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Published: June 21st 2014
Well it’s been one week of training here in Chicago. For those of you unfamiliar with the happenings, the program I am in is called GESI. Global Engagement something something. It is a program based at Northwestern University that revolves around connecting students to real communities in the world that are being assisted by NGOs. We work for those NGOs and in turn learn about working in development. My program has me in Chicago this week, then I am in India for eight weeks, then I return home for three days to report on my findings (or sneak out and steal a car to drive back to my girlfriend). So I actually have a lot to cover on this blog. This will be my last report in America! But I feel this is a good time to explain what the aim of this program is and why I was so inclined to do something like this and not something else like study abroad.
First off I want to tell everyone about the schedule we are on. Every day this week I awake around 7:30. I live in a hostel with all other 60 students in the program. My room of
eight guys is hustling and bustling at their own pace. We all awake at different times, but I am usually first to leave. The reason being is that I like to walk to our building. Our hostel is on Congress and State Street. Basically it is right next to millennium park. And the Northwestern campus (which is not the actual campus, but a separate campus for graduate programs like medical school and law school) is up Madison about two miles. So I get to walk up the busiest Chicago street at morning rush hour and it is pretty cool. I love wandering around places (as my bar mates know) and I just enjoy starting the morning off in the middle of all the action of the city. I arrive to the school around 8:45 and class starts at 9 sharp.
We technically take two courses for the summer, both of which I don’t know the actual name of. But basically they are in the department of international work and development. The first course is from 9 to noon and is usually a combination of lecture and small groups where we discuss case studies. Case studies are basically old projects
or examples of projects in international work that we have to critique. At noon it’s lunch time and GESI doesn’t skimp on food. Most lunches and dinners are very nice and border-line on catering. After lunch is language hour! This means myself and the 9 other India bound students in the program go into a room with this cool guy named Veejay who attempts to teach us Hindi…….in one week…….in only one hour a day. Basically it is a chance to learn helpful phrases, a little of the written language, and some insight into culture.
After lunch hour is a break then on to a guest speaker. We have had many guest speakers ranging from a lawyer to talk about how to stay safe internationally (basically a talk about the chances of getting raped), a woman who talked about how we will always be an outsider in these communities, a guy who worked for the peace corps (and hated it) and went on to live in India for many years, and also a woman who gave us a history of Indian politics. These sessions are meant to be more informative to us to prepare us for either our own
country, or going internationally in general.
This is followed up by our second course which lasts in the vicinity of 2 to 3 hours as well. Usually this course is oriented more towards looking at international work in general. Mostly they try to teach us how to not fuck up a community by trying to come in and think we can solve all of their problems. Somewhere in there we get a break, dinner, and watch a little of the World Cup (FRANCE GOING ALL THE WAY BABYYYY!!!) By the time all is said and done it is somewhere between 7 and 8, and now we have to get back to the Hostel.
But the day’s not over! Now that we are at the hostel we must sit down and get all of our readings and activities done for the next day of lecture. This has usually meant I get finished around 10:30 or 11 (if I am fast). By the end I am pretty beat and most people just go to bed. Or we stay up and chat about our upcoming adventure. Basically you get the idea that this week is exhausting, and we all want to
get going our flights mostly to get away from the classroom.
So some of you may be wondering what it is we learn all day. Well I have a little story to explain this. Most of you may or may not be familiar with a little facebook post that was passed around in the recent months about “Voluntourism”. In the post a woman explains she went on some kind of mission trip in order to ‘build a shed’ in a developing country (I want to say it was Haiti, but I can’t remember and it’s not really important). She explains that when she and the others were building the shed that every night the locals would go in and redo their work. Basically they don’t know how to build a fucking shed. Then after a week of that they went on a week long hiking trip. The woman goes on to say that they did more harm than good and that they shouldn’t have gone and that people who are considering doing international volunteer work should probably not go.
The reason I know this article exists is because an individual that I will not name sent me this
article about a month back. She then told me that she heard I was doing international work, and she thought I should read this article so I could “learn from this girl’s mistakes and realize it’s best if you stay home”. I will leave my friends their imaginations to figure out what I thought of this person’s idea. But in the end I just never responded. I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t trying to be mean or place their opinion onto another person’s life. Despite the poorly way the facebook article is written and presented, it has a point.
In the last ten to twenty years there has been a culture of international work that has done a lot of harm in the world. Everyone wants to help, but there seems to be an increasing phenomenon that international work means that someone from the west goes to a country that is not as well off, and will attempt to fix problems. I read a TIME article about a young girl who graduated high school and went to Nepal on a trip. She found some orphans and decided to build her own orphanage and
today has like twenty kids that she raises and educates. Sounds great right? Not really. Today Nepal has a terrible child trafficking problem. It is in part due to that this TIME article is a number of years old and started a “Gold Rush” of westerners going to Nepal to make their own orphanages. The result is that it is now a lucrative business to sell children into Nepal so they can fill these orphanages. Crazy right? This week has been full of terrifying articles of people with good intentions going about international work in the wrong way and causing more harm than good.
