Sambhali Trust in August 2010

Some Pictures from August:
-The 6 Sans Frontiers groups of August visiting Setrawa village projects.
-Sambhali Trust Collaboration with the local Government on Breast feeding week
-Starting of Balwaadi Project for street kids
-Graduates visited me on the festival of Rakhi


Below pictures of our new initiative Sambhali Baalwadi, we have started to work with some street kids, malnourished babies in Jodhpur. This picture below is from their home and a place where they live and sleep.

Ms. Sarla, Tutor for Sambhali Baalwadi Project!!

Sambhali Sheerni Micro- Finance project meeting for forming group no.4,5 and 6





Pictures above for the cultural exchange program between Sambhali Setrawa Empowerment center and Sans Frontiers groups


Pictures above from the collaboration program on breast feeding awareness with the local Government , department of child welfare. 2nd August
Graduates for the festival Rakhi
Moon in the courtyard of Durag niwas

Sambhali Boutique
Went to circus one day with family





Pictures above taken from the roof of Durag Niwas


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Maren Deerberg – Kiel, Germany – Volunteering time: July 16^th – October 16^th 2010

First impressions

When I arrived at Durag Niwas Guesthouse 10 days ago, Govind and his wife Mukta gave me such a warm and nice welcome. From the first moment I have been feeling very welcome and comfortable. Govind’s family , the other volunteers, the girls, women and teachers from Sambhali Trust make me feel at home. I feel settled and I’m looking forward to my three months of volunteering!

I’m overwhelmed with impressions. Everything is so different, but I’m getting used to it…

It seems, that my body still needs some time to get used to the climate, the food and the time difference. Beside that, I really love the Indian food, especially the vegetables made by Mukta.

Last week it was my first time teaching basic English at Payal Sewing Centre. I really enjoyed it. All the girls were looking at me with eyes wide open and listened attentively to me. They kept on repeating the words I taught and still wanted to keep going after the lesson was over.

For the next two weeks I will do some cultural activities with the girls. On Saturday we started singing and today we did some drawing. I enjoy the time with the girls and women very much. Especially when I’m unhappy or homesick, they make me feel better. Even with just a smile smile, they give me so much warmth.

I also have to write reports about some projects of Sambhali Trust. I am a bit worried about this because all the other volunteers are native speakers in English. But I hope after some time I will get used to it and be fluent in spoken and written English.

When I was walking in the city for the first time, I was kind of uncertain about how to behave. I felt like everyone is starring at me and keep asking me: “What’s your name?” “Where are you from?”. This is kind of nice because people are interested in me, but on the other hand I’m not used to it at all. I will see how it will be the next times.

I summary, I’m content about my decision to volunteer at Sambhali Trust. I’m looking forward to my time here in Jodhpur. Even if there are some moments I don’t feel well, the next moment I’m more than happy to be here. I think it may take some more time to become accustomed to the Indian way of live.

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Final impression of Ms.Malia Lee Hunt

Final Report

These two months have been packed full of surprises, bonding, learning experiences, and more, but have also been very efficient in the realms of work. Looking back, I am happy to say that I have accomplished a lot! I began my stay here by going daily to the JodhpurEmpowerment Center as well as the Payal Empowerment Center. Over this time, I had the opportunity to teach a bit of English, and make friends with a lot of Sambhali’s members and teachers. After a while, I began brainstorming about what initiatives I could take to help with sustainability of the NGO. For this reason, with Govind’s approval, I began using my mornings to work on multiple projects, and by three I would go to the Payal Empowerment Center to continue bonding with some of the girls and women we hope to empower.

The first project I worked on was to recruit volunteers from top ranking universities such as UC Berkeley, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and a few others. I contacted heads of departments such as Gender and Women’s Studies, Ethic Studies, and other various departments where I thought there would be parties interested in volunteering with Sambhali. To the heads of departments I asked that they send out on their list serves an email I constructed about the benefit of volunteering with Sambhali, and the need of NGO’s like this in Jodhpur. When I finished this project, I began gathering data to construct a workshop on sexual and domestic violence. I collected laws, a sample workshop, personal problems our students are facing via anonymous statements, and other research tools that will be helpful to do this. In the future, a volunteer I will complete this workshop with the information I have gathered.

In addition to these tasks, I have also interviewed (with the help of other volunteers and three teachers/translators), twenty five of our students on their lives and views of best ways to empower women and gain independence. As a follow up measure and for comparable data, I created a survey about empowerment and independence, and demographic information, and have distributed and collected this from forty-nine students. This couldn’t have been possible without one of our most precious teachers and translators, Simmi. Next, I made a series of graphs with the data collected from the surveys about women’s want for employment and lack thereof, household size of our participants with shockingly high numbers of people per room, and English capabilities. I put all of the other data from the surveys into a excel spreadsheet so future volunteers could make their own graphs that will be most appropriate for the projects they are working on such as report writing. There have been a number of other projects I have worked on that I have not listed above, but the ones provided I feel are the most helpful and useful for sustainability of the NGO.

While talking about sustainability, I must note what I have spent most of my remaining time doing while with Sambhali. Over the past month I have written four grant proposals to solicit funding for four of our projects. The projects I have written my proposals for are the Jodhpur Empowerment Center, Payal Empowerment Center, Setrawa Empowerment Center, and the Sambhali Boutique. The amount of work I put into these proposals is immeasurable. I spent most of my waking hours working on them to produce an outcome that I hope will generate a source of funding for Sambhali. In these proposals I used much of the data I collected from the surveys and interviews, and information from a tremendous amount of documents I have gathered or been given about Sambhali.

While writing the proposals, I still managed to make it to the Payal Empowerment Center Although these proposals were a lot of work, and I had little time other that at the Payal Empowerment Center to spend with people I cherish, I value every minute I spent working on them. While writing them, thoughts of all of Sambhali students were on my mind, thoughts of their potential, their will to learn, their need for empowerment, and their drive to make this happen. Sambhali offers to them a means of reaching this will, and funding makes Sambhali possible. For this reason, these proposals meant a great deal to me, just as every single one of our members do. In close, these two months have been an incredible amount of work, but they also have been constant with joy, with closeness, and with knowing that after enough time and work, empowerment can be possible. It will be possible; it is. mostly every day to keep my connection strong with our students.