Artist Profile: Kamani Devi

Kamani lives with her husband, Raman, two sons and a mother in law. However, her elder son lives four hours away with her sister in a village that has a better education facilities. The only source of income for her family is agriculture.

Years ago, her husband's elder brother, Chumman, was working as an illegal agent for sending laborers for manual jobs to countries such as Iran, Iraq, Dubai, Qatar, South Arabia, etc. Months later, the international immigration laws became highly strict due to September 11 tragic event, making it almost impossible for laborers to travel internationally. Hence, Chumman could not send most of his men to foreign countries though he had already taken huge amount of frees from them. As a result, all those people wanted their money back and Chumman fled from the village, leaving behind Kamani's family to pay back his loans. Hence, they had to sell most of their farmland and it took them years of extreme hard work and saving to recover and reacquire farmland for survival.

Kamani Devi was married at an age of fifteen. Due to early marriage, she bore her first child at an age of sixteen, who was born a sick girl child. It cost Kamani lots of money and resources for the treatment of her daughter but she died at an age of five. After that she gave birth to two more girls and they died as well.

However, she finally gave birth to two sons at later age of about twenty and twenty two. Due to these safer ages of bearing children, both her child were born healthy and she is now happy as a mother of two healthy sons. She is glad to have joined Jurshital Institute, as she hopes to gain some extra money to send her second son to her sister in law's house as well for a better education. She thinks that access to better education to both her sons will result into a better future of her family.