Ladies : Are You Global Girlfriends?

Last month I saw this book perched on the 'new books' shelf in the High School library and the blurb below the title riveted me." Global Girlfriends : How one Mom made it her business to help women in poverty worldwide". I thought of my own mother immediately and I pulled down the book for a closer look. What I read in the synopsis interested me enough to get the book home. Call it a coincidence, but a few days after I had finished reading this book and was mulling over writing about it, I got a message from an adult lady student of mine from India. Someone had posted an update on What's Aap' about Mother's Day and she wanted to know whether this occasion was around the corner. If it was so, she said, she wanted me to write about my mother who had taken her under her wing and was helping her to stand on her feet and use her innate talents to be her own person. She said she wanted to write herself but could not find the words! I assured her Mother's Day was on the second Sunday in May and thought no more about it, though, of course, finding words is never an issue with me!
Gradually the idea dawned on me that since the first person who had come to mind while just catching a glimpse of this book was my mother, this was a good way to link and broadcast what she does to a wider audience with the fond hope that at least a couple of people would feel like emulating her and strive to make a difference in the lives of those less fortunate. This way I could fulfil her protegee's wish as well as make people aware of how the concept of 'Global Girlfriends' works, as outlined in the book.
The author Stacy Edgar talks about how she started a retailing business in the United States where she purchases and imports goods made by women and ONLY women in poor or developing countries, at a fair price and then urges well off women to choose to buy these items as gifts or for personal use, instead of making the rich brand owners simply richer. She makes no bones of the fact that hers is a commercial enterprise but by buying these goods you are surely making a difference to someone, somewhere around the world while giving in to your own baser instincts of shop, shop, shop, till you drop! Her idea is that money in a women's pocket ALWAYS means food in her child's belly, books in his or her school bag, clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet. The same cannot be said for men from the lower economic strata, who, specially in India, are known to squander the whole fortnight's salary on locally brewed liquor, while the starving children wait patiently at home and finally doze off on an empty stomach.
My mother, in her own, almost all adulthood long personal crusade, to empower women and improve their lives, has made no commercial gains but has managed, nevertheless,to make a difference in the lives of many women, not globally of course, but surely and steadily, in her own ambit. The roots of this desire to help women lie in what she saw her own father do, when she herself was very young. With a freshly minted Master Of Business Administration degree from the United States Of America, he returned to India and landed a job to manage a huge coffee plantation in the southern part of India in the very early 1950s. He saw labourers drinking away their weekly wages and then stipulated that all women coffee pickers would be paid their own wages as well as a part of their husband's wages. The women would then make a weekly trip to the nearest small town to stock up on groceries with all that money, so that their children need not go to bed hungry at night, He would even organize a vehicle to take them back and forth, often leaving the drunken husbands with their teeth gnashing. But he remained firm and this soon became a standard policy on the estate.
And so my mother always taught us to buy vegetables and fruits only from a lady vendor in the market while pointing out clearly how the profits would surely be used, every single house help has had her own personal savings account opened the minute she started working for us and all those lady sales women who used to frequent housing societies in those days of a Mall (and mall rats) free India never left without at least a small purchase being made by her. The daughters of all the house helps we have had over the years have been coached for free by my mother and have been encouraged to go to college by my parents and they have often chipped in financially and still do, all because educating a women means empowering her for life. Then she is no longer dependant on a drunk man who thinks nothing of thrashing her up.
My mother used to hunt out organizations which sold goods made solely by destitute and dependant women and then buy things and food items from those shops and spread the word too while gifting that particular item, so that others, like me, could follow suit. Every drop in the ocean counts and what seems like a negligible amount to the more fortunate among us, often means a month's supply of food on the table for a poor family. To get a clearer idea of what I am trying to say, just compare your own grocery bill with the salary you pay your house help if you live in Asia or Africa.
 On a wider scale, she passes on her own puppet and cloth toy making skills by partnering with  various organizations which help women. She teaches these women free of cost so that they can make such goods and sell them to schools and other institutions and thus ensures that they have some money to meet their own and their children's basic needs. She has even roped in many of her friends to collect scraps of cloth from sympathetic tailors, which are then sent off to these women so that they do not even have to invest in cloth to make puppets, patchwork baby sheets and soft toys. Tribal women in a rural part of my home state walk out with a fully clothed new born baby thanks to my mother and her group of friends painstakingly stitching baby clothes and baby sheets and dispatching them in copious quantities because they believe having clothes on your back is a necessity, not a luxury, right from the time you are born! No global reach, but an urban / rural one for sure!
For my own part, I, too, try my best to buy only from women vendors at the Masai Markets in Nairobi and all the gifts that I carry home to India are completely Kenyan and preferably made by women, which is exactly the premise of the book 'global Girlfriends'. My vegetable lady and my fruit lady are women who are sending children and grandchildren to school. I am buying what I need but at the same time it is also helping to feed a tiny mouth! When I buy gifts in India to get back to Kenya, I ensure I do it from small women entrepreneurs, who in turn, are buying from women who are making many of those things at home to supplement the family income! Now my children's teachers know why they get so many different types on purses and bags made of rich Indian fabric every year during teacher appreciation week!  So now you can see why the book 'Global Girlfriends'  struck a deep chord within me! You don't have to be a global girlfriend, start by being the friendly neighbourhood one... If we do not stand up for our own ilk, who will? Not the men, that's for sure! (With apologies to my husband and to my father who have supported us in every endeavour of ours, no matter how crazy it may have seemed to begin with!)

My latest purchases from the Masai Market here will go to Singapore as gifts for my niece's teachers. So my sister ended up making a global girlfriend in Kenya by asking me to buy these! The joy on the lady's face when I bought not just a couple, but a handful.... One small raindrop starts a flood! So Global Girlfriends, let's begin now.