Marzina – House Mother
Tuhina and Reshmina (Marzina’s daughters)
Marzina started working for Balo English Medium School in 2017 in the kitchen. Her husband had left her, and she needed work.
Her income from Balo enabled her to rent a small room. Then Balo staff learned that she had two daughters. With limited options and no money after her husband left, she put her youngest daughter in a cheap and dreadful boarding school. The boarding school was shoddy, and didn’t provide adequate education or care for the children. She placed her oldest daughter with an uncle in a distant village. It broke her heart, but Marzina was only able to see her once a year.
Betta and Rehana were set to reunite the family and asked Marzina if living at Casa Balo, would allow her to get her daughters back. She didn’t know. They started by trying to get the older daughter, Tuhina, back from the uncle. She had been with him since she was six. She would attend a village school for one hour a day, and the rest of the time, she took care of the house. Tuhina cooked, cleaned, shopped, and kept the uncle’s affairs in order. At this point she was 11 or 12, and the uncle was ready to get her married. He liked having a servant for free, yet he was working to find a good marriage for her. The uncle was very pleased with this arrangement, and he ignored Marzina’s requests to let her return to Kolkata.
Finally Rehana and a Balo teacher went to the village to collect Tuhina. They had to shout and threaten to bring the police, but finally the uncle acquiesced. When Tuhina arrived at Casa Balo, she couldn’t stay seated for a moment without popping up to cook, clean, or tidy something. Betta told her it was time to become a child again, and it took six months for her to realize that she didn’t need to work as a servant. It took even longer for her to start conversing normally again, but she was so happy to be with her mother.
Next Betta and Rehana went to the boarding school to rescue Reshmina. The director did not want to release her stating that Marzina was not living in a proper place, yet the school was bursting with rats and roaches, and the children lacked proper nutrition. Betta and Rehana threatened to call the police, which scared the school officials, and they released Reshmina. Now the family is joyfully all together again. The children attend the Balo school and are doing well. Tuhina was a little behind academically because she was out of school for so long, but she put in exceptional effort and caught up with her classmates. She is doing very well in hairdressing and wants to be a stylist.