Living the Dream

Sorry for the long time between blog entries. I got a bit wrapped up with some grad school essays and with the completion of one of my applications, I’d like to declare this the best week ever. It started with a weekend trip to Jaipur and ended with progress on the work front. I’ll start with my trip to Jaipur…

Trips:
I traveled there on an overnight train with some fellow Seva Mandir volunteers and met up with my friend Carolyn, another AIF Fellow who is based in Delhi. We spent the first day walking around the old city (also called “the pink city” because of the use of the color on every buildings). We walked around one of the bazaars where there was plenty of old school shopping juxtaposed right next to largest movie theater in India.

We also visited the city palace and the lake palace and it was there that I began to see how I have become settled into Udaipur. Here were two beautiful palaces in a cool city, but all I could do was compare it to “my city” and suddenly they weren’t too impressive. Maybe I’m becoming a palace-snob, but Jaipur can’t really hold a candle to the palaces and city landscape of Udaipur.

The next day was awesome. We met up with some other Seva Mandir volunteers who were also in Jaipur for the weekend and went to the Monkey Temple. I’m not sure what the official name is, but the place is overflowing with monkeys so I can’t imagine a more appropriate name. The temple is situated in the valley between two mountains. There are three levels, each with its own holy swimming pool. I think one is supposed to be for women, another for men, and the third for monkeys, but there seemed to be monkeys swimming in all three. I think someone in the group mentioned that there are some five thousand monkeys that are around the temple. It was hard not to keep taking pictures of the monkeys, some fighting, others swimming, I even saw one monkey toss a smaller monkey into the pool.


After the monkey temple, we went to check out the Amber Fort. At first it seemed like any other fort, big walls, big doors, big courtyards. It was nice but not unlike what I had seen at other forts in Rajasthan. But then we went up to, what I can only assume to be, the living quarters. It was an amazing maze of rooms, halls, and courtyards that I got lost in a few times at least. They were in the process of restoring some of the walls and I can only imagine what the place would have been like in its heyday, with thousands of people occupying the labyrinth.

At night, we went to dinner a little outside the city at Choki Dhani. It is sort of difficult to describe the place, but I think the best analogy would be Colonial Williamsburg meets Disneyland. The basic premise was to experience a “traditional Rajasthani village.” There were dancers, camel and elephant rides, and local food. I am not sure how the giant Tyrannosaurs Rex seemed to fit in to the environment, but it actually worked. The next morning we went and had brunch with a fellow volunteer who is from Jaipur before heading back home. Overall, the weekend was a great chance to get out of Udaipur, hang out with Carolyn, and explore a new city. I would definitely recommend Jaipur as a place to visit for a couple of days, especially to see the monkey temple, which was my favorite part of the trip.

Work:
SHG Program
I have not written much about my project at Seva Mandir and that is primarily because I have not made much progress since arriving in Udaipur. I have attended some meetings, talked with various people, but it was not until recently that my project has started to get some traction.

As many of my friends already know, one of my main interests in coming to India was to do some work in the microfinance sector. Seva Mandir uses a SHG model for microfinance (as opposed to the Grameen Bank model for example). SHG stands for “Self-Help Group” and is basically a collection of women who meet regularly to address issues that are affecting them or their village. The SHG is also used as a vehicle for savings, loans, and income generation. For example, a group of ten women will meet monthly; each member will be required to put 10Rs (about 25 US cents) of savings into the SHG fund. This pool of money then grows until they have enough to open a bank account, which generates some interest income. The savings pool can also be used for internal loaning, but the SHG as a unit can also go to banks and get external loans for various uses such as consumption purposes, income generating projects, or emergencies. Seva Mandir does not actually do the lending but helps to facilitate the SHG program, offering financial literacy training, accountants, etc.

The problem with the program is that though it has grown to well over 500 SHGs, there is no tracking of how the various groups are doing (how much they are saving, loaning, etc.). The “accountants” are usually village people who have high-school level education at best and often not completely proficient in math. I have been working with Alvaro and one of the regional managers on some capacity building iniatives for the SHG program.

