Jagran Jan Vikas Samiti

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So I want to explain to everyone what my work is and what my project for the summer is. What has been involved and what I do everyday. I haven’t re-read all of these blogs so there’s a chance I could repeat some information by accident. If so I’m sorry but I hope to give an encompassing summary. Now onto the ''good'' stuff!

The NGO I work for is called Jagran Jan Vikas Samiti (JJVS). JJVS was created about 30 years ago in response to a tragic loss of many children in a village in Rajasthan from disease. Through trials and tribulations JJVS strives to encourage the general public in traditional medicines and conserve the practice. In many rural villages the use of traditional medicines by healers can be vital to the overall health of the people where hospitals and allopathic doctors are scarce. While there are many names for the practicers of ayuverdic medicine like healer and shaman, guni is the term now most used here in India. These gunis are usually people who come from a family heritage of being gunis. Many went on to have their own career and now practice in their retirement, but many also have done it their whole life. These gunis usually specialize in some form of treatment like bone setting, uterus prolapse, digestive problems, etc. They act as a vital resource when it comes to common ailments that don’t require costly medicines or hospitals.

JJVS is familiar with pretty much every guni in Rajasthan and they help them by providing resources, information, and funds. One major resource that JJVS is involved in is gardens to grow medicines. Traditionally the gunis would find the medicines on their own. There are many natural gardens in Rajasthan called natural pockets where herbal medicines grow. JJVS has created many ashrams around the area where they grow many medicines in order to give the gunis a more reliable source. I have visited many of these ashrams and village gunis around the state in my time here.

So what am I doing here? Well our project this summer is based around creating a program to help educate people on these traditional medicines, gunis, situations in villages, etc. The practice of traditional medicines is dying and JJVS wants to work to preserve it. One of the best ways to do this is to educate people in the urban areas about gunis since they are not practicing there. Also if people were more aware of traditional medicines they would have more accessible resources when it came to common illnesses.

Our project is split into two basic steps. The first step is that we had to create an herbal garden at JJVS. The reason for this is that JJVS is a very nice facility here in Udaipur. Currently people come here mostly to be treated. We have an ayuverdic doctor here and a myotherapist (massage trained) for healing. The governor of Rajasthan was actually treated here in early June, and the result is a lot more people started coming for treatment which means that people here are very busy. But more importantly with a garden here it can be used to demonstrate and show people for the more important part of our project.

Part two of the project is to develop an educational seminar that can be run every month to slowly educate people on medicinal gardens, traditional medicines, and guni practices. The idea is to specifically have it for school children, but we want anyone to come. We will show them around the facility at JJVS, have gunis give small seminars on their life, have our doctor talk about he treats with herbal medicines, and have a local talk about how people can grow their own herbal medicines at home. So while we educate people on traditional medicines themselves we also give ways they can support and keep the practices alive. We hope that these seminars will be run once or twice a month from now on after we leave.

Throughout this summer we had loads of help from JJVS. Not all NGO’s here are doing what one would call ‘good work’. We have heard many stories about how corrupt some places are, which is especially awful considering how corrupt the Indian government is. You can’t get much done in regards to government documents or requests without bribes. Even the police force can be swayed in many situations with bribes (as I learned first-hand). The result is that there is a strange concept in India that many people want to work for NGO’s because many people think there is “a lot of money in them”. Due to funders not always paying close attention to where their funds go, it has become very easy for NGO workers to skim off the top, to overprice simple goods, and to go home with a lot of money meant for better intentions. I don’t want to say too much, but I would caution everyone reading this to be wary about donating to UNICEF (not a joke).

Sadly not all of the interns in my program ended up at trustworthy NGOs. I feel I can say that after being at JJVS for the summer that it is has some of the most hard-working and dedicated individuals working for them. It’s much easier to work for a group knowing they have the best intentions at heart. These various individuals are all a bit quirky and strange in their own way. And a large part of my enjoyment this summer has come from getting to know these people.

Firstly there is Ganesh. He is the director of JJVS. The best way to describe him is to say he is kind of like a wise old master. He always wears traditional indian robes, he is always sitting out on the front porch. I occasionally see him feeding birds. He is usually the person that meets with possible funders and is a very social guy.

