Village Maroof Dahri is situated in taluka Shahdadpur District Sanghar. In this village mostly people are dependant upon agriculture. The literacy rate is 50% in male and 10% females. In this village Safwco intervened during the year 1997 and village development Organization formed in the same year. While step wise activities began and the activists started to participate in the trainings imparted and arranged by safwco. In addition to all other capacity building trainings paralegal training was also organized for the activists through which they got knowledge about basic legal issues like Nikah nama, FIR etc.

Bashir Dahri, Secretary of the VDO and para legal activist told that his village community is now completely sensitized regarding the legal rights especially of women and such a committee has been constituted under VDO to keep a watch on human rights violations. The training initiative taken by Safwco has enabled and actually empowered the activists to keep a vigil on the violations. Bashir is now acting as foremost activist and a local resource person on para legal awareness. Commemorating an even that occurred in his village he shared that:

“In my village an unwanted event took place in the year 2003 when a person divorced to his wife and he did not pay to her “due amount” called Haq Mahar which is obligated by Islamic law on male member while he is getting divorce from his wife. As Safwco organized para legal trainings there fore we were aware from the basic rights. I, myself took this issue very seriously and discussed at village level that all villagers put social pressure on the person that he must pay to his divorced wife her due amount as haq mahar. The matter was continuing for quite some time but the VDO members did not loose heart and continued its efforts of mobilizing the person (husband) to agree on paying “haq Mahar” to her wife and be ready for legal process. At the continued insistence and pressure by the community the husband agreed to pay the due of Rs. 25,000/- to her ex-wife.

Bashir is very jubilant and confident at the skills he has gotten through this awareness and training. “Now we won’t let any male to deprive women their due rights”, he shares with a firm determination.

Your Cannot Keep a good Woman Down

There are two persons inside my body in equal measure: a man and a women, says 40 years old Saleemat, sitting cross legged on a charpai with her back resting against the mud plastered wall and her head cocked proudly to one side. A pair of goats browsers in her dusty courtyard in front and behind her; an electric fan churns the air in a room corwded with a bedstead, two charpai's, a large steel cupboard and a television. There is no one in the room and I ask her daughter to switch off the fan but Saleemat says not to worry, for she makes enough to pay her electricity bill without difficulty. Having spent an hour and a half with her in her home in village Solangi abad, 12 kilometers from Shahdadpur on the road to Sanghar, I know it is rare to meet a person with such unflagging energy and resolve to fight the odds.

Born in a sharecropper’s household, Saleemat knew little else besides griddling poverty and was virtually raised under the burning southern sun either assisting her family in the wheat harvest or picking cotton. While in her teens, she was wedded to a man who despite being a go good deal better off than her family, led a directionless life like most young rural men of that social class. An idler was someone Saleemat could simply not put up with an so she left him shortly after her wedding to return to her parents home and cotton picking. The man followed her there and, an understanding was reached, for she worked the cotton fields to pay for his schooling. As the years unfolded, Saleemat saw him through his twelve grades. It was now time for him to seek a government position that he south with some deal.

Then she left him a second time but when she returned to him after almost a year she had saved 5000 rupees. By this time four of her six children had been born and thinking of their future she kept half her earnings aside. Saddled with the responsibility of paying for her sons’ schooling, Saleemat returned to daily labour in the fields.

One day as Saleemat walked home from the fields one day, she paused to chat with the sunflower seed seller who, thinking her merely another curious customer, told her all about roasting them with salt and sand. At home, Saleemat did a little arithmetic and was surprised to discover the large ratio of profit in the business of roasted sunflower seeds. Procuring 10 kilograms of the seeds, she told the landowner on whose farm she worked that she would thenceforth be putting in only half a day’s work. Returning home early, she roasted her supply of seeds, portioned them out into packets of 100 grams each, set tem out on a tray and sat in the street outside her home. Within two hours she was done with her days’ work. “One kilogram of uncooked seeds costs 16 rupees and I sold my lot of 10 kilograms for five hundred rupees,” she says to illustrate the ratio of profit. And so that became her routine; half a day in the fields and the remaining roasting and selling sunflower seeds.

In 1991, Saleemat came into contact with the field staff Safwco and began attending their meetings in nearby Shahdadpur. For the first time, she says, she learnt about saving and began pulling away part of her earnings until she had a respectable amount in the kitty. Adding that to the money raised by her husband from selling a block of inherited agricultural lands, Saleemat leased a mango orchard for 100,000 rupees. That year off season rains destroyed her mangoes and with them her husband’s hopes. Overcome with despondency, Saleemat did not loose heart and started an other enterprise of selling potato cutlets through which she earned a sizable amount every day.

Recognizing her incredible talent as art entrepreneur, Safwco offered her a loan of 2000 rupees, Saleemat had already sorted out the use for this amount and soon set up a village candy store in one room of her home. During the first half of the day when her husband was at work, Saleemat would mind the counter selling sweets, paper, boiled chickpeas and sundry tidbits favoured by children.

Business was good and before the year was out saleemat had not only repaid her debts, to Safwco, her lifestyle had also improved considerably. Come 1998 she got another loan, this time of 5000 rupees, and did what she had always wanted to do: She made her candy store into a provisions retail business. This was even better, profits slowed in steadily and before the year was out Saleemat had repaid her second loan. Seeing traders purchasing raw cotton put yet another idea in Saleemat’s head during the same year and she purchased a Imd of the fibre to store in her provisions shop. With genuine pride she tells of the profit of 50,000 rupees she earned from that trade. Consequently she has kept at it and nearly doubled her trading income by dealing in both wheat and cotton.

Meanwhile, in 1999 safwco came into contact with the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF) the only indigenous donor agency in Pakistan. This partnership led to Safwco receiving a funding of 2,000,000 rupees for its credit program that had since changed the lives of so many in lower Sindh. One among these fortunate people is Saleemat who borrowed 10,000 rupees in April 2001.

Throwing in an equal amount from her kitty Saleemat purchased a deep freezer just as summer was setting in. When the heat turned the landscape around Solangi abad a burnt out half tone, Saleemat became the first seller of manufactured ice cream, ice and goal sanda in her village.

Saleemat makes no secret of her wretched, poverty stricken past or of her present success. “We were so poor we had no furniture in our house, no education, no good cloths to wear. And we had never tasted chicken. Now I have educated my husband and two sons to the 12th grade and the rest of the children are in school. We eat good food and have everything we need,” she says, She also toys with the idea of moving her family to the city” so that the younger children get the best education.” There she hopes to own a pacca house with a lintel above her head instead of the wattle and mud roof that she till maintains in the village. Such then are the dreams of Saleemat who is woman and man in equal measures.