India, a Country of Contrasts

I’m sitting in a Starbucks in one of the nicest neighbourhoods of Mumbai making time for my train to depart to Udaipur. I’m on my way back to Gajner, the new village where COM Team lives now. When I decided to come to India I knew that I was going to be working in rural villages and, when I arrived there I strangely felt at home. Rural India is not that different from rural Spain 50 years ago in some aspects. Obviously, cellphones didn’t exist back then and the villages were not entangled with wires everywhere, but washing clothes by the river is something that my mother used to do when she was a child. My grandma tells me all the time, “you better save money, you don’t know what could happen in the future, the world is getting worse and you may end up living like I did when I was young”. She was right, I’m living more or less like she did years ago, but thankfully the world is still in good shape or at least Spain is still what it was a year ago.

Housewarming party at Labu’s house

Now my experience here is coming to an end, a couple more days to go, and I am thinking about what I am going to tell people when they ask about India. “How was India? What does India look like?” I’m trying to prepare my answer in advance because, let’s face it, people will only ask you about your amazing experience once, maybe twice, but this incredible and life-changing experience won’t mean anything to them or anyone that hasn’t lived something similar. I had the chance to visit India as a tourist and as a local. I was two people here, the western woman that can dress and act as she wants, as a mere tourist, and the woman working in rural India where there is a complete different code of clothing and behaviour. It truly changes your perspective when you have been living in India and go to other cities as a tourist.

Thousands of people in their finery visit the Golden Temple each day

So going back to the original question…. How is India? India is the country of contrasts. Colourful and beautiful India, people say, and they are not wrong. Women wearing colourful dresses, Hindu temples combining as many colours as possible and lights, neon lights everywhere, in the bus, in the temples… Yes India is a country of lights and colours, but there is also a lot of darkness and dirt. You just have to look around to realize to what extent Mumbai and Delhi are cities of contrasts. For example, when you meet young women holding their babies and begging for food in a nice area full of expensive restaurants, or when you are walking around a fancy neighbourhood and you meet a woman carrying pieces of wood on top of her head for the fire. Yes, cities in India are a place of contrasts and within 100 meters you can see both sides of India, the rich and the poor. Inequality is alarming and not only in terms of wealth but also in terms of gender. Men can go wherever they want at any time of the day or night, but if you arrive home after the sunset your neighbour will let you know that “you are late”. Yes, that happened to me. 

Same street, two different scenarios, Chandni chowk, Delhi

These inequalities and contrasts made me come to India and to EduCARE, to try to do something to change it. I enjoyed my experience here and despite struggling with the slow Internet, which is the worst thing that can happen to you if you’re the Communications Coordinator and your entire work depends on it, I think I did my best for EduCARE and I will continue to do it from a distance. I enjoyed every second I spent in my village, in Maiti, especially with the girls from the community. We did Girls’ Club every Sunday and I hope they learnt something from me because I definitely did from them. Going back home is going to be difficult, India definitely changed me for good or for bad, I still have to judge it. But it definitely did and I am not the same person that came to India 6 months ago. I’ve grown up more than I imagined and that is what I was looking for.

Making dream catchers in Girls’ Club!

I am going to miss my EduCARE family, the children in the street shouting “hi” while waving their hands, the spicy food that it took me so long to get used to, the colourful dresses and especially my little family inside EduCARE, the COM Team, the girls that made my experience an amazing and unforgettable adventure.

It’s getting dark so I guess I should go home… or not?

My crazy lovely COM Team!

“Because it’s a lie that things are as they are; things are as we leave them to be. The world changes when we change and in order to do that we have to believe that change is possible, that is an act of faith, of courage, of compromise, of love”.

Laura Sabater – Spain

Communications Coordinator, Gajner (Rajasthan)

The Chicken Coop Journey in Modiya

When I came to Gajner in Rajasthan, the previous microfinance intern was about to leave EduCARE. For the past three months, he had been working on finding an agreement with a family in the nearby Muslim community, Modiya, on building a chicken coop. He asked me to take over his project and I was not sure about what to do. I just had gotten to the centre and I had not even met the family interested in the project. I felt I needed more time to decide. Yet, the more we discussed it, the more I was finding the idea of a chicken coop an exciting way to help a woman, not only to empower herself, but to provide food security to a community that has limited access to vegetables and eggs, as well. On these premises, I embarked on this journey with Saira and her family that turned to be a true adventure.

