Impressions of India

Now that I'm back from the trip to India, it was quickly back to the real world. Fortunately, I've also had a chance to go through photos and really reflect on the whole trip and the country.

India is a truly fascinating place, although certainly not the easiest or most comfortable place to travel in. The sights and sounds (and smells!) can be pretty overwhelming but once you get used to it, the chaos of it all is actually pretty incredible.

Driving in India is not for the faint of heart. Traffic lights are only used during certain hours of the day. Horns, however, are used ALL day long. The drivers don’t use their rearview mirrors, so if you are driving up behind someone it is expected that you honk incessantly to make them aware. There are even signs on the trucks reminding other drivers to honk. As a result, it is a constant cacophony of horns (and they don't limit themselves to just regular horn sounds, songs and little dittys are fair game making the whole thing even more hysterical, and annoying!).

No matter how many times I go to India, the traffic is something that will always amaze me. The road is full of all forms of transportation - cars, trucks, camels, motorcycles (literally with families of four crowded on), rickshaws, bikes, cows, elephants, etc. Traffic in the US looks so orderly (and kind of boring!) after you witness India. What no cows? People are actually abiding by some semblance of traffic laws? Driving in lanes instead of all directions at once? Boooorrrinng ;)

As you are driving around India, it is impossible not to be struck by the poverty and hardship that is everywhere. There are so many people begging on the streets, run down and dirty buildings, trash everywhere. While I was in India there was an article in the newspaper entitled “Everday, 1.1bn poo without a loo” (Indian newspapers have a habit of coining rhyming and entertaining headlines). So, according to a 2008 World Health Organization report, there are 1.1 billion people around the world without access to toilets or other basic sanitary options. Of those 1.1 billion, 58% or 638 million are found in India.

It is things like that that really hit you over the head when you are in India – the difference between the way we live in the US and the most basic of needs that so many around the world live without. I guess that’s why I say India is not a comfortable place to travel. You feel dirty and guilty and sad all the time.

But, despite all the poverty and hardship, there are so many bright spots as well (literally and figuratively). Your eyes get used to the dirt and varying shades of gray everywhere. But then the beautiful Indian saris pop out against that background and remind you of the beauty of the Indian culture.

And the people are truly welcoming and open-hearted. They want to be your friend and welcome you in to your homes. I drank SO many cups of chai while I was there! Much like Greg Mortenson’s book, drinking tea is truly the way that you begin all meetings. Relationship building is so critical in the culture. As a result, things just take (muuccchhh) longer and the type A personality in me has a hard time with that sometimes!

Anyway, in general, an amazing but overwhelming place. So much to take in - smells and sights and sounds, I think that if I went back 5 more times, I would still learn a million new things each time.

Seeing the Sights

So, the point of this trip is definitely work but we did manage to see some touristy stuff while we were in India. In addition to the Jaipur City Palace the first day, we had the chance to see some other amazing sights.

Of course, you can’t come to India without seeing the Taj Mahal. This was my 2nd trip to the Taj so I had been worried that it wouldn’t be as amazing the 2nd time around. But it still is a pretty awe-inspiring place – think about 20,000 workers and 20 years of work to create this amazing building. The Taj was a zoo full of tourists, both local and international, but it was great just to take a moment to sit and enjoy it, even though there are about a million other people swarming the place!

While we were in Agra, we also saw the Agra or Red Fort which was pretty amazing as well. The great Mughals lived at the Fort and the country was governed from here. It contained the largest state treasury and mint.




On another evening Pranab and I escaped and went to see the Nahargarh Fort in Jaipur. We didn’t actually see much of the Fort since it was dark out but the point of going was to take in the amazing views of the night lights across Jaipur, very cool. Interesting to get the perspective from up above of the massiveness of Jaipur and the urban sprawl that has taken place outside the city center.



Finally, on the last day we visited Amber Fort to cap off the trip. It was incredibly hot (and it was like 9 AM, must have been crazy hot in the mid-afternoon) but enjoyable to see one last bit of amazing architecture before heading out of the country.



And the final stop on the tour of India? Elephant rides! Last time I was in India, I avoided the elephants because I felt bad for them – it’s so hot and who wants to lug my big butt around in that heat! ;) But then I found out that animal activists have really cleaned up the operation and the elephants are treated much more humanly. So, this time around I decided to participate in the tourist trap and lumbered around on top of an elephant – it was pretty fun!

Shopping!

