Ahmedabad, India

August 22, 2009

I leave for school tomorrow, which means my summer has (after tonight) officially come to an end. Given that it has been quite the summer and I probably will not have much in the way of exciting news to blog about in the coming school year, I thought I should take a moment to wrap up this blog.

Though this may seem unconnected I would like to start this post by revisiting corruption: Last time I wrote about or really thought about the issue of corruption I was sitting next to Cailey bemoaning the obvious corruption in the Nepalese police force. “At least the U.S. doesn’t have problems like that,” I thought even as I continued to be disheartened by the health care debates raging on this side of the Atlantic.

While on a security line in Doha I happened to be standing next to a Princeton Professor who was doing work on what kind of aid measures actually work. In an attempt to produce a soundbyte of decent intellectual quality I mentioned the blatant corruption that I had heard about and witnessed. The professor was not impressed and was quick to point out that we have corruption in the US as  well,  we’re just better at hiding  it. Though I agreed, it did seem that  at least on a basic local level our government appears to be doing something right. Unfortunately when we got to the end of the security line our conversation ended and we went in different directions. Happy thoughts of going home quickly pushed out thoughts governments and corruption.

I did not give the subject much more thought until I began reading Stiglitz “Making Globalization Work.” If it was not already, it quickly became obvious that I am not the first westerner interested in development to have been struck by the obviousness of government corruption in developing countries. As Stiglitz writes, there is in fact an enormous focus on corruption throughout the developing world. However he also writes the the corruption of campaign contributions by major corporations is larger and perhaps “more insidious to democratic processes than the petty but more pervasive corruption involving small bribes to government officials,” (pg 55). Additionally he goes on to say that when government salaries are high/adequate this kind of corruption is quickly extinguished.

Upon reading his words I realized that though first hand observations are an invaluable part of my learning process, there is also a need for background research. In this particular case I need to think more deeply about the implications of corruption in developing AND in developed countries. I consider myself to be fairly well traveled and well-educated but over the course of my time in India I was struck again and again by how much I did not know. Often I would think I understood something after a quick glance at a situation, “my observations are so revealing and insightful,” I thought after my first week in India. Of course the more I immersed myself in the culture and issues, the more I was forced to realize that I understood much less than I had originally thought. There are of course a number of different ways in which a person can learn about an issue and I am exceptionally lucky in that this summer I have been in an environment where opportunities for learning abound. My first hand observations have opened my eyes to a culture and way of living in a way no book ever could. However I also appreciate the books I have read (and will read in the future) as they provide me with a context in which to understand new surroundings. In writing and receiving feedback from people much wiser than myself I have learned much more than I would have otherwise. A very large thank you to the CPGC for not only funding my summer in India but also for providing me with a space to write about it. I would also like to send out a very big thank you to anyone who has read or commented. Though my insights may not have always been “correct” per se, I do hope this blog gave you something to think about or was interesting in one way or another.

The last time I posted I wrote about my experience with “two types of Indians.” The next day I awoke to a note in my inbox, it was a kind critique  from my mother gently reprimanding me for the over-simplified nature of my statement. As soon as I saw her email I realized she was of course correct.

I could now take her ideas and write them as if they were my own to make up for my short-sighted statement but I think it would be more fair to her if I quoted her.

“In  any situation where people don’t have much there is much more pressure on the those in need  to  be on the “take”–for self, for family. Even the same people who “take” one day will be generous on another day if the circumstances allow. There are the  noble needy who resist the need to take, ask, beg, whatever the form, and, well that is remarkable really. However  most of us are more vulnerable to our surroundings and our needs, or at least to the needs of our loved ones, children, etc.”

She went on to note that as a Western tourist I was perceived as someone who had more money and so why shouldn’t they try to get as much as they could out of me. This of course can be difficult to deal with as a student on a budget, but regardless I can’t deny that I have much significantly more money than any of the people on the street trying to push me to buy a scarf or boat ride.

I do feel in many ways that I have been lucky to see many  sides of India. On the one hand there is the extremely family oriented, incredibly hospitable side. This was not only the side I saw through staying with Mirai’s and her family, but also working with SEWA. Countless times I went into the homes of SEWA women and I was offered chai or biscuits by women who had next to nothing.

I have heard and experienced that India can be a very tough place to manage until you have a connection. Once there is that connection though everything can open up. I think this is unique to India/South Asia and is partly attributed to the centrality of the family. In the US I do not get the sense that if you are a friend of a friend you will instantly be welcomed and cared for the way you are in India.

When I first arrived in India, my introduction was to a wonderful family and work environment. Though I did not want to import every bit of Indian culture back to the US, I was amazed and pleased by how nice and welcoming all the Indians I had met were. A month later I met up with Cailey and it was clear she had a different perception of South-Asian culture. To her everyone was pushy and she got the feeling that if people were being nice it was just because they wanted something from her. These observatins no doubt extended from the fact that her interactions were mainly with shop keepers and taxi drivers whereas mine were with families and people I was working with.

When I got into tourist mode I was of course treated differently but I now realize (with a little shame) that I also reacted a bit differently. Being surrounded by other backpackers my mentality changed and I was unable to be a part of the culture as I had when I was working with SEWA. As my mother quite correctly pointed out, to lose sight of how other people see me would be doing myself a disservice. I have tried to process everything I have seen and experienced, but there has been a lot, some of which I may not fully appreciate in the moment. Writing and (reader comments) have been a major help in my attempts to better understand my time in India. I have 9 days left in India, here is to hoping I continue to have wonderful, enriching experiences.

“I feel like we are in a zoo,” Cailey remarked to me as we leant against our backpacks in the Varanasi train station. I looked up from by book to see what she was talking about. Sure enough all the westerners were lounging around us in one corner of the station. Several station attendants in light blue shirts separated us from Indian train travelers. Station attendants directed each new tourist into our area. The station attendants looked at each of our tickets and then instructed us to sit and wait until they called us.

Whenever a native Indian attempted to walk through the pack of backpackers a station attendant would literally stop them at the perimeter, ask them what they needed, and then direct them away. To cap off the zoo-like feelings there was a ring of Indians standing and watching us around the perimeter of the backpackers. Some of them even pulled out camera phones to snap a quick photo.

