"Validating our work" in the land of lions, tigers and snakes

Our orientation included a rural site visit to Rajasthan’s Alwar District. Though I had known that Rajasthan was supposed to be one of the most beautiful states in India, it didn’t really hit me until we were there. We made a trek to a school set up by an NGO called Bodh, where we stayed the night – we were told that we might see lions, tigers and snakes. Sadly, I didn’t see any, but the beauty and simplicity of living at the campus that we stayed at matched only in comparison to the farm I once lived on in Honduras. It was breathtaking. We spent part of our day visiting one of Bodh’s schools. Bodh provides an alternative to the government schools found in the rural areas of this district, where the children’s voices are suppressed and discipline is a carried out by a stick. Bodh encourages their students to question their teachers and treats them with more respect than is shown to them in the government schools. Bodh concurrently tries to train government teachers in this model so that their method reaches more children and becomes sustainable in the community. We sat in on one of their lessons, during which some of the children read me the stories they had written as part of an assignment. After their lesson, we played Kabadi in the playground. A game sort of like tag and wrestling put together, needless to say when I tried to play, one of the other fellows, Brian, knocked me out immediately.

While in Rajasthan, we also visited a group of women in a farming community who are clients of a microfinance organization. In microfinance parlance, their group is called an SHG – a self-help group. The women told us about how they run their meetings, how their loans are used (mostly for water buffalos – the animal that to me symbolizes rural India), and most interesting to me, the other ways their meetings have helped improve their lives and their communities. For example, by working together, they were able to get the teacher to regularly come to their children’s school. In other words, they used the social capital they created through this network to aid in the social development of their community. I spent a lot of time in my last year of law school reading and writing about the social capital that arises out of microfinance initiatives. I honestly believe that this capital created through social networks is what sustains a community. When women—the backbone of society—are able to create social capital and use it alongside the financial capital they’ve been given through microfinance initiatives is when true development can occur.

I labeled this post as “validating our work” to quote another fellow in our program. He had worked with the Grameen Foundation in the States (an NGO that focuses on microfinance initiatives) prior to this fellowship – and for him, meeting the women of this self-help group in Rajasthan and seeing how the microfinance initiative improved their lives really validated the work he had been doing over the past few years. I know that we all felt that way in some shape or form throughout orientation so I thought quoting him encapsulated what I took away from those two weeks.