Ok, so I totally lied. I told you I’d be a better blogger, but it just hasn’t happened. It’s apparently not IN me. I’ve been writing plenty during my time here, but hardly any of it has been making its way onto this blog. In any event, an update:
It’s nearly the end of March, which means I’m rounding down month 7 of 10 (crazy). Up until a few weeks ago my post-AIF future was fairly open. I fancied thoughts of staying longer in India, then jaunting over to Iran to pay my amazing grandmother a long overdue visit, maybe even intern with an NGO in Tehran, before making my way back to Massachusetts, then later back over to San Francisco. But as of the past few weeks I’m about 99.8% sure that I’ll be in graduate school come September (urban planning), which changes everything. I'm okay with that, though, because I'm getting fairly excited about doing some hard-core learning for the next couple of years (although, the truth is I've learned more since college than in college... but for now I'll take my friend Darzen's words that "grad school is a whole new ballgame").
It’s nearly the end of March, which means I’m rounding down month 7 of 10 (crazy). Up until a few weeks ago my post-AIF future was fairly open. I fancied thoughts of staying longer in India, then jaunting over to Iran to pay my amazing grandmother a long overdue visit, maybe even intern with an NGO in Tehran, before making my way back to Massachusetts, then later back over to San Francisco. But as of the past few weeks I’m about 99.8% sure that I’ll be in graduate school come September (urban planning), which changes everything. I'm okay with that, though, because I'm getting fairly excited about doing some hard-core learning for the next couple of years (although, the truth is I've learned more since college than in college... but for now I'll take my friend Darzen's words that "grad school is a whole new ballgame").
Between the reality of potentially being a student again, a good-ol case of heart-ache, a visit from my parents and younger brother, and the urge to go to Old Farm Road in Amherst to give one of my best friends a big hug, I’ve found myself thinking about life back in the states quite a bit this month. The strangest part, though, is that when I think of the states (mostly I picture laying in bed watching the parrots outside my old bedroom window in SF, and a setting sun splitting through my family’s screened in porch in Amherst), I immediately start missing my life in India: the work I’m doing with my NGO (Saath), my friends, the animals, my yoga instructor… It’s a really strange feeling considering I’m still here, sweating and typing, in Ahmedabad.
Leaving the immediate future where it actually belongs, I’ll tell you a bit about what I’ve been working on through the Urban Resource Center at Saath. Up until a couple of weeks ago I was working on a project that links household data (of residents in two of the major slum pockets we work in) to a GIS (Geographic Information System). Alas, as the weeks went on it became clear that the project was way to big for just one NGO to handle, so my focus shifted from making myself useful on the project, to writing a proposal for partnering with Ahmedabad’s prized architecture/planning school (CEPT), and a local government body (Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation), to complete the project. I'm crossing my fingers that it works out because a) I think it's a really important project, b) It would really be a perfect partnership and c) it'd be a great use of all of Ahmedabad’s different resources: we (the NGO) have all the data that the project needs (let alone the most knowledge about the slum communities), CEPT has the technology and professors that have already laid the groundwork, and the AMC has both the funds and the NEED for this kind of information in order to target their schemes for the urban poor. So, now we just wait and see if the powers to be agree (what an awful sentence).
In the meantime a new and very interesting project has somehow landed in my lap, which involves sifting through surveys, charts, graphs, and data about the construction industry, in order to come up with a viewer and reader-friendly socio-economic analysis of the industry (by viewer friendly I mean making simple sense of the charts, graphs, and data pumped out by the stats package, and by reader-friendly I mean the reader shouldn’t need to know anything about development or the industry to understand it). I should mention that the construction industry is relevant to our work with the urban poor because a majority of construction workers here are migrant laborers who have settled--temporarily (mostly on construction sites) or permanently (mostly in slums)-- in the city because [prepare yourself for an oversimplification] their rural (or maybe I should say non-urban?) livelihoods were insufficient. I’m only two weeks into it and already learning tons, but also finding that I simply have a lot more to learn (that has actually been the trend with all of my experiences and work to date). I’ll make no promises, but I hope to share some of what this project is making me think about in my next post…. but in case that never happens, which my record implies as highly likely, I’ll tell you that it’s title would have been something along these lines: Cheap Labor Makes The World Go ‘Round Until our Cities Drown!
Leaving the immediate future where it actually belongs, I’ll tell you a bit about what I’ve been working on through the Urban Resource Center at Saath. Up until a couple of weeks ago I was working on a project that links household data (of residents in two of the major slum pockets we work in) to a GIS (Geographic Information System). Alas, as the weeks went on it became clear that the project was way to big for just one NGO to handle, so my focus shifted from making myself useful on the project, to writing a proposal for partnering with Ahmedabad’s prized architecture/planning school (CEPT), and a local government body (Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation), to complete the project. I'm crossing my fingers that it works out because a) I think it's a really important project, b) It would really be a perfect partnership and c) it'd be a great use of all of Ahmedabad’s different resources: we (the NGO) have all the data that the project needs (let alone the most knowledge about the slum communities), CEPT has the technology and professors that have already laid the groundwork, and the AMC has both the funds and the NEED for this kind of information in order to target their schemes for the urban poor. So, now we just wait and see if the powers to be agree (what an awful sentence).
In the meantime a new and very interesting project has somehow landed in my lap, which involves sifting through surveys, charts, graphs, and data about the construction industry, in order to come up with a viewer and reader-friendly socio-economic analysis of the industry (by viewer friendly I mean making simple sense of the charts, graphs, and data pumped out by the stats package, and by reader-friendly I mean the reader shouldn’t need to know anything about development or the industry to understand it). I should mention that the construction industry is relevant to our work with the urban poor because a majority of construction workers here are migrant laborers who have settled--temporarily (mostly on construction sites) or permanently (mostly in slums)-- in the city because [prepare yourself for an oversimplification] their rural (or maybe I should say non-urban?) livelihoods were insufficient. I’m only two weeks into it and already learning tons, but also finding that I simply have a lot more to learn (that has actually been the trend with all of my experiences and work to date). I’ll make no promises, but I hope to share some of what this project is making me think about in my next post…. but in case that never happens, which my record implies as highly likely, I’ll tell you that it’s title would have been something along these lines: Cheap Labor Makes The World Go ‘Round Until our Cities Drown!
