March in Mhaswad

Well, I’m now in the last big push of my fellowship. From now until I leave the village to travel, only 11 weeks remain. It’s pretty hard to believe. Being here 6 ½ months has the effect of all those hard-earned friendships, expanded comfort levels and acquired local understanding adding together in a way that makes everything more enjoyable. Mhaswad feels more like home than it did before (obviously), and my experience of things is increasingly less associated with its comparison to the U.S. or my norms back home. All this means that an adjustment period has reaped a lot of fruit that I’m beginning to now enjoy! In addition, having only 11 weeks left in my community makes me appreciate it all the more, knowing how quickly those weeks will fly by.

Here are some random updates:

Temperature:
I think we’re technically still in the midst of Spring, but a Northwesterner can hardly call 92 degrees F, INSIDE a cool building, springtime weather. It will reach up to 120 degrees in May and June, which I can hardly imagine surviving.

A Friend Arrives!:
My friend and former college roommate Rachel joined me last week for two months of interning with Mann Deshi, which has so far been great! I wasn’t sure how blending my home life and India life would change my experience of India, but luckily I think having someone to experience and process all the crazy and irrational daily stuff here helps me stay low-key and good natured.
So that brings us to three interns now—the third is Moniek, from the Netherlands, who has been with us one month and will stay until early April. We were recently invited to have lunch at our friend Archana’s house (see picture)—Archana’s mother made my favorite dish, grilled okra, and Archana drew sand designs around our plates with our initials! How sweet is that.

A Busy Week:
On Rachel’s first day, Mann Deshi was hosting a site visit for an RBI (Reserve Bank of India) conference on off-site surveillance (don’t ask me what that is). There were about 40 people from all over Asia, representing various microfinance and national banks, who came to Mhaswad to see our operations. We prepared as though the Queen was coming, with food and snacks on platters everywhere, many of our clients dressed in their finest jewelry to meet the participants, and even a local trumpeter to great them (see picture). One of the visitors, a man from Afghanistan, was trying to convince me to visit Kabul, which is apparently very safe so long as you hire a “shooter.” Convincing.
Saturday was World Women’s Day, and was an incredibly packed day. Rachel and I were honored guests at our friend Sejal’s free clinic day at her Ayurvedic clinic. Rachel, Chetna, a local doctor and I were given chai and breakfast at their home, and then we lit ceremonial candles at the clinic and said prayers to bless the day. We broke coconut over a stone to bless their renovated humidifier room, and then were given beautiful wool shawls as a gifts before we left. Once we got back to the bank, all the women were being given strings of Jasmine called “veni” to pin in their hair. Almost immediately after putting venis in our hair, our cook arrived at the bank to invite Rachel and I to eat at her house-- so off we went, following her down the winding and confusing alleys of Mhaswad, until we got to her little house and sat on her hot stone floor while she and her daughter cooked us absolute feast of a lunch. It was amazing. The final unexpected event of the day was being invited to attend an event at the police station after work. Rachel and I lugged our heavy bags to the station, assumed our seats at the front of the waiting room with Chetna, a politician and some police sergeants, and the hour-long event conducted purely in Marathi began. We were asked to speak a few words to the women, and got some interesting opinions from the police sergent about how America's society isn't as family oriented as India's, since Indian women stay loyally with their husband's family. He also chose that women's day event as the perfect opportunity to coach the women on the evils of girls running off with boys, thinking they were in love, and getting involved with crime. I wasn't a big fan of that guy, and Chetna was rolling her eyes through most of the event.

A trip:
I’m leaving tomorrow for a week-long site visit to Gujarat, a state north of Maharashtra made famous for a large earthquake that devastated the area in 2001 (which actually served as the impetus for creating the American India Foundation). My friend Brenna, who is also an AIF fellow, works there with an NGO called Khamir, which works with handicraft villages in the Kutch region. I’ll shadow her for a day as she takes some British researchers on a tour of various weaving villages, accompany her NGO co-workers on a retreat to the beach, and camp out in the desert with our friend Katy before heading back to Bhuj and departing the next week. My mentor, Chetna, is actually from this area and speaks glowingly about it, so I’m really excited to see it for myself!

There’s the update for now—I’ll write more after my trip to Gujarat and the holiday of Holi. I should have plenty of stories by then! Much love-

were asked to speak

Back to the Grind

Hello friends! I’m very excited to say that it’s good to be back in the ‘Wad.

When I first returned, I was a little overwhelmed to find that I had about a week of travels planned for me as I attended two back-to-back conferences in Pune and Hubli, but in the end, of course, they were both interesting experiences and I was really glad I went.

The first, in Pune, was a microfinance conference (called ‘Conference in Microfinance’—very clever) aimed at bringing together the practitioners of microfinance and the academics who study their impact, methods, philosophy, etc. Among the speakers were some big names from Harvard, MIT and NYU, including the directors of the Poverty Action Lab and many Indian bigwigs. Although it took me awhile to get out of my jet-lagged stupor, I met some really friendly people during the networking breaks and finally had some snazzy business cards to distribute—yay! It’s amazing how handy they are.

