'Make Every Mom Who Faces Childbirth Count'

A Clothing Accessory For Women Cotton Pickers

Jess's Descent To Somewhere Else

A Moving, Singing Revolution: The Bauls Of Bengal

Kandhamal's Mothers Live With The Memories of Violence

From Asian Teens, With Love: Healthy Meals

Give Her A Good Story, She'll Make A Great Film

In Pakistan's Hour Of Need, GenNext Responds

Maximum City, Minimum Opportunities: How Mumbai's Unorganised Women Workers Cope

Rasoolpur's Gang of Girls Take Charge

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India
A Clothing Accessory For Women Cotton Pickers
Nitin Jugran Bahuguna

Body aches, bleeding hands and rashes were part of life for Jankabai Muley, a cotton picker of Kachhighati village in Maharashtra's Aurangabad district, all thanks to picking cotton day-in-and-day-out on her farm. When she was presented with a special cotton-picking coat being distributed to women farmers in the region by the World Wide Fund for Nature-India, as a means of alleviating their hardships on the field, Jankabai was sceptical. She didn't like the white garment that reminded her of a shroud, nor was she enamoured of the sac attached to it, which she doubted would be able to hold as much cotton as the 'pallav' of her sari. But just a day of using the new garment and she knew she was wrong. Today, the cotton coat is the reason Jankabai and many other women pickers here are a healthier and happier lot.

"The coat actually covers and protects my whole body! And my neck and back pains have also miraculously disappeared with the continued use of this new garment."

[Photographs Available]

New Zealand
Jess's Descent To Somewhere Else
Sarojini Vittachi

She sat in the garden in her wheelchair reading a detective story. I went out to join her in the March autumn sun, and said, "Jess, what's the book about?" "I just can't figure it out," she said and continued reading. The next day a smiling lady came to the door. "I've brought some things for Promilla (Jess) and Pixie (her husband)," she said. I whispered to Jess, "Who is she?" She replied, "I've never seen her before." When Jess - Jessie Promilla Iyengar - was young she excelled in studies, won medals at medical college and was the youngest Professor of Pathology in Mumbai. But the brilliant New Zealand-based doctor passed away after a tough battle with Alzheimer's Disease. Her sister recalls Jess's struggle with the illness even as her family and friends rallied around her. A special first-person account to mark World Alzheimer's Day.

Her thoughts slipped away before she could articulate them into words like "Turn on the electric blanket" or "Give me water".

[Photographs Available]

India
A Moving, Singing Revolution: The Bauls Of Bengal
Ajitha Menon

With a song on her lips and the desire for a social revolution in her heart, Radha Rani 'Bairagi', 39, a fifth generation 'Baul', roams the towns and villages of Bengal. A unique cult of free-thinkers, Bauls are wandering poets who are part of the vanguard in the struggle for social change. So if her forefathers sang of freedom fighters laughingly embracing the noose for their motherland, today Radha Rani, and 50-odd women like her, sing of the dangers of the communal divide, environment issues like how excessive fishing destroys the ecological balance, the importance of educating every child, and even the need for polio vaccinations and AIDS prevention.

Radha Rani and her partner Rabi Das will sing in France about fishing nets and fish. "It's a song we sang in Goa about the need for fishing cautiously so as to preserve the delicate ecological balance."

[Photographs Available]

India
Kandhamal's Mothers Live With The Memories of Violence
Aditi Bhaduri

Kanak Rekha Nayak hid in the forest with her two girls as rioters murdered her husband on the outskirts of their village Budedipada-Madinaju in Orissa's Kandhamal district. Priyatama Nayak, a mother of four, saw her husband being burnt alive before her eyes, even as her home was being looted. Runima Digal, from Mallikapada, is struggling to get justice for her slain husband. Kanak, Priyatama and Runima are all women who had personally experienced the devastating violence that had rocked Kandhamal in 2008. Experts have since gone into long explanations of the causes of the violence - inter-tribal rivalry; changes in demographic composition because of mass conversions, and so on. But while such analyses are needed to usher in sustainable peace in the region, they cannot help Kandhamal's mothers, wives and daughters who continue to live with the searing memories of violence.

What did Kanak expect from the tribunal? With an empty voice she said that she actually expected nothing. She had come there because she wanted others - as many people as possible - to know what had taken place in Kandhamal.

[Photographs Available]

Canada
From Asian Teens, With Love: Healthy Meals
Naunidhi Kaur

The meeting room at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in Mississauga, Ontario, was abuzz with activity. A group of 10 women was waiting for the Meals with Love youth to make their presentation on healthy eating and hand out hampers of locally-grown produce. For the women congregating at the YMCA hall, fresh food was a luxury - the reason why their caseworker had chosen them for this unique gesture. Inspired by a youth leadership programme, six high-school students of Asian origin have initiated the Meals with Love project. In its second year now, the project reaches out to single mothers, marginalised seniors and abused women with care packs of nutritious food and tips on healthy eating.

"This year our target was to distribute 50 hampers. We gave out the packs to families of single parents, seniors and people suffering from chronic diseases like diabetes. We wanted to share the food and the message of healthy eating."

[Photographs Available]