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Kayalyn Kibbe

AIF Clinton Fellow, Class of 2014-2015

By AIF

December 29^th, 2014

Film, photos, and text by Ilana Millner | Media Fellow, Class of 2014-2015

Write your story here. (Optional)

Sunrise practice in Hesatu.

The faint glow of the autorickshaw’s headlight hiccups and sways as it bumps along the road from Hutup Village to Hesatu. Every few minutes Pappu—the driver—leans into the breaks and the headlight vibrates in place, suddenly bright in concentration beneath the full night sky. Out of the darkness emerge small figures—girls of all ages, each wearing a motley assortment of cold-weather clothing: layered track jackets and sweaters, skirts over leggings under knee-high socks, and floral-patterned scarves wrapped tightly over ears and tied beneath tiny chins. The girls clamber into the back of the family-size auto, piling on top of their friends who are already seated, and once again the vehicle chugs along forward.

When Pappu turns off the main road and onto the open field in Hesatu, the sun is just beginning to spin the color wheel: deep blues melt into somnolent purples, allowing eyes to focus just enough to see the feet of the girls as they move across the field. Each and every podial pair is clad in football cleats, which soon begin to pound the ground in quick circles—a warm-up before the footballs start rolling. White plumes rise from a smokestack in the distance, suspended in a yellow haze; the air is growing warmer and as the girls begin a set of scrimmages, a new figure steps onto the field. The girls spot her and immediately run to her, doling out hugs and shouting her name: Kayalyn! Within seconds, she is pulled into a game, sprinting across the field to receive a pass from one of the younger students.

At 06:30 the scrimmages end and Kayalyn and the girls pile back into Pappu’s auto and set out for Hutup Village. Along the way the girls hop down, group by group, and begin their walk to their regular schools. Kayalyn continues on to the Yuwa house, where she prepares tea and breakfast, and then settles in to lesson-plan before teaching her next two English classes. Outside, the sun has finally emerged in full; it casts the fields in a deep, golden hue, announcing to all that a new day is ready for the taking. And yet, unbeknownst to the sun, the girls at Yuwa have already claimed their hours. This is how it is at Yuwa—the girls don’t ask permission to seize the day; they simply do.

Sunrise practice in Hesatu.

Kayalyn Kibbe

Kayalyn Kibbe

Kayalyn Kibbe

Kayalyn Kibbe

Kayalyn Kibbe

Kayalyn Kibbe

Kayalyn plays defense in a scrimmage with the girls of Yuwa.

Kayalyn Kibbe is an American Fellow from Bronxville, New York, who recently relocated to rural Jharkhand after spending six months in Bangalore working for INK Talks. Now based in Hutup Village about an hour outside of Jharkhand’s capital Ranchi, Kayalyn works as a teacher, researcher, and advocate with Yuwa, an extraordinary organization that uses girls’ team sports as a platform for social development in rural India. Yuwa’s mission also includes combatting child marriage and human trafficking, serious issues in India and particularly in the state of Jharkhand.

Founded in 2009, Yuwa is unique in its focus on ownership and accountability; new teams are formed only when girls express interest, and it’s up to the girls to set their practice schedule and commit to attendance. Franz Gastler, Yuwa’s Founder and Executive Director, says he asked the first group of girls how often they wanted to practice, and they told him that they wanted to be on the field every day. Franz was skeptical at first: “Originally I thought, ‘that’s a bad idea’—football wasn’t even our point, we were making Yuwa as an education initiative.” However, a year into the program Franz realized that the girls who were attending fewer football practices were also missing forty to fifty days of school in a year; “they were staying home, their parents weren’t sending them [to school], or their parents were keeping them back.” Franz explains that while parents were happy to see their kids attend a prestigious school, many had no real investment in their child’s education.

Franz Gastler, Yuwa's Founder and Executive Director

“Whereas the girls who were playing football, they created this space where it didn’t matter if their parents were telling them not to go to school, or if their parents weren’t encouraging them, because they [the girls] started encouraging each other. And this space they made—it was a place where they felt like it was cool to be an ambitious girl, and they were working towards something together.”

From the beginning, Franz was intent on creating a positive, nurturing environment for the girls, in which they were never chastised for failing to perform well on the football field. “I just thought: you can become a lot better at something by enjoying it, and if you like coming to this place, then inevitably touching a football with your foot a hundred times a day, you’ll probably get good at it. And sure enough they did.”

