Final Impression, March 2010
Ms. Franziska Schmidt


When I look back at the time as a volunteer at Sambhali Trust, I think about a lot of beautiful and overwhelming moments with the girls and women in the Jodhpur Project and the Payal Sewing Centre, the staff of the Sambhali Trust team and the great people I met in the Guest House. I remember smiling and laughing faces, strong women that cope with their often difficult lives, powerful and brave. I also learnt a lot about the Indian culture and the role of women in it. Sometimes it made me sad to see all those smart girls and women willing to learn, but because of their family situation and the attitude of the men in their families, lag behind their possibilities.

But Sambhali offers the girls a real chance to change their situation, to get an education and to earn their living with the handicrafts they learn to do. In addition to that I realized that it is already empowerment to give the girls the opportunity to spend time without their families and that it makes all the participants so much stronger to be in a group of women without a man around them. They find space where they can talk about their problems and issues without fear and they support each other and also find support through Sambhali if they need it.

During the time I was volunteering I taught Basic English in both centers and prepared and took a few workshops. However after two months teaching, Nora, Natalie and I decided, that it doesn’t make much sense to teach English through volunteers, because most of the volunteers don’t speak Hindi and teaching a foreign language which you can’t explain in a proper way is difficult and doesn’t give the benefit to the girls it should have. In addition to that, we noticed that we didn’t get enough time to prepare and create the workshops, because we needed a lot of time to prepare the lessons. So we decided that we would suggest Govind Singh Rathore, to try and find a local English teacher, immediate actions were taken and Ms. Simmi Singh was employed as the new English teacher of Sambhali Trust. Almost immediately she had a great connection to the girls and they learnt more in the first week than I was able to teach them in two months!

So in the last month my duties and responsibilities changed. I was doing more writing, like preparing a folder for the next volunteers including the workshops we did, material for English lessons and a list with pictures of all the participants. Together with the teachers and Govind we worked new timetables out to give a little more structure into both projects.

By writing the statements of a few girls in the Payal Sewing Centre I learnt more about their lives, their hopes and dreams. I also started teaching the beginners in the Payal Sewing Centre, whilst Semmi taught the advanced girls that I taught before. It was great to see the progress the women and girls made. In the beginning they were not able to write the ABC but they loved writing and every time I came in they sat there with the pencils in their hands eager to learn. I tried to learn Hindi while they tried to learn English and we always had a lot of fun by joking and learning. In the end they were able to write their name and to introduce themselves and it was so nice to see how proud and satisfied they were.

To say good bye is hard and I know I will miss all the great people I met a lot. I will never forget the girls and women, the teachers, Govind, Mukta, their son Ayush, Corinne and the staff at Durag Niwas. I learnt more than I could imagine before about India, this amazing, colorful country and the people that live here – and also about myself.