Some Belated Background

I feel like I’ve gone about this blog the wrong way. Here I am narrating experiences and feelings without a background on the program I am completing or my day to day routine. So, a little too late, here goes nothing:

           I am in Pune, India on the Alliance for Global Education’s Contemporary India program. There are 20 students on our program this year from many different schools in the US. We all meet in the morning at our program center in Fergusson College to have breakfast and then troop through campus to our class on Contemporary India.

           After a discussion that begins with a variety of topics and inevitably ends with an analysis of politics, we all disperse to our internships throughout the city of Pune. For me personally, internship times means either waiting at school and creating my own assignment or heading to one of the seven branches of Parvati Swayamrojgaar, a NGO with the mission of alleviating poverty through micro-finance. The branches are located in slum communities and I have now been into four of the seven to observe the collection motivators at work as they promote PSW, collect loans, and check-up on the partners in the field.

            After internships, we tend to gather again at the program center before heading home, out to eat, or to our expressive culture classes (pictures of pottery class soon to come!) The program center is that home away from home that you hate but still can’t totally desert. Littered with combed through newspapers, always occupied by one or two students, it beckons us even as we try and resist. It is safe, familiar, and static and so it is there that we regroup before heading out into the foreign land of Pune.