Santosh is making great strides

Twenty-six year old Santosh, her husband and her son live with her husband’s parents in a slum community in Pune. Santosh’s parents-in-law help out in a small roadside shop, and her husband is a day laborer. Santosh had been spending her days taking care of her son and looking after the family’s small house when she heard about an opportunity to learn tailoring at the nearby AIC Community Center.

Soon after, she signed up for the Basic Tailoring course, and spent the next 6 months learning the fundamentals of tailoring. Recently, the Basic Tailoring course ended and Santosh signed up for the Intermediate Tailoring course. She loves being able to take a break from her household responsibilities to spend a few hours doing something that makes her feel productive and invigorated, and she is even exploring the possibility of starting her own in-house tailoring business so that she can earn supplementary income while tending to her house and watching her son.

Your donation, Billy, enabled AIC to offer the Intermediate Tailoring Course to Santosh. By the end of the Intermediate Tailoring course, Santosh will have a strong foundation in the necessary skills and techniques to be successful in such a venture, and her husband is supportive of this idea as his own income is only around 3,000 rupees ($65) per month. Santosh also enjoys the opportunity to spend time with other women in the class. With an 8th standard education, she is one of the most educated women in the class, and she helps the women’s literacy teacher work with her illiterate classmates during the women’s literacy component of the class, which also gives her a much-needed boost in confidence.

Thank you, Billy, for enabling Santosh to dream of becoming the highest earning member of her extended family.