BY AARTI MONTEIRO

The walls of Pushpika Freitas’ study are covered with fabric and drawings her children made for her in preschool. It is a cozy room filled with plants, but you can tell that it is a place for hard work. I spoke with Freitas in this room about her experiences with MarketPlace: Handwork of India, a nonprofit organization she and her sister, Lalita Monteiro founded in 1980. In 1986, MarketPlace was incorporated in Illinois.

MarketPlace works with women artisans from various areas in India, who make and embroider clothes that are then sold in the United States through a catalog. Freitas and Monteiro started MarketPlace to empower these women. Freitas feels that economic power provides self-confidence for the artisans and positively impacts their families, especially their daughters, and in turn the community. However, Freitas does not consider herself a feminist. She feels feminism often holds a negative connotation. “I don’t come to this because I think men are evil,” she says. “Men and women, you know, we need each other. We can live in harmony with each other…I think everybody has a role to play; everybody has both positives and negatives. I’m not able to put myself into a box and say, ‘Okay, I’m a feminist.’”

The organization started small, with modest goals and without a clear action plan. However, Freitas believes this flexibility was beneficial for the structure of the organization. “The whole program has evolved according to what the women need as opposed to what we think they need…that is the crux of the organization. It has gone way beyond my dreams, and where the women are concerned, it’s gone beyond their dreams too,” she says. Now, MarketPlace’s goals are to increase the work the organization is doing. In order to impact more women in India, they must increase sales in the United States.

MarketPlace is a “fair-trade organization”. Freitas says this term is difficult to define. Mainly, it comes down to wages. She offers the example of Starbucks. They talk about fair-trade, but a small percent of what they buy is fair-trade, and the rest, she says, is not. On the other hand, Starbucks’ one percent is worth more than many other companies’ entire fair-trade purchase. Starbucks also introduces the conversation of fair-trade into the consumer market, which Freitas thinks is important. Fair-trade is a policy providing suppliers and employees with living wages, consistent employment and decision-making ability. Sometimes companies find a product they want and give the maker wages, but then later when the product is out of style, the company will move on to something else. Freitas’ definition of fair-trade is about trying to figure out ways to keep these people employed consistently and over the long term. Just as important to her is the idea that the workers should be part of management. “It’s not like, I own this and there are fifty people under me. I’m paying them fair wages but they have no rights, no decision making powers,” she says. MarketPlace works to uphold to all of these elements that encompass fair-trade.

Freitas is one of six sisters, and grew up in Mumbai, India. Her mother was a social worker, and from an early age, Freitas and her sisters were aware of their privilege. These experiences motivated her to give back to the community. “We lived fairly close to the slum,” she says. “At 1:30 [in the morning], there was a knock on the door, and there was this woman that mum was working with who came with a primus stove. She brings her stove in, asking to keep it in our house because her husband was drunk and was going to sell it. It would take her two months to collect enough money to buy a new one. Which means for those two months nobody would be eating because there was nowhere to cook in her house. Her husband did not work, and she worked eighteen hours a day and still had no control over this.”

Freitas remembers many incidents just like this one from her childhood. They all pointed to the fact that poor women in India needed more power over their lives. This realization motivated her to act. A woman is a nurturing person, Freitas says, one who brings up the children and impacts their lives. She realized that she was fortunate to be born into a progressive family; there was no doubt that she would be going to college. She knew other girls who worked twice as hard as she did yet did not have the same opportunities she had.

Most Indian women, especially women in low-income families, can sew. MarketPlace first began by just selling patchwork. It started with three women, which was a smart idea because the mistakes the organization made in the beginning were small and easy to fix. The organization grew rapidly because they paid a living wage to these women. Other women in the area quickly realized the advantages of working with MarketPlace. They were able to do the embroidery at home, allowing them to stay with their children and manage their homes as they needed to do as well.

MarketPlace has changed the artisans’ lives profoundly. The artisans are divided into co-operatives. The bonds of these women are strong. If they have any problems they consult their groups first. There have been occasions when the group has learned that a husband has been abusing his wife and the whole group has gone to sort it out. MarketPlace facilitates summer camps for children in the neighborhood as well. They have a committee of artisan mothers who plan these camps. Two years ago, they had a henna class where girls drew henna designs and learned and practiced the different elements of the art. In Freitas’ view, schools in India rarely tend to challenge a child’s creative side. MarketPlace tries to bring out these children’s creativity and build their confidence and self-worth. Most importantly, these children know they are getting these opportunities through their mothers, so the mother becomes an important figure for them. Ideally when a boy gets married, he will treat his wife with respect because his role model is his mother. For the daughters, when asked what they want to do when they grow up, none of the girls say that they want to just get married and have children, which would have been the traditional response. They now say instead that they want to do things more career oriented. The ultimate goal for these camps is to create a positive cycle.

Freitas goes back to India twice a year to visit her sisters and the Mumbai operations of MarketPlace. She finds these experiences revitalizing. “When you see the MarketPlace women, and you see other women on the street, you really do see a difference. They are confident; they are looking you in the eye,” she says. “You can see the spirit of the women, the excitement… And for me, the small things are the important things.”

Freitas listens to the experiences the women share with her, and she understands that she is making a difference. She tells the story of a woman who returned home from MarketPlace late one day. When she got home, she found that her husband had made tea for her. Although this doesn’t seem like much for many of us, in India cooking is considered women’s work. This simple gesture made this woman so happy.

Another story that Freitas recalls is when Mehmuna, another artisan, was in a training program where she received a certificate upon completing the program. Her husband took the certificate and laminated it so that it wouldn’t get damaged. He then put it up on the wall. For Mehmuna, that was better than getting the certificate itself. She felt acknowledged. “Those are the stories that are closest to my heart,” Freitas says. “What you and I may say is small is really very big, and I think that is what, for me, going back to India is all about. Sitting on the floor … you listen to the women, interact with them, talk to them. They want to know about me just as much as I want to know about them. So it really is a relationship.”

Freitas says that she has grown a lot since MarketPlace first began. She knows that she could never live the lives of the women she works with. The artisans don’t complain; they contemplate how to move forward. They now do so much that they hadn’t done before. Some women didn’t know how to use a telephone when they first started. They weren’t sure which side to talk into, which side to listen with. That was the extent of how they communicated with the world. They had no self-image, but that’s where the power came for them to figure out what they were doing. “It’s not the big things. It’s not becoming the…prime minister of India that we are about, but that one individual person gaining power by doing something that she’d not done before and…is making a difference,” Freitas says. Whenever she’s irritated or annoyed, she thinks about the women in India who are dealing with things ten times worse, who are doing it with poise, enthusiasm and confidence. “To some extent, this is what we got from [my] mom and dad… You realize how people deal with life without needing all these different things…you don’t need what they advertise…you are who you are, and it’s reinforced by the fact that the women are doing things that are much more heroic than I have ever done.”

In terms of the future, Freitas hopes to see MarketPlace: Handwork of India expand. She hopes the model MarketPlace has created will reproduce itself to include more people. “What has been accomplished is in India. It’s not the sales; it’s not the million dollars…that’s not the accomplishment. That’s the means to the end. The actual accomplishment is the women in India and what that has changed for them.”