When I am traveling internationally, I love to shop. Of course I love the culture and the people and the architecture, etc, etc - but there's-something about finding a trinket that will remind you of the trip and the place and the smells and the sounds for years to come, that I just love.

So Pranab and I were able to squeeze in some shopping over the course of the two weeks. We went to a sari shop – a flurry of beautiful (and some not-so-beautiful) fabrics, a cacophony of negotiations happening in Hindi and multiple cups of chai while we were sifting through fabrics.

We also visited a shop where the shop owner and his family had been making traditional Indian musical instruments for generations. Here are some of sitars (which I was seriously tempted to buy but didn't want to lug around with me for the rest of the trip!) and Pranab and the shop owner having a little jam session!



And, of course, we went to markets including the Johari Bazaar, which consists of streetside stall and stall in downtown Jaipur. I bought a few bangles while we were thing but mainly I was just excited to take in the market scene. I love listening to the chaos, crossing the street back and forth amongst the market (totally a game of frogger, super fun once you get the hang of avoiding the oncoming traffic which includes trucks, rickshaws (auto and bike) and of course camels, cows and elephants). I could do without the shopkeepers running after me with various things that they think I want but hey, everyone’s gotta make a living, right?

Tagging along on site visits

As I mentioned, I was feeling a bit jealous that the students were getting to go on some great site visits with their clients, so I decided to tag along whenever I could escape from other work responsibilities. Turns out I was able to do a couple of amazing site visits with the I-India team which made the trip that much more amazing. As I mentioned I-India is a nonprofit that works with orphaned, destitute and/or abused children in Jaipur. They provide housing, food and education for the kids in the hopes of giving them a chance at a better future.

I went with the team to Jagh Children’s Village which is an area where I-India has built a school and boy’s shelter in a remote area in the outskirts of Jaipur. The school is this little happy oasis in the middle of the desert. Water is trucked in twice a day to meet the needs of the kids and they are working on constructing a medical center, another shelter home and vocational training program as well. Here are some pics of the school and some of the boys that live in the home.

On another day, I tagged along with the team to visit some girls’ home which was a blast. The girls' homes are three very modest homes all within walking distance of each other. They are not much to look at from the outside but as you get closer, you know they are something special.



You can hear the sound of girls laughing and playing and being truly happy. To think that these girls were brought in to I-India because they reached out for help after being abused, were living on the streets begging or were orphaned. As one of the staff member’s at I-India said, “our payment for working here are the smiles on the kid’s faces and knowing that their lives have been turned around”. Just an amazing place.

And finally, we went to visit Ladli which is the jewelry making and handicrafts operation that I-India runs. Ladli is a place where the older kids can go to get a meal, be taught for a few hours and have the opportunity to hang out with their friends while making jewelry. I-India then sells the jewelry to help support their other programs. Again, happy kids everywhere and happy Duke students buying trinkets and getting our hands henna’d from the girls.

These visits are what I think is so amazing about the GCP. To have an opportunity to go to a country and see some of the traditional tourist attractions but then also have the opportunity to spend time with really impactful organizations that are making a real difference in the lives of the poor and underserved. Very cool.

Random thoughts thus far

Some random thoughts about the trip thus far …

• A trip to India is truly awesome, but being on the trip as a staff member is definitely not as fun as being a student. We (the staff and faculty) put so much work in to setting up the class, the projects and the trip but once we are on the ground, the teams are basically on their own, working with their clients during the day and then using their cars/drivers to go off to dinner or out shopping or whatnot in the evenings. So, they are off going on amazing site visits and fun things with their friends and most of the time the staff are behind at the hotel or off running errands. The whole thing was even stranger for me since most of the students are only a few years younger than me (and some are my age or even older). But in the end, the point is that the students have a valuable, educational experience and I think that we are accomplishing that!
• The Internet sucks in India (ok, at least in our hotel). It’s ironic to me since India is supposed to have all this technologically capability, with software developers everywhere, outsourced call centers and the like. Apparently, someone needed to inform our hotel of that. The only thing more annoying than the lack of internet was the amount of complaining that the students were doing about the lack of internet.

• Indian food is awesome for vegetarians, which makes me very happy. On the other hand, for someone that was trying to cut back on carbs the constant array of rice, naan, fried samosas and other tasty treats makes eating healthy a bit difficult (but delicious!)
• Pigeons are crazy. They are everywhere (apparently they eat mosquitoes so people encourage pigeons to be around – a fair tradeoff I suppose, nasty pigeons in exchange for less malaria). But sitting in my hotel room felt like being in the midst of Hitchcock’s “The Birds”. The pigeons on the windowsill were constantly making a racket and sounded like they were trying to peck their way in to my room – totally creepy way to fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning!