Eventually we got to leave our pen and board the train for Agra. As it turned out the relatively unobtrusive photo-takers on the Varanasi platform were only a taste of what was in store. I admit to being a bit surprised by the random photo snapping but I then realized that I have been snapping lots of shots of locals as well so I shouldn’t complain too much. Or at least that was my frame of mind until I got to Agra.

As Cailey and I were walking through the monuments we constantly got asked if we would be in pictures with someone or with their family members. We obliged a couple of times at Agra Fort but by the time we got to the Taj Mahal we were getting a bit tired of it. Sometimes we would be sitting, enjoying the view of the Taj, and someone would come up and ask if they could take pictures with us. Other times they would just sit down next to us and start clicking.

At the end of the day we were exhaustedly lying on the ground waiting for the sun to set on the Taj. We saw two young Indians coming towards us and I firmly made up my mind to not move. “Can we have picture?” They asked. “We’re not moving, we’ve taken so many already,” we replied. They continued to ask for a few more minutes until it was clear that we would not sit up to be in a photo with them. Eventually they walked away mumbling about how we were rude.

As the day was wrapping up we saw two other Americans, a man our age and his father, who jokingly asked if they could be in a photo with us. We laughed together about the day of all the photo taking and it became clear that we were not alone in being bombarded.

When I snap photos of a local culture it is because I want to have documentation of a different style of living. Cailey’s brother who spent a year in China said that many Chinese people would take pictures of themselves with Westerners and then frame them in their house. It was considered a status symbol of sorts to have been able to have interactions with Westerners. By the end of the day our experience being photographed was a rather minor nuisance but I do wonder what the major motivating factor behind all the pictures were.

It has been awhile since I last wrote and this is of course because I am now traveling and living the rough life (without a computer of my own, actually kind of nice once I got used to it). Sadly since I am no longer working with SEWA I do not have any interesting field interviews to report. I have still been having some wonderful experiences but to any readers who were more interested in the work I was doing I apologize. Though I have had some well-thought out revelations, much of what follows will merely be taste of backpacking in India. If nothing else these entries will at least satisfy my dad who keeps harassing me for details about my travels.

Cailey and I have now arrived safely in India after spending about a week in Nepal. The trip across the border, though free of major glitches, was still a tiring endeavor. We woke up at 5:45 am on the 25th and took a taxi to the bus stop, from there we took an 8.5 hour public bus to the border of Nepal and India. We then took a cycle rickshaw across the border and stop at immigration. There it turned out that they hadn’t given me the right visa stamp in my passport so Nepal immigration said I should go back to Kathmandu. Kathmandu would have been another 7 hour bus ride back. I tried to muster up my New York toughness to tell them absolutely not but I am afraid it may have came out more like a meek a pitiful “please don’t make me do that.” The border patrol relented and told me to just speak with India immigration and that turned out ok.

We then got on another 3 hour bus to go from the border town of India to Gorakhpur, where there are trains. At the train station we waited for 2 and a half hours on the platform and then got on a 6 hour sleeper train. We got the most expensive train tickets for the ac sleeper car so we thought at least it would be some small amount of luxury. But this of course was not to be. Nonetheless we attempted to settle in on two of the upper bunks. Just as we were getting comfortable the conductor came around and told us we had to go to different bunks. So then we moved our heavy backpacks to identical bunks 10 feet down the car. Somehow, probably because we were so exhausted already, I did manage to fall asleep. Then at 5 in the morning I woke up to an Indian man yanking on the curtains and yelling at me. I thought he was telling me I had the wrong seat because I kept hearing “seiit,” all I could think was “No, I’m not moving again they told me to go here.” Luckily Cailey figured out that he was saying “Varanasii” and it was our stop. We  clumsily strapped on our backpacks and I kept bumping into peoples beds as I was trying to stumble to the exit in a half awake stupor.

Of course as soon as we get onto the platform we start getting harassed by rickshaw drivers telling us to go with them so we finally got in one and went to a hotel suggested by the guide book. The cold shower was the most amazing thing ever. By the time we were done showering and everything it was almost 7 and we were starving because all we had eaten the day before was a box of digestive biscuits, water, and chai. We tried to go out and walk around and find something but everything was either closed or too sketchy so we gave up and came back for breakfast in our hotel.

After a very complete breakfast and a brief rest in the lovely air-conditioned (size of a shoe box) room we made it out onto the streets of Varanasi. We had barely stepped foot outside our hotel when we were harassed with calls of “boat, do you need boat?” One man leaning against the outside of our hotel struck a different tune with, “burning bodies – that way.” We said ok and started off but he followed and said he would show us the way. We attempted to wave him off, “we’re really ok,” we said, we didn’t want someone leading us around only to ask for a large sum later. “No, no, I’m from your hotel, I don’t take any money from you,” he insisted. We shrugged and allowed him to lead us along the river.

We walked along the Ganges towards Manikarnika Ghat where they were in the process of burning three bodies on large fires built of wood. Our self-designated guide told us that they burned people with three different types of wood depending on how much they could pay. The most expensive is sandalwood for 15,000 rupees. After our tour of the ghats our guide led us through the narrow passages of Old Varanasi to a number of temples and then to a silk shop and finally to a guru. (the Guru experience is deserving of its own entry)

Eventually we went back to our hotel to relax a bit but by now our guide was attached. There was a major festival going on in Varanasi while we were there and so our guide offered to pick us up from our hotel at 7 to take us to a large ceremony just a short ways down the river. We happily accepted.

In the end I was very glad to have an unofficial tour guide. Though I am sure we would have managed, it was nice to have a knowledgeable guide who wanted nothing more than to share his knowledge of Varanasi and the culture. It is interesting that our first reaction to his attempt to help was annoyance. We are finding it hard to differentiate on first glance when people are being genuinely kind and when they are just trying to get something from you. Between my time spent in Ahmedabad and traveling around in other cities I have been struck that there are these two very distinct aspects of India and India personalities. This is an issue deserving of more time than I currently have but it is something I have written about some in my journal so perhaps I will share it here in the near future.

