What is tailoring training?
Panchhu and Sarmila
It is a project of opportunity for illiterate or inadequately educated ladies to receive a skill to generate income and be supportive for their family rather than being dependent on them.
Why is this?
When a family awaits news of a new birth, they want to hear it’s a boy rather than a girl. As soon as they hear it’s a girl a sense of unexplainable sorrow moves in the air.
Generally this is the case with most of the families unless they had difficulty in conceiving or already have a boy. The reason behind this is the gender discrimination that exists in this culture for a very long time. We have a patriarchal society. Families tend to have sons to carry on the family name.
This may sound simple but its consequences have a huge impact on women’s lives. First they get no education, compelled to spend their entire lives around household chores or go to government school while boys go for quality education which leads them to well paid jobs in the future. This is leading many women to have early marriage, work in dance bar, low self esteem, physical, verbal and sexual abuse, working abroad with a lot of risk, discrimination in every area and so on.
ACC believes if we support girls for their education and train young women to be skilful and provide an opportunity for mothers to have income, we can help women from the bitter truth of discrimination from birth to death-bed. Having this in heart, ACC started this project to empower ladies to be independent.
What is going on?
We are providing sewing training to 16 ladies at the moment, two hours on two shifts, five days a week. We have Panchhu and Sarmila working for us as tutors who are also not educated ladies but have the skill and want to help women like themselves.
Once a year we have planned to give away three sewing machines for the best students with which they can start their own tailoring shop and make a very good income.
How it all started
ACC had this desire to help poor women for some years. Surprisingly one of ACC’s friend asked about the possibility of bringing three ladies here to help out with training. So we welcomed Pat Capp, Lesley Brookman and Kay Shortland in October 2017.
They landed here and trained our 13 ladies for gift items making. Not only that they helped us to set up the training centre by buying nine sewing machines, raising funds for the training hall and a little shop. Now we are carrying it on and making this shop independent soon. Lesley and Pat have supported our two trainers and one marketing person. Thank you so much for this!
How can you help in this?
- Pray for the ladies
- Give one-time gift to extend the training
- Sponsor a tutor who can teach our trainers some advanced course
- Buy our gift items
Thank you!