I am Maharani Chaudhary and I am 45 years old. I live in Saurahiya, Motipur VDC with my children. My daughters are married and son is working in Pokhara as daily wage labor. My husband did not care for me nor did he look after the children. He lived apart from the family and died 6 month ago. Due to our local cultural barriers, I did not get opportunity to go to school for study in my early childhood. I was married at the age of 15 which was a normal tradition in our community at that time. My husband never loved and gave me care as his wife. So we decided to live apart but I lived with my children and brought them up with many years of struggle while our main source of winning bread was working on daily wage labor. My life passed by with enormous of problems. I was very fortunate to come in contact with PNL three years ago. PNL conducted a survey in my village and they set up a SHG with the name of Manakamana and I was given the responsibility of Chairperson. Our group consists of mostly poor and marginalized people. Now I am also leading the Network for Empowerment of SHG in Motipur. This is an honor for me as I am not an educated person.
Presently, I am running a small tea shop using some space of my small house. This shop is now the main source of my livelihood and supporting to my children. Our SHG helped me setting up this small shop and I am more than happy to have this little nice tea shop. Several organizations came into our village to uplift the lives of people, but they were of short term and never sustained whereas PNL is working for and with us as our friend. PNL is providing us relevant education and empowering us based on our local needs. We received various aspects of knowledge and skills by utilizing local resources to uplift the quality of lives of people in the community and particularly of those members in SHGs. We are thankful to PNL for the support and services we are receiving.
