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Postcard from India   
When CEDPA’s Senior Technical Advisor for Reproductive Health and HIV/AIDS, Laurette Cucuzza, visited the Barmer district in Rajasthan, India, she met newly trained youth educator Rupa Choudhary. Rupa was attending a workshop to train her in using CEDPA’s Choose a Future! curriculum, which teaches adolescents about issues and options in their lives, how to set goals and make healthy decisions. Facilitating Change in Barmer March 11, 2008—Rupa Choudhary, dressed in a bright red and green traditional “lehenga choli", is a petite woman of 30 with gentle brown eyes, a brilliant smile and the lovely chiseled features common to the people of this region. I met Rupa while visiting CEDPA’s “Child, Maternal and Reproductive Health Awareness Initiative” (CMH), funded by and in partnership with Cairn and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in the desert region of western Rajasthan, India. The project is promoting child and reproductive health awareness and education in 32 villages in Barmer, Rajasthan. CMH particularly focuses on women’s health in the community, and builds on existing health programs for HIV prevention with truckers and their helpers in Barmer.  Rupa was attending a CEDPA Youth Facilitators’ Training of Trainers, where she learned how to implement the Choose a Future! curriculum for adolescent girls and boys in her community. She heard about the project while working as “Sahaika”, or helper, at the government run Anganwadi Center, which provides nutritious food to needy children in the area. In her work there, she had many adolescents approach her with questions that she found she could not answer, about their bodies, feelings, and growing up. Rupa’s life is typical for this sparsely populated, arid land. She lives in a hamlet with her extended family (her husband, two children, a mother-in-law, sister-in-law and her five children). Her husband is a farmer, but in this drought-prone area, he often leaves his family in search of work in other places. Several of these widely scattered hamlets together make a village. She would like to see change come to her community, but knows it has been slow in coming. Rupa hopes that her work as a youth facilitator within her family and community will help to create that change. She will be able to answer those questions from youth in her community and hopes to spur them on to seeking more education. This, she believes, will help her community to have more educated adolescents, better health, and economic opportunity. |
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