December 1, 2022

Yesterday I did my first field visit.

A few days ago, Laila’s dad asked her how she is going to use the next two weeks before she goes home. While the comment wasn’t directed toward me. It sparked a set of questions in my own mind about the best ways to utilize the time I have in India and how to take advantage of the opportunity that I have to be here.

I think that I’ve felt guilty about the last two weeks in that I haven’t done very much outside of the walls of the places where I have stayed. I’ve continued taking language classes, talked to friends from home, read, and written more than I have since I’ve been here. I think that there can be space for these activities and that there should be, but it comes at the cost of my own guilt for not exploring the spaces around me more. That guilt is something that I am working through, but for now, it seems to be a constant when my life lacks the structure I normally rely on.

What can I do here that I can’t do anywhere else in the world? I did, what my parents would describe as dialing for dollars. I compiled a list of my social enterprise contacts around India and sent out introduction emails with requests for informational interviews.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve had to release the chokehold that plans previously had on me. Spontaneity is not something that I take on easily. The way I see plans in my brain are cemented. If I think that something is going to happen, it will––despite how it impacts the people around me or if my better judgement has anything to do with it. One easy example of this is if I tell myself I’m going to run one day. It’s now subconscious, but if I tell myself I’m going to run, somehow, someway, I will run. In college, I cancelled plans or showed up late to things because I told myself I had to run, study, or what have you. No matter what it was, if I had something in my head that had to happen, it would.

Here, I planned to stay in Delhi. To stick it out until the end of the year no matter how challenging it was. That is, until I travelled to the mountains, and realized that I didn’t have to be constrained by the previous notions that I had about how the year was going to be for me. I realized that just because living there was challenging, I didn’t have to stick it out.

I grew up thinking that challenges were always meant to be overcome. If something challenged me, I learned the importance of sticking it out––this year, however, I have been allotted more freedom to learn and grow. I questioned what the point was of staying in a place that crushed the excitement I had about my research.

So, when I left Delhi, I read, I actually read. For the first time since I’ve been here. I wrote. I called people who I missed. I studied Hindi outside of class with genuine passion. I did work on my research. I thought critically about my actual interests.

I didn’t do any of that in Delhi. But I still felt guilty for leaving, even though I was more productive and engaged in my work.

I still have doubts about leaving, but when I look at a notebook full of thoughts from each day over the past two weeks, I’m trying to feel proud of myself for shifting out of the groove that I was in, onto something that has the potential to bring tangible progress.

I’ve learned that not doing anything––in terms of changing your situation is far easier than changing. Shifting, although we like to perpetuate the narrative that it’s easy––no part of it is.

So, I cold-emailed. I reached out to a company called The Goat Trust. It’s a company that works with women in rural villages within 60 km of Lucknow, where I am currently based. They train women to be Pashu Sakhis. A Pashu Sakhi functions like a low-level veterinarian. They are trained to treat symptoms rather than understand the functions of the animal as a whole. This model of training is very important because many villages don’t have access, and certainly don’t have easy access to veterinarians when goats get sick, which can lead to the loss of many goats in need of treatment.

Their business model is innovative, in that it gives women a very specialized skillset, without the burden in terms of cost and time, of many years of school.

While the Goat Trust and the Pashu Sakhis are involved in many more activities, for ease of understanding, that’s as far as I will explain for now.

Yesterday, I got to visit the field. The day prior, I bought a pink kurta. A kurta is a long shirt that many people in India wear daily. Women in villages don’t wear any western clothing––unlike in populated cities––even there, many women still wear traditional Indian clothing. I stand out already, so I figured for my own comfort and to respect local customs, I would wear a kurta.

As I drove further from the city, I saw the forests around me become dense. I saw crops growing in fields that spanned in every direction. I often feel relief when I leave the city. I think that it’s because I grew up in a rural place, where there was more green than buildings. Cities tend to make me feel like I am being suffocated. When I saw miles and miles of green, I finally felt like I could breathe. Like the weight on my chest was being lifted.

When we arrived at the office, it seemed like everyone was staring at me. This is something that I’ve gotten used to, but this time it didn’t feel threatening. It was mostly just curiosity.

We sat down with the person who runs the operation in Uttar Pradesh and I was told to ask him questions about what he does. I felt unprepared for this conversation. I didn’t have many questions. I didn’t have many that I could ask in Hindi and I just kind of froze with all of the attention and overstimulation from being in a new place. This continued happening at each village we went to after. I was supposed to ask questions and I didn’t even know what to ask, especially not in Hindi.

There was one boy who I thought was cool––Suraj. It’s not often that I come by people who I like, but he treated me like a normal person, instead of a foreigner.

I was inspired by the way that he spoke to the women in the villages as if he was friends with them. It was clear that he had taken the time to make a connection with them and learn about the intricacies of their lives. He made jokes with them and asked them questions that got to the heart of the stories that they were trying to tell.

That first day was tough because of the language barrier. I spent the entire time trying to decipher what people were saying and then thinking of the best ways to respond. I find that at the end of days when I have to speak a lot of Hindi, my brain just turns off––that is until I actually have to respond. I think that the most learning has come from those moments––where I just want to be done. The moments where I wish I could dissolve into a pile of goop and be slowly pushed aside. When I am forced to respond, however, my brain goes into overdrive and comes up with answers that I didn’t even know I could conjure.

In the car on the ride home, the driver wanted to chat away. I don’t know why the tail end of the day was the time when he decided that he finally wanted to chat, but he did. We talked about our lives and what we like to do for fun. He told me about his 6 siblings and that he wanted to learn English to be able to read the street signs.

It was nice to have him in the front seat and me in the back because I felt less pressure to respond immediately. I took my time understanding and responding. It felt like I was having a real conversation and not just one where I was using regurgitated sentences that I had learned over the past two months.

There was a point where I didn’t know what else to ask, but in time, I will learn more and be able to continue.

I then thought about Arun and my conversation about social enterprises and their impact on rural villages. We talked about the fact that people in the villages that we visited think of life much differently than people in cities. They live for survival. They don’t get to think about the future nor do they have many hopes and dreams past the present moment. Their life is centred within the village––centuries it seems away from life anywhere else.

When we talked about COVID, I realized that it wasn’t a reality that they faced there like everywhere else in the world––they did experience economic hardship and mass starvation. During the third COVID wave that India experienced, many people also got sick. But it didn’t impact them in the same way because there was no way of transmitting information to them. Smartphones in those villages are new, and before that, there wasn’t a real means of decimating information. They saw COVID at face value: economic hardship, starvation, and sickness.

As the week went on and I continued to visit villages, I noticed lines of children outside the doors. They stumbled over one another giggling as I smiled at them from where I was sitting. They were shy and cute and simply shocked to see a white person with blond hair enter their home. My favorite conversations were the ones that I had with the children. They were patient with me as I stumbled through questions about their lives and tried to learn more about their perspective on the world. The reality is that those children are the future. Adults’ perceptions of the world and their lives are hard to change, while children’s views are malleable. The Goat Trust has the opportunity and is beginning to teach children, especially young girls all that is possible for their futures. Girls are shown that there is potential for them to earn an income for their families and how to be the face of growth and change within their communities.

Growing up, I was always told that children are the future, but it didn’t resonate with me until I met the children in the villages where the Goat Trust works, or until I met the girls who were inspired by the work that their mothers and aunties do to earn money. Children will make the changes needed to improve the quality of life for all people––but it's the role models who have to teach them unless they will continue to make the same mistakes of their parents

and perpetuated cycles of poverty

that exist in the world.