Saira's family and the interns building the chicken coop

It was mid-October when we started to bring materials for Saira, and after three months, we can finally say that the chicken coop is ready. There have been vicissitudes as in every journey, but a few exciting and surprising moments are certainly what I will take home with me. The fact that we are going to buy chickens by the end of the first week of February is extraordinary. However, what really matters to me are the financial literacy lessons Saira and I started back in December. Back then, I discovered that she is illiterate, while until that day I had been told she could read and write. I was still positive though because I realised she can write numbers and she is treasurer of Gajner Self-Help group. It was a great starting point!

Ilaria has been giving financial literacy classes to Saira

Right before Christmas we had a lesson and I gave Saira some homework for the holidays. When I came back in January and I visited her I was pleasantly impressed to see that she did it all and really well too. The surprises did not stop there. Saira showed me her notebook and she is learning to write and read Hindi. I do not know whether studying math together made her want to learn more, but I want to believe that we are truly bringing change in people’s lives doing our small part.

Ilaria Iovieno - Italy

Microfinance Project Manager, Gajner (Rajasthan)

New Microfinance projects are on a roll in Paro, Punjab

The Punjab Microfinance project is undergoing an overhaul! The cluster went from zero microfinance interns to three, and thus the weeks since Educare’s quarterlies have been spent coming up with a shared vision for the microfinance initiatives we would like to see here. Assessing some of the past microfinance projects here we decided we wanted to go ahead and open a ReStore, and the best way to do this would be to start with a juice stand run out of the Paro office.

We believe this juice stand will be a good way to increase Educare’s visibility in Paro, and we can gradually encourage some of the girls in the Paro migrant camp to come help work the juice stand. We’re hoping this will teach the girls financial literacy skills (such as bookkeeping, addition, and subtraction), independence, and a desire to expand on new projects!

Rachel hopes to engage the women in Paro in a sewing project to make and sell re-usable bags either out of the ReStore or out of the local shops, Aurélien plans to expand on an organic farming project to sell fresh produce, and Madeline hopes to re-engage the chicken coop project out of the Paro camp to sell eggs in the ReStore.

We have a lot going on for Microfinance here in Punjab, stay tuned for some big changes!

Madeline Zdeblick - USA

Cluster Coordinator, Punjab

Cultivating Community Projects: What’s Really Involved

This blog is usually used to communicate, celebrate and reflect on EduCARE’s successes; be it a successful health project, a significant milestone in community relationship building, or the start of a village-wide environmental awareness campaign. We love to share the photos of smiling interns side by side with satisfied community members, and recount that special feeling of achieving something amazing together. This blog is usually a record of the fruits of our labour.

In this post I have no grand event to report, no milestone to reflect on and no photos of a crowd of community members with EduCARE staff snapped after a long but fruitful day. This post contains no fruit at all, only carefully prepared soil and the first suggestions of a fresh green shoot.

Every morning and afternoon, our landlord, a seventy-something year old man with a neat moustache and gravelly voice, helps us tend our garden at the Rait intern house. With one of our main centre goals being to maintain a sustainable house project, the veggie garden is very important to us interns. With years of agricultural experience, “Uncle” demonstrates how to prepare the soil, explains where and when to plant each crop, and diligently monitors the watering schedule. We are all very excited with the prospect of soon cooking and eating our own home-grown vegetables;perhaps, a little too excited and a little too quick to throw seeds into the unprepared soil of a new garden bed just in front of the veranda.

Our Uncle just shakes his head at this, patiently gets the shovel and instructs us to loosen the soil in the small plot of land. “Do we plant the seeds now”, we ask, Uncle shakes his head and smiles. The next day, he brings a bag of cow manure, directs us to scatter it across the small plot of land and then work the nutrient-rich goodness into the soil. “Do we plant the seeds now”, we ask, Uncleshakes his head and smiles. The next day, he brings three huge bags of dried leaves, scatters them over the plot of land and leaves them there. We don’t ask about seeds this time, we just watch and wait. The leaves stay there for days, weeks even, getting no attention other than the occasional watering. As I write, we still haven’t planted any seeds in that plot of land in front of the veranda. We realise now that there’s more to gardening than throwing seeds into the dirt and hoping for the best.

