The Women of The Slum

“The only reason I’m so strong is because God made me a woman. No matter how physically strong a man is, he could never handle all the tension and suffering that I’ve gone through.”
The woman who said this lives in a slum in Mumbai, India called Kaula Bandar. Women from across India follow their husbands here and end up shouldering the burden of raising a family in the slum. Kaula Bandar's 18,000 residents live in hundreds of tin shacks densely piled on top of one another with dark, narrow lanes winding between them. In its 60 years, it has never received basic services, like electricity, water, and garbage collection, creating a feeling of a forgotten temporary outpost rather than a bustling established community.
I got to know Kaula Bandar volunteering at the non-profit PUKAR, where I transcribed interviews for a mental health study. There were many amazing stories---husbands with multiple wives, a transgendered person living with the sexual complexities of the slum, a murdered son, people living with HIV, and wild dog attacks, but the women were the most inspiring. The quote above was just one of many incredible things these women uttered after listing all the stresses of their humble lives. The woman of the slum doesn't just bear the load of being the housekeeper, she elevates her role to something admirable. Her daily duties like purchasing water, scraping enough money together to buy food, cooking dinner for her family, and making room on the floor of her one-room home for everyone to sleep may seem awful and mundane, but it is her life’s purpose and she does it with pride. She knows that without her efforts her family would not function, and this gives her the strength to carry on.
After six months of traveling throughout Asia, the women of Kaula Bandar have stayed with me; as the female head of my household, I strive to have as much courage in my daily life as these woman do, and have made it a personal goal to meet life’s challenges with as much dignity.