Smart Zombie: Sunitha

This is my new friend Sunitha. She is a wife, mother, and worker in one of the garment factories that surrounds her little village in Tamilnadu, Southern India. She is an amazing woman, a Christ-follower, and a member of one of the churches currently pastored by one of our "Super Pastors". She is a hard worker, and can manufacture nearly 300 pairs of shoes or similar garments in a single workday.

From her, we learned about the plight of women in this particular industrialized community. In each factory, the men and the women are separated into facilities where they have no contact with one another. In the women's areas, all the supervisors are men. In virtually all of the factories in the community, if you are a young woman and you want a job to support your family, you are required to have sex with your supervisor or foreman. If you do, you get to keep your job. If you don't, you are labeled a "poor producer" and dismissed. You could, of course, try to get a job at another factory, but you would find the same situation facing you there. "It's the same in all the factories," Sunitha told us, "and if you keep moving around, you are viewed with increasing suspicion as a worker who will not 'submit' to the demands of the supervisors, and therefore not hired." Most of these women, then, daily have to balance the tension between remaining faithful to their husbands and children and providing food and basic wages for those same relationships.

In December, GCC Justice Teams will be travelling to help women just like Sunitha through micro-enterprise training, community organizing and legal education. According to Sunitha, "if i had $250 to buy a sewing machine of my own, i could multiple my income by a factor of 7 and avoid the harassment in the factories." Micro-enterprise and loans through partners like Growing Opportunity, Int'l, will help with capital equipment loans, and we will be training GCC teams to help with forming basic power structures like unions and collectives. We will also seek to educate women about existing Indian government legislation preventing sexual harassment and "outraging a woman's modesty" (a penalty which, if proven, carries prison sentence and/or fine).

Helping people like Sunitha is the essence of what being a Smart Zombie is all about. If 2,000 women suddenly rise up against the oppression of their dehumanizing employers by refusing to work, organizing power and developing alternate means of income-generation, they starve the industries subjugating them. In return, they gain their own power, and begin to exert influence over the structure itself. Many say it's a long shot or a pipe-dream to long for such things. But then... they don't understand Hunger the way Smart Zombies do.