Similarly,there is more to community development than just throwing a project at the community and hoping it will take root. When the Rait centre first initiated its figure-head women’s empowerment project in March, the Young Women’s Association, it was assumed that a range of other projects would inevitably shoot off, including skills development and training programs, self-help groups and micro-enterprises. Things are never that simple.

The women’s empowerment team in Rait has learnt the importance of leg-work, liaising with stakeholders, comparing options, exploring new avenues and finding creative solutions to unexpected challenges. Take our mushroom farming project, for example. The project design involves training a group of women in the art of mushroom cultivation, providing a small interest-free loan to help with training and start-up costs, and helping the women source materials and equipment to start their own mushroom micro-enterprises at home. Sounds simple enough, right? Hold on, don’t throw those seeds in that hard, compacted dirt just yet.

We’ve spent the last two months travelling to agricultural research institutes and universities, communicating back and forth with professors and mushroom experts, learning about mushroom cultivation techniques, preparing cost analyses, and comparing training options. Only once all of this behind the scenes legwork was done could we go to the women, who expressed an interest in growing mushrooms, to tell them the good news. But wait, you may have broken your back turning that soil, but you haven’t introduced the manure yet!

The women of Rait live diverse and complicated lives. Their time is split between domestic duties, child care, social and community obligations, and a diverse range of income-generating activities. There is a diverse mix of living and housing situations, from large multi-roomed complexes, which house entire extended families, to simple two room structures, and single rented rooms that are shared by each family. The diversity of these women’s experiences poses some interesting challenges for designing a project suitable for each of their living situations, schedules and needs. From difficulties with finding two consecutive days to attend a training course,to identifying a suitable spot in the house to allow the sensitive young mushrooms to grow, communicating with each of the women requires multiple visits to their homes (and lots of cups of chai). The language barrier poses another problem and we often have to enlist the aid of a native-speaker. Every visit presents a new challenge and requires some creative problem solving. It may not be so glamourous, but this is what community development work really looks like.

It takes time and a lot of back-breaking labour to get the soil primed and ready for sowing.

We’d love for this blog post to be about the success of our first mushroom farming training workshop, or to include a photo of a smiling woman proudly presenting her crop of home-grown oyster mushrooms. In the future, we hope to bring you these things, but for now all I can share with you is the nitty-gritty of what community development really looks like. We’ve put a lot of effort into laying the foundation of this project, anticipating and solving challenges in creative ways, and tailoring solutions to meet the individual and the collective needs of the women of Rait. We are currently putting together individual contracts for each of the women, to ensure the micro-credit process is both transparent and specific to each woman’s needs. We plan to hold our first training workshop in early June; our first mushroom crop should be ready by late July or early August.

We might not have anything to show for our efforts just yet, but with such rich and carefully cultivated soil, we are bound to have a successful crop soon enough.

Katherine Woolnough - Australia

Women's Empowerment Project Manager, Rait

Steps towards a sustainable future

Just a short walk away from the main square in the village of Naddi lives a small community that we refer to as the “Shanney community”. It consists of eight families, about 40 people and although they are only a short distance away from the main village they tend to live their daily lives somewhat removed from it. Like every person around the world they have basic needs and wants with regards to their health and sanitation but due to a lack of a sense of empowerment, education and finances they don’t have the sense of responsibility, the knowledge or the organisational skills to implement ideas that will help to give them a better standard of living.

This is where EduCARE India comes into play. An old Chinese proverb springs to mind that might best explain our intentions;

                              Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.

We intend to teach the Shanney community “how to fish”. Our programmes involve sustainable community development that will help empower the community and teach them that they can take responsibility for their lives, health and environment. We want to show them that they are not entirely dependent on the state to organise infrastructure that pertains to their health, safety and sanitation.

