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.

Lesson Three: Use Your Right Hand

In India, there is a very big distinction between which hand you use for what. See, Indians don’t use toilet paper, they use a sprayer-thing and a personal towel to dry themselves with and their left hand. As one of my classmates has labeled it, the left hand here is the “poop hand”. Yet Indians don’t use silver wear, and instead eat all their food (each meal consists mainly of rice and different “gravies” which are actually curry type dishes with different ingredients in them) with their hand. Yes, hand. As in singular. As in only the right hand. Furthermore, the right hand is preferred over the left in almost every situation. On the bus, you hold on with your right hand if at all possible. When reaching out to receive or give something, you use your right hand. I’ve even heard that money should be paid using only the right hand, which I found particularly interesting since in America, money is considered one of the dirtiest things around. When I can remember, I try even to wave to people with my right hand because I'm afraid that they'll be offended if I use my left. It kind of sucks for the left handed people in our group because they have to learn to do all their daily tasks with their right hand. And I always feel like it's a bit awkward for them when they're using their left hand to take notes during class. There are, of course, exceptions to the right hand only rule. Like in cuisine class which requires both appendages and during art when we work with clay and all sorts of things like that. But for the most part it's important to remember that in almost every situation right is right.

It's All About the Food.

 As some of you might imagine, India is very into it's food. We eat rice at almost every single meal without fail, and they are always asking if we are "veg" or "non-veg". It's a big deal here, because many Hindus are strictly veg. They assume that Americans are hardcore carnivores and are always shocked to learn that someone in my group is a vegetarian.

Trying a fresh coconut.

People here are big on breakfast. Literally the first thing people at school as you in the morning is "Had your breakfast?". Like, actually EVERYONE asks. Even all the way til lunchtime. It gets really awkward when I say that I haven't and they ask why and I have to explain that I don't really like eating breakfast and they ask if I don't like Indian breakfast foods and I have to say that I really don't eat breakfast anywhere and they act like it's the strangest thing they've ever heard (which it definitely ISN'T--you should see some of the bizarre articles published in the newspaper here!). I've concluded that much of the time, the simplest answer when anyone asks this question is "Yep!"

Classic "mess" (cafeteria) food.

 As per Indian custom, we eat with our hands here. You take your four fingers and mush some liquid into your rice, form a kind of ball and then lift it up with those fingers and push it into your mouth with your thumb. I'm terrible at it. I can't ever get my ball formed right, so I'm essentially just shoving fingerfuls of food into my mouth. It was really hard at first to be so bad at eating and have all the girls around me staring and giggling while I tried. It doesn't bother me as much anymore, either because I've gotten better at it or they've just gotten over it...I'm not sure which.

Cooking in the wok during cuisine.

The meal we made during my first practical cuisine class.

 I've gotten pretty good at eating all the spicy things they throw my way, although according to my cuisine teacher the Indian catering students we have class with use significantly less chiles when preparing dishes that the American students are going to be eating. And they're STILL hot! Not to mention we taste test everything here and my teacher likes to just plop some piping hot thing into your palm. A few times I've chickened out right before the food left the spoon and pulled my hand away. Whenever I do this, the Indian students think it is hilarious that I can't palm some curry or other that's been simmering for ages. They can all just pour things onto their hands no problem. But everything that we've made has been really delicious.

Making dinner in the apartment.

 On Wednesday and Friday nights, as well as weekends, we cook dinner for ourselves in our apartment. I've been making a lot of stir fries or simply heating up bagged curry dishes (the Indian equivalent of a microwave frozen dinner, I think) to eat over rice. I also bought some pasta, pine nuts, and sun dried tomatoes (those things all cost a fortune, but that's okay since it'll be nice to have a more American...okay, Italian... meal) that I'm really excited about cooking up. And then there was the one time that my apartment ordered some Pizza Hut delivery and watched a movie. That was so much fun and it was real pepperoni and it tasted ALMOST exactly like American Pizza Hut!

That one time I ordered Pizza Hut delivery in India...