We are creating tests to assess where the accountants are having issues, a training module to address these problems, and a training manual to serve as a reference for existing accountants and to teach new accountants. This week we took the first step by training the regional managers who are in charge of the accountants. We spent a day going through the test we created and set up a schedule to visit each of their regional offices and train their accountants. We then laid out a plan of hiring external accountants to go through each village/SHG and check the books in the upcoming months and the ultimate goal will be to resolve all the major issues by early next year so that the SHG program can begin to be audited by external accountants on an annual basis.

We are also working on a performance measurement tool to analyze how the SHG program is doing using various quantitative and qualitative methods. That part of the project will begin in the next few months but will be really exciting and I’ll update you as it develops.

Custard Apple Livelihood Program
Along with the SHG program, I am also working on a livelihood project. As a very basic overview of the current situation, local villagers collect custard apples (a local fruit that I will talk more about later) and sell it to a regional collector for about 2Rs/kg. By the time it reaches market, custard apples are sold for at least 20Rs/kg. Based on our initial assessment, there is limited value-add from the regional collector and with some basic training, the villagers will be able to cut out the middleman and increase their productivity and livelihood by three to four fold.

We have found an NGO in a nearby state that has done a similar capacity building project with their local custard apple pickers. I contacted them about providing training for our villagers and have received very positive feedback. The first major challenge is that the other NGO recommends we come before Diwali because this is the prime custard apple picking season. The problem with that is that Diwali is next week and so we are scrambling to see if we can logistically plan a trip for the upcoming week or if they can host us training after Diwali. Either way, the project has gained some momentum with the help of this other NGO and during the past week, I went out to the village to meet see where the custard apples are grown, how they are being picked, and talk with the local farmers.

It was great to be “in the field” and though there was a language barrier, I really enjoyed meeting with the villagers, seeing where they lived, and the best part was trying custard apples for the first time. One of things that I was most excited about is trying indigenous fruit and the custard apple is my first new fruit. The custard apple is about the same the size as an apple but otherwise that is where the similarities end. On the outside it is bumpy and almost looks like an artichoke. The meat is soft and fleshy, and the fruit is filled with big seeds. The custard apple is very sweet tasting and it has quickly become one of my favorite fruits so it is too bad that they don’t have anything similar in the States.



Other:
In other news, life at the Love Nest is terrific. We redecorated one of the spare rooms to be a living room/lounge. It used to be my bedroom, but when Ron moved out, I took over his space and we had additional space to use. We used some extra mattresses as seats, a bed frame as a dining table, and covered the room with bright posters and Christmas lights. It's quite a nice place to have dinner, watch a movie on somebody's laptop, or just hang out and read.


Alvaro and Fizzy (my two roommates) spent an afternoon building a swing outside our porch with a piece of wood and some rope. It actually came out real nice so I have to give props to the two for their efforts. The latest changes is that Alvaro went to buy a ping-pong set and is planning to turn our bed frame/dining table into a ping pong table. We'll see how that works out and if our living area becomes a game room, I'll post some pictures.



Also, my friend Sam, a local who has now been absorbed into the Seva Mandir volunteer group, has been helping me to find a scooter. The word on the street is that he may have found a good one for me and so I’m going with him to check it out in the next couple of days. With any luck, I’ll be posting about my adventures on my scooter in the next entry.

Oh, and speaking of the next entry, if I do not write anything in the next week, hope everyone has a great Diwali. I’m going to travel down to Kerala in the south with a few AIF Fellows. I’m meeting up with two Fellows from Ahmedabad: Rick, my roommate from orientation, and Ekta, who graduated from Duke this past May. We’re going to meet up with another AIF Fellow, Meera (Duke ’06) and one of Rick’s friends (no Duke connection I believe). We have a packed week and I really can’t wait to see those guys and vacation down in Kerala. I hear it is beautiful and so I’ll be sure to take as many pictures as possible.

Note: I uploaded more pictures onto Picasa and have included it as a new slideshow (India, Part III). You can navigate the slideshow from this blog or click on the pictures and it will bring up the entire album in a new window.