First Parish Bedford UU

In 1981, Ela Bhatt, a lawyer for the largely male Textile Workers' Union inAhmedabad, India, organized the "Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA)".  The women workers with whom she and a few colleagues worked lived in deep poverty -- they carried head-loads in markets, sewed quilts out of discarded remnants of cloth from the town's textile mills, among other forms of self-employment.  Hanna Papanek spent time with Ela Bhatt and SEWA during the 1980s and will talk about the early years of this organization and its later successes and failures.