I’ve made it to another internet cafe and hopefully I have at least a bit of time to write before Cailey becomes too impatient with me. Ok so where was I? I had mentioned that the Nepalese government has a plan to pay people to marry out of their caste. This of course certainly does not solve the problem (as I am inclined to see it, I am aware that not everyone sees it this way) of people not marrying for love but I had to wonder -could it change the caste system? And if so would the change be for the better?

Before I go any further in my discussion of caste and marriage I must admit that pre-arrival in India, to the extent that I did know about the caste system, my knowledge was very limited. In an attempt to make it something I could better understand I equated it with class distinctions in the US. I thought that the major difference was that though one is in many ways born into their class, it is subject to change in a way that caste is not. In other ways I thought caste and class were similar in that the lower castes and lower classes are generally afforded fewer opportunities and are subject to greater hardships. In my defense (or perhaps to further point out my ignorance) the British upon arriving to India also attempted to equate caste with class. Like them, I assumed that one’s caste was a  good indicator of place in society, education, and income level. I knew of course that there were some exceptions. I had done at least a little bit of background reading on India and knew that there was a prominent women from the dalit class who was causing a stir in the government. However though I was aware of this, I did not fully absorb it and so my understanding of caste was incredibly limited in scope. Caste has been a hard thing for me to understand and in particular write about because though I keep trying to equate it to something from my world, there is obviously no exact equivalent. It seems to me that it has some similarities to class, some to a large family name, and some to race. I admit of course that I still don’t have a clear picture of how everything works and my, at times limited, understanding of the things I am experiencing inevitably colors my observations. This is something I have forgiven myself for and I hope any blog readers can also extend me this courtesy.

Ok back to trying to explain why I might consider paying people to marry out of their caste a maybe not-so-terrible idea. As more people marry out of their caste, the caste label would lose a large amount of its meaning. If marrying between caste was considered acceptable caste would be a less derisive feature of Indian/Nepali/South Asian culture (though how derisive it actually is is still a bit unclear to me). It seems to me that for such marriages to be considered acceptable in the near future there must be some active encouragement since it has been so heavily discouraged for ages.

As I’ve noted, I tend to have a (perhaps detrimental) desire to compare the new things I am seeing with bits of my own world. I am currently attempting to compare inter-caste marriages in India or Nepal with inter-race marriages in the US. There was of course a time not so long ago when such a thing was considered taboo in the US. However I can’t stretch my analogy too far because as I’ve written about before, the purpose of marriage is very different in the US and India. In the US people are expected to marry for love and if they love someone of another race then that is acceptable (perhaps not everywhere but in the US that I grew up in). On the other hand in India or Nepal people are more likely to marry for the stability it will bring to them and their family. A dowry is still an important part of marriage, as is the man’s employment opportunities. Thus is it so strange to think that monetary compensation could be a good way to encourage inter-caste marriages?

Though the government policy Cailey told me about seems ridiculous on face value I can’t help but thinking that maybe some kind of monetary incentive is an effective way to change the caste structure in Nepal. Of course, this post does nothing to address the issue of whether or not the government actually should impose change. I don’t feel comfortable seriously attacking this question because I don’t feel I have a clear enough picture of what the caste system means to the people living in it. Caste is not as deterministic as I originally assumed but I have far from a clear picture of what the system looks like. In traveling in India and Nepal I have become acutely aware of how much I still don’t know about the world, I consider myself lucky to be realizing this at a young age.

Upon deciding to do an internship in India I knew I wanted to spend at least some time traveling. Originally I planned on spending about a week traveling and then when I found out that a good friend from high school would be in Nepal a week of travel became two. When I got to Ahmedabad and started my internship I was eager to work and excited by all the things I was learning. I was glad I had some flexibility and though I might end up staying longer at SEWA. Then a couple weeks in it started to become clear that the amount of work they had for me was limited and I had basically filled my purpose as far as they were concerned. Furthermore the person I was reporting to (not Jayshreeben but Nehalbhai who is beneath her and working on pension promotion) was taking a work trip to Laos. I changed my plans and decided to travel a week earlier. I may return to Ahmedabad to work a few more days with SEWA at the end of my travels when Nehalbhai is back from Laos but for now I am in Nepal.

I arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal on Sunday afternoon. The tourist area of Kathmandu is not much different from a busy market-tourist area in Ahmedabad, India. Immediately I had people trying to get me to buy things and stay at their hotel or take their adventure tour. Luckily I had a place to stay with my friend’s (Cailey) family friends. After meeting up with Cailey in central Kathmandu we traveled out of the city and to her friends home. The home was not only very comfortable but also full of rich conversation. The male head of the household is an American who married a Nepalese woman. He is active in NGO work in Nepal and it was easy to talk to him about the rich cultural experiences I have been exposed to daily. I told him that I was questioning the idea of “progress” in a way I never had before. He noted that the Native Americans must have questioned why the British thought they were bringing “progress” to the Americas – “what exactly was so civilized about the British?” Keith asked humorously. Growing up on Thanksgiving my father once brought me to a Native American museum in New York. We talked about how terribly the Native Americans had been treated and what we were actually celebrating. From then on I had accepted that history as we learn it is not absolute. Furthermore I firmly believed that term progress had at best a slippery definition when applied to the past. Nonetheless I assumed, without thinking too much about it that my world was one of progress, my culture was what was internationally accepted as being appropriate in this day and age. I was of course very wrong.

When I spoke with Keith about how I was dealing with my ideas on the caste system and arranged marriage he encouraged me to think about what about such things offended me and why I felt they were things we should “move past.” In thinking about the caste system, the conclusion I came to with his help was that it offended my sensibilities because it is so hierarchical and one is “born into it” with no chance of change.

Cailey noted that in Nepal the government is trying to institute a program in which they pay people to marry out of their caste. This of course sounds ridiculous and as a group we dismissed it as a silly idea, but I couldn’t help but wonder if some good could in fact come out of it.

I have a lot more to write on this and it is all written down in my notebook. Unfortunately I am currently at an internet cafe and cailey has been waiting somewhat impatiently for the past 15 minutes. I will transcribe and elaborate next chance I get.

