Area residents speak at new college in India

Three MetroWest women - one from Wayland, one from Sudbury and one from Acton - have recently returned from an unusual trip to India and hope to share their experiences in and around their communities in the near future.

The trio visited the Mrs. Helena Kaushik Women's College in the remote and rural village of Malsisar in the state of Rajistan in northeastern India, five hours by bus from New Delhi.

Their journey really began, though, more than 30 years ago when Ginny Steel, 68, and her husband of Wayland acted as a host family to Surendra Kaushik, a young Indian graduate student at Boston University.

"Surendra truly became a member of our family," Steel said. "He has been at each of our children's weddings and, somehow, when a new baby comes along, he's always there too."

Kaushik went on to marry an American woman and become a professor of economics at Pace University in New York.

"Surendra always told me that, if I ever wanted to go to India, he would personally show me around," said Steel. "So in 1997, when he was on a sabbatical and I was between jobs, he and I toured India for five weeks. What I didn't realize at the time was that he was working on his networks because he was working on a dream, which was to open a women's college in his hometown."

The college finally opened in 1998 and was named after Kaushik's wife, who had suffered from a disabling stroke in 1991. Meantime, Kaushik issued another standing invitation to Steel to come to the college and lecture on any subject of her choosing.

Finally, this past January, Steel decided it was time to go. She enlisted two traveling companions: Marion Tratnyek, 70, of Sudbury, and Alice Shafer, 59, a former resident of Wayland who now lives in Acton.

Their destination, Tratnyek says, was a remote and impoverished part of Rajistan.

"The people there basically live on subsistence farming augmented by the money (other villagers send home from paid jobs)," she said.

The college sits on a 30-acre tract of land that Kaushik persuaded the government of Rajistan to donate. It is surrounded by a sturdy metal fence that is guarded 24 hours a days.

"One of the things we learned is that apparently the men of India need a lot of education in how to treat the opposite sex," Steel said. "This is because women in India feel chronically unsafe. Families feel that their daughters must not go out unchaperoned. So the first thing Surendra had to do was to build this wall and keep it guarded so that parents would allow their daughters to attend the college."

Today, the college has about 260 students - most of them are in a three-year program - while a handful are doing graduate work. When the school was first established, it offered courses in the humanities, last year, however, it added the first of what will eventually become three years of science to include biology, chemistry, physics and botany.

"They're doing superbly in terms of academic standards," Tratnyek said. "It was really inspiring to see the enthusiasm inside those walls about learning."

Shafer added that they have a good library now in place.

"But the most critical need right now is a satellite hookup so that they can get on the Internet," she said. "This is because the minute that occurs, they can link up with the rest of the world, they can partner with colleges in other countries - and already Tufts has expressed an interest in doing that. In short, the fact that Malsisar is a village community becomes quite irrelevant."

During their stay at the school, Steel, who was director of religious education at First Parish of Wayland and First Parish of Sudbury for many years, lectured on religions in America and their historical interaction with the political system. Tratnyek, who worked as a nurse and nurse anesthetist, talked about careers in the sciences - specifically in the health sciences - on family-centered maternity care and on cardiovascular health and fitness. Shafer, who is an occupational therapist, shared her expertise in occupational and physical therapy as well as her enthusiasm for music.

"The college is particularly interested in occupational therapy because of Mrs. Kaushik's stroke and has applied to the Indian government for permission to establish a program to train students in that specialty," Shafer said.

Shafer went on to say that her experience at the college taught her that the primary way to change the lives of women in India is by college education.

"The principal reason for this is not so much that they will come out of it with a profession, but that it will change the very person they marry," Shafer said. "Almost all of the marriages in India are arranged. And, if a woman has a college education, this will ensure that the person she marries is college-educated too."

Shafer, Steel and Tratnyek are now in the process of pooling their experiences and photos to put together presentations to be made to local schools, libraries and other institutions.

"We want to share our wonder, appreciation and excitement about this grand institution in the middle of the desert with camel carts going by," said Steel. Anyone interested in hosting a presentation should call Steel at 508-358-7517.

As for the lasting value of their trip, Shafer said, "All the people I met from high government officials down to an 8-year-old beggar girl, clearly an untouchable, were phenomenal. I gave the little girl some money, but it soon became apparent that this wasn't what she really wanted. She came and sat beside me for some minutes. I showed her the photographs on the back of my digital camera, and she was fascinated. I realized that here was a child who was dealing with terrible difficulties in her life, but still coping. And you just don't come away from an experience like that unchanged."