I have been out in the field the last couple of weeks with our partners in The Philippines and India. As Chairman of the Board of Trustees, I believe it is important to understand well what we are actually doing with our women clients to solve the problem of chronic hunger in a sustainable way. I also wanted to understand our follow-up and measurement systems so that we can fulfill our commitment to ourselves and donors to have an effective tracking system in place for our results.This week I participated in two focus group sessions in the village of Gangodanga Para in West Bengal, India. Our initiative, Reach India, has been conducting sessions called “Learning Conversations” for groups of adolescent girls and their mothers. Read more …
Freedom from Hunger serves the rural poor. The poorest of the poor. This week I came to understand what that means.
I met a mother, Fula Devi, who had lost two children, one to a cold. She was in such deep despair, so full of sadness, that she could not recall for us one example of even a small joy in her life. The closest she came was to say, “When I go to my group, I am happy. We laugh and share the stories of our lives. I can depend on them to help me when I have an emergency. And then I walk home with my sadness.” Fula was describing her experience attending a savings-based self-help group established by one of Reach India’s partner organizations. This newly formed group has only begun to receive the much-needed education to accompany their savings—a combination that has met great success in other regions of India. But as a brand new group, such successes have yet to be seen.
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Tomorrow, we depart India to return to the U.S. This brief visit has revealed to us the struggles and hopes the women here face. We have seen a side of India that only a program field visit could offer. Despite the prior knowledge that we would be traveling to one of India’s poorest regions, Bihar, no statistics could have prepared us for our visits with women who are at the front lines of the daily battle against chronic hunger and poverty.In the rural, agricultural landscape of deeply impoverished Bihar, I met Vimla Devi. Although Vimla could not tell me her age, or the age of her children, there was a number that she knew quite well: two. Not long ago, Vimla lost two of her children to a devastating disease in her village-malaria. Vimla and her family have very little to eat-they are lucky when their two daily meals of rice are accompanied by a few vegetables. About four times a month, she forgoes her meals altogether so that her children can eat. As an added struggle, one that is difficult to overstate, Vimla and the entire village belong to what was once a caste of “untouchables” in India. This caste system and its cultural stigmas still very much persist and will take a long time to eradicate. Read more …
Village of Bandali Bigha,
27 miles and 2½ hours from Patna, Bihar, India
February 12, 2008
My name is Christopher Hest, and I head up the external affairs team at Freedom from Hunger. I am traveling in India with colleagues to step into one of our new programs, Reach, in deeply poor rural areas of West Bengal and Bihar. Our interactions with villagers have been profound, and I find myself feeling sad, frustrated, and angry that life for so many is so staggeringly difficult. The most enduring emotion, however, has been hopefulness, because in addition to the warmth and pure grace of these impoverished women I have been moved by Reach’s Service Center Trainers. Read more …
I’m Sean Kline, the Director of Reach Global, writing to you from Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India.
As I write, more than a billion people struggle in poverty that goes beyond a lack of money. These resourceful and resilient people live in poor health, are malnourished, have high maternal and child mortality rates, and suffer from low self-esteem, lack of knowledge, and short life expectancy. Poverty is a cycle that is too often passed from one generation to the next.
But there is hope. Reach is Freedom from Hunger’s innovation that equips millions of poor, rural women and their families to address these fundamental life challenges head on by delivering non-formal education that enables them to improve their livelihoods, secure more and better food, and make informed choices about family planning, business, health, and use of financial services.
Imagine a poor woman needing access to savings and education of the kind I just described. Now imagine just one of the many thousands of local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) working in rural areas across India whose staffs are capable and eager to transfer these lifesaving skills and knowledge to millions of such women.
If a woman can turn to the NGO for such resources, to whom can the NGO turn? The answer is Reach, a “social business” that is creating a totally new way to reach poor women and the NGOs that serve them.
Some of my colleagues have joined me in India and will be blogging over the next few days as they travel to some of the poorest communities in India—places like rural Bihar—to see firsthand what Reach, local NGOs and, most importantly, resilient women can do to end hunger for good.
I invite you to follow, ask questions, and comment on my colleagues’ blogs.
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