Quanta D: That is amazing stuff Beni. If you don’t mind my asking, some of us need to understand, why did you have to create an educational opportunity for women’s sanitary pads? Please continue.
Beni Ghale: Yeah, the people of the village areas, due to the many different caste of Nepal, girls and women have to leave the home from the very day they start their menstruation. So they have to stay away from the home when they have no education, no money and they will begin to work as prostitutes just to be able to get food. If she cannot go back to her family for help, it’s a big problem for her life. My point is, I’m going to each of these 7 villages each, teaching them about menstruation. Women should have the right to share our woman problems, we women have the right to respect our bodies and men have to understand sometimes they have to accept us and understand that menstruation is a natural process. So for that I am talking and I’m giving these programs and workshops to all of these people. And now in 2015, in my district of Dhading, I am going to be making the sanitary pads and teaching them how to make them out of good materials that are washable and durable.
Quanta D: Please excuse me Beni, just to be clear for your readers, how many people of 7 villages is Beni Handcrafts Pvt Lmtd providing work and resources to? How many people has this helped? I mean 7 villages worth of people seems like plenty of folks.
Beni Ghale: Yes please. Now it’s like 11 years of doing this.
Quanta D: 11 years?
Beni Ghale: Yes and we have trained 7 villages worth of women, of course all of the people need the work but I choose the ones with very weak economic condition with lots of children and lots of problems and then give them training and then work. So now we have trained 300 women crew from the 7 villages and we are able to continue the job for them. Now it is 115 women from the remote village areas and I am giving work to the prisoners in Nepal, one prison in my Dhading district and one prison in Kathmandu. We are going inside the prisons and giving them training, recycling materials, and then we let them make the bags and purses so that we can bring them here to Kathmandu for sale. That money from sale goes to these prisoners, their families come to receive the money that then goes to support the family and for their children’s education, so we are helping and connecting each other.
Quanta D: Oh my God.
Beni Ghale: So it is 1590 prisoners and 115 village women are working these jobs outside of the prison.
Quanta D: Wow. Well congratulations as that is a major accomplishment so far. This is definitely something you don’t just come across normally. What you and your people are doing is showing the power of true community. You all support each other to enhance each others lives and therefore your community. You are supporting each other with the necessary resources that come from a non-profit organization that does so much already. As you all are collecting trash, you then create beauty that is practical and from garbage, that alone is a big deal when we touch upon the global environmental headache that human garbage is. Please continue, Beni. We want to know more of your story as you’ve mentioned before that it will explain how you decided to do all of this with Steps Foundation Nepal and Beni Handcrafts.
Beni Ghale: Yes I have to say because all of the work comes from my life story, my life struggle. I wanted to do this because I wanted to help people because of my life. I have had lots of trouble in my life from fighting with a difficult society and culture. The women of the country have disadvantages within this country. This is a women-dominated country, like many foreign countries, so in fighting with society I always felt why can’t women get the right to speak, the right to do what we have the power of doing. So I at the age of 10 was married. It was my first marriage, arranged marriage by my parents because this is traditional culture in our area in Nepal. I have fought through 15 years of pain. I didn’t like it, I was in aching pain, screaming and crying and running away with no way to get solutions. But, for myself, I got a little bit of education, I decided for myself to go and learn. It’s a long story how I began my studies and what I’ve been through.
Quanta D: Excuse me, Beni, We are pretty interested in your story. Your hard work and efforts are beginning to get some more attention. You did mention that you were a Social Worker and it still looks like you are partly still in Social Work.
Beni Ghale: Yes, yes.
Quanta D: Of course, because what you do is Social Work even though you don’t get paid for doing it. So you were a Social Worker, a Midwife, give us a little more on your educational background.
Beni Ghale: Yes, so one year I joined a governmental program with some organization. I forget the name but I had to go nightly to study for 1 year, 8pm-10pm. I went for writing in Nepali education. And then I got a chance to go for Natural Health Child-Care training through the government, and then I worked 5 years in the villages being a Midwife, helping the women in Nepal rural areas, the 7 villages. I was helping them during the child-birth, I helped the women deliver more than 40 children in different areas in Nepal when I was working there.
