Fortune in bottles
 

Lamps burn brightly within the walls of the small, otherwise gloomy, mud hut. Seven people – six males and a female – sit there melting glass bars in the heat of the lamp fire. Within the magic of their deft hand, the bars turn into delicate small bottles for homeopathic medicines.

Parina, the only female, around, is thoroughly engrossed in her work: she has to make 14,400 bottles before the week turns, from where she can pocket in a profit of Tk 1,000.

“I can’t slacken my work place”, Parina says without looking up. “Because I don’t want to go back 10 years – back to the dark days of being a widow.”

After the death of her husband, Parina and her four children were left penniless. She had no way of survival other than work as domestic help for one meal a day.

“Then one day I tried to get enrolled in the RMP work and luck favored me.” “I can’t forget the day I got the job”, she recalls.

“With my first wage, I bough a chicken and had a feast with my children after a long time. I put aside from whatever small amount I earned and soon had enough to buy a cow”.

When the RMP work term ended her son advised her to set up a homeopathic bottle-making factory. The son learnt the skill from a neighboring village factory. “I thought: Why not. It could be a good venture,” relates Parina. “So I spent my savings on this factory”.

In the beginning, she went to the market with her products, but her son has now taken the burden off her shoulder.

As her business flourished, Parina appointed six workers on weekly basis. She bought 15 katha of land, more cows and goats, and built her own house. Inside her home, a television, a showcase, beds and chairs vouch for her prosperity.

“I am now a well-respected person in the village. My masters, those who engaged me as a maid, now call me to village arbitrations.”

The RMP has changed the course of Prina’s world, but she wants to push even further on her own.



My trade as a hawker is now quite accepted in the village
 
Parveena slides the bad off her shoulder in the courtyard, while eager men and women gather around her. She fishes out saris and trousers, T-shirt and blouses. Villagers check on the price. Two of them buy a sari and a T-shirt.
She slings the bag over her shoulder again and sets out for the next neighborhood. A typical evening for the hawker woman.

Married off when only in class seven, Parveena was expected to lead a housewife’s life.

“But my in-law tortured me everyday for dowry,” she says. “One day, my husband kicked me out. I was carrying my second child. My in-laws did not let me take my two-year-old son along.”

Her days of hardship began, and she worked as a maid from her mother’s home. Sometimes she stitched kantha. In the meantime, she gave birth to her second child.

“I was desperate for money,” she says. “Then I came to know about the RMP and applied for a job. When I got it, I was relieved.” While working on road maintenance, she received training in business management.

With her savings from the RMP pay, Parveen bought 3 kantha of land for Tk 15,000 and leased 1.5 bighas.

This year she earned Tk 34,000 from the paddy she grew. Parveena also took the job of a cook at a local NGO for Tk 900 a month. She bought three cow and five goats too. She turned her mother’s tin-shed into a brick structure.

With her savings and entrepreneurship Parveena thought of a new venture. She bought some bangles, hairclips, and hair bands and started selling them to the villagers. She became a hawker woman, ignoring the initial disapproval of some villagers.

Today, she goes to the town alone to but the goods and sells them in the afternoons after her RMP work. She rakes up a sale of Tk 2,500 a week and makes a profit of Tk 300.

Parveena now sends both her sons to school. She never returned to her husband, and she bears the children’s education cost. “My trade as a hawker is now quite accepted in the village,” Parveena says proudly. “They don’t have to go to town, I bring the town to them!”

 

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