Almost five years later, the success of this approach is evident. One hundred fifty girls regularly attend practice, each spending an average of three hours daily with Yuwa programs, six days a week. Says Franz of Yuwa’s success: “If you create a space where there are no laps, no lines, no lectures; where the coach is the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage; where kids are rewarded based on attitude, which they have a hundred percent control over, not rewarded based on God-given talent or physical ability or whatever; and if you cheer for the ones who fall down, rather than the ones who are scoring the goals, then people feel like ‘this is a place where I can give it my all; where I can be competitive as a girl, which is something that society is not telling me is okay.’ Then it becomes a really fascinating kind of space where people are creating a counterculture. So these girls have essentially made a movement of girls in rural India who are fighting for and finding their freedom through football.”

The living room in the Yuwa house.

In Jharkhand, this freedom for girls is hard won. Carved out of the south of Bihar in 2000, Jharkhand is the fulfillment of a long struggle for statehood by the adavasi communities in the region. Active rebellions throughout the British occupation were followed by a protracted political struggle in the newly independent India. Although endowed with abundant natural resources—forty percent of the nation’s mineral reserves and twenty-nine percent of the nation’s coal reserves—the state is financially poor; a typical case of the “paradox of plenty.” Jharkhand’s tourism sector is also weak, sadly summarized in the Lonely Planet travel guidebook’s review of Ranchi: “There’s little of interest here for travelers, and it’s not really on the way to anywhere except Betla (Palamau) National Park.”

Kayalyn Kibbe

Coach Mashreeb Aryal and Yuwa students on the road outside the Yuwa compound

A scene from Hutup Village.

Underdevelopment extends far beyond Jharkhand’s lack of tourist attractions; according to the most recent national census, only 48.91 percent of women (ages 7+) in rural Jharkhand are literate, as opposed to the national average of 57.93 percent of women residing in rural areas. Jharkhand is also a major source state for domestic labor, child brides, commercial sexual exploitation, and forced labor. According to the 2013 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) “India Country Assessment Report: Current Status of Victim Service Providers and Criminal Justice Actors in India on Anti Human Trafficking,” over 126,000 cases of child labor trafficking were reported nationwide in 2011-2012. In many cases, these exchanges were engineered by so-called “placement agencies,” which purchase, kidnap, or co-opt girls and then sell them to customers in major cities like Delhi.

The same UNODC report states that, “the business of placement agencies has been fueled by huge demand of maids from eastern tribal states in the National Capital Region of Delhi. In the last three years, NGOs working in Delhi have reported rampant trafficking of women and children from Jharkhand.” Yuwa has experienced this first hand; girls in the area have been kidnapped in the past, and all are on constant guard against men attempting to lure them into strange spaces on their way home from school or football practice.

Students work by candlelight during Kayalyn's 5:30am class, following one of many frequent blackouts.

Particularly disturbing is the fact that since 2009 the state of Jharkhand has failed to report the number of missing children and missing persons to the National Crime Records Bureau. Yuwa’s work stands to counteract this in a subtle but very powerful way; “Yuwa’s the only place that requires the girls to get here on time,” says Kayalyn. “So if you don‘t come to my class within five minutes of it starting you are marked late and that is a deduction of a point. We have a point system for every month, and at the end of each month, if the girls have any points left then they get a special treat like a party or new notebooks or candy, and it really teaches the girls that they are responsible for their time, and they are accountable for their time and their work.” It also means that the entire Yuwa community is on high alert for missing girls—if a student is late to a Yuwa class or practice, her coaches, her teachers, and her peers are there to question her absence.

“It’s really great to see how motivated these kids are,” says Kayalyn. “I know that when I was fourteen I was not waking up at four-thirty in the morning to get extra schooling, and it’s really been incredible to see. My class usually ranges anywhere between fifteen and twenty girls, and for the past month it’s consistently been twenty girls every morning, at 5 am, showing up and really participating.” The girls’ enthusiasm and regular attendance speaks to how eager they are to participate in an environment that is both safe and nurturing. According to Franz, this is in stark contrast with the other formal education institutions that the girls attend. “The systems are oftentimes very abusive,” he says.

Yuwa students practice for the annual Yuwa talent show. Dancing is a favorite pastime at Yuwa.

