Most Significant Changes Stories

I don’t listen to my mother in law anymore

Sita Nepal has gotten the authority and confidence to rebuke the senior people in her family after reproductive health training from Women's Welfare Association. They don’t know the truth, she says.

By Malene Lærke

26. July 2006

“The training really changed my life. Before the training I did as my mother in law told me to do but today I have knowledge about my rights and I have the confidence and the arguments to talk against her and the old traditions. Therefore my life has improved,” says 34 year old Sita Nepal.

“Before the training my mother in law demanded that I should sleep on the floor in the basement during my period but after the training I can tell her that this tradition is not right. Today I sleep up in the attic together with my husband,” she says and adds that the training has also meant a change in the community:

“The senior people in our community thought that child birth in the goat house was just fine and I did not know what there was good or bad but now I have been educated and I can tell them it is not right. I speak against the senior people and tell them they don’t know the truth.”

Speaking against the senior people within the family and in the community is not easy and it takes confidence for Sita Nepal to raise her voice but after 19 years of marriage and a daily life where the mother in law had to be obeyed new rules today apply in the family.

“I have a mother in law and I tell her that she is not worth listening to. She then tells me that she would wish that she could erase all the workshops from my head. She tells me to forget what I have learned and follow her rules. But I don’t obey,” says Sita Nepal.

“Fortunately she is beginning to understand. I have asked her how she felt when she had to sleep on the cold floor in the basement when she had her period. She told me it is old culture so that made it all right for her but she did not like it. But I have not asked her why she made me and her own daughter do things she did not like herself. Maybe I should.”