The Clients

The great thing about the GCP is that the students really get to “go and do” as opposed to the “go and see” of most tourist trips. Most of the weekdays during the trip are allocated for client work – the students meet with their clients, conduct site visits and interviews and gather the information needed to complete their consulting assignment.

This year in India we have 4 client organizations. Pranab and I spent the better part of the first week (which was just Wednesday - Friday) visiting with each client to check in on the teams and basically do some handshaking and relationship building. Seems like that shouldn’t have taken us the full week but it was slow moving because: a) the clients are located all over Jaipur which is pretty spread out; b) the traffic in this town is seriously crazy; and, c) there is no rhyme or reason (at least to me) about how addresses work so we had to spend time driving up and down streets, stopping at shops to ask directions (the “Indian GPS” as Pranab calls it) and looking for building #3 on a street that literally goes 1... 14... 108... 22 etc. It’s quite an entertaining process.

Anyway, a quick description of each of the organizations that the students are working with:

Bodh Shiksha Samity started in 1987 with the establishment of a community school (or bodhshala) in Jaipur and has grown to be recognized as a pioneer in the field of education for the urban deprived. They are opening schools of their own, in close partnership with local communities, and are also working closely with the government to help improve the government schools. As the number of schools in their network grows, the student team is working on a process for gathering and evaluating data from all the schools (e.g., collecting data on appropriate metrics such as attendance and performance and then analyzing and using this data in a useful way to measure success and identify areas for improvement). Not an easy task in a country where most schools don't have computers (or even electricity or running water in some cases). Here's the Bodh team:

Center for Microfinance (CmF) provides a range of technical and support services to local microfinance institutions and stakeholders in the microfinance sector. CmF also conducts pilot projects to test the feasibility of new microfinance products/services, e.g. they are currently overseeing an urban microfinance pilot in Jaipur (in contrast to traditional microfinance programs which are located in rural areas, leveraging the family and rural community structure). The students are working with CmF on diversifying their fundraising strategy and identifying ways to make their programs more sustainable. Here's the CmF team at their first meeting at the client site:

CECOEDECON (Centre for Community Economics and Development Consultants Society) was founded in 1982 to provide relief to the victims of devastating floods in Jaipur. Since that time, they have grown tremendously and now serve the Rajasthan region in many fields, including poverty, child development, education, health, finance, women's empowerment, equity and human rights. The students are assessing the impact of recent financial and political decisions in India on the farmers that CECOEDECON supports and potentially recommending ways in which these farmers might be helped.

I-India is an NGO “giving street children a future” through a variety of programs, including residential homes, education and vocational training, medical care, nutrition, and a crisis helpline. Their programs reach over 3,000 street children daily and assist children with homelessness, malnutrition and illness – while also developing their attitudes and skills so they can make a better future for themselves. One of these programs, Ladli, is a vocational training program providing emotional support and education – including specialized trainings in jewelry and handicraft making - for abused, orphaned and destitute children. Handicrafts and jewelry are then sold with proceeds going entirely to the children and funding the project. The students are helping to think about expanding Ladli to help more children and sell more products to help fund I-India’s programs.

Touch down in Delhi and on to Jaipur

So, we made it! Some of us worse for wear – I entered India with a whopping migraine, which was not exactly the way I wanted to kick things off! Oh well.

We spent the first night in Delhi and then headed off first thing in the morning for Jaipur – a 5-6 hour drive by bus. Here’s the crew looking excited for the trip to come. I’ll be curious to see how much we want to kill each other by the end of these 2 weeks ;)

Once we made it to Jaipur, we toured the city on our bus and visited the Jaipur City Palace. We were all pretty exhausted and it was like 95 degrees out but it was nice to get our first taste of India and the amazingly intricate architecture that you see in palaces across the country. The City Palace was built by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh during his reign and then added on to by succeeding rulers. A part of the Palace still makes home for the residence of the descendants of the former rulers of Jaipur. It’s really interesting to drive through the chaotic, crowded, dirty streets of Jaipur and then come upon this royal palace which seems just a bit out of place.

Before the night was over, we had an introductory dinner with some of the clients and then it was off to bed, completely exhausted and jetlagged!

