TO A SIDEWALK
A visit to the Byculla Mahila Milan in the heart of Bombay
Who can forget her first trip into India - into Bombay, it’s
teeming mercantile capitol, and into Byculla, right in the gritty,
overcrowded, clamorous heart of the city?
For the connoisseur of the THWACK, India has immense and boundless shock
value.
Here are some telegraphic impressions from a Thai visitor to the Mahila
Milan ’s Area Resource Centre at Byculla.
First the street kids pick you up at the airport in their
Citibank-donated taxi. They are grown up now, and driving so fast,
nothing to do with rules!
Collecting daily savings with Shehnaz, in the early morning.
People on her street live in 3-square metre "bed-houses" on
the street. The feet of sleeping people stick out of these tiny
shelters.
Men bathe in the gutter, babies play under parked taxis and women roll
out chapattis and pound spices.
And that food! They way they mash it all together on a steel plate,
and scoop it up with their hand.
Shit even on the sidewalks - Shehnaz says, "Watch out for those
bombs!"
How can people survive like this! We’ve seen the pictures, we’ve
heard the stories, we’ve read the statistics, but nothing - nothing! -
can prepare us for the shock of Byculla, of Bombay, of India!
Even tough people like us, who live and work in poor communities are
shocked when they come here.
In Thailand, we get awed by Klong Toey, Thailand’s largest slum, with
6,000 families. That’s nothing at all in Bombay. Jockin explains about
federating the RSDF or doing the survey, and everything is reckoned in hundreds
of workers, thousands of families, millions of poor
people!
The scale of everything here is staggering, the scale of filth, the
scale of poverty.
But underneath all this, there is this women’s savings collective,
this federation which has got so much going - building thousands of
houses, hundreds of toilets, saving millions of rupees. It’s a
little mechanism in all this big scale, but it’s working! It’s
healthy, alive, growing.
Book keeping back in the Byculla office, in the garage out behind an
old municipal dispensary. So many people here, all in different groups
do different things, all sitting on the floor in one small room - making
payments, taking loans, counting money, filling ledgers, rubbing feet,
combing hair, gossiping, arguing, sleeping.
The phone rings all the time. Sadak Chaap kids wrestle outside, women
slap each other on the back. Glasses of sweet tea are handed around.
Women pavement dwellers come and go with so much confidence - it’s so
plain to see.
This is their place - you can feel it, it’s not like the
offices you visit in other projects - these women are the ones asking
you questions,
"Do you have savings schemes in your country?"
