On What I'm Doing

Wow. It's been a bit since I last posted and the weeks are flying by. After a month of living with a family in a tiny apartment and searching for a place I've finally moved into a new apartment with my flat-mate, which is quite a relief. What's especially nice is that, just as in San Francisco, I am able to walk to work from my apartment. Although it's only an 8-minute walk it's highly entertaining as I'm just one of the many parts of traffic here in Ahmedabad: Waterbuffalow, bicycles, Ox, Motorcyles, buses, cows, cars, scooters, pedestrians, rickshaws, stray dogs (so many stray dogs), kids in school uniforms, veggie and fruit wallahs, and the occasional camel all share the road with meon my way to work. And just so you know, my neighborhood is considered a slower residential area.

On top of finally moving my projects at work have taken form and are already keeping me busy. I’ve been ridiculously impressed with my NGO and my colleagues, and am happy to report that the organization I’m with is not one that suffers from inefficiency. My office is a really pleasant place to be: lots of natural light, lots of busy people coming in and out of meetings with community members, tea is served twice a day, lunch is like a big potluck (everyone shares their food, which I love!), and all in all I generally feel like I’m surrounded by productive and interesting people who enjoy their work. I felt the same way about my work in San Francisco, and have decided that as long as I work in an office, it is a pattern I plan to replicate.

So about the NGO itself and my projects: The short of it is that Saath has been working in Ahmedabad’s informal sector since the late 80s. As the country, state, and city has changed around them, so too have their programs/initiatives. All their programs are aimed at improving the standard of living and quality of life of slum residents through health, education, and livelihood schemes, and they’ve also done lots of infrastructure work in partnership with the gov’t. They’ve had a lot of success and what I’ve been most impressed by is their philosophy in using the market as a tool for development (many NGOs are resistant to this concept). The best example of this is a program they initiated 2 years ago, and I’ll try to describe it without going into too many details:

Gujarat (the state I live in) and Ahmedabad (the city I live in) are among the fastest growing areas in India (both in terms of private investment in the area and population). While Ahmedabad has always had a large industrial sector it now has a large and growing service sector. In response to this Saath did a market scan to understand what the changing employment sector and the necessary skills for employment look like. From that they've set up a number of specific job-skill training programs for 18-30 yr. old slum residents, and all the programs (which are split up depending on the sector of employment) include a life-skill module and computer literacy training. They go through this 3-month program and are fed into a corporation/company/etc., and their progress is monitored. Saath has set up centers all around the city, and through the program they’ve already trained and employed close to 2,000 youth, all of whom are from the slums and had dropped out of school. What’s interesting is that the program is not free of charge to the youth (they pay about 500 Rupees for the training – a bit over 10 US dollars), so they are paying for the service that they receive, which gives them a sense of ownership over and commitment to their own success. The idea is that otherwise it’s seen as a charity being given to them, which, it’s been argued, can be dis-empowering.

The project is called “Umeed” (which means Hope), and is only one of the many initiatives that Saath employs. I’m currently working on a grant proposal for this project as one of my smaller short-term projects, so it’s been really great to get an understanding of all the little details that went into starting and creating the program. In the back of my mind I’m constantly wondering whether and how successful projects I come across could be implemented in different contexts (e.g. Bay Area, Iran), or what it is about a given context that allows it to be successful. One thing for sure about this project is that it is a response to the growing economy (so the economic growth and changing labor force are assumed). It’s refreshing to be learning about a project that has successfully used economic growth to reach the bottom of the barrel, and NOT as a trickle down effect but as a proactive initiative that focuses specifically on involving the urban poor in the city’s growth and involves partners at the corporate (employers), state (the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation has already agreed to scale up the project), and civil society level (NGO partners are helping to implement the program). I feel strongly that NGO work should never excuse or completely alleviate the government of it’s social obligations, so when an NGO comes up with something innovative (which involves the private sector to boot) and the government is able to then scale it up (in this case by adding centers all around the city), that’s pretty much an ideal cooperative approach in my mind.

On top of this short-term project I have something I’m working on in the long-term and medium-term as well. My long term project is with one of Saath’s newer initiatives, called the Urban Resource Centers, where I’m working on a report about how the creation of the URCs exemplifies a rights-based-approach to development. In it’s most basic form the purpose of the Urban Resource Centers is to serve as a facilitator between service users and service providers, but it’s a lot more intricate than that (especially in a rights-based context) and will require a post of its own at a later time. What’s great is that the URC team is made up of really interesting people (an urban planner, and an architect who focuses on housing for the poor, to name two), so I’m learning a ton from them along the way.

The medium-term project that I’m working on, which is technically “on the side”, is helping the Community Video Unit (CVU) with their process documentation. The CVU is an arm of Saath that produces films by and for the slum communities about different issues that effect them. They call these videos “Video Magazines”, and they’re screened in strategic locations within the slums (in the local language) so that people are aware of services and civic life around them (the most recent film they’re working on, for example, is a film about the upcoming elections in December, to tell the residents about the candidates and their positions on different issues that will effect them, and information on how to get an election card and who from Saath to speak to about this). The producers are all members of the slum communities, and are part of Saath’s paid staff.

