I have never lived alone before. At least not ever entirely alone. I've had weeks in the house by myself when my family was out of town, but I nearly always used that time to have friends, boyfriends, and parties there so that doesn't really count. Since I left Suneeta's that first weekend, I've been living in my own room (with a bathroom and all) in the Annex III on the St. John's campus. St. Johns includes a nursing school, a medical school, a hospital, a research institute and undoubtedly a few other things that I just haven't found yet. I fit into the research institute part of the whole deal. The Annex III is a big white building, glorifying the best of solid sixties architecture, and has three floors of rooms that serve as the sort of dorms for campus. There are short stay residents, people dropping in for conferences or hospital matters, and then longer stay residents (such as myself) who are doing research or internships or fellowships or some other kind of ships in one of the many facilities on the campus. I live in room 347 down a hall that, until recently, housed a number of German medical students. My room is a white square with one 'accent wall' in beige, with an open plan bathroom where the shower and toilet take turns working and occasionally both go on strike. I've known for a while that I'm somewhat of a serial nester, and therefore I came in like whirlwind, unpacking and sticking up pictures and hanging up clothes and arranging mundane desk items and moving furniture around at all hours of the night for the first few days. The walls are still a little plain, but two weeks in I have it just about how I want it.
I can't go overboard on the decorating and nesting because I have a deep fear of ridicule from Sister, the old and horned rimmed glasses nun who has taken control of the Annex. She in turn fears God, and going with the theme of the Catholic institution that St. Johns is, she tries to run the Annex accordingly. Dusty laminated words of the Bible are hung every few feet in the halls and the whole building, inside and out, is painted a clean and holy white. Thankfully, the residents here bring in enough color that it doesn't ever feel too sterile. In an attempt to curb the ranging hooliganism that is inevitable when young people live together, there are constantly black and white print outs being taped up that have reactionary rules stated on them. I say reactionary because no set of rules is given to you when you arrive. They simply go up as Sister or any other Annex III keeper witnesses behavior they determine must be banned from the premises. Though these rules aren't taken seriously and aren't even expected to be, they are always written out as unwavering ultimatums. Some of my favorites include: "food is FORBIDDEN in room", "do not take foods out of fridge without PERMISSION", "Do NOT touch fridge with no permission","We do not have the facility to have laptops and phones and electronic plug in room"and
lastly, the one I disregard most often, "Kindly MUST leave room key at front desk when you leave". Apparently Sister gets snappy if she sees you breaking one of these photocopied laws, but she hasn't caught me yet.
However, being the goody-two-shoes that I am, I wouldn't have been so eager to disregard the rules if I hadn't had the in on what really matters at the Annex. If there's one thing I've learned from travel, it's that if you show up somewhere new and expect to settle and adapt there for work or volunteer opportunities or even permanent residency, you have to make friends. There are trips I've been on that had the potential to be extraordinary but ended up being a beautiful place and a lonely girl. I do very much enjoy traveling alone, but long term stays are made better by surprising and eager company. And the 'will I have friends?' aspect of India was something that I worried about a lot. But from where I'm standing now, I can safely say that I can stop worrying and that I've been really lucky. Coming in, I knew I had, potentially, one friend. Emily, who works with Suneeta has been in India for 10 months, lives in the Annex and knows the lay of the land. And thank heavens, she's amazing. She's been my guide into a very academic work environment, a strange neighborhood and the tips and smarts that one needs to coexist with an environment that does not favor young, foreign, english-speaking women. I'd like to say I'm out going in new situations and that I went around the Annex and St. Johns introducing myself and making dinner plans and making good first impressions. But that's still something I'm working on. Therefore, I'm more than a little grateful that I've been able to be Emily's shadow of sorts the past few weeks. Through her and her initiative, I've probably met the most interesting mix of people ever. It has been incredibly humbling. Because, even before I really get to know them, everyone I have met has been two things: older than me and working on or pursuing incredibly challenging, interesting and enlightening ideas. I want to listen always, to speak carefully and to aspire endlessly. My friends here have Master's degrees, are Fulbright scholars, registered nurses and medical students. The people who I am collaborating with and working for have PhDs and such fierce convictions and knowledge in their fields and the work that they are doing that I can only hope to someday possess at least half the passion and energy that they have. But I'm not just throwing out credentials, because that's not what matters to me. What matters to me is the conviction and empathy and power that the people who have come into my life recently demonstrate everyday. I'm intimidated a lot, and I don't understand a lot, but everyday still feels like some sort of intellectual gift. I spend a lot of time thinking about the incredible women I encounter everyday and how my dream is someday be like them. Women who seem to stand heads taller than the people around them, women who don't take no for answer, women who have thrown themselves at their careers with full force simple because they believe in something.
