Bharat Bandh: Laxmi and Jagannath lost in Orissa!

Beautiful Children of Dusara

This blog is a little long. Since I have not had a chance to update in awhile, I thought I would write a lot on what kind of work I am doing (to answer the famous question people like my Mom keep asking, "what are you actually doing in India?") and about some recent adventures that I went on. There are basically 2 blogs in one here. Enjoy!

To Start, here's a look at some typical days at work:

The line of translation: The girl I am talking to is from a local
village and is speaking Santhali. The girl standing is translating it to Hindi
 to the girl sitting next to me. Then Shikha, the
girl sitting next to me, tells me in English what she has said.

Project RISHTA. Visit to a youth resource
 center for the youth development project

Local Children watch a play 

on HIV/AIDS

The usual end of the day after
visits to Seraikella villages

Leading a workshop on Self Reflection
with RISHTA peer educators

Giving the car a push to
start with some other guys

Waiting for late people. . .getting
used to IST (Indian "Stretchable" Time)

Monday June 28, 2010

Exactly one month ago today was my flight from Cleveland to Mumbai. In exactly one month, I will be back in Mumbai giving my final presentation. I have completed half of my internship with Tata Steel this summer, and I am looking towards only one month more in Jamshedpur with the Tata Steel Family Initiatives Foundation and then two weeks of travel before flying back to life in the U.S. It’s kind of weird that so much time has already gone by. I feel slightly nervous with only one month left to do all of the work needed to make this project what I want it to be, but all in all I know even if I walked away right now I would be pretty satisfied with all of the experiences I have had working on the ground with an NGO.

Traditional greetings by Peer Educators of RISHTA

I am getting more and more nervous with leaving India with only a broad understanding of many things, and not full understanding of any one thing. My thoughts are constantly sprawled out in too many directions. I have spent time trying to sink deep into the culture to fully understand the environment that I am working within, and also understand how development works “Indian Style”. Yet, in places like India, you can only crack the shell of culture in two months. Simultaneously, I am trying to learn everything that the department that I work within does. This is also ambitious, and taking more time than I want it to. Then there is figuring out what I can actually do here. Every time I think to do something, I am assured that it has already been tried, or it’s impossible given the circumstances – going back to the fact that these people know this place better and I actually don’t have anything really practical knowledge to offer. Then I struggle with whether I actually agree with this company and their interventions. It is definitely interesting to work within a CSR division rather than a non-profit NGO. For one, resources are a big difference. They seem to do so many things because they have resources and the knowledge to implement a project. Yet, because there is so much general and broad work being done, no single project or intervention is fully successful or operating sustainably within its proposed goals. And no area that they work within has an overall better quality of life.

The Zoo

The most important issue for me right now—after finally learning the project proposals, intentions and also adjusting to cultural barriers—is what my role is here. I have learned so much, yet I don’t feel confident with all the brushed over details. People say it’s better to get a gist of things, but what I was looking forward to most was really understand how an NGO operates on the ground and immerse myself in practical ways to problem solve and implement something real that can help people.  It is not that easy though. The only tools I know how to use would require more time and a better array of perspectives. There is no instant gratification in this line of socially driven work; it is such a process to get from that desire to improve people’s lives to actually experiencing the change. But the truth that I am coming to learn is that it is not impossible. I think people just have to put the reports down and spend more time in the field, where reality will paint it’s own picture—regardless what funders expect. In these dubious times of skepticism, I think of what Paul Farmer would say. I think his example proves that it’s definitely not impossible just to give the poor what they need. I don’t really know what I can do here, but the least I can do understand how I see inequality so clearly and how its really simple what needs to be done. I guess its all in how you define injustice, and how you choose to deal with it.

July 9, 2010 - Work Hard, Play Hard

Peer Leader Training

Time is flying! The last post were some random thoughts I have been having for awhile now, and wanted to share it. I am in the latter phase of my internship this summer, getting ready to wrap up my project and begin compiling all my observations and interviews to create a qualitative report on my activities and interactions with the beneficiaries of TSFIF services, how the plans work into action and how people using these services actually perceive them (sort of a mini-ethnography). As I sit here in an air conditioned office in the Muslim neighborhood of Dhatkidih of Jamshedpur sipping chai and looking over all of my notes, I realize that this past month has been nuts!

Fetching water in a drought

So before this trip, I mostly had contact with urban populations and urban poverty. I had been around the urban poor of the U.S., most recently in the Bay Area. I had no experience with rural poverty in a developing country and was skeptical on working with those in rural areas, as most people mistaken simplistic village life for poverty. I was also suspicious on how making them dependent on urban services would improve their lives, or make them more apt to move to urban areas, which would most likely result in them living in slums in Indian big cities as urban cities become more crowded and unable to house more people (sort of a slippery slope I suppose, but urbanization is the trend). So, crowded and polluted slum life, or rural village? Also, what happened when Tats Steel stops giving them help? How do you sustain such give aways?

