Interning, India Style.

Part of my semester through ISP is participating in an internship in an NGO here. I was placed with World Vision India, specifically KADP which is the Area Development Program in Coimbatore (I can't remember what the "K" is for...). All that I knew about World Vision before I came was Operation Christmas Child, a program where people assemble shoeboxes of gifts to send to children in underprivileged areas of the world at Christmas time. As it turns out, World Vision does a lot more than that (I mean, who would have guessed they did more than mail shoeboxes, right?). KADP is present in twenty-six different slums in the Coimbatore area alone, running programs to raise awareness about health, cleanliness, education, and alcoholism, as well as running the child sponsorship program.

The beginning of my internship was kinda rough, mostly because “internship” means something different in India than it does in America. Honestly, I would have been fine just doing desk or office work, running around and alphabetizing files or something. Even better would be doing some actual field work, getting out there and helping people in the slums. But no, the reality is that in India, “internship” often means more like observation by American standards. One of my classmates from ISP told me that at her internship she learned that social work students here in India are required to participate in internships but they are only concerned with getting the required hours to complete their degree, so they aren’t really invested and don’t put much effort or dedication into it. That could be a contributing factor in why we aren’t taken seriously as a potential source of help to our NGOs. Or maybe the NGOs just view us as more work to be supervised and led, and not worth their time. Either way, it was disappointing to sit in the office for the my first two visits to World Vision India with nothing more than reading material about everything from what their area development program has been doing to workbooks from a leadership conference the program manager attended.

It has started to get better though, as we’ve been assigned to do a case study in a specific slum called ELGI (at first, I thought it was LG, like the phone. But nope, it’s a spelled out word). So far, I’ve been to ELGI slum three times. The first time was to attend a distribution of lunchboxes to the sponsor children who live there. The program was to run from five to six, so my fellow ISP intern, our BACAS student guide/translator and I arrived at about 4:45. We spent the time before the program touring around the slum. It was really interesting! In a way, the slum is both beautiful and disgusting, peaceful and disturbing. There is a sense of community there like none I’ve experienced in America. Everybody wanted us to take a picture of them or their children. It was a little strange (especially when somebody thrust a baby with a naked bottom into Ashley’s arms) but it was overall a really beautiful evening. The actual ceremony, which finally started an hour and a half late, was pretty boring except that they started it with two different dances. The first group of dancers were three girls aged about eight to ten, and the second group of dancers was four older girls, probably about fifteen years old. The older girls were much better, but the little ones were still very cute.

My subsequent trips into the slum were intended for gathering research for my case study on it. Even though they were really information heavy and not as much based on interaction, we still got to see and take pictures with some of the kids that we’d met the first time we visited.
One of the girls there even reminds me of my sister! I took a picture with her and tried to communicate to her that I thought she reminded me of Britt, but I’m not sure she really understood. Oh well. What I’ve learned during my research is that the biggest problem that slum faces is the fact that it sits right on the banks of this disgusting body of water which flood during the rainy season. There is a hospital right next to the slum and even the hospital dumps all of its garbage into the water! And so do the slum-dwellers, because they have no garbage bins or anything, and then it all floods up into their houses for a couple of months every year! YUCK.

All this to say that the internship experience I’ve had so far has been unexpected, interesting, and sometimes just boring. But I’ve really enjoyed my time in the slums, learning about the people who live there and having the opportunity to get to know them as people a bit rather than just thinking of them as anonymous statistics. Their world is so different than the world that I grew up in and so different from what I could ever have learned before I went there myself. Four of my ten visits are over at this point and it’s crazy to think that I’m just scratching the surface of implications of slum life and won’t really be able to orchestrate change for the problems that are so blatantly prevalent.