Bhadvasia Sewing Center- Stitches of Change

Bhadvasia, is a slum area in the Northwestern city of Jodhpur, India. Jodhpur, located in the sweltering Thar Desert, is the second largest city in the state of Rajasthan, the most conservative and underdeveloped state in India. With minimal educational opportunities, the women and girls of Bhadvasia are powerless in the face of the many social, economic, and health hardships that burden their everyday lives. Forced to cope with the reality of their desperate livelihoods, many of the women secretly enlist in the sex trade as a means of income. Sex work, or offering sex for money, incites a multitude of issues that further bind the women, their families, and their communities to the cycle of poverty and disease. To address the many economic and social struggles forcing these women and girls into commercialized sex, I am currently designing a program to implement sewing trainings in the communities. In collaboration with a small local NGO, Gram Vikas Seva Santhan, the sewing training will lesson the reliance on sex work for the support of women’s families. Their current dependence on sex work to put food on the table sentences them to a fate of physical and social affliction. Not only does sex work increase the vulnerability of the women and their families to the transmission of HIV and other STIs, but also it perpetuates gender inequality and violence within the already hierarchical community. I want to support the women of Bhadvasia as they stitch their way to a disease free life of social and economic empowerment. The short term effects of the project range from providing the women a sense of community within the trainings to allowing them to experience a feeling of accomplishment. In the long term, this skill development is a vessel for empowerment, health, and social well-being for futures to come.