“Our girls have been chosen as the ambassadors of this campaign to end violence against children, put on by UNICEF and the government of Jharkhand. They [the girls] talk about where they’re abused in their lives, and the most intense abuse that most of them face is in their schools. [For example,] getting their hands beat bloody if they don’t keep their hands behind their back and their eyes down when they’re walking through the hallway. So we can’t just go in and say ‘oh, let’s start working in schools! Let’s find a teacher there and train them’— no! There’s very little accountability there, there’s all types of abuse.

So how do we make certain that the kids in our program are safe, not just in eight out of ten cases or something like that, but in nearly a hundred percent of the cases? We’ve realized that if you want to do something right, oftentimes you’ve got to do it yourself.” In this case, that’s meant basing Yuwa’s expansion plan on the time it takes to develop its next round of coaches. Emphasizing how critical core values are to Yuwa’s continued success, Franz explains, “[T]he best people to hire are girls who’ve been in your program for six years.”

A testament to Yuwa’s influence, the NGO is highlighted on the final page of the UNODC report on Jharkhand; it is cited as a powerful source of hope, and a point of pride for all those invested in fighting human trafficking in India . The Yuwa girls are minor celebrities in India, but it wasn’t chasing fame that got them there—it was hard work, and in equal measure, bravery. Through their dedication to their sport, and more importantly, to each other, Yuwa girls are completing their education and shaping bright futures for themselves.

Students on their way to Kayalyn's evening class.

Although this is the first year that AIF has placed a Fellow with Yuwa, the two organizations have a close history. Recounting the development of the friendship, Franz recalls: “[T]he progression of that was that the first AIF Fellow here in Jharkhand sent her friend to work with us; and then the second one [Andrew Fertig] actually came to work for us himself; and then the third [Kayalyn] is now actually working for us in an official capacity.”

Kayalyn couldn’t be happier to be with Yuwa: “Yuwa is absolutely incredible for what it does, and the people who work here are the kindest and most loving people I’ve ever met and we all have totally fallen in love with these girls. We just love waking up every day knowing that we can see these girls, and talk to them, and make them smile, and give them a place where they can come to be themselves.”

Kayalyn reviews her students' homework during an evening class in November.

In addition to teaching several English classes a day, Kayalyn is also pursuing an exciting research project that allows her to spend more time with her students outside the classroom. She explains: “My main project for my Fellowship right now is writing a recipe book based on mother-daughter relationships in rural village life. It’s been really fun to be able to go to these girls’ homes, and to cook with them, and to observe their relationships with their mothers. A lot of these girls are around the age at which their mothers were married off, and it has been so incredible to see the shift in thinking about marriage age, and just marriage in general. A lot of these girls are extremely vulnerable to human trafficking and all kinds of abuse, and to meet these mothers who work full-time jobs in fields or in factories, and then come home and take care of their families, and their number-one priority is that their daughters will finish their education and reach the age of eighteen before they get married—that has been just so amazing to see.”

Kayalyn, on the roof of the Yuwa house.

Kayalyn continues: “A lot of these girls come from families that don’t necessarily value girls, or see girls as an economic burden, and they [the girls] sometimes face a lot of backlash for being at Yuwa. These girls are so brave, and they stand up for themselves, and I think Yuwa has taught them to speak out and to be their own advocates. [Yuwa’s] also empowered a lot of mothers—and fathers in some cases—to speak out against community practices that may be harmful to girls. And Yuwa is a very inclusive place where we’re not only changing how the girls see themselves, but we’re also changing how their family members see the girls. [It’s] really about elevating the status of girls in their homes, and then in their communities, and also in their own minds. That has been just such an experience, to be able to go to these homes and share a meal with these families, and hear them talk about why they love their daughters, and why their daughters are special and important to them.”

“Community cooking and meal sharing is something that I am extremely interested in studying as a form of healing and transformation in communities,” says Kayalyn. She’s also interested in the act of teaching within the kitchen setting—particularly in “the way that mothers pass down familial and communal information,” and in how “the act of cooking together and feeding one another can open incredible spaces for transformative and healing dialogues.”

The area around the Yuwa compound is largely agricultural. Many of the girls help their families with the harvest.

A Yuwa student displays a radish she helped harvest.

Cow-patties dry on a tree trunk near the Yuwa compound. They are used as fuel in cooking fires.

Members of the Rockstars team prepare a fire for their team dinner, which was held as a reward for excellent attendance.

