Chaos....thrust into the organization and the Global AIDS Week of Action in Pune

On Monday, Rashmi and I toured the three slum sites that Deep Griha (DG) caters to as well as their crèches. Their main office building is located on Tadiwala road (about a 20 minute drive from our place at the cultural center) where we met the director, Dr. Neela Onwale, and watched a video that showed us all of the projects that Deep Griha is in charge of, such as the education they provide to children as well as adults, DISHA, the eye clinic, etc. We met our contact and volunteer coordinator from DG, Hans Billimoria on Tuesday who set up a meeting for us to meet and talk with the SureStart leaders that afternoon. This week, the SureStart community health workers are in training sessions from 9am-5pm everyday, so we decided to turn our attention to another project for the week since the sessions were in Marathi and we wouldn’t have been able to understand. Instead, we read the instructional handbook that was in English.

During the day, Rashmi and I worked with DISHA, another DG project that focuses on HIV/AIDS awareness in Pune. This week is the Global Week of Action concerning AIDS, so in order to prepare for the street rally occurring on Thursday (5/22/08) and the candlelight vigil occurring on Sunday (5/25/08) we created signs, posters, did some inventory calculations etc. on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Thursday, a few other NGOs as well as DG’s DISHA held a street rally which was a few kilometers long that culminated in front of Pune’s municipal court where Hans was successful in persuading them to send a message to the federal government to pass the HIV bill that is supposed to eliminate discrimination and therefore stigma against those with HIV/AIDS in terms of employment, education etc. (more info can be found at http://www.wakeuppune.org/)

The only communication I had with the SureStart leaders before our meeting was through email; unfortunately, they didn’t have very much email access, so I didn’t get very much information on my project. The truth is that I didn’t know what my project would exactly entail before I came to India and that was a mistake. I only knew my general area of interest. This past semester I had done research on SureStart and similar programs that have already been implemented around the world; therefore, I was prepared to work on help design SureStart and improve on what they had already designed. In my emails, I told them that I could understand Hindi and speak a little, so I wasn’t really qualified to do any communicating in Marathi. So it was at this meeting I was hoping that they could give me some more details on my project.

At the meeting, I found out that they had already done most of the designing and that they had not actually thought of a project for us even though they’ve known since mid-March that Rashmi and I were coming to assist them in any way that we could. When talking to them, it sounded like that they hadn’t prepared anything for us to do, in fact they didn’t even know we were students. They told us that we could do some observing at the training sessions and in the slums. When I heard the word “observe,” I got frustrated because I had prepared for this trip by doing a semester of research in my independent study, received DukeEngage money to travel and have the opportunity to obtain a hands-on experience. Right then and there Rashmi and I told them that we didn’t want to just observe, so then they told us that we could do some computer input concerning medical reports and hospital referrals. I understood and knew that this work was necessary, but I didn’t want to spend my days in front of a computer. I came to Pune to do field work with SureStart; however, after that meeting, it seemed like I wasn’t going to be able to. So, we told Hans, and he said he would talk to them. Rashmi and I are awaiting to hear good news from them at our next meeting with them on Saturday morning.