I did something very silly in that I did not post my last entry written on my laptop when I had the chance. Early last week my work for SEWA Bank was starting to slow down. I mentioned this to Mirai and she invited me to join her in her own field excursion for SEWA health insurance. I wrote all about it and had an almost complete entry but it wasn’t quite done to my satisfaction so I didn’t post it when I was last at work. I went home to finish the entry forgetting that I didn’t actually have wireless at home. The next day I left to do some traveling first in Nepal and eventually around India. I didn’t bring my laptop with me so now that entry will have to wait. This is a placeholder for that entry until I return to my laptop.

July 16, 2009

Two nights ago at dinner Mirai and Binoy were asking me how work at the bank was going. “It’s going well. I am learning so much, it has been such a wonderful experience,” I started to reply automatically. These were of course my very true feelings about the first few weeks I had spent at SEWA. In that time I had received a wonderful introduction to a culture dramatically different from my own. I would never go so far as to say my learning is finished but I cannot help but feel a sense of pride at the radical shift in my understanding of India, SEWA, microfinance, and grass-roots poverty alleviation strategies. However even as I was feeling good about all that I had gotten from my experiences in Ahmedabad so far, I had to admit that the last week was looking pretty slow.

Having gotten a sense of the pension project and its challenges I was no longer doing the field interviews that had opened my eyes to another part of the world. I had also spent some time creating a powerpoint presentation that will be shown at local universities in an attempt to recruit students to help SEWA Bank get in contact with more women. Though I was under the impression that once the powerpoint was done I would be a part of the team that would go and give the presentation, it was not looking like there would be any trips to schools in the next couple weeks. This was something that required further organizing by people higher up and though I do not know what is taking so long, I have accepted this frustration as a part of being an intern for a large NGO. With so little time left to work I could not ask for a new project; however even if I had I am not sure I would have received one seeing as giving out projects to summer interns has not been at the top of anyone’s to-do list.

I confessed that I wasn’t doing much at the bank this week and if Mirai had any small jobs I would be happy to do them. She seemed concerned and as luck would have it she was going into a few villages the next morning to speak with the women about insurance. To my delight I was invited to come along.

The next morning Mirai and I climbed into a car with two other SEWA health insurance workers. We drove out of the inner city and away from the congested streets. As large rice paddys began to replace buildings I was once again struck by how incredibly lucky I am to be here. Mirai pointed out all the workers dotted along the rice paddies. Because the rains had finally come, the fields were full of workers eager to plant and reap the rewards of the land.

We are going to villages where a number of women who previously held SEWA insurance policies have stopped taking them out. The SEWA team is attempting to find out why the women have stopped taking out insurance and how the product can better suit their needs. The first home we arrive at belongs to a midwife in the village. It is very simple but Mirai tells me this family owns 10 bigas of land and is rather well off by village standards.

The midwife tells us that many of the women in the village have stopped taking out insurance because SEWA Vimo, as the insurance program is called, does not pay for claims for one of the hospitals nearby that many people like to go to. Mirai informs me that SEWA only pays for claims from hospitals it has connections with because they found that many were making fraudulent claims. After a somewhat lengthy discussion about insurance and the happenings of the village we leave the midwife’s home with one idea about why the number of people with insurance has gone down.

We walk down the road to get to the next home where three men are sitting around outside and a few women are engaged in household tasks. Mirai and the SEWA team sit down outside and speak with the men. I find it interesting that it is primarily the men who are speaking even though I know the policyholder must be a woman, as per SEWA rules. I make a mental note but realize it is best to wait to bring this up.

Mirai is engaged in what appears to be a heated conversation with one of the men who has sat outside to talk to us. When we leave this house Mirai tells me briefly that this family has also said they were upset with SEWA Vimo because it did not cover claims for a particular hospital. Later, in the car ride back into the city, Mirai says they know for a fact that this man had been involved in making a fraudulent claim to SEWA. He has colluded with his doctor to try to get SEWA to pay out for an illness he didn’t have. SEWA had called the doctor and asked some follow up questions when they got the claim. The doctor had admitted that the patient (the man currently arguing with Mirai) had asked him to fill out the forms so that he could collect money from SEWA. Though Mirai knows this, she chooses to avoid an unnecessary confrontation and simply explained that SEWA insurance can only support claims from certain hospitals but they will look into the other hospital.

The next home we go to is a ways down a dirt road and past other houses. When we get there I quickly notice a young girl sitting off to one side doing bead and sequin appliqué work on a piece of fabric. She is 16 and when Mirai asks her grandmother why she is not in school the grandmother replies that she had to drop out to work because her father was a drunk and is now very sick. Later however a grandson of 17 walks by and we find out that he is finishing school and there will be money for him to continue on to learn computer work. “If there is money it will always go to the boy’s education first,” Mirai tells me as I digest this news.

We sit down and speak with the lively grandmother. She has SEWA insurance but, as we have heard before, she notes that many people are unhappy that they cannot go to the hospital that they like. After a few more stops in the first village we came away knowing that the two main reasons people said they had stopped taking out SEWA Vimo were a) they wanted to be able to use another hospital or b) they hadn’t been sick or collected from a claim for a couple years so they figured there was no point in having insurance.

We leave the first village and climb back into the car to see another village where many people used to have insurance and now do not. Our first stop is the home of another midwife. She has SEWA Vimo and was a promoter for the insurance in her village. However she too went to a hospital not approved by SEWA and thus did not get money for her claim. She says she understands why but it makes it harder to promote it when she didn’t even have her claim taken care of. I find it suspicious that she would choose to go to an unapproved hospital but Mirai later tells me that she has a family connection at this other hospital.

The more we speak with people, the more it is becoming clear that many individuals have connections with doctors at some of the unapproved hospitals and the doctors and patients feel they have insurance so there is no reason to control costs. Inevitably my mind turns to parallels with the abysmal US health care system.