A Bank holiday immediately followed, which allowed me to stay in Pune for a couple days, hang with my fellow fellows (see picture) and do some shopping. Patiala pants, which are the biggest, fluffiest Indian pants you can find, are my new love, and luckily I was in need of some replacement pants after an unfortunate shrinking laundry incident, so I hit Lakshmi road up and reconnected with the Indian market scene. It felt good. To extend my time in Pune, I had decided to take a night bus to Hubli just in time for the second conference (always cuttin’ it close) so I had the unfortunate experience of tossing and turning at a 45 degree from 11:00 pm to 6:00 am on the Indian equivalent of a Greyhound. I’ll never do it again.

In Hubli, I attended the three-day Development Dialogue Conference hosted by the Deshpande Foundation, which is a family foundation run out of Boston but benefiting the Hubli-Dharwad community in Northern Karnataka (the state below Maharashtra, which is where I live). The conference was pretty big (about 250 people) and touched on basically every sector of development in India with panels of practitioners speaking about their personal experiences. I was really excited to sit in on an agricultural session, and made some really useful connections with other organizations that I’m hoping to collaborate with on a project. I also got to meet up with fellow fellow Menaka for dinner, which was nice!

What else….now back in the ‘Wad, the excitement continues. We have a new intern on the premises, Claudia, and because of her arrival we had a really constructive meeting with Chetna (my boss) about the division of projects. I had roughly outlined an agenda for the meeting after reflecting on things while in the U.S., and luckily it served as a pretty good guide for the discussion and I’m very excited about how I’ll be spending my time during the final 5 months. I’ll be helping with the community radio project (licensing, procuring a building and equipment, designing on-air programs, etc.), creating an action plan for a potential sustainable agriculture curriculum for the business school (!), and hopefully encouraging greater cohesion in the office and for the interns by authoring and designing organizational materials that make sense of this madness. Some of my greatest frustrations with the Bank stem from the fact that things don’t feel connected, systemized, organized, or intentional. I’ve never seen a mission statement, a 5 year growth plan, etc. That’s not to say they don’t exist, but just that you have to trip over things sometimes to realize they exist (which is really problematic). I’m hoping to spend time with the staff over the next few months, fleshing out these things and writing them/publishing them in a form that can be easily used for interns, potential donors, in grant applications, for clients, etc. And of course, the financial literacy—I’m hoping I can hand this off to another intern when they start to arrive in the spring, but in the meantime, I’m continuing to work on the curriculum. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed with how much I’m working on, not to mention the continuous flow of grant applications we’re always working on, but….it’s only 5 more months, so I’d like to get as much done as possible. Go big or go home.

To add to the insanity, I’ve been staying with Chetna and her family since getting back to India because my host family is out of town. Women simply do not stay alone in these parts, so I’ve been sleeping in their “middle room,” (what Americans could call a HALLWAY, reference picture please) living out a bag and rewashing the same three outfits every few days. Chetna’s house, which after some adjustment definitely has some perks, is a bit of a madhouse. Her mother-in-law is basically the reason for this. Akka is in her 70s, and basically terrifies me. She sleeps on the floor, not for lack of mattresses but because she’s Akka, and begins to sweep through the house at 6:00 in the morning, banging doors, turning on lights, and growling at people to wake up. One morning, she shoved my face until I woke up so she could yell incoherent things at me in Marathi. I yelled incoherent things back at her in English and turned over. Chetna and her family have this attitude of bemusement concerning her all the time, and luckily for me, I never know what she’s ranting about so I can be bemused by her, too.

Fortunately, the Narales are getting back tonight, and I’ll finally regain some personal space when I move back tomorrow. Thursday night, I’m happy to say, I’ll be catching a night train to Goa to meet up with fellows Ann and Diana for a few days on the beach, doing nothing but swimming, eating and relaxing. I cannot WAIT!

That’s all the news that’s fit to post—hope you all are staying warm and healthy! Keep in touch and much love to you all :)

Back in Bombay

Hello once again! I know I have a LOT of catching up to do after such a long hiatus from writing, but the short of it is that my laptop, shortly after writing my last post in October, went completely haywire and was in a shop for about a month, followed by a very hectic few weeks leading up to the AIF mid-point conference and a trip back to Portland.

As most of you know, I trekked home in mid-December for my sister's wedding and Christmas, both of which were fabulous and joyous occasions. It was wonderful to be back, despite the whirlwind of craziness and activity that could be a little overwhelming for a jet-lagged, road weary traveler. After about 24 more hours of being in transit, I'm back in India, enjoying the last few hours of western civilization in Vaani's (a fellow fellow) family's 5-star hotel room before I take the plunge into the madness of Mumbai and catch a bus back to Pune, and then Mhaswad.

As I was expecting, it's a little strange to be back, and yet also really special to feel a sense of familiarity and confidence in a such a distant and vibrant country. Mhaswad is going to be a different place without any other westerners there (Brenna returned to Syracuse to finish her graduate program right about when I left for the wedding), and I’m definitely feeling some of the pangs of homesickness that will take some time to get over. The re-adjustment period, though, is probably a small price to pay for the perspective I gained by being away, and I’m really looking forward to upping my productivity now that I have a mere 6 months to accomplish some big goals with Mann Deshi. Our Financial Literacy curriculum is in it’s final stages of development, and I hoping to start working with another staff member, Padma, on beginning a local community radio station this spring.

Stay tuned for some recaps of stories from the past few months! Hope to hear from you all soon, and take care.