While working with the women and girls from the empowerment project in Jodhpur for some time now, I was always wondering about the men in their families. I thought with a little effort we could do a little difference in their lives and having in my mind that any tiny drop leaves stain, therefore I thought by finding out a way to approach these men by doing a little workshop we could make some change.
Men in the Dalit community should know what we are, what we do and the safe environment that we provide to their mothers, sisters and daughters.

Whenever I came across women with issue, most of it involved their men, whether they were sons, brothers or fathers, and I was always requested to go and speak to the men creating troubles.

It was these men who would stop sending the girls to the project, scared of us, thinking of what we were teaching that was making girls strong inside outside. One application came from Ms. Becky Moyce from the UK to volunteer with us, where she wanted to conduct photography lessons for our girls and also by handing out cameras, so that the girls could build their self esteem by making pictures they wanted. I thought this could be something that the family men of our Jodhpur project participants would like to do also. I asked the Jodhpur project participants that from the 27th of April we will conduct a photography workshop for boys related to them from 6.00pm till 7.00pm. We have about 21 boys now, Meera’s sons, Saraswati’s sons, Monica’s brother and so on.

We have in between decided to take workshops related to HIV/AIDS (none of them knew what it was), and Dalit rights (none of them knew some rights for Dalit people existed).

The photography workshop has been quite a success, we have given a lot of other information to these boys on sex/health/basic general knowledge for day to day life. I was told by one of them that most of these boys cannot believe some information, such as we gave, related to life existed or if someone will ever talk to them about it. We were able to bring the boys out of the many myths they had related to health, hygiene and sexual behaviors.

The workshop for the boys will last till 18th of May when we will do an exhibition and display pictures taken by boys and girls who participated in the photography workshop of Ms. Moyce. We will also prize the best male and female photographer of Sambhali.

Our Sambhali workshop boys' age range from 14 to 23 years and none of them go to school, some have a little or no education, all work for living.

I asked them to bring me a letter, one page each, to give me background on their life, it is shocking, sad and unbelievable what they went and go through.

Read Ms. Becky Moyce report about the boy class photography workshop!