We make a few more stops in the second village. When we are confronted by women who tell us that they have stopped taking out insurance because they haven’t been sick one of the SEWA workers I am with gathers a number of women together to explain the nature of insurance. She explains to them even if they become ill only once in ten years it is still financially better to have insurance and they begin to come around to the idea. The women say that it wasn’t explained well enough before but now they are more willing to take out insurance; whether or not they will remains to be seen.

In a couple of instances we do not go into the homes because all the women are out working in the rice paddy. In one case the woman of the house tells us that her husband is out and he is the one that makes all the decisions so we must come back another time to talk to him. I am reminded again of one of the first houses we went to where we spoke to the men only; I cannot help but be disappointed that this is the situation but I have been here long enough to not be entirely surprised.

At the end of the day we get back into the car and I again watch the landscape change from rice paddies to buildings. A short ways out of the villages we pass a building that Mirai points out as the hospital the people are saying they prefer. I comment that I would never have guessed the building was a hospital from its exterior. Another kilometer or so down the road we pass the hospital that is approved by SEWA and I notice it is much better kept and even has a shiny ambulance outside.

On the ride back Mirai talks with her coworkers about the findings from the field visit. She periodically updates me on the conversation, “we are going to try approaching some of the doctors at the other hospitals that the people have said they like and see if we can try to get them to abide by some basic rules,” is one big thing that has come out of today.

I find it interesting that I am listening to debates on how to provide health care for informal workers in India while at home we can’t seem to get it right either. Here the major problems seem to be corruption (well that seems to be everywhere) and getting people to put money into healthcare when they haven’t been sick in awhile and they would rather use the money for other things (a parallel can be drawn to individuals in their 20s in the US). Otherwise, I don’t know whether it is wise to draw too many parallels because it seems to me that the US should be much more advanced when it comes to providing for its citizens. Suffice it to say for now that I feel very lucky that I was able to tag along with Mirai on this health care mission for SEWA and it has given me some very interesting things to think about.

July 14, 2009

Before deciding to travel to India I assumed it would be fairly westernized, though obviously with its own spin on the term. With all the talk about globalization and how fast India is growing my mind equated India’s cities with other fast-growing cities in Asia, such as Hong Kong and Tokyo.

I was alerted before leaving New York that Ahmedabad is one of the most conservative cities in India, but I had no idea how that would play itself out. Ok, maybe it would not be nearly as westernized as I had originally thought. What would I be able to wear? Would I be able to run? Could I walk around alone? I know to wear salwars to work, and I wear jeans and a t-shirt when I go out with friends (and I try not to think too much about the heat). I can and do run everyday, in running shorts and a t-shirt. I get some funny looks, but I assume this is just because I am a girl and running (or running at all). Walking around alone is fine as long as I stay alert, which is of course something that comes naturally having grown up walking around New York alone. The answers to these questions were not hard to find, but after being here for a few weeks I have come up with more than a few questions that are much wider in scope.

I didn’t know whether to expect a western, modernized city or a very old and traditional Indian one. I have realized that Ahmedabad is not easily classified. Everywhere I look I am confronted with the stark juxtaposition of traditional Indian culture and Western culture. What does it mean for a place like India to be in the throes of westernization? What will it mean for the people and the culture? And of course, the often asked but seldom answered question, what is progress?

Though of course there are many ways in which I could begin to attempt to answer these questions, I will start with one facet of life that I have found particularly intriguing. I wrote briefly before about how surprised I was to find that many people in India still have arranged or “arranged-love” marriages. I observed situations where marriage was seen as more of a business transaction than the culmination of a loving relationship. The man would work and provide for the woman while the woman would keep house and cook for her husband.

When I first learned about the arranged marriage phenomenon, I assumed it was something confined to the lower classes. I soon realized however that it was something far more widespread than that. Last weekend when I was in Mumbai I spoke to well-educated people of the upper classes and was surprised to learn that many of them would have or would consider having an arranged marriage of some sort. I recently found out that about 80% of the people in India have at least some variation of an arranged marriage. However even if the idea of the arranged marriage is accepted, there is a movement away from not meeting the person at all/seeing them once before the wedding and towards spending time with the person first. It seems to me that this is changing first in wealthier households where access to the West and Western media is more prevalent, however I imagine there there will be some trickle down.

In thinking about arranged marriages my mind naturally began to question what the implications were for the family. In the US, where families tend to be small, if a marriage is not working it is difficult to ignore. Some adults in a failing marriage may choose to stay together “for the sake of their children,” but more often there is the sense that if things aren’t working everyone will be better off with a divorce. Older generations reading this post may point out that the US was not always this way and my sense is that in the next few generations India is also likely to become more this way. However I believe things are likely to change very slowly if at all in the villages where families are large. In the villages people get married for their families more than for themselves. Furthermore, though I cannot speak with authority, I would assume that because it is an entire family surrounding the couple, it is far less of a private loving relationship. As I found the family structure incredibly important when it came to old age, I am also finding it important in sustaining a marriage. There are no doubt many cases where marriages are arranged and the individuals come to love each other; however more often than not it seems that the love and the commitment individuals feel towards their entire family sustains many marriages.

When I first posted about arranged marriages my dad wrote me an email saying to look into exogenous versus endogenous marriages and theories about whether capitalism is destroying the family (this makes sense if you know my dad). My first thought was, “really? If capitalism means the ability to choose to only marry if I love someone and not because it will reflect well on my family or because I will be provided for, then I will take it hands down.” My second thought was that he might be referring to the way in which in a capitalist/westernized system children leave the home and often go very far away when they grow up. (No offense dad but if capitalism means I don’t have to live at home with you forever then I’ll take that too.)

