Poverty is an attitude, some people say. A failure to conceive of the long-term.
What if your life was an endless vista of sales that you never had the cash for? You’d stock up, if you could, at those bargain prices. But you can’t. So everything costs you three times as much as those middle-class folks pay.
Poor people need money yesterday. Poor women, in particular, needed it last week.
Many programs designed to lift women out of poverty concentrate on long-range goals: empowerment, education and all that.
Poor women, too often, can’t afford such luxuries. They need income. Now.
More specifically — they need a means of earning money suitable to their present circumstances.
In 2000, during a visit to in-laws in a very conservative area of Pakistan where women’s lives are supposedly far more constricted than here, I founded The Zarghoona Women’s Center.
Our program, focused on the most impoverished women and girls, combined literacy and vocational skills, and gave them a practical means of contributing to family income without needing to leave their homes, or their street. We trained them in tailoring and fancy needlework arts.
Some of them were able to start home-based businesses, sewing for relatives and neighbors.
But even if they couldn’t market their talents to others, their newly-acquired skills had a positive impact on their households’ budgets. Everyone needs clothes, which are a considerable, ongoing expense for poor, often large, families. Money saved on such purchases can go toward food, toward medicine. A mother able to sew her children’s school uniforms has eliminated or reduced a major barrier to sending them to school. A woman — mother, sister, daughter or daughter-in-law — who brings tangible, measurable value to the household begins to earn respect, and other people start to pay attention to her voice. Start to grant her the right to make her own choices.
The New York Times obituary for Esther Ocloo, a Ghanaian-born pioneer of micro-lending for women, quoted her as saying: “Women must know that the strongest power in the world is economic power. … You cannot go and be begging to your husband for every little thing, but at the moment, that’s what the majority of our women do.”
That’s there, you say. We’re here.
What keeps poor women here from exploring entrepreneurial talents or outside employment? A lack of seed money or marketable skills; a lack of affordable, reliable child care; a lack of affordable, reliable transportation. And perhaps the lack of a cooperative partner or family.
Just like there.
Furthermore, the regulations governing our welfare programs often make it difficult for women to seek financial independence in creative or alternative ways.
There have been experiments in private enterprise tapping the potential of women interested in working from home. Deva Lifewear, a now-defunct catalog company, contracted out piecework to skilled seamstresses in the upper Midwest.
What if you don’t want to work for someone else? What if you can’t commit to a set number of hours, or piecework output? What if you just need to resolve a current situation of financial instability, so you can move forward? What if you need to discover you’ve got more in you than anyone else has ever seen, acknowledged or encouraged?
Here in the Upper Valley, we have great need and great tangible and intangible wealth. We have older generations with many talents, and younger generations who could benefit from the transfer of skills.
We have social welfare organizations already deeply involved in seeking solutions for what seem to be intractable problems. We have a tradition of volunteerism.
Why don’t we bring all this treasure together in a very practical way?
Here are some suggestions:
How about starting a demonstration project on turning cast-offs from Listen into hot, vibrant, even cutting-edge fashions? How about starting a lending library of refurbished sewing machines so that women can work from home? How about getting local merchants to showcase what women in such a program have made?
How about introducing unemployed or under-employed men to the joy of knitting? Turning it into a competitive sport? Explaining to them what a hand-knitted sweater can fetch on the retail market in New York or Boston?
How about proving to the youngest mothers and fathers that they have the inner resources to be excellent parents? That even a drop-out with undiagnosed dyslexia can “read” a picture book to his or her toddler? That natural story-telling gifts are a signpost to other, as yet-undiscovered abilities?
When people are enabled to unlock their own creative talents — gifts they often think they don’t have — remarkable things happen. They begin to find many other strengths within themselves, too.
I saw that over there.
And — people are the same all over. They really are.
Sarah Crysl Akhtar lives in Lebanon.