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Meeting People is Easy

By Manish Pant '03

I am standing under a sun that seems to hover teasingly complacent at its highest noon peak. Feeling helplessly misplaced with an awkward baseball cap, and impatiently maladapted to India’s thriving bacterial population, I attend to my persistent allergy’s body itch with annoyed scratches. Two men with thinned eyes, reddened by years of retina-decomposing dust, are watching my every foreign gesture and accent. With some apprehension but decided resolve I muster the few polished Marathi sentences I have rehearsed for countless previous introductions.

I don’t know what is more remarkable: how many people I have met in my first five days here, or how little one meeting can prepare you for the next. The men smile but I can tell it’s not with the welcoming transparency of my mentors or various committed volunteers in my NGO, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Vaidyakiya Pratishthan. Just as soon I can get out the ambitiously combined statement that “I have come from America and I would like to do social work here in the slum areas of Aurangabad,” they burst into a satisfied and unbridled laughter. It lasts for another half-hour as they point to my clothes, my sweat, my nervously butchered statements and answers in their language, and maybe most of all, my goals. Given my place of undeniable privilege, I can understand where a lot of this is coming from, even though their acceptance would feel better.

The question on everyone’s mind (and frankly the one on my mind as well), is: Yes, you are an Indian-American volunteer serving a one-year fellowship through a US-based non-profit called Indicorps. But why are you here?

The reasons are hard enough to express in my native English, much less the broken conversational facility I can control in Marathi after a rigorous four-week orientation-period class. But the forced simplicity helps to clarify my thoughts and isolate the important parts of this year.

1. I want to experience life in the country my parents and countless relatives will always call home.

2. I want to work within a poor community to understand how its social inequalities can be improved.

Given my affluent Western background and previous focus solely on the injustices gripping Washington DC, my first two months here have actually been surprisingly validating. True, a bulk of the uneducated urban population may mock my intentions here. But through close identification with doctors and outreach workers dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention, I’ve found that our differences are mostly derived from cultural exposure. So I regularly connect with them on a variety of human rights issues, and a common desire to live simply. Yes, it took a few weeks to acclimatize my health, to get over the stares and occasional laughs. But along with those difficulties is a flexible support system all around my efforts to motivate positive behavior changes in the slum gullies that I can soon call “home.” And I’m becoming convinced that as long as my intentions are pure, we will all come to know each other a little bit better after this year.

Did You know?

Indicorps offers a variety of programs and opportunities that encourage leadership and civic engagement. While the fellowship focuses on empowering people willing to do whatever it takes to affect change, we also have local volunteer programs in India, an established internship program, an emerging domestic program, an effort to engage late-careers seniors in development, an online volunteer opportunity site, and more....

NDTV Feature on Indicorps

New Blog Entries

From the Gallery

See images by Kajal Patel, a talented UK-based photographer, that are part of an Indicorps project to capture the journey of India's people. Her work particularly focused on widows and the nature of the rag-picking industry in Gujarat's largest slum.

Aasma

Learn about the Indicorps / SAATH partnership, started by Indicorps intern Ajlai Basu, that has lead to Aasma - a volunteer-driven school for street children near the Indicorps office in Gujarat.

The Fellowship

The next fellowship applications are available for fellowship classes starting August 2008 and January 2009. To apply, click here.

Inspiration

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

- Lila Watson