. We met at a cafe in the popular area Hauz Khas village. She explained that all of the restaurants and bars around there were illegal and we were in what was supposed to be a residential area. The restaurants and bars are affecting peoples homes. They are fire hazards, loud, and they dump in the river thus the pollution in the area has become very bad. Hauz Khas is right next to a slum, and as the it expands people from the slum are being dislocated and losing their homes. Slums are self sustaining economies, when people come and try to move them or change things it messes everything up. Kristin told me the story of a woman who lived under a tree. Developers came into the area to try to redesign it to sell apartments to expats. The woman would not move from her tree, so they offered to put her up in an apartment for a year. She refused, because she said “what would happen to me after a year? I would leave and my tree would be gone.” The tree was her home. Everyone knew it was her tree, the police nearby knew her and looked out for her there and she was protected there. This is an unusual story in the sense that she was even offered an apartment, other research has told me that usually people are just forced to move and find somewhere else. So far in my interviews people are supportive of tourism and globalization but I’ve only been getting one half of the story. It’s hard to get the negative effects globalization has on the poorer population of India because they don’t have a voice. Kristin said that the problem is tourists come here to party and do their eat pray love journey, and don’t think about others. The only positive thing they bring in is money, but tourism money isn’t sustainable because then you are always relying on other countries to survive. She says jokingly, “India attracts a bunch of weirdos.” People come here to find themselves, but it is a hard place to be and a large number of foreigners have mental break downs. She said there was a mental hospital that received 100 foreign patients in a year. There is also an issue around cultural sensitivity. She went to a music festival a few weeks ago where there were foreign girls running around in sparkly bras and found it disrespectful, saying “yes it is a music festival, but you’re still in India.”
We talked briefly about the issues of racism and homophobia in India. Being gay was illegal here because Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code makes sex with persons of the same gender punishable by law. This law was held to be unconstitutional in 2009 and being gay was made legal, but then was again overturned in 2013 and now it is illegal again. Kristin has a friend who is gay and married to a women, but he has lovers on the side and lives in fear of his parents finding out because they will literally kill him. Racism against African-Americans is something that shocked me while I was here and we discussed how historically it doesn’t even make sense. She told me the story of how her friend from Kenya came to visit her and her landlord wouldn’t let her friend stay in the apartment because she was black. White privilege is also dominant in society and something we both experience everyday here. She told the story of how she took one of the women at the centre and her child to the hospital. The hospital was so overcrowded they couldn’t get seen by a doctor, and the kid died in the waiting room. Kristin went up to the doctors and started screaming at them, and they apologized saying if they knew the kid was with a foreigner they would have been seen sooner. Kristin couldn’t believe it, saying “how can you do that, he was one of your own people?” Race and wealth are valued very highly in Indian society, if you are a wealthy white person you get more privileges than I ever could have imagined.
There is one main issue with healthcare in India: accessibility. This means financial accessibility, literally being able to get to the hospital and the issue of begin able to get seen by a doctor. Private hospitals are very, very expensive for the average Indian and even public hospitals cost money which if often out of reach for the poorer population in the country. Kristin says that in the rural area where she works people often can’t afford to even get to the hospital, which means that everyday things often go unchecked, then all of a sudden you have a kid with a fever who dies. There is some financial support from the government but government health schemes are hard to understand. She explains that while AIIMS hospital has a worldwide reputation but is too busy and chaotic so they have very bad patient care. The doctors are good but it’s impossible to get seen, and the nurses aren’t good enough to ensure good patient care. Kristin suffers from chronic migraines and also got and treated cancer while she was here. She goes to private hospitals and said she found a good doctor off of google. She doesn’t have insurance and pays out of pocket, but her doctor does a good job of finding her cheaper medications that work just as well.
I am going to go to the Sew New Futures centre in a week to meet some of the women and observe their work. I was very inspired by Kristin today and the idea of foreigners coming to do more than just party or make money, and also not coming with this notion of being “India’s white saviour.”