Kumkum Chauhan (left), 20, and Sarita Chaudhary, 17, of Pradesh, India, talk about their visit to the United States while visiting Mount Madonna School Monday.

Even to the well-traveled, the 15-hour flight from New Delhi, India, to the United States can be trying.

For Sarita Chaudhary, 17, and Kumkum Chauhan, 20, who arrived Sunday afternoon, it was a journey to a land utterly different from their own.

The young women have spent their lives in small, impoverished rural villages in Pradesh, India, with populations of no more than 2,000.

They sleep in single rooms, which they share with their entire families. During bad weather, they also share the rooms with their animals, which could include water buffalo, cows and goats.

The women had never used a bathroom — residents of their villages instead go in nearby fields. Making matters worse, modesty in their patriarchal society dictates that women wait until after dark to relieve themselves.

They have also lived without running water, and instead retrieve water from a community well.

In their part of the world, many girls are married as young teenagers, and many still get virtually no education, laboring instead as sustenance farmers, said Jenny Steeves, senior project manager for the Pardada Pardadi Educational Society. The society is an Indian nonprofit organization that aims to empower girls through education, in turn allowing them to become self-reliant women.

Upon their arrival at Boston’s General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport, the girls were immediately flabbergasted at the reasons for the moving sidewalks favored by Western travelers.

As for the flight, they said the takeoff wasn’t as scary as the landing. The most terrifying thing was being questioned by U.S. customs agents.

And it was only the first day of the three-week trip.

Chaudhary and Chauhan are different from most of the girls in their villages. They attend the Pardada Pardadi Educational Society’s school for 1,000 girls in Uttar Pradesh, about four hours east of New Delhi.

The school provides academic and vocational training for girls, which ranges from accounting to chemistry classes. To encourage them to attend, the girls are given a credit of 10 rupees per day, equal to about 22 cents. Upon graduation, the girls are given their trust, which can range from $700 to $1,000. This makes each of them one of the wealthiest and most educated girls in their villages, Steeves said.

“We had to provide an incentive for the families to send their girls to school,” said Steeves, who is leading the trip for the girls.

The society is so patriarchal that when asked how many children they have, many residents simply don’t count their female children, Steeves said. The school strives to counter this by educating and providing job training and jobs to at least one daughter of each of the 50,000 families in the region.

Since the school was founded in 2000, 20 girls have graduated, upon which they are guaranteed jobs at the school. Chaudhary wants to be an accountant, while Chauhan said she plans to be a teacher.

“When you’re a teacher, you’re giving away knowledge and you’re allowing other people to learn,” Chaudhary said.

The focus of the trip is to introduce the women to schools in the U.S. Their first stop was at Mount Madonna School in Watsonville. They said they were amazed by the way the classes were run.

“They discuss their thoughts about what they’re studying,” Chauhan said through a translator. “That doesn’t happen in India.”

“Whatever the teacher says, the students have to take in, and they can’t voice their opinion,” Chaudhary said of Indian schools.

Next, the girls will travel to schools in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Santa Monica.

For Chaudhary and Chauhan, the trip will raise their status among their fellow villagers. They’ll always be known as the women who went to America, Steeves said.

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*Photos by Tarmo Hannula*

(Published in 10/7/08 edition)

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