 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| |
Home Partner |
| |
| Building the future |
 |
Looking into the serious, lined face of Mohammad Azad, it’s easy to believe that until he received a Habitat house three years ago, he was forced to rise every day at 4:00am just to make the two hour commute to his embroidery factory job in Delhi. “When we had a shack, I used to have to go to the factory to work,” Mohammad explains, shaking his head. “Since the house is here now, I can work over here instead.”
Mohammad Azad and his wife, Tohra Begam, exchanged one finished shack on the Yumana River for a new hut in Bawana when the government cleaned out the Yumana slum in 2004. On the banks, Tohra Begam sighs, “floods used to come and fill all the houses with water.” Trouble did not immediately disappear after the family moved to Bawana: “Fires used to be a problem…they burned up the supplies and sewing materials” that Mohammad used for his embroidery projects. With five children and inadequate housing no matter where they went, the Azad family had no choice but to focus purely on survival.
That is, until Habitat came to their aid in summer 2007. After constructing the |
|
| home, “it’s much better,” Mohammad stresses, gesturing proudly around the room. “We are much safer in this home.” |
| |
|
Mohammad, finally set with a place to house his family, started to dream of other ways to make life easier. He took the next step and applied to build a sewing workshop across the street through the Robin Raina Foundation, a charity organization that donates houses to needy families in Bawana. The application was accepted, and construction on the workshop began a year after the family’s Habitat home was finished. Now, Mohammad says, “I go to work and seven o’clock in the morning….It’s just across the road from the home.”
Mohammad’s workshop has not only made life easier for his family, but for many of the neighboring women as well. “I taught my wife to sew, and my daughter. I like teaching people,” Mohammad says. “I |
 |
|
| still take help, also, from the women in this area, in the neighborhood; they also do this embroidery….I pay them three rupees for a piece, and the factory only gives me four or five. I don’t try cheat them; they do this work also.” |
| |
 |
Mohammad and Tohra create a variety of clothing and goods-shirts, shawls, purses, pillowcases - for the factory, which pays them for every piece they finish. “We show our designs to the factory, and then whichever they like - the factory likes-they tell us to make them.”
But in the future, Mohammad dreams of something bigger. “I would like to invest in my own fabrics, my own thread and cloth, but there isn’t enough money right now….I would find it very nice if I could buy my own supplies, because I could sell it myself, at my own price,” he says. |
|
| |
| Mohammad’s plans, though currently unreachable, could not have even existed without the stability of a Habitat home. “How can you think of the future if you don’t have a place to live in the future?” Mohammad asks straightforwardly, adjusting the beautifully embroidered cloth in front of him. It’s 9:00am in Bawana, and already, the streets are crowded, the people are moving, and the air is vibrant with life. The women have resumed their chat on their dusty doorsteps, and the shops are once again opened up to passing customers. Leaving the center of town, the streets wind in and around themselves, snaking in a disjointed path. Ducking under the lines of fresh laundry drying, the people of Bawana have begun their morning errands. |
| |
| Life in Bawana is constantly driven by routine. Eat, work, sleep, repeat-sunrise to sunset, the days are steadied by the routine of survival. But throughout the city, with the construction of each Habitat house, new possibilities are slowly presenting themselves. The daily pattern is being broken. Although they are only modest homes made with bricks and cement, every story added to a Habitat house raises it farther above the dusty narrow streets, breaking up the monotony of the Bawana skyline. These houses allow the community of Bawana to dream of the possibilities that the future holds. With each new story that is built, another family can expand their own story. Habitat houses are more than bricks and cement; they are places for discovering talents, of believing in the value of |
 |
|
| community, and of re-writing the future. More than bricks and cement, each Habitat home is a house of dreams. |
| |
| Imagine what could happen in Bawana with a few more Habitat houses. |
| |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