Next you have Dr. RK. He is an ayuverdic doctor and most of the day is treating patients that come to JJVS. He is incredibly smart, dedicated, and can pretty much do everything. He is always pushing us to work harder. He is also very funny and loves to do wacky things just because he can. One of my favorite examples is when he took myself and Victoria to a lumber yard to get our weight. He then had me call Gabby back at JJVS to tell her to walk over to us to get her weight taken. I called her and she said, RK took the phone and said, “No. You not busy. Come here!” It was all in good fun and RK is a master of making things fun.

Gabby is a myotherapist from Australia. She has been working with JJVS about 16 months and will leave in September. She mostly trains in myotherapy and also helps patients at JJVS. In addition she helps with a lot of the day-to-day aspects of JJVS. She is a little worried how they will handle her leaving lol. She has been our unofficial supervisor since we got to India. Knowing where we are coming from having learned all about India as a ‘westerner’ she provided a lot of wonderful guidance to us. We were able to tell her about our frustrations knowing she would understand and found that she went through pretty much everything we went through.

Then there is Bharat. He is another worker at JJVS who is not much older than I. Everyday he comes in to shake my hand. To give you an idea of his personality I have one story of my first week in India. Bharat had just introduced himself to me while I was settling into my desk. We had some small talk because his English isn’t great. He smiled and walked back to his desk which was in the same room. About five minutes later he leans back and moans, “Niiiiiiiick! I want to learn ENGLISH!” in the most pathetic voice possible. He seems very interested in America and learning about the culture. He even asked me to take some money to buy an iphone and mail it back to him. It took a while to explain that wouldn’t work haha.

Then there is NP the unofficial translator at JJVS. He is a sweetheart who was always there to help Victoria and I with things. If we had to go out and buy things he would take us and explain to us not just what was being said but about the culture and viewpoint of who we were talking to.

Mackenzie is a woman who was very interested in our project from the start of the summer and was around a lot. She is a girl from America who came to India on an internship like mine many years ago. She returned for a six month stay and during that time she met a man who would later become her husband. She has now lived in India for four years, speaks perfect Hindi, and was a wonderful source of info on the “real” india. She usually provided us with information at india that other people wouldn’t want to talk about. She is very interested in social movements here and works very hard to better her community.

In addition there are many more people at JJVS I didn’t get to know as well as I wish I had. Pankagi is also a head at JJVS and works in accounting and takes care of money I believe. He was always full of smiles and said my name pretty funny all the time. Premjee was our driver and didn’t speak any English, which led to some pretty funny moments. Bawani Sinhgi was a guni that always stayed at JJVS and he helped us a lot when it came to creating the garden. Then there were some other interns and such that I never got the name of. But literally everyone at JJVS always greeted us with smiles and a hearty “HELLO!”

All-in-all these people are what made my job over the summer so enjoyable and so full of twists and turns. I heard some horror stories of other NGOs and I couldn’t be happier that I was at JJVS. I learned a lot about communication, discipline, multi-tasking, dealing with frustration, and developing new plans when necessary. All of these people helped to make my project possible and they will be the ones that continue our educational program after I go home.

On Saturday the 9^th we hosted the first trial run of this seminar. Since it can be hard to sway the minds of adults we oriented these seminars to be for kids. We invited kids from a girls school and a boy’s school to come and see everything at the JJVS facility. On the morning of RK drove me on the motorbike to both schools. It turned out that both principals were out, so no one remembered to come to JJVS. So they all got rounded up and made the ten minute walk to JJVS. When all the kids arrived they sat down to first hear all about what Dr. RK does and what traditional medicines are used for. Then they got a tour of the garden, lessons on what various plants did, and finally were given lessons on how to bring herbal medicines into their home (with a fun game).

Overall I think we got a lot accomplished this summer. It’s a different environment and a whole new way of doing things, so from an American standpoint we didn’t do a whole lot. But it’s important to remember that the work environment is just different over here. Things take longer to arrange, organize, and prepare. Plus it doesn’t help when you don’t speak the language. So for what we were working with we actually got quite a lot accomplished I think!

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