At this point you should be asking yourself the same question that I ask myself day to day: what on earth is a 19 year-old hooligan with a fondness of cat videos (Kitty Corliss grinding the crack-youtube it right now) babysitting skills and minimal farming experience doing keeping company such as this! Good Heavens! Luckily, I've had a lot of guidance and help on the projects I'm involved in. I could go on forever about what I'm doing here but I'm gonna try real hard to just 'sum up' (here we go again) the things I am and will be working on. Here goes:
The project I started with right away is called The Soukhya Project: Preventing Family Violence in Bangalore. The long and short of it is that there are three zones in Bangalore in which the project is being implemented and those are East zone, South zone and West zone. There are a lot of sponsors and funders and health care conglomerates behind the thing but I'm trying to keep this simple. Suneeta is one of the masterminds behind this project, and from that brillance came the idea to educate the health care professionals in those zones to properly assess potential domestic violence victims and then give them the tools and resources to help. Each zone has free health centers that are primary level health care, so child and maternal health and maternity centers. Each health center has link workers (contract workers who are from the community they serve), nurse(s) and one doctor. My very first assignment was to document the training of health care professionals from the South zone, the second zone to be trained. The training is led by the Soukhya team, and each group of health care professionals comes for two sessions before their training is complete. Link workers are trained to be advocates for an end to violence, nurses are trained to spot signs of domestic violence, take a detailed history and ensure the women gets to see a doctor with the right information conveyed. The doctors are trained to talk to patient and then offer them resources from the referral network Soukhya has worked so hard to produce. No counseling occurs at the center, the doctors make an assessment, notify the woman of her rights, comfort her and provide as many resources and referrals as she needs to NGOs and other service providers of counseling, shelter, legal aid, and medical care.
Obviously that's a very, very broad overview of the whole thing. But where I fit in is that I attended each day of training and took photo and video of the trainings for the Soukhya file. This project is a research experiment, the data from the first zone is still be analyzed, because no one can yet be sure if it has had any difference the in level of violence that women experience, the perceived gender roles, gender inequity and the sexual, pre-natal and post-natal health of the women from this zone. So everything needs to be carefully documented and that's what I'm doing my best to do. All the trainings except for the doctors were in Kannada, but the doctors was in English and it was so interesting finally being able to understand. The differences in opinion and prevalence of culture and tradition made for a very interesting discussion medium and it amazed me the gender stereotypes and gender role expectations that emerged. Maybe, after the fact and with permission, I could one day publish my notes on the training from the time. It was a great way to dive head first into my time here.
The other thing I'm trying to do for the Soukhya project is help redesign the posters that are part of their intervention kit that is given out to each health center. These posters are meant to be displayed around the clinic, but the current versions are borrowed from another project and don't quite capture what the Soukhya team really wants to get across. We're just in the conceptual phase of planning currently but I will likely being doing some staged photoshoots and developing these new materials. I will continue to write about this project as it develops.
Though there are a lot of projects on the table, and I've occasionally done a little work on little parts of big projects and paper and proposals that Emily and Suneeta are working on, I'm only going to bring up the immediate things for now. The other thing that I have had the opportunity to be a part of is a collaboration with an NGO for a project they are implementing in garment factories. Emily and I have essentially been loaned out for our video and photo skills (Emily has documentary making skills). On Thursday, March 21st, we took a cab out to a garment factory. The project was developed as a workplace intervention effort called Namgaagi Naave. Studies indicated that garment factory workers were a high risk population for HIV/AIDs, STIs, substance abuse and domestic violence. So Namaagi Naave has started this intervention program in a garment factory, using poster campaigns, a street theater group that does public health awareness pieces called BreakThrough, and a Core Team of workers and management representatives to encourage personal sharing and workplace awareness. On the particular day we went in there was a BreakThrough performance that we were documenting and some interviews with Core Team members, sharing stories of how the program had made a difference in the workplace and in their own lives. Though neither of us speak Kannada, Emily and I agreed that the message got across. This had a been a program that had shook things up but that had changed a lot of lives of the women who worked in the factory. There were one thousand workers at the performance, because the company pays them overtime to go to the trainings, because the program coordinators have showed evidence enough to prove that a healthy workplace and healthy workers improve business. We will be doing more work for them as they want to develop a short informational video about the program and it's success in the first factory to show to corporates. And I am really, really looking forward to documenting it.
