After losing contact with sister school Etomba Combined School in Africa, Marshall has a new partnership with students in India through Girls Learn International, a club founded by Marshall alumna Ritika Jain and currently headed by her younger sister, junior Eisha Jain.
Marshall’s GLI chapter will be establishing regular communication with a GLI chapter in New Delhi. The chapter in New Delhi is made up of 15 girls who all live in the village of Dakshinpuri.
Ritika and Eisha Jain went to visit Dakshinpuri in June to meet the girls. According to Eisha Jain, one of the girls she met used to be beaten by her brother and was never able to stand up for herself until she joined GLI.
“In their community, boys are superior,” Eisha Jain said. “The girls are inferior.”
GLI is an American branch of the organization Action India, a voluntary organization based in New Delhi that was established in response to New Delhi’s 1976 forcible relocation of poor people to remove the city’s slums.
According to Action India’s official website, the organization has a “feminist approach …evolved through interaction with grassroots women in Delhi’s ‘resettlement colonies.’
”According to GLI’s website, GLI partner schools are required to implement an education free of stereotypes while using “gender-sensitive” textbooks in order to empower girls.
GLI’s website also mentioned that its partner schools “may actually provide year-round housing facilities to girls who have fled their communities because of safety concerns such as forced marriage or sex-trafficking.”
Senior Dani Fletcher said that she was “glad [she] joined because it seems like a great cause and a lot of fun.”
Communications manager Lexi Tsantes, junior, echoed similar sentiments and said that gender discrimination in India was “something that not a lot of other people realize over here and it’s actually a really big issue and it’s really sad that it’s that way.”
The club has already received two e-mails and a scrapbook from the girls in Dakshinpuri and junior Eisha Jain plans on sending scrapbooks and letters to show the girls from Dakshinpuri what life in the U.S. is like.
“It’s so we can have a better understanding of international problems,” Eisha Jain said. “The best part is definitely interacting with them because it helps us realize how lucky we are.”
According to Jain, the girls in New Delhi are making bangles, key chains and scarves that will be sent to Marshall’s GLI chapter to help fundraise for the GLI chapter in India.
GLI differs from 2009’s Partner School Project, which was established by alumnae Samantha Plotner and Emily Moonan. Due to the lack of underclassman interest and difficulty in shipping supplies to an isolated village, the project fell apart. Jain says that while her GLI partner school project initially lacked interest, it will be “bigger” this year.