On Saturday the twelfth of April 2014, we had an informal meeting led by Mr B (EduCARE India’s Chief Project Director) with seven of our project managers by his side and seventeen members of the Shanney community (each family was represented by at least one person) to discuss what measures we can take together to help them improve their quality of life. Representatives from different generations of life in Shanney were present and they all expressed their intent to continue living there long into the future. For them to stay there in good health habits need to change, education needs to be improved and infrastructural systems need to be developed.

Before we revealed our own agenda with regards to areas that we think they need help with, we wanted to know what issues they felt needed addressing and what it is that they thought they as a community could do to make improvements. One by one they were asked the same question and they all replied with the same answer. That solid waste is a major issue, plastics and paper litter the surrounding area and the only infrastructure that they have is a few bins for paper and plastics which EduCARE had previously placed in their community and have been collecting. Initially these bins raised awareness to the practise of separating waste, but now they are ready for an upgrade.

They all suggested and agreed that they are responsible to do a mass clean up of the surrounding area which we have volunteered to organise for them on the first day of the following month. From this idea a new community based initiative was developed. On the first day of each new month we shall organise a community based activity that directly addresses important issues that the people in Shanney face.

Unfortunately, perhaps due to the fact that waste which litters the valley is so obvious to the eye; this was the only issue that the meetings participants were comfortable enough to mention. This demonstrates either a lack of awareness to the conditions that affect their lives or a lack of confidence to speak up about problems that are not so evident. Either way, it is clear to see that we have a lot of work in front of us.

Following up on the community’s primary concern, is the first item on our agenda; solid waste management. A newly developed solid waste management system has been implemented in the EduCARE staff houses. Although it is not a perfect solution to the waste management problems that people face in rural India, it has been designed in such a way that the foundations of the system should be relatively easy to replicate within the community. Waste can be separated into 4 main categories then brought by volunteering member of the community to our waste storage facility where it is collected and repurposed or sent away for recycling. For example; soft plastics can collected for making Ubuntu-blox (google this if you don’t know this simple but ingenious way of dealing with the plastics problem in the developing world); plastic water bottles are being collected to make a greenhouse; paper can be recycled by the community or turned into burnable briquettes producing energy and lowering the dependency on gas; fabrics can be reused to make clothing for the ReStore (ReStore is an empowerment program which we run where local women make clothes and crafts that they sell in a shop which EduCARE runs)...

These solid waste management initiatives are for us to teach the people from Shanney how to implement and operate, not for us to do everything for them. We help with the initial development of a system, but eventually they will take over. We want them to learn that they control their surrounding environment and that the less waste that they produce the better and that whatever waste is produced can become a useful resource. Very little “rubbish” is actually dirty!

Next up on our agenda is their water supply. Poor infrastructural development has left many leaks along the waters’ pipelines as well as the rampant dumping of waste around the water sources and the leaks have left the water contaminated. Although we are not exactly sure to what extent it is affected, we are certain that water-borne parasites are prevalent, causing many illnesses in the area. A laboratory is being set up for the purpose of testing the water, but this will take some time. In the interim, other solutions must be found. A simple provision would be to boil the water before drinking it and using a water filter, the hard part is getting people into the habit of using these precautions and for them to truly understand why it is they are taking them.

The third issue we addressed is our initiative to raise awareness on health issues. Little education is given with respect to health related practises which we in the developed world take for granted. For example; drinking dirty water or having an indoor fireplace with no ventilation. To counteract this void in learning, we are developing a health centre where the community can learn about the factors that affect their basic health such as; good / bad nutritional practises, basic first aid, causes of respiratory problems, causes of illness such as dirty water, sanitation and hygiene...


There are no local doctors in Naddi and only when someone is very ill do they undertake the forty minute journey down the mountain to the hospital. We hope to be able to arrange having a doctor come to our soon to be developed health centre once a week; to provide basic medical care for relatively easily treated illnesses, which if left ignored might become dangerous.

