Name: Piper J
Social Justice Group: Women and Education
Date of Fieldwork: December 13, 2017
Name of Organization: Women’s Education Project (WEP)
Person (people) with whom I met and their job titles: Danielle Fazzolari: Director of Strategic Projects
Type of Fieldwork: Interview
What I did:
For this fieldwork, we got the amazing chance to be able to interview Danielle Fazzolari from WEP. WEP is an organization working to get women in India into school. Since most of the work actually takes place in India there are only two people that work in the US which makes it so both of them know a lot about the topic of Women’s Education. Danielle was able to answer many of our questions with great detail and help us learn more about this.
What I learned:
Something that I learned in this interview was that you can only get so far by just educating a girl but adding an entire support can push her to go even father and hopefully stay in school. WEP focuses not only on giving women in India the education they need, but also the having centers for the girls to go to after school. The centers are so great for the girls and women because they give them a place to be able to talk about their day and how everything is going at home and in their towns. It gives them a place to feel wanted and express how they feel because that is not really something that they can do outside of the WEP centers. People who work at there are usually women who have gone through the program so they are very good at giving the women now going through the program avice because they have gone through many of the same experiences.
What I learned about Social Justice “work” and/or Civil and Human rights “work” from this fieldwork:
Through this interview with Danielle, I learned that there is a lot to getting women into schools. In most of the places in India where WEP works the rest of the people in the towns have very fixed mindsets and do not want girls to become educated. They believe that the woman should always be lesser than the man and that education prohibits this from happening. These thoughts all stem from ideas from the beginning of time. Since people in these rural areas have not been exposed to anything other than what they know, their ideas will often stay the same which results in injustices toward women and especially in education. In order to be able to send these girls to school, people in the towns will have to go out and hold conversations so they can teach everyone else in the towns that educating a woman and having her do more than just household work is a good thing. After learning something for so many years it’s very hard for you and an entire town or country to change its beliefs even if it’s for the right thing.