The Rockstars enjoy cooking together, and each girl displays great confidence in her ability to prepare a meal.

Members of the Rockstars team enjoy the dinner that they prepared.

Describing her project, she says that being at Yuwa “has only fed my interest in this subject because when families can sit together and have a discussion about anything—be it school tuition or football coaching, there’s always a sense of listening and reciprocation in communication because everybody is sharing the same experience. And whether or not people have the same opinions on something, they’re all already in the act of sharing something together; we’re all sitting in the same room, we’re all eating the same meal, we’re all feeling the same cold night air, and that kind of levels the playing field for communication. That opens up a space in which everybody’s on the same page, everybody has exactly the same amount of everything, and it allows mothers to speak up in a space where they might not necessarily have a voice in the home; it allows the girls to voice their opinions; it allows fathers and brothers to also voice their opinions, but also to sit and listen.”

Students in Kayalyn's evening class raise their hands to answer questions about past and present tenses.

Kayalyn goes on to say: “My students are the best people I know; they are very inquisitive and curious, and I love that they have a lot of questions. One of the funniest things that I’ve learned here is—I hated getting homework when I was a student, but here—the Yuwa tuition classes are usually the only places where the girls are held accountable for their work and they really want homework. So if I don’t assign enough homework, there will be a girl in the front of the class saying: ‘Kayalyn that’s not enough homework, please give us more, we want to practice more.’” When asked about her teacher, Sheetal, age twelve and a member of the Rockstars team, independently confirms this: “She’s very good teacher, and I like her homework questions. She gives always homework, and we learn many questions with Kayalyn.”

Kayalyn Kibbe

Kayalyn reads a story during her evening English class.

Kayalyn Kibbe

Kayalyn and her students play a favorite game called — Kayalyn and her students play a favorite game called "Hot Seat" during Kayalyn's 5:30am English class.

Kayalyn's students wave to her after the conclusion of their early-morning English class.

Kayalyn has quickly become a core member of the Yuwa family—a role that she is both grateful and honored to have—and her students have joyously welcomed her into their homes. Additionally, Kayalyn is grateful for the Fellowship community, of which she is an integral part. “The Fellowship is like a family,” she says. “I feel extremely supported and heard and listened to in the Fellowship. It’s tough to be a little bit further removed from some of the other Fellows; I have another Fellow [Julia Wallin] who lives in Ranchi but it’s kind of like living in a different place because she’s an hour-and-a-half away, and she lives in a city. But the other Fellows are very good at keeping in touch; the Fellowship staff are always a phone call away, and just knowing that no matter what time it is, no matter what my question is or what my problem is, there is somebody in the AIF crew who is going to pick up their phone and listen to me laugh with me, or cry with me, and be really supportive and helpful. […]I feel very independent in AIF, but I also feel very well protected, and if I need anything at all, someone in the Fellowship is there. It’s been really relaxing to know that I don’t have to do everything on my own, and while I feel empowered to do so, there’s always someone there in case I need help.”

Kayalyn and Niharika (Neha) Baxla share a laugh at practice. Neha is a Yuwa mentor and conducts life-skills workshops.

In many ways, Yuwa provides a similar safety net for the girls in its programs; Yuwa’s coaches and teachers are always on hand to support and assist, and at the same time the girls themselves offer each other encouragement and strength. The energy and inspiration that Kayalyn derives from her Fellowship class is what she pours back into her own classroom, and in turn what the girls will continue to give to each other—a beautiful cycle of both personal growth and community development. Describing this exceptional community, Kayalyn says, “It’s one of the kindest places I’ve ever worked; everybody approaches everything with love and kindness and honesty, which has been extremely informative and transformative for me professionally and personally.” Watching Kayalyn at the head of a classroom or out on the football field with her adoring students, it’s clear that her heart and hard work are helping to shape a similarly transformative environment for the girls at Yuwa.

Kayalyn Kibbe

Write your story here. (Optional)

Kayalyn Kibbe

Write your story here. (Optional)

Kayalyn Kibbe

Footnotes

Film, photos, and text by Ilana Millner | Media Fellow, Class of 2014-2015. © Ilana Millner for the American India Foundation.

FootNotes

Film, photos, and text by Ilana Millner | Media Fellow, Class of 2014-2015. © Ilana Millner for the American India Foundation.

© 2026 AIF

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