Though I don’t think this is where he was going, if capitalism is a system where the consumer is supposed to have a high variety of options and communism means a more centrally planned system where options are reduced then I do see connections parallels to a westernized versus an arranged system of relationships. In the west we may feel we have a ton of options when it comes to choosing a partner. Unfortunately information is imperfect and so as daters, “consumers of love” if you will, we may make what might be deemed irrational choices. If however our parents/ society is choosing for us then things are likely to be more stable with less heartbreak. (Dad, I clearly did not see where you were going with your note so maybe you can enlighten us all by posting a comment to this piece). Of course in the West we often hear of people, worrying that “I’ll never find anyone,” and the cliché female lament that “my ovaries will shrivel up.” This is not a problem in a system where arranged marriages are common because even if you haven’t found “the one” you still have someone to marry. Dating inevitably is unpredictable and can lead to heartbreak, if I wasn’t such a Westerner I too might ask why one wouldn’t want to avoid such things. Of course there is the upside of finding someone that makes you happy beyond belief. At the risk of sounding silly, I might go so far as to say greater happiness is progress, but this too brings up all sorts of questions of what makes someone happy and the very simple fact that in different cultures different things make people happy.

In India dating is if not uncommon at least unpublicized, regardless of what class you are in. A man and a woman do not hold hands in public. I should not have been surprised to hear that even in the top universities in the more westernized cities boys and girls live in completely separate buildings, but I admit I was at least a little bit. I am curious to find out more about the interactions between boys and girls at school but I am rather confident that it is nothing like Haverford or other schools in the US.

As students go abroad for school and then return home to India I cannot imagine that the dating culture will not become more like it is in the US. Is the dating world progress? Given that I grew up in the US, I want to say yes, but I can’t help but once again raise the question, “what is progress?”

Note: This post has been about how strange I found the idea of an arranged marriage and whether a movement towards a Westernized view of relationships is in fact progress or just different. It is obvious that world of dating is radically different from a straight set-up where the couple decides after one encounter whether a marriage will or will not be acceptable. In another vein, it is worth discussing the importance of caste and “good families” when it comes to set-ups but this must be saved for another post. To go into this topic I would inevitably also have to consider the importance of class when it comes to marriages in the US. Suffice it to say for now that though there is significantly more mobility in the US, people often do marry more or less within their class and nearly always seek the approval of their parents. I am likely to marry someone who has had similar access to education and job opportunities and I know I will want my parents to like him. These issues however fall less under the question of “what is progress” and more under “caste and class: issues of mobility.”

July 6, 2009

If you are open to it, an offhand comment can shake your entire understanding of something. This happened to me the other morning while I was having breakfast with Binoy, Mirai’s husband. He was telling me not to worry too much about what I could do for SEWA because my learning was enough and would benefit me, and the entire cause, more in the future. I assured him that I understood this and of course I had been learning a lot. To prove that I had been paying attention and had interesting insights I remarked that I found it interesting that SEWA, unlike some other microfinance banks, emphasizes saving first and foremost. He frowned, apparently not impressed. “But SEWA started with the cooperatives,” he said. I backtracked, “right, no of course, I just meant the bank,” I sputtered.

Ok maybe I didn’t understand quite as much about SEWA as I thought I did. I knew SEWA started with cooperatives but I hadn’t appreciated that this was such a defining feature of SEWA until his comment. I had been focused primarily on the daily operations of the bank without even truly understanding its history. Binoy’s comment made me realize I needed to be more open to understanding SEWA and not ask it to fall in the model I had of a microfinance bank. Luckily for me the next few days would be a crash course in the nature of SEWA and its founding.

I got to the bank that morning and, as usual, had some time to sit on the couch before anything actually got started. The good news is I have learned my lesson and I had my book by the founder of SEWA with me. I was up to the chapter on how the bank was started. Primed by Binoy’s comment I took a look at the page number and realized she hadn’t gotten to banking until the 100th page, it was obvious the bank was not where the SEWA story began.

The Sewa Bank did not begin because someone from outside decided that these poor women needed financial services, though they desperately did. The women were in debt to private moneylenders, pawnshops, landlords, and even grocers – all of which charged interest rates from 10 percent per day to 25 percent per month. The women also did not have a place to put their money for safe keeping as their homes did not have much privacy. However traditional banks could not fathom extending their services to such poor women. The idea to create their own bank came from the women themselves. Bhatt (author and founder) writes that Poori, a garment dealer asked, “why can’t we have our own bank?” When Bhatt tried to explain that they did not have the money for such an endeavor another women replied, “Well, we may be poor, but we are so many.” And so with 10 rupees from 6,287 members the SEWA Women’s Cooperative Bank was established. I had known it was not a traditional bank but not that it was the poor women themselves who were responsible for realizing their need and working to fulfill that need. It made me not only rethink SEWA but also the idea of development aid that doesn’t go where it needs to. I started to think about whether aid money does enough to listen to the people it is supposed to target. My mind started to wander and come up with more questions than answers until I finally caught myself and stored those questions away for another time.

I was glad that I had come to a place mentally where I could appreciate Ela’s story of the founding of the bank. However, I could read about it anywhere, given that I am spending my summer in the birthplace of SEWA, it should come as no surprise that the pages of a book were to be only the beginning.

Today I spoke with members who have been with SEWA since its inception in 1972. We went out because Jayshree wants more interviews on some of the older women who did not have the opportunity to save with a pension scheme. Jayshree calls them the lost generation because though she knows that SEWA has done a lot of them she is sad to see that many are not as comfortable as they deserve to be in their old age. Jayshree was sending me out because she wanted more writing and photos, I of course was happy to oblige.

I didn’t have a translator today because I was working with Shashin, a rising sophomore at UChicago who is fluent in Gujarati and another intern for SEWA this summer. This had its benefits – as it helped that he really understood the cause, but also its drawbacks – as sometimes I didn’t know what was being said until later in the rickshaw. Nonetheless working with him went well and he did always remember to ask if I had questions so I can’t complain too much.

The first woman we spoke with came into the bank to speak with us. Her name was Saira and she was well put together in a light pink sari. She told us that many years ago she started out as a block printer. One day when she was going to a mill in Ahmedabad to buy cheap silk she happened upon a gathering of women. She asked what was going on and the women said that they were meeting to change their situations and she could get a loan here. Ela gave her a loan to buy her own block printing apparatus so that she would not have to pay a middleman such high fees to use his. However this only led to a new problem because she did not know how to actually make the ink and the man who sold it to her would not divulge his methods. Ela decided to invest in having someone teach Saira how to make the inks and then in turn had Saira teach other people. Saira held block printing classes to teach 25 women at a time how to make the inks and dyes. Thanks to Ela’s work Saira and the women she taught were able to get out from under the people who had taken the majority of their profits and they were able to start earning for themselves.

