I may be taking a short hiatus from posting blogs. It's not that I don't want to post, but I am so unbelievably busy at work that it may be difficult to have time to write the blogs. I am working on a training manual that consists of 13 one hour trainings. I have two weeks to finish writing and researching the trainings then I'm doing a test implementation over two days and reviewing and making changes. If you do the math, that means all of my time is taken up in the next few weeks until I leave. I will [View Full Entry]

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A couple things I feel I haven’t talked about: People are very proud to be Indian and being from the same country is a uniting factor just like in the US; however, each state has its own identity that might even override their patriotism. More people turn out for local level elections than national elections and an Indian person will always identify where they are from. Each state has its own dishes and traditions that people follow and make it very hard to generalize India. People in Maharashtra, the state I live in, especially are proud of where they are from. [View Full Entry]

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10/5-10/6 Today I went on my first field visit in rural Maharasthra, the state that Rajgurunagar and Mumbai are in. I went with a field officer Sanjay who was going to be conducting a training in a nearby town, approximately 25km away. We took the bus early in the morning and arrived to the town 1 ½ hours later (it takes awhile to travel small distances here because the roads are so bad). When we arrived it was pouring rain. We both forgot our umbrellas and became completely soaked in the minutes it took to get from the bus stop to [View Full Entry]

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On Tuesday the 29th of September Sandhya, the coordinator of my program, came to take me to Chaitanya. I was unsure if Chaitanya was a town or the name of the organization I was going to work with and basically unsure of anything where I was going. We went by a car and drove through the most beautiful scenery. We kept rising in the mountains and went through a beautiful mountain pass. The sparse houses and green hills surrounding us in contrast to the buildings of Mumbai created so much excitement for what was to come. I arrived in Rajgurunagar or [View Full Entry]

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21-27/9 My last week in Mumbai was quite strange. On Monday my rickshaw driver didn’t come because it was Id, the celebration of the end of Ramadan. The day consists of praying and celebrating with family after a long month of fasting. There was a picture in a Mumbai paper of trains from Sunday literally crawling with people. People on the roof, on the side of the train, in the tracks- everyone trying to get to their families in preparation of Id. I decided just to work at home instead of trying to find a rickshaw and returned on Tuesday. For [View Full Entry]

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9/14 to 9/18 Because I finished most of the office work I needed to do I was able to be in the field every day this week. Still I felt some apprehensions because most of the CSP (people who go into the field) don’t speak very much English meaning even if I go on the field visits, I don’t know exactly what is going. Going on the visits was reviving though and have been the best part of the internship thus far although it is so stinking hot every day I am constantly perspiring. The first day I went with two [View Full Entry]

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For some reason it’s impossible to get a ticket out of Agra to Mumbai on a weekend so Emily and I reserved our last day to go to Delhi and fly home. We hadn’t bought tickets so Sunday morning we arrived and bought tickets to Delhi on the “superfast” train for approximately $1. The “superfast” train took 6 hours instead of 3 so we had to cut out a lot of our activities for the day. We decided to go to a cheap guesthouse and buy a room to hold our stuff for the day so we didn’t have to carry [View Full Entry]

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We went to Agra on an overnight train that was supposed to be 12 hours. It was my first time navigating a train station and I was a little overwhelmed. The train stations embody everything that makes India India- the mix of smells and people and cows, the beggars, the travelers, the wanderers, different religions, different classes and castes, etc. We found our car which was 2nd Class AC just fine and chose our seats. Our tickets were e-tickets and didn’t have seat numbers so we decided anywhere would be fine. Two nice men from Germany sat across from us and [View Full Entry]

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The second week of my time in India I decided to go with Emily, the Seattle girl I had met on my first day in Bombay, on a little vacation. She seemed very comfortable in India after spending six weeks there so I thought her positive and acclimated attitude might rub off on my surly mood. The trip was very…loosely planned. We decided to go to Uttar Pradesh a region up north where Varanasi and Agra are. It was a very short trip, 4 days and three cities, Varanasi, Agra and Delhi. Varanasi is India’s holy city. If you die there [View Full Entry]

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Namaste from India! I haven’t used this greeting yet but I read in my Hindi book that this is how you should greet most people. Here is some background on India. Under Britain’s rule for a long time India, gained its independence in the 1940’s and is still struggling to define the country’s political structure. The bureaucratic system of the British is mostly still in place and the government offices are a HUGE, interconnecting maze, a combination that makes it really hard to get anything done. In addition, (and you should look the actual figures up on your own) th [View Full Entry]

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