So basically my program GESI exists to train us not to do that. We are not on an agenda to do something specific like build wells in all of our cities, we are not educating, growing plants, or feeding the hungry. We are going into these NGOs that are already in place, and work to figure out what the community in our area needs. Many people have asked me over the months what I will be doing in India and I say “I don’t know yet. We will figure it out when we get there.”
Some people were confused by this and didn’t fully understand. But if you think about it, why would I know what I’m going to do? How do I know what the villages around Udaipur need or want? I don’t live there. But when I get to India I will work with my NGO (Jagran Jan Vikas Samiti) and do a lot of research in order to figure out what kind of project would most benefit the community. See what I mean?
At the end of this week I can’t say that I understand every aspect of this idea. Basically the idea is that a community will not gain anything by being given things. Giving them money, buildings, charity, or food is kind of like a band-aid that’s not fully sterilized and you put it on a gaping wound. It may do something, but in the long run it could cause much more harm. So we are being trained to focus on projects that will train locals, provide them means to create their own projects, or create systems that we won’t run and that people in the community will run on their own. Because in the end we don’t live, we don’t know the culture, and we don’t know what is best. So we will go and try to help kickstart programs or ideas or educational seminars that can give the power to the local people.
It’s a lot to take in this week and I am exhausted. But I am so happy that I am in this program and learning so much. I feel like I have gained a whole new perspective on what I am doing and what I hope to accomplish in Udaipur. In the end I have no idea what to expect until I’m in India, in the villages, talking to people and asking them what they feel is necessary for their community. I hope I am up to the challenge and that I can help to start something that does a little bit of good. Before I move on I want to share a quote that I read in a reading this week that really struck me. It was said by a south African community leader in regards to western volunteers:
“They are building buildings while our children are dying.
They care about buildings, but not about souls.”
In the midst of all of this learning and lectures and meetings and discussions and terrifying dreams that I am going to cause the death of millions of Indian children, I have also been spending all my time with the students in this program. While many of the kids are from Northwestern and live in Chicago, there is a lot of diversity here. We have people from Ghana, India, Saudi Arabia, and Columbia. I have met kids that align very well with what they hope to accomplish in their countries, and kids who still think they are a white knight on a white horse going to save the savages. Many of these students are just like me and looking for ways to develop our skills in helping others around the world. Some people here seem have travelled internationally a lot, some like me have never left the states, and some people are in this program after spending a semester in another country for school. While only 9 other students will go with me to India for the summer, I have done my best to get to know many people here. I hope to get updates during the summer about their own experiences while I go through my own.
In Chicago we haven’t done a whole lot of walking around. When we return to the hostel we usually stay and get our work done. But in the time we have been here we have seen millennium park, might go to a concert, gotten free food from a new burger joint, eaten a literal mountain of thai food, done an embarrassing scavenger hunt, and had fun laughing about how exhausting this week is. I feel like I’ve already had a great experience and I’m still in the states!
Like I said this is my last post in America. I leave for India at 10 am on Monday. My flight is a straight shot from Chicago to New Dehli in 16 hours (I thought it was 25 hours, but apparently airplanes are faster than I thought). We should arrive in India around 2:30pm their time because they are 10.5 hours ahead of Chicago. We will spend a day or two in New Dehli then take a shorter flight over to Udaipur where we are living. In Udaipur I will stay with my host family. I have received the details on my family which consists of a mother, father, and one son that is my age and in college. I don’t know if the son will live there while I am there since I don’t know the schedule of Indian colleges. But they look like wonderful people and I can’t wait to meet them!
As of right now everyone here is tired. We have been going non-stop and as I am writing this on Saturday morning (during lecture, sorry Corey/Patrick! (our supervisors)) we all just want to get on our planes. But I know we all appreciate what we have done this week and have all gained a new perspective. As of now I still have no idea what to expect in India. I hope that I am ready to be unprepared, do new things, be uncomfortable, muddle my way through Hindi, and completely embarrass myself. All the while still being able to help promote a community to develop itself. I’ll see you all in India! J
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Keep Smiling
Mike Fossey
Bon voyage!
As your one and only official 'follower', it falls to me to wish you a safe journey and a fulfilling stay in India. You will find it a culture shock at first, but the people are wonderful, Udaipur is lovely city (one of my favourites in the whole country), and the food is , well, the food...! I look forward to reading your blogs. I'll be with you all the way. Work hard, have fun and, of course, keep smiling!