Saira became very active in teaching the block printing and then eventually traveling around further and organizing women into cooperatives. Everywhere she went she encouraged women to look at their production strategies and think of ways to get out from under the grips of moneylenders and middlemen that sap profits. In the early days her husband was very controlling and verbally abusive, as he could not stand the idea of her going so far from the home. Ela helped her to build up her self-confidence and stand up to her husband.

Today she looks back happily on nearly 40 years of working closely with SEWA. She has saved over the years and is now retired, even without having had the pension scheme! When we ask her what she would say to a young woman now who says she can’t save she tells us that she would tell them to take just 5 rupees out of every 50 and put it in a savings account. Now that there is an option with the pension account set up for women like her it is obvious that all young women should take advantage. She then tells us that many years ago she joined SEWA with three other women, but of the four of them only she has won. The other women gave their money to a son, husband, or mother-in-law and did not really save for themselves. “I feel empowered that I have my own money today,” Saira tells us, “I have saved enough that I can go out when I want to and I don’t have to ask anyway, I am independent.”

Saira’s story reminds me that SEWA is not just about reducing poverty but also about enabling these women to come together and stand up for themselves. The next two women we speak to bring me back to this question but from another angle.

After we talk to Saira we leave the bank in a rickshaw to meet two other women who have been with SEWA since the beginning. I quickly realize that the fact Saira came to us is telling in and of itself – it means that she has both the time and the money to not work and to travel to us. Our rickshaw driver takes us away from the center of the city into a poorer area. Eventually he stops the rickshaw and gets out but tells us to wait inside. Shashin explains to me that because there are no house numbers our driver has gotten out to ask around for the woman we are supposed to see. While we are waiting in the rickshaw five young children come around, a couple climb in the front seat to sit and talk to us. When our driver comes back and leads us through the small concrete homes the group of children follow us. By the time we get to the SEWA woman’s home, ten children are behind us and follow us into the house.

The home belongs to Suraj, an old woman of about 75. Her face is etched with deep lines and when she smiles she reveals a few back molars and a long stretch of gum. She moves around well for an old woman and her voice is lively. For over 50 years she has earned an income by trading old cloth for old stainless steel kitchen utensils and dishes. She then fixes up the kitchen pieces and sells them in the market. She got in touch with Ela through her son-in-law who happened to be working as a telephone operator. Ela said she wanted to bring women together and Suraj got on board. Suraj, who used to have to deal with a lot of police troubles, is thankful for the way SEWA helped to organize women to stand up for themselves. She was one of the original members who put 10 rupees into the bank and over the years she has brought thousands of poor women into the SEWA family.

Unfortunately, as much as SEWA has been a positive influence in her life, Suraj has found it hard to save over the years. Her earnings are not steady but she earns an average of 50 rupees a day (a dollar). She cannot think of not working because to do so would mean to not eat. Her husband, who is lying on a cot with a pained expression on his face in the front of the house, can no longer work. This means that he eats very little because the family needs the sustenance to go to people who can work.

The conversation turns from all the work Suraj has done for SEWA to the fact that she does not think SEWA has done enough for her in the way of financial support. I again must take note of the fact that SEWA is not an organization that gives handouts of any sort. Inevitably I question whether this is for the best or a tragic flaw. If SEWA is about primarily organizing women to fight for themselves then Suraj should have been more active to achieve her own financial security. However even as I tell myself this, my heart aches for the old, animated woman who will never know a day of rest and comfort. After we have heard Suraj’s story and we have a very clear example of the negative consequences of not saving, we head out for our final home of the day.

The final woman is also in her 70s, her name is Malakshmi. She is very slight with thick glasses that make seeing her eyes near impossible. Her sari is worn thin and faded from years of use and washing. She begins to tell us about her years of stitching work before SEWA. Then she met Ela and was swept up into the SEWA cause. She worked as an organizer in various villages for SEWA.

When I asked her why she dedicated so much time to SEWA she said, “I did it for the women,” and followed up by explaining that she was able to devote more time to SEWA because her husband died early. This comment confused me because it seemed to me that not having a husband meant not having another source of income in the family and this would make it harder to travel and do organizing work. When I asked how it was that she had more time without a husband she explained that it meant she did not have to worry about what he wanted and she did not have to devote large portions of her day to looking after him.

As SEWA became more established she left embroidery work and became a full time worker for SEWA. She worked for Sewa Bank until 2002 and then had to stop because her eyesight had gotten so bad she could not longer read the passbooks and do the necessary tasks. She was paid by Sewa Bank, but unlike the first woman we spoke with today, Malakshmi did not save regularly. She now lives with her niece’s family in their home. After decades of working closely with SEWA she has not managed to end up independent in her old age. When we ask her what her thoughts on the new pension scheme are she responds somewhat sadly, “it is very good for people when they get to old age, when you are older you shouldn’t have to be dependent on other people.”

Throughout the interview Malakshmi’s niece and grandniece have come in and out of the room. The niece looks to be in her early 40s, while the grandniece is probably in her early 20s. I ask if they are SEWA members, I expect the answer to be yes after all the work Malakshmi has done with the bank but to my surprise they say no, neither of them are. They explain that their husbands want them to stay in the home and not have their own bank accounts. I am surprised at how much say their husbands have, especially in the house of a woman who has spent the better part of her life working with SEWA, a women’s self-empowerment organization. It is obvious that in many homes in India the man of the house still has an egregiously large say in the affairs of the women.

Upon leaving Malakshmi I am acutely aware that I have received several very different perspectives of the bank’s history – from Ela Bhatt’s book to the three women I spoke with today. While I respect and appreciate that SEWA was able to have a major impact in Saira’s life, I wonder how many women around India still need to be reached. The size of the problem leaves me feeling helpless. Shashin and I talk this over in the rickshaw back to SEWA. “The only way I don’t get sick to my stomach when I see this kind of poverty is by telling myself that I am dedicating myself to helping these people,” he tells me. It still doesn’t feel like enough but I can’t believe that anything ever will; for now I will take Shashin’s statement and hold on to it.

