3/29/16 (Tuesday, March 29, 2016)  11:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Our next two stops were to meet two suicide victim families, widows Smt. Patil and Smt. Sunita Pendor. We were exposed to two different scenarios. Although difficult for them, the two women did allow us to interview them about their hardships after their husbands’ deaths.

Smt. Patil was not only a wife at one point in her life, but also the mother of three children, one that is mentally ill. When she found out that her husband committed suicide due to the large amounts of money owed to moneylenders and banks, she was devastated. Not only did she have to sustain her own life now, but she had to sustain two healthy children’s life and a mentally ill child’s life. Smt. Patil was lost; she did not know how she would provide food and water for her family, and medications for her mentally ill son, or how she would send her children to school.

When Save Indian Farmers contacted her, she made the choice of receiving four goats to begin with her business to make money. Unfortunately, two of these goats died, but the other two gave birth to two kids. Currently, she is paying a monthly fee to someone else to raise the goats. Once they are of optimal use, they will be sold for a profit. So her strategy is to undergo this cycle of raising and selling the goats. She now is relying on her sister and the minimum government funds for her yearly income. In fact, she still has to pay off the debt of her husband, even though he is no longer alive! When I heard that this I thought that this was so unjust since the debt was under his name and not hers. But nonetheless she had to pay every month at a high interest a fixed amount of money to both the bank and the moneylenders, the two parasites that will never let go of Smt. Patil and her family. However, I conveyed to Smt. Patil that her efforts will not go to waste, but will hopefully help her to live the life she and her children deserve. I told her to never give up and to always have hope, and people do care about her situation and the corrupt systems that suck the living sane out of these poor people.

The second widow, Smt. Sunita Pendor, a mother of two children, chose to have her own convenient store, to sustain her and her children’s lives. W e also interviewed Smt. Sunita Pendor, and we found that she although she did have a business of her own, it profited only a little and did not help her too much for the costs of her and her two children. She barely scraped by everyday, she told us, and she still had to pay for her husband’s debt as well to the bank. Smt. Sunita Pendor rented her farm land to a farmer for about 25,000 rupees a year, but sometimes the farmer would not be able to pay her back due to the low amount of yield in crops. Again, the corrupt system of the moneylenders and banks, had Smt. Sunita Pendor continues to pay at a high interest a fixed amount of money every year to repay her husband’s debt, even though he was long deceased.

One thing really stuck to my mind that Smt. Sunita Pendor told me

“A father, a man, can give up. A mother in my situation has many thoughts to take her life and give up, but can’t because she must live for her children. A woman always has to bear more hardships than a man, and she will do it just for her children.”
I was heartbroken when I heard this, not just because this was a sad situation, but because it was very true. Almost always the man of the household gave up, but the woman had to persevere on.