Again, I have failed to be brief and I'm still haunted by the details I have left out. I guess what I want you to know is that what I'm doing is really, really interesting. And relevant. And probably very closely tied to what I want to be my life's work. I see myself coming back, with a degree or more in something useful. It would be an understatement to say I am moved and inspired by the people and powers that are at work here. I have questions on questions and so many dreams about programs that could come to be, things I'd to work on. And I think about other countries, specifically Southeast Asia. Do they have programs like this in Thailand? Burma? Can I work with them? Can I start one? Who knows. For now, I'm here in the company of inspiration in the form of many extraordinary women. For now I'm living in my little white room, and adjusting to living alone, because when the toilet paper is out, it's no one's fault but my own. For now, I get woken up each day by the heat well before my alarm, take a bucket bath and go into days that I am continually challenged by. Days in which the injustice I witness would break me if I didn't also spend each and every one in the company of people who convince me that something is being done, and they are that something.
I can't go overboard on the decorating and nesting because I have a deep fear of ridicule from Sister, the old and horned rimmed glasses nun who has taken control of the Annex. She in turn fears God, and going with the theme of the Catholic institution that St. Johns is, she tries to run the Annex accordingly. Dusty laminated words of the Bible are hung every few feet in the halls and the whole building, inside and out, is painted a clean and holy white. Thankfully, the residents here bring in enough color that it doesn't ever feel too sterile. In an attempt to curb the ranging hooliganism that is inevitable when young people live together, there are constantly black and white print outs being taped up that have reactionary rules stated on them. I say reactionary because no set of rules is given to you when you arrive. They simply go up as Sister or any other Annex III keeper witnesses behavior they determine must be banned from the premises. Though these rules aren't taken seriously and aren't even expected to be, they are always written out as unwavering ultimatums. Some of my favorites include: "food is FORBIDDEN in room", "do not take foods out of fridge without PERMISSION", "Do NOT touch fridge with no permission","We do not have the facility to have laptops and phones and electronic plug in room"and
lastly, the one I disregard most often, "Kindly MUST leave room key at front desk when you leave". Apparently Sister gets snappy if she sees you breaking one of these photocopied laws, but she hasn't caught me yet.
Ze Annex III: Third window in the from the left is cha girls
However, being the goody-two-shoes that I am, I wouldn't have been so eager to disregard the rules if I hadn't had the in on what really matters at the Annex. If there's one thing I've learned from travel, it's that if you show up somewhere new and expect to settle and adapt there for work or volunteer opportunities or even permanent residency, you have to make friends. There are trips I've been on that had the potential to be extraordinary but ended up being a beautiful place and a lonely girl. I do very much enjoy traveling alone, but long term stays are made better by surprising and eager company. And the 'will I have friends?' aspect of India was something that I worried about a lot. But from where I'm standing now, I can safely say that I can stop worrying and that I've been really lucky. Coming in, I knew I had, potentially, one friend. Emily, who works with Suneeta has been in India for 10 months, lives in the Annex and knows the lay of the land. And thank heavens, she's amazing. She's been my guide into a very academic work environment, a strange neighborhood and the tips and smarts that one needs to coexist with an environment that does not favor young, foreign, english-speaking women. I'd like to say I'm out going in new situations and that I went around the Annex and St. Johns introducing myself and making dinner plans and making good first impressions. But that's still something I'm working on. Therefore, I'm more than a little grateful that I've been able to be Emily's shadow of sorts the past few weeks. Through her and her initiative, I've probably met the most interesting mix of people ever. It has been incredibly humbling. Because, even before I really get to know them, everyone I have met has been two things: older than me and working on or pursuing incredibly challenging, interesting and enlightening ideas. I want to listen always, to speak carefully and to aspire endlessly. My friends here have Master's degrees, are Fulbright scholars, registered nurses and medical students. The people who I am collaborating with and working for have PhDs and such fierce convictions and knowledge in their fields and the work that they are doing that I can only hope to someday possess at least half the passion and energy that they have. But I'm not just throwing out credentials, because that's not what matters to me. What matters to me is the conviction and empathy and power that the people who have come into my life recently demonstrate everyday. I'm intimidated a lot, and I don't understand a lot, but everyday still feels like some sort of intellectual gift. I spend a lot of time thinking about the incredible women I encounter everyday and how my dream is someday be like them. Women who seem to stand heads taller than the people around them, women who don't take no for answer, women who have thrown themselves at their careers with full force simple because they believe in something.
