My first few days have gone quite well. While I was planning my trip to India, I was in contact with my NGO but they suddenly became unresponsive when it came near my time to come here. They had said they would send me my agenda and I never got any information. So my first day, I woke up and went to the address of the NGO and asked for the person I had been contacting, Shruti. She came out and I told her I was the person over email and she said she could take me on as her intern and told me to come to the shelter the next day, so im glad that worked out well. The next day I had a hard time finding my way to the shelter as I had to use the rickshaw driver to get into the village where the shelter was located. It was so sweet because I was standing asking the drivers if they knew where the Sanlaap shelter was, as Shruti had told me to do. No one knew, except everyone around me was asking around helping me out as well. This one man even called his friend that spoke English to translate for me over the phone, although it didn’t help us much at the end, it was still such a sweet gesture. After a while a rickshaw driver gave me a ride and called Shruti on his phone. After a much longer time than it should have taken, I made it and was able to sit in on many activities they had for the women living at the shelter. We were playing games like telephone and different variations of it to improve communication skills and show the importance of it. Shruti, explained to me that because they are such young girls, and they have all experienced various traumas, a lot of this builds up and causes misunderstandings, drama, and tensions between the girls, and so games like this are meant to mend that. I was so surprised when she told me this because sitting in on the activity, these girls were joking around and giggling with each other like normal school girls and they were incredibly young, as in around 11 or 12, and so I had assumed they must have been the daughters of women that the shelter had rescued and was rehabilitating. However, it came as a shock to me when I realized that these were the girls who had been through such experiences, and at such a young age. My work this past week and for the next one is basically moving between the shelter, where I observe the activities and services provided to the women at the shelter, and going to the office where I write up reports for their annual report.
Summer in South Asia Fellowship
Organized in 2006 by the Center for South Asian Studies with a generous donation from an anonymous donor, the Summer in South Asia Fellowship has provided over a 100 students with funding for research and internships in India. Undergraduate students at U-M who receive a Summer in South Asia Fellowship can design and carry out their own summer fellowship programs in India. This platform was created to connect the previous and present fellows in the SiSA Program.