Pomegranates are awesome and other stories

One of the many stray dogs that live around Freeset is a gorgeous little black labradorish mongrel puppy named Charlie. Sometimes he'll wander in the gates of the Freeset factory and sleep under the pallets (sp?) that all the jute sits on. But Sarah won't let me keep him.

On Thursday, the tee-shirt part of Freeset started the move into the new building and production started today. This I think is a great move, as the factory was getting too big, and the communities which were so strong when freeset was smaller have struggled with the growing numbers. The move was quite funny - the women all stuck in to scrape off hundreds of years of paint and dirt (Sarah is exaggerating with 'hundreds' but probably 50 wouldn't be far off), scrub the floors and windows, and set up their work spaces. They enjoyed it and all sorts of hilarious things were happening - water got everywhere, they all joked around, John had a large bucket of water emptied on him while he was filming the process. Fortunately the camera was spared - I only hope that it happened before, not after, mopping.

In terms of our work, Sarah's been settling in to her design work well - bag mockups, brochures and communications, screen layouts for printing keeping her busy. John (the other designer here, who used to work for TV3 and Campbell Live) will be away for 6 months of the year so Sarah will be taking on more then. He is also meant to be making promotional videos at the moment (he did the documentary some of you have watched).

And I've started working on the screen printing training programme. It will be an interesting beast to co-ordinate given the language barrier, but I expect my Bangla learning will accelerate, if only because it'll have no choice. Other challenges will be that many of the women have had few educational opportunities, and hence some of them (especially the older ones, who are less likely to have had a decent education) have few literacy, numeracy and problem solving skills. It's just occurred to me that what I'm working on, for some of the women, will represent a significant chunk of their life's education - quite a humbling/scary thought. Wish me luck!

The plan is to teach all of the women in the screen printing department all of the major skills required. At the moment what's happening is we have a few specialists in each of these elements of the process. There are also a few women who were recruited recently, and they're currently handling the more menial tasks until I get a training programme sorted for them. Their current work can't be the most stimulating job in the world, but still better than the alternative, obviously.

The immediate outcome will hopefully be increased productivity, which in turn means that Freeset can do more for the women in terms of wages and other support. And it's also an empowerment thing. Being better at their work will hopefully improve the women's self-confidence, and of course it also increases our ability to give the women positions of leadership. This is obviously something Freeset wants to do as much as possible, but conversely, handing someone a responsibility they're unprepared for is doing no one a favour. If all of the women who work in printing are given the chance to learn all of the skills, then the more able women will develop a fairly comprehensive understanding of the overall process. Hopefully one day when Rakesh decides to move on, one of the women will be able to take over his job.

We have just moved back to Kalighat (Karl and Lyn's soon-to-be-old place) for a few weeks. Nice to have a place to ourselves (not having to feel like guests all the time), but the trip home is quite tough (long and crowded) after a long day, so we don't have much time or energy for anything else in our days!

Food is ridiculously cheap here. Sarah and I went out for dinner last week and had amazing curries and ice-cream, costing a total of NZ$7. Egg rolls (pancakey eggy things with sauce and veges in it) for dinner cost 12 rupees from the place around the corner from freeset. That is about 15cents NZ. They're super yummy. However we're not so keen on the places on the footpath - we will often see dozens of flies on the food; children are plonked up on the surface where the food is prepared at times, and children and adults use it for sleeping on during the heat of the day.

It has cooled down a bit (we sometimes get down to 29 degrees overnight!) which is great. We still manage to be drenched in sweat from about 10 in the morning.

We are struggling with how to deal with beggars. They are not everywhere as we were lead to believe, but you wouldn't usually walk more than about five minutes without seeing one. And in centre city (such as it is) they are everywhere, often kids pulling on your umbrella, waling beside you pleading in mainly English that they have learnt. There are so many issues with giving in this way that it is hard to process.

It seems easy to give something, but we're always concerned that we'll be supporting one of the begging rackets (where a criminal enslaves children to beg for them) - not sure how common these are but it's definitely a reality. Also, are we disempowering these people? (but then extreme poverty is pretty disempowering too - how do you weigh that up?). Suggestions anyone?

All the best,

Sarah and Tim

NB: sorry forgot about the pomegranate story - will update you next time