At this point you should be asking yourself the same question that I ask myself day to day: what on earth is a 19 year-old hooligan with a fondness of cat videos (Kitty Corliss grinding the crack-youtube it right now) babysitting skills and minimal farming experience doing keeping company such as this! Good Heavens! Luckily, I've had a lot of guidance and help on the projects I'm involved in. I could go on forever about what I'm doing here but I'm gonna try real hard to just 'sum up' (here we go again) the things I am and will be working on. Here goes:
The project I started with right away is called The Soukhya Project: Preventing Family Violence in Bangalore. The long and short of it is that there are three zones in Bangalore in which the project is being implemented and those are East zone, South zone and West zone. There are a lot of sponsors and funders and health care conglomerates behind the thing but I'm trying to keep this simple. Suneeta is one of the masterminds behind this project, and from that brillance came the idea to educate the health care professionals in those zones to properly assess potential domestic violence victims and then give them the tools and resources to help. Each zone has free health centers that are primary level health care, so child and maternal health and maternity centers. Each health center has link workers (contract workers who are from the community they serve), nurse(s) and one doctor. My very first assignment was to document the training of health care professionals from the South zone, the second zone to be trained. The training is led by the Soukhya team, and each group of health care professionals comes for two sessions before their training is complete. Link workers are trained to be advocates for an end to violence, nurses are trained to spot signs of domestic violence, take a detailed history and ensure the women gets to see a doctor with the right information conveyed. The doctors are trained to talk to patient and then offer them resources from the referral network Soukhya has worked so hard to produce. No counseling occurs at the center, the doctors make an assessment, notify the woman of her rights, comfort her and provide as many resources and referrals as she needs to NGOs and other service providers of counseling, shelter, legal aid, and medical care.
Obviously that's a very, very broad overview of the whole thing. But where I fit in is that I attended each day of training and took photo and video of the trainings for the Soukhya file. This project is a research experiment, the data from the first zone is still be analyzed, because no one can yet be sure if it has had any difference the in level of violence that women experience, the perceived gender roles, gender inequity and the sexual, pre-natal and post-natal health of the women from this zone. So everything needs to be carefully documented and that's what I'm doing my best to do. All the trainings except for the doctors were in Kannada, but the doctors was in English and it was so interesting finally being able to understand. The differences in opinion and prevalence of culture and tradition made for a very interesting discussion medium and it amazed me the gender stereotypes and gender role expectations that emerged. Maybe, after the fact and with permission, I could one day publish my notes on the training from the time. It was a great way to dive head first into my time here.
The other thing I'm trying to do for the Soukhya project is help redesign the posters that are part of their intervention kit that is given out to each health center. These posters are meant to be displayed around the clinic, but the current versions are borrowed from another project and don't quite capture what the Soukhya team really wants to get across. We're just in the conceptual phase of planning currently but I will likely being doing some staged photoshoots and developing these new materials. I will continue to write about this project as it develops.
Though there are a lot of projects on the table, and I've occasionally done a little work on little parts of big projects and paper and proposals that Emily and Suneeta are working on, I'm only going to bring up the immediate things for now. The other thing that I have had the opportunity to be a part of is a collaboration with an NGO for a project they are implementing in garment factories. Emily and I have essentially been loaned out for our video and photo skills (Emily has documentary making skills). On Thursday, March 21st, we took a cab out to a garment factory. The project was developed as a workplace intervention effort called Namgaagi Naave. Studies indicated that garment factory workers were a high risk population for HIV/AIDs, STIs, substance abuse and domestic violence. So Namaagi Naave has started this intervention program in a garment factory, using poster campaigns, a street theater group that does public health awareness pieces called BreakThrough, and a Core Team of workers and management representatives to encourage personal sharing and workplace awareness. On the particular day we went in there was a BreakThrough performance that we were documenting and some interviews with Core Team members, sharing stories of how the program had made a difference in the workplace and in their own lives. Though neither of us speak Kannada, Emily and I agreed that the message got across. This had a been a program that had shook things up but that had changed a lot of lives of the women who worked in the factory. There were one thousand workers at the performance, because the company pays them overtime to go to the trainings, because the program coordinators have showed evidence enough to prove that a healthy workplace and healthy workers improve business. We will be doing more work for them as they want to develop a short informational video about the program and it's success in the first factory to show to corporates. And I am really, really looking forward to documenting it.
Again, I have failed to be brief and I'm still haunted by the details I have left out. I guess what I want you to know is that what I'm doing is really, really interesting. And relevant. And probably very closely tied to what I want to be my life's work. I see myself coming back, with a degree or more in something useful. It would be an understatement to say I am moved and inspired by the people and powers that are at work here. I have questions on questions and so many dreams about programs that could come to be, things I'd to work on. And I think about other countries, specifically Southeast Asia. Do they have programs like this in Thailand? Burma? Can I work with them? Can I start one? Who knows. For now, I'm here in the company of inspiration in the form of many extraordinary women. For now I'm living in my little white room, and adjusting to living alone, because when the toilet paper is out, it's no one's fault but my own. For now, I get woken up each day by the heat well before my alarm, take a bucket bath and go into days that I am continually challenged by. Days in which the injustice I witness would break me if I didn't also spend each and every one in the company of people who convince me that something is being done, and they are that something.
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