Hitting the Road

I promised a long time ago that I would post about my new (well, at least new at the time) job. Of course, I’ve been completely remiss in doing so (I’m almost a year into the job at this point!) but in order to explain why I am on a plane enroute to India right now I need to back up a few steps...

So, flashback a year ago to when I was a consultant, traveling from one client site to another, creating what seemed like never-ending powerpoint slides and wishing that I could be more passionate about what I was doing. I’m one of those people that believes that you spend enough time at your office that you should be enjoying it, be stimulated and challenged by it and feel like at the end of the day you are making a positive impact on the people around you and, ideally, the world! To me a job is not just a job; it's what you think is interesting and important enough to devote your skills and time to.

Needless to say, consulting was a good experience but not what I wanted to dedicate my career to. So, after years of talking about it, Brad and I finally decided to move back down to NC and I started to look for new jobs. Soon enough I found myself talking to some folks at the business school at Duke in a group called the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE). Suddenly, there was a light at the end of the tunnel and a job that I could get excited about!

So, what is social entrepreneurship? In a nutshell, it is about using innovative, entrepreneurial thinking and business skills to create solutions to social issues. Social entrepreneurs can be found within nonprofits, for-profits or hybrids. In other words, the business model doesn't define a social entrepreneur; what does define them is their intent (focus on accomplishing social goals, not just financial) and their innovative solutions that draw on the best thinking in both the business and nonprofit worlds to develop strategies that maximize their social impact.

As David Bornstein noted in How to Change the World, "What business entrepreneurs are to the economy, social entrepreneurs are to social change. They are the driven, creative individuals who question the status quo, exploit new opportunities, refuse to give up, and remake the world for the better."

So, that is what CASE works on – creating new research and thinking around the topic of social entrepreneurship; studying organizations to understand what works and what doesn’t, and developing programs for the students that are going through business school and learning skills like accounting, marketing and strategy that we hope they will one day put to use in the social sector.

I was brought in to help with the running of the Center. Operational and strategic planning; marketing; fundraising; partnership development – basically all the functions that help the Center to run. I also do some work with the students, in particular helping run a course called the Global Consulting Practicum (GCP).

So, that brings me to why I am heading off to India. The GCP is a course that CASE runs in which MBAs learn about social entrepreneurship and also consulting skills. The students are divided in to teams of 4-6 students who are matched with a social entrepreneur in a developing country. This year, we have 4 teams working with “clients” in India; 4 teams in South Africa and 3 teams in Belize. The student teams work closely with their client on a topic of strategic importance to the client – they work from Durham most of the course and then over their Spring Break, they travel to the country where their client is located and work on the ground with that client organization. It's a great opportunity for the students to get real hands-on experience ... consulting skills, international experience, and understanding how the things they are learning in textbooks actually related to real social problems.

So, this morning 61 students, 3 faculty and 3 staff members (me included!) headed off to India, South Africa and Belize. Should be an interesting 2 weeks!

Weekend with the Worshams!

As Brad and I have continued to get our house decorated and furnished, one of the things we love is having visitors come stay with us. It’s so nice to finally have a place for people to comfortably stay, as opposed to our old condo where the only guest options were the couch or an inflatable mattress on the floor (apologies to all the folks that stayed with us there)!

Last weekend we had the Worshams come to visit which was really fun. They came in on Thursday night, in time to catch a Duke Men's Basketball game at Cameron Indoor. Granted it wasn't a very good game - Tulsa wasn't exactly stiff competition - but a game in Cameron nonetheless!

That was a great way to start off their visit, followed by a busy weekend full of catching up, touring the local towns and watching the Olympics.

We spent a day in Durham, touring the area and taking in revitalized warehouses that are making Durham a really unique and cool place to live. We also spent a day in Raleigh, including a stop at the huge NC Farmer’s Market and lunch at a restaurant called “The Pit” which is NC barbecue (made famous by the head chef’s appearance on “Throwdown with Bobby Flay” on the Food Network!). Here’s a pic of Brad, Tommy and Le Anne enjoying some beers before their fried chicken, ribs and pulled pork was brought out. I had some delicious barbecued tofu! (guess there are enough vegetarians around these days to warrant tofu being on the menu, I loved it!)

It was a fantastic weekend - so nice for Brad and I to get to spend some quality time with just the two of us and Tommy and Le Anne! The weekend, of course, went by too quickly and was over before we knew it!