Once I began more work in rural areas here in this area of the state of Jharkhand, I confronted a lot of these internal problems as well as began to realize how I wrongly saw things. The choice, or the tradition, or the random occurrence of coming to live in a rural village should not be any different that the choice, tradition or random occurrence of living in an urban area- except if you get sick; or, if you are a woman in most of these villages; or if you want more for yourself than working on a farm and having a family. It can also be a huge problem if you have no access to water, sufficient agriculture techniques to yield larger crops (for food and livelihood). There is no option if you are isolated hundreds of miles away from possibilities of help. The rural life is tough, and it is not the romantic life of simplicity and constant natural beauty that us busy city slickers dream up. In India especially, during those extremely hot summer days and nights where the temperature is breaking 110 degrees before noon and the rain is a month late, it can be pretty miserable.  When you can’t even grow crops for cash or food, where do you go?

Me asking quiz questions in Hindi to the adolescents
during a peer leader training for RISHTA

Sahiyya Training for MANSI

RISHTA Nukkad Natak teaching about HIV/AIDS

Girls Peer Leader Class - RISHTA

Girls Peer Leader Class - RISHTA

The projects I have spent most time with are RISHTA (Regional Initiative for Safe Sexual Health for Today’s Adolescents) and MANSI (Maternal And Newborn Survival Initiative). RISHTA is an educational project that establishes YRCs (Youth Resource Centers) in villages where select community adoloscents are trained as peer educators and teach other youth in the community about sexual and reproductive health, gender equality and empowering the youth to make better decisions about their future. The most important things are bringing men and women together (something that usually does not happen in these villages) between the ages of 12-24 to talk about STIs, family planning, contraceptives, HIV/AIDS, empower girls to have equal opportunities with guys, and also enforce the legal age of marriage (18 for girls, 21 for guys) since most girls are married off as young as 12 years old. MANSI on the other hand is trying to improve health of mothers and newborn babies since maternal and infant mortality rates are extremely high in these areas (they are even higher in this state than the already high national rates). They pretty much try to promote births at hospitals rather than at-home deliveries, educate pregnant women on caring for newborn children, changing cultural beliefs around how to treat new mothers (some villages believe they should not touch or feed the mother and child for two days after birth, a time when it is essential to give mother and child nutrients and care), weighing the child after birth to assess whether or not the baby is underweight and to promote the usage of current public services offered by the district. This project is complicated though, as it is not easy to convince most women in isolated rural areas with no mode of transportation to get to a hospital or clinic up to 20 km away to have a birth, especially when they fear hospitals and it is tradition to have children at home alone. Both MANSI and RISHTA are linked though, as I begin to see that educating and empowering women at a younger age lends to change around how they also manage their births and marriages.

The other part of my work has been to just observe mobile health clinics and health camps that are sponsored in rural villages and urban slums to give free basic health care to the poor on specified times of the month. These have been really interesting to watch. It has been difficult to follow unless I have a translator, and it becomes difficult to understand how people socially interact here and what is appropriate and what is not. A few times I have actually experienced some horrible doctors giving care to people and did not understand why people who do not have any sort of services have to wait until the one time every few months when there is a free clinic, only to interact with a complete jackass that does not deserve a medical license. It is not fun sometimes to do this kind of work. I have had a lot of emotional struggles as I watched women bring children into clinics that are so extremely malnourished that they can not even stand or stay awake, extremely underweight adult men who look so this you could break their limb just by grabbing them the wrong way, families infected with malaria, people struggling with skin boils due to poor hygiene (due to the lack of access to clean water and extreme heat), parasitic infections, scabies, children covered in lice, old women in desperate need of eye care or medication for painful arthritis, and parents living with HIV trying to raise their children and take care of themselves while dealing with scrutiny of the community. One emotional story was when an entire family (a brother, a pregnant wife and mother) came in to support their brother, husband and son as he learned he was positive with HIV. They sat on the bench in the waiting room all crying. I kind of internalized the pain a bit, and couldn’t understand what they could possibly be feeling, let alone what the man was feeling.

Basically I have spent my time observing, interviewing and learning how an NGO working around poverty and health works on the ground in a developing nation. I have also had opportunities to help create modules for projects like RISHTA training sessions for self-reflection and second hand leadership. I actually led one last week- ALL IN HINDI! (Don’t ask, I still don’t know how it happened). I have attended meetings to help coordinate TSFIF with other NGOs in the area and government services, and I interact with beneficiaries to get a sense of whom this department targets. It’s intense just to get to the rural poor though. It takes three hours just to get 70 km to villages in the district of Seraikella. The roads are horrendous. A lot of pregnant women in villages have to drive on these torn-up roads while having contractions just to give birth at a clinic. It is also intense to experience their lives and then just leave and go back to my nice guesthouse. The imbalance of privilege seems wrong. The main problem often times though is the political problems that happen everyday around Jharkhand. Because of Moaist rebel “bandhs” (protests that close the roads), we have had to cancel a lot of field visits and my project has taken a big hit. I am not sure what I will end up with anymore.