We then moved on to discuss “the clay oven project”. The houses in the community have open fires in the kitchen, but they do not have any form of chimney to ventilate the smoke. All of EduCARE's staff spend their initial two week induction period staying with certain families in the community which take part in our “homestay” project (similar to a guest house). One of the negative aspects that is always mentioned by the new interns is the problem with smoke inhalation caused by the open fire in the kitchen. We notice this immediately but the families either aren’t aware of the hazard to their health or feel like there is nothing they can do about it. They have learned to live a certain way and for them it is ok, but they seem oblivious to the massively detrimental effects this is having on their health. To combat this, a model for a very cheaply made clay oven and chimney has been developed. Our hope is to eventually have one of these in every house, but it is up to the potential recipients of the oven to help us make them.

There are no ovens in Naddi, hence there is no bakery. The clay oven project also provides an opportunity for business, whereby fresh baked goods can be sold in the Restore shop providing a supplement to a household’s income and fresh bread to a village (this will please many who work at EduCARE).

As an eco-friendly organisation, trees were always going to be mentioned in our meeting. Deforestation is one of the biggest problems that the earth faces. Many of us know that the main effects of this are reductions of global oxygen production and massive losses in wildlife habitats culminating in mass extinctions of species.

These effects are also prominent in Naddi, but there is another pressing issue that the people of Shanney face. The community is built on the steep valley leading down to the river where they experience large snowfalls in the winter and heavy monsoon rains in the summer. The stability of the soil that rests above them is in jeopardy because there are no more trees to keep it in place. The possibility of a landslide will someday become very real. These missing trees should also act as natural groundwater filtering system for the water that flows down to the river which feeds the villages below us. Instead it flows through dumped solid waste, contaminating the water source that supplies neighbouring villages.

We already have projects underway in which we are working with the community and have created a tree nursery. Many of the trees have been planted by the children of Shanney and the life giving favour will eventually be returned when the trees bear fruit for them and their new children whilst keeping the soil above their houses intact.

These ideas are not quick and easy solutions to immediate problems. They require time, patience, persistence and optimism. We want to change the way that people view the world, their place in it and the control they have over it. It is our hope that we can learn from these projects and eventually develop replicable solutions to common but important problems that people face across rural India. When the meeting in Shanney finishes, without anyone mentioning these last points on what it will take to achieve our goals, it feels as if the people of the community understand the problems that lie ahead of them and that they are looking forward to engaging with us as much as we are with them.

Alex Moran, Ireland

SWASH Project Manager

Naddi (Himachal Pradesh)

Starting of a Girls Club in a new village

After the success of the Girls Club and Young Women’s Association in Naddi, our volunteer-interns team is working to start up a new group in Himachal Pradesh village cluster at Maitee. As new international volunteer-intern members, the team-members had moved to Maiti at the end of January, 2013 to help initiate this new project.

Naina, Kate Davis - Canada (Girls Club and YWA Project Manager),
Laboo, and Auréline - France (Micro-finance Project Manager)

Since moving to Maitee they (Kate, working with our affiliate YWI; and Aureline working with affiliate MicroEmpowerED program) have spent the majority of their time getting to know the women and children of the community. Kate, from Canada remarks, "At first I was intimidated by this task because there had been no previous interaction with these families and I was worried as to how they would receive my presence in their village. After some casual visits and many cups of chai my worries soon vanished as I got to know the families.  Up to this point, there are about 15 girls with whom I regularly interact that range from the age of 6 to 20. The older girls have been helping me learn some Hindi and I help them with their English when I can. The children are so happy to teach me about their way of life in Maiti and they especially enjoy it when I dress in the traditional Indian Salwar Kameez outfit, saying that I look “Oh! SO nice!”." 

            In the next few weeks, the team has started to organise a room in the near vicinity of the intern house to use it as a common get together and activity room. A classroom at the local elementary school is also being put into use..The team-members will not only be able to assist the teachers with the English curriculum during school hours, but they will also teach skills for community based waste management and good case practices for environmental conservation amongst the children. In the afternoon they would be able to conduct Girls Club and After School Program activities. For Girls Club, the girls have shown a great interest in learning various life skills and practicing English. They have also said that they would like to do arts and crafts as well as organized team sports on the field out back.  We look forward to seeing these activities come to fruition in the next few weeks, and, support Aureline (from France) towards initiating a Young Women Association and Self Help Group there!

Main Road Square of Maitee village
A lline of houses of the marginalized and poor lie (beyond visual sight) behind the trees on the right extreme