July 2, 2009

I would not begin to presume that my attempts to figure out my place in my internship have been harder than most other interns’; this job alone is seldom an easy one, perhaps especially for an unpaid intern at a busy firm. The people in charge are constantly busy and don’t feel a pressing need to get everything they possibly can out of the intern. Interns on the other hand come in excited to get some work experience, willing to do almost any task, and eager to learn. Though the firm or NGO receiving the intern is likely to benefit from the intern, serving the intern’s desire to work is not their first priority. My acute awareness of this made me feel lucky once I had been given a task, and then disheartened when I began to feel I couldn’t complete it as I had been instructed to do. I was coming to terms with the fact that I might not find the interview that I had already scripted in my head, I was still nervous about what I would present to Jayshree. “She finally gave me a task to do and I don’t know if I’ll even be able to do it,” was a constant worry of mine.

Yesterday, while I was sitting on my usual couch in SEWA Bank I confessed my fear to Maya. “You should still tell Jayshree what you found,” she said, “you never know what insights she might find useful.” I nodded but instead my head I was doubtful.

Maya joined me on the couch and we began to talk about our interactions to date with SEWA members. She has been observing SEWA’s financial literacy class for 16, 17, and 18-year-old girls. The girls are very sweet and are excited to talk to Maya, someone their own age from the West who is interested in what they have to say. Maya and I talked about the experiences of the women of all ages that we had been talking to. We discussed Indian culture as it was coming out in our discussions with SEWA members. Talking to Maya helped me too further see how different Indian culture was from my own and it further cemented the fact that it would be counterproductive to try to impose my wishes or ideas on the people I wanted to help.

As we were talking about the importance of family I started to further appreciate not only how “families as pension” works but also how willing people are to sacrifice for their family. Suddenly the idea hit me, to market pensions I didn’t need to fight against the importance of family in old age but rather use it. I might not be able to make these women want to save for retirement, but maybe they could still benefit from the financial security that having a pension would bring in their old age. This may seem like a very obvious thing but it took me a couple days to come to. For those who are interested what I ended up writing up for Jayshree is copied below.

Micropensions – background research
The overwhelming response when women were asked about retirement was that they cannot imagine not working. If they are not working they are not earning and this means they are not contributing to their families.

The family structure in poor India is such that kids (boys) do not move away from the home. Women even will say that they have a lot of children to help bring in income. While a daughter may move away to live with her husband’s family, a woman’s sons will stay close and bring his wife into her family. This means if a woman does get to the point where she can no longer work, she has a family to support her.

The combination between even old women wanting to feel that they are contributing and the family support structure makes pensions and retirement a hard concept to hold onto for many poor Indian women. However, today in India the elderly population is growing rapidly, this combined with a decreasing birth rate means that in the future the traditional support structure will be limited.

The question remains of how to change the mindset of these women to help them see the benefits in saving now. It seems many of the younger women who have the capability to save and are made aware of the pension scheme are more than willing to put away money for a pension. It is unclear whether they actually see retirement as being an end goal but either way they are pleased with the idea that they will be able to get more back at the end and have a cushion for old age. For those for whom saving does not come as easily there must be some other push or incentive that motivates them to save with the pension scheme. I feel that the best way to do this is to use both the hard-working, selfless nature, and the importance of family – both of which are central aspects of Indian culture.

Rather than talking about having a pension so that one can “retire” from working in old age I suggest talking about pension as a way to make sure that one can still contribute to their family in old age. The women know that if they are no longer able to bring in money they will be a burden on their families, furthermore the idea of not working is foreign to them. However inevitably the women also know that as they get older they will not be able to work as long hours or as quickly as they were in their youth, this means a reduction in income for the family, unless they have a pension account.

Platform Pitch:
After many years of serving the self-employed women of Ahmedabad [India?], SEWA Bank has realized there is a pressing need that must be addressed. Until recently there was no program to assist SEWA women when they reached old age. The very first SEWA members did not have a program that would allow them to feel financially secure when the work does not come as easy as it once did. SEWA is working to change this for its members.

Being in the informal/self-employed sector also means that there is not an employer putting money into a pension fund that you will be able to withdraw from when you are too old to work. Many SEWA women say that they will “work for as long as they have their hands and their feet,” or even that “they will work until they die,” there are no certainly no thoughts of retirement.

Even if you do not have thoughts of ceasing to work or of retirement, there is still reason to plan for the future. Today, and every day, you work hard for your family and you only want the best for them. With hungry mouths to feed at home it can be very difficult to save money. How can you think of putting away money now for the future when the needs of the present are so acute? But as you get older, and you are unable to work as much, the needs of you and your family only grow. By beginning to save now and putting money away regularly until old age, you will not only be helping yourself but also contributing to your family more than you ever could be by working to the point of exhaustion.

Begin saving now, with 50, 100, 200 rupees a month or whatever you can manage, in ten years it will be worth ? [I don’t know the exact numbers] in twenty years ? It is important to contribute regularly to ensure that the money grows at a steady rate. The peace of mind you will have knowing that you and your family can have a sense of financial security in your old age is priceless.

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I was excited, I had an idea to pitch, but I was still nervous, were my ideas too obvious? If family was such a central part of Indian culture wouldn’t Jayshree, who lived here already have accounted for it? Would I be useful? I arranged a meeting with Jayshree for today. To discuss with her what I had so far and how to proceed. Well, I have now had my meeting and things went wonderfully. She read what I had and to my surprise, because it was Indian culture was her culture, she had never thought of the importance of the family in the way I saw it. She liked my work and when someone suggested pulling me away from this project to do something else she seemed perturbed. A compromise was reached; I will spend part of my time on the interviews and part of my time creating and helping to give a presentation to university students that may be interested in helping SEWA to reach out to more women.

It turns out there can be benefits to having an outsider look at an issue, and (to my delight) that my insights could be useful to SEWA. While meeting with Jayshree I had to fight to keep my excitement from showing too much; it feels good to be actually working with SEWA in their mission to help women achieve financial security.