Dear friends,
Greetings of the New Year! Even though so far 2022 feels like Twenty-Twenty-Too, let’s hope that the situation will improve during the year. Hopefully the vaccination rates will increase significantly around the world and some degree of normalcy will return soon.
Our Work, Our Lives has reached its sixth issue which is very encouraging for a publication that relies completely on women workers and our colleagues who work closely with them. The women workers who write for the magazine are part of self-organised or community-based groups. They are at different stages of their collectivisation process. All of them meet regularly to carry out various collaborative activities. Some have facilitated discussions on various social issues and learning themes.
For the January 2022 issue of Our Work, Our Lives, we requested our sisters to share their collective hopes and dreams for the New Year with us. We made some suggestions on how they could go about their Collective Dreaming processes, but each group also had complete freedom to plan their own session in a completely different way.
The result is an interesting collection of stories, drawings, visual art, and poems. Seventeen groups from eight countries – Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kuwait, Nepal, and Sierra Leone – have shared their dreams and hopes for 2022 with us. The dreams range from simple personal aspirations for a decent job, hopes for good health for near and dear ones, and well-being of the community to visions for a strong collective. Bangladeshi women working in the garment sector in Jordan co-created a poem called Hope in Bangla. Our sisters from Seruni, a collective of women farmers in Indonesia, created the face of a rural woman using vegetables, food crops, and flowers from their farm. For them, the face symbolised the source of life as well as their faith in the collective struggle. Sex worker sisters from the state of Andhra Pradesh in India were unable to meet due to the spike in COVID-19 infections, but they drew pictures and shared with each other via WhatsApp. The women from Banjar village in the state of Chhattisgarh, India brought various objects that they use in their daily lives and made interesting links between those objects and their hopes for the future. Each group’s method is unique but the dreams are quite similar. Collective well-being, peace, harmony, decent jobs, and security of lives and livelihoods are what everyone dreams of.
We hope their dreams come true and their collectives go from strength to strength.
As with other issues, many colleagues supported the process by facilitating discussions, in-person or remotely, and by transcribing and translating the spoken or written words of women workers into English. Tanuja Sethi from Kala aur Katha has once again designed a beautiful cover page.
We trust that the dreams of our sisters will kindle new hopes in you too. You can read the issue as a "flip book" by clicking on the image below or you can download the pdf here.
You can write to us with your comments, suggestions, or stories for upcoming issues at
Warmly,
GAATW-IS team