Mini and I
(aka Laxmi & Jagannath)

As I was saying in the last post, I have become pretty good friends with Mini, my Indian-born-part-American friend. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t meet her. Absolute immersion into Indian culture and dedication to a project are the kinds of experiences I have craved for my practice experience this summer. However, I have come to realize that it would have been pretty tough to be all alone here without someone who understands where I am coming from. Being the only foreigner, the only westerner, the only person not understanding Hindi, the only American, the person who has deal with stange American stereotypes, the person who sometimes does not know what food we are eating or what famous Indian people are talking about—being this person everyday gets as frustrating as it is fun. Mini has been great as someone who has been living in the US and understands where I am coming from as she is basically American (and also someone who actually understands my accent!). It is also nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of and discuss issues around the work we are doing, especially when trying to assess whethere or not they are doing the right things. The other perk is that she is my translator (not by her choice). I wasn’t even supplied with a translator, so without her I am usually totally lost as people speak a whole pool of languages from Hindi, to Bengali, to Bihari, to Oria, to Santhali—even to English I can not understand!

Dhaulighiri Buddhist temple

Orian Temples

Ganesha - the remover of obstacles

The amazing sun temple and it's carvings

Last week we took a trip to a state south of here called Orissa. It was an amazing place, one of the most beautiful places I have seen in India. I was reminded how stale Jamshedpur is in some ways. It is a factory town with little to do, and it full of people tied to the corporation for their livelihood. Nothing is extravagantly beautiful and everything has to do with the company itself. Life in the guesthouse usually only promises the same food and conversation from upper class officers from Tata Steel. I have made some good friends, and it has been an interesting time with a lot of Indian cultural experiences, but I was reminded how excited I am to travel and see more after this internship. So anyway, Mini and I traveled to the capital of Orissa—Bhubeneswar, the city of temples. It is full of tropical palm trees, awesome restaurants, strong Hindu tradition, old Hindu and Buddhist temples covering most of the city, ancient caves, its own script (Oria is the most beautiful written language I have seen yet!) and it is the hub for travel to the beautiful beach town of Puri (home of Jagannath, Hindu lord of the universe), national parks, artful creations of local Adiviasi (indigenous communities of India) and the sun temple of Konark (one of seven wonders of India). It was the perfect break from work and it was exactly what I wanted. Tata steel hooked us up with a free guesthouse stay with meals and a personal driver. The best part was Puri’s beaches. Aside from the scary current, swimming in the Bay of Bengal was beautiful! A funny story was how our nicknames were changed to Laxmi and Jaggarnath (two Hindu gods that were a married couple) by a Buddhist monk when we posed as a married couple to bypass strange questions of why we were traveling together. It was hilarious! He blessed us in this long ceremony when he also blessed our future children. Mini is Hindu and almost died afterwards in fear that we offended the gods! The whole situation was pretty funny.

The unfortunate day of the trip was Monday when we got stuck all day in Bhubeneswar in our guesthouse as there was a nation wide bandh (hindi for closed, but also a political demonstration where everyone closes up shop and heads to the streets). Every store, cab, rickshaw, driver, place and train shut down in protest to the increase of petroleum prices in India. There was nothing to do, so it was a bummer to waste a whole day in our trip. It was also crazy to experience a nation-wide protest. I spent most of the day brushing up on the issues around the bandh and learned that many people were passionate about defending lower prices for fuel, but many were also pressured into participating as they might encounter violence from protesters if they opened their business or continued train and flight services. All day, all over the news were crowds rioting, fighting and burning tires in protest. People were injured, airports shut down—the whole economy just stopped for a day. It reminded me of protests in Argentina, and protests I think I would never see in the U.S.

Bharat Bandh

Village Temple in the Jungle

swimming in the Bay of Bengal

Building of the "rath" (chairiot) for the Rath Yatra
celebration in Puri for lord Jagannath

Jagannath Temple

Playing with Pinky in the rain

I have been hard at work and adjusting to a lot of unfavorable and too favorable conditions here (like eating more food than I have in my life). Aside from work troubles, I have also been fighting a lot of presumptions people have of me based on what I look like and where I come from. Everyday someone says something like,

“You must be uncomfortable in this heat that you are not used to."

"The food must be too spicy for you."

"Do you miss your McDonalds?"

"Is sex really free in your country?"

"You probably have so many American girlfriends because Americans can date as many people as they want!"

"America is a very calm place and there is no crime or corruption, you are very lucky."

"Well you are rich, so you can do whatever you want in India!”

And if I say something simple, like the word “aloo” (potato in Hindi) instead of the English word, or “namaskaar” or “namaste” (greetings equivalent to hello) people go into a major fuss and want to know, “How on Earth have you learned these words?!” After a month I have actually picked up a lot of vocabulary, but yet people still have the lowest expectations of Westerners and their learning capacity for Indian culture. We will see how much I can impress them in the next month when I can hopefully speak an entire conversation in Hindi instead of just random sentences! All in all, my Indian summer has been a time I will never forget. People are already asking me to come to weddings next summer or work on other projects. Third summer in India in a row? . . .

Although this entry is a rant of doubt and problems, I have had some pretty amazing moments here. Let the photos tell you what I can not.

Orissa

Bamboo Scafolds and
Building up Jamshedpur

Puri

Sahiyya Training in a village

Just another commute to work

Fresh Coconuts in Orissa