So that’s the lengthier short version of what I’m doing. I feel lucky to be placed with this organization and it’s also nice to have been put to work right away considering that one of my largest fears was that I’d show up and have nothing to offer. I’ll do my best to write more often so that my posts don’t end up being so long, but if you’ve made it this far congrats!

First Generation Born, Second Generation Immigrant, or Just Plain American?

(Photo: Logan Int'l Airport, Pre-departure)

I know that I owe a post about the NGO I’m working for, and the work that I’m doing/will be doing, but I don’t think I’ll pump that one out for another few days or so. Instead, I want to write about something totally unrelated that I’ve been thinking quite a bit about: what it means to be the child of people who moved to the United States from another country. Many of the individuals that I’ve met through the AIF program are individuals who, like me, were born in the United States but raised in a non-American household and culture. Just as I have never been to Iran without my mother, many of them had never been to India without their parents before their arrival this past September. During orientation I found myself quite jealous as they discussed their excitement and curiosity about this new adventure, that is, about having their “own” experience in their parents’ homeland. To put it in one fellow’s own words, one of her goals during this year was to be able to “manage herself” in India. As I bobbled my head in agreement, I pictured myself in Iran, without my mother, and wondered whether I could “manage myself” there without her. I’d like to say yes, and maybe someday I’ll be able to, but in reality I’ve never been presented with that challenge, and at the very least I can comfortably say that it would be difficult from both an emotional and practical standpoint.

At one point I asked one of my Indian-American friends whether she could picture herself staying in India after the fellowship. Her answer fascinated me, and in its essence went something like this: “I couldn’t imagine my mother’s reaction… after she sacrificed so much for me to grow up in the United States, only to find that I’ve moved back to square one.” My immediate internal reaction went like this: “well yea, you’d move back here with all the tools that your education equipped you with.” And then I wondered whether my reaction was an imperialistic way of thinking about moving back to your parents’ homeland, that is, the idea that you have something to offer their former Society, simply because you were brought up and educated in the West. But I also wonder whether a second generation return would in fact be the perfect ending to the immigrant’s tale: not the “American dream” of making it big in the west (where your grandchildren will hardly learn your language, and have a watered down understanding of your story and sacrifices), but the tale of leaving the country you love, sacrificing all that you know for the prospects of a “better” opportunity abroad, to raise your children in an open society with greater opportunities for them, and then -- and here's where the stories diverge -- as they grow older and educated they decide out of their own volition that they want to go back to your homeland and reconnect with the society whose culture they so strongly feel attached to. I know that was a run-on sentence, but is this not an ideal picture for immigrants? Is this not the reverse of a brain drain? And of course, I realize that it assumes a certain level of opportunity in the original homeland that didn’t necessarily exist when the parents left (which seems to be true for a country like India, what with her expanding economy).

There are of course many different kinds of issues for first generation borns (indeed too many to discuss in one blog). Sure, we feel connected to the non-American half of our cultural upbringing, but that doesn’t necessarily translate well across borders -- when I go to Iran the simple reality is that I stand out, for a number of reasons. Many of the surface issues that account for this are easily mitigated with a make-over and a few months of language immersion, but dig a little deeper and it gets even more complicated: being American, among other things, in your parents’ homeland. I’m watching my Indian-American roommate deal with a number of such issues relevant to being a Non-Resident Indian (NRI), and some other people in my program have discussed it in their own blogs (see Curly In India discuss her thoughts on being an NRI).

Another issue that I think lots about is how, having grown up in the States, it will take first generation borns twice the effort to pass down the non-American part of ourselves to the next generation. It’s difficult for me to picture having children who don’t understand Farsi, or who don’t appreciate the amazing and noble nature of their grandparents’ and great-aunts/uncles’ stories and decisions. And I suppose this is part of why so many families – especially first generation families - urge their children to marry people of the same ethnicity, same culture, etc. But if you bring your child up outside of your culture’s society, how many and which of the cultural norms are you allowed to expect them to follow? I ask this question less about my own experience -- which in many ways is an exception to the rule -- and more in the context of conversations I’ve had with some Indian-Americans, many of whom – on top of educational pressures to become doctors, lawyers or engineers - are still explicitly expected to marry within their caste, state (Indian, not American) and religion. As for me and my siblings, the only time my parents mentioned marriage during our upbringing was to tell us to prioritize our education and careers over it – all the while instilling strong values about love and family, and a strong appreciation for our culture (which adds its own implicit pressures). And regardless of whether, given the choice, my parents would do any part of it over again, I must say that my upbringing is perhaps the thing I’m most proud of and thankful for in this life. And yes, I realize how lucky I am to be able to say that.