Greetings followers! We're excited to be able to share some of our experiences in India with friends and family - hence this blog. Does everyone get it? It's Che "nine" weeks, which sounds like Chennai, the city where we are, and 9 weeks, which is how long we'll stay.
Just wanted to make sure we got to that point all together :)
We have had a whirlwind of a first week. We left Denver on a flight to New York at 1:00 a.m. on June 15, and after layovers and flights in New York and Delhi, we got to Chennai at 11:00 p.m. local time on June 16. For those of you doing the math, that's almost 2 days later. We were delighted to get to our beds at the International Guest House on Madras Christian College (MCC) campus that night.
Friday morning, a number of spontaneous decisions ended with us joining a short-term visiting group from Appalachian State University for a weekend stay in the rural village Malaiyamkulam. Though perhaps different than we first expected, we had a great "trial by fire" experience getting to know other MCC students who accompanied us and interacting with members of the rural village and their church. We woke at 5:30 a.m. each morning, did manual labor, helped cook meals (eaten traditionally with our hands), interviewed villagers, interacted through broken English and Tamil with the children and church leaders, and finally performed the ChaCha Slide and taught the Chicken Dance to a very receptive village audience.
Not bad for a couple people recovering from a half-day internal clock change!
Since returning to the college, we've maintained a calmer orientation schedule. We often participate in lectures and discussions of Indian culture, or cross-country comparisons of Social Work related issues. Today and for the next two days our agenda is agency visits. This morning we saw Little Drops, an organization that provides basic residence and medical care support for the elderly, and Reheboth, a care facility for the mentally ill. Many of our interactions with the residents were very fulfilling, some heartbreaking. The facilities and programs fall short of the quality of care we've come to expect in the United States, but there is great need and Little Drops and Reheboth at least cover some distance in meeting those needs. It will be good to talk with our Indian colleagues about how they perceive this agencies' capacities and what improvement could be made in the future.
Our brief time has already yielded some great recurring topics for investigating, including how religion is incorporated into counseling and mental healthcare in India and by MCC social workers more specifically, women working and attending school after marriage, and alcohol-driven domestic abuse as a national concern. We're hoping to have a lot of time to explore this and other topics during the workshops we plan to lead for the social work students here. We've also been prepared for counseling work with a girls school, and hope to have a sense of other opportunities with the agencies we'll see over the next few days.
And our experiences don't stop with the formal agenda. There are cultural confrontations at every turn as we travel by train in the ladies' car, are targeted by shopkeepers in the mall Spencer's Plaza, and make the harrowing trek as pedestrians across Chennai's wild roadways.
So thank you for joining us on this journey! Until next time!
Just wanted to make sure we got to that point all together :)
We have had a whirlwind of a first week. We left Denver on a flight to New York at 1:00 a.m. on June 15, and after layovers and flights in New York and Delhi, we got to Chennai at 11:00 p.m. local time on June 16. For those of you doing the math, that's almost 2 days later. We were delighted to get to our beds at the International Guest House on Madras Christian College (MCC) campus that night.
Friday morning, a number of spontaneous decisions ended with us joining a short-term visiting group from Appalachian State University for a weekend stay in the rural village Malaiyamkulam. Though perhaps different than we first expected, we had a great "trial by fire" experience getting to know other MCC students who accompanied us and interacting with members of the rural village and their church. We woke at 5:30 a.m. each morning, did manual labor, helped cook meals (eaten traditionally with our hands), interviewed villagers, interacted through broken English and Tamil with the children and church leaders, and finally performed the ChaCha Slide and taught the Chicken Dance to a very receptive village audience.
Not bad for a couple people recovering from a half-day internal clock change!
Since returning to the college, we've maintained a calmer orientation schedule. We often participate in lectures and discussions of Indian culture, or cross-country comparisons of Social Work related issues. Today and for the next two days our agenda is agency visits. This morning we saw Little Drops, an organization that provides basic residence and medical care support for the elderly, and Reheboth, a care facility for the mentally ill. Many of our interactions with the residents were very fulfilling, some heartbreaking. The facilities and programs fall short of the quality of care we've come to expect in the United States, but there is great need and Little Drops and Reheboth at least cover some distance in meeting those needs. It will be good to talk with our Indian colleagues about how they perceive this agencies' capacities and what improvement could be made in the future.
Our brief time has already yielded some great recurring topics for investigating, including how religion is incorporated into counseling and mental healthcare in India and by MCC social workers more specifically, women working and attending school after marriage, and alcohol-driven domestic abuse as a national concern. We're hoping to have a lot of time to explore this and other topics during the workshops we plan to lead for the social work students here. We've also been prepared for counseling work with a girls school, and hope to have a sense of other opportunities with the agencies we'll see over the next few days.
And our experiences don't stop with the formal agenda. There are cultural confrontations at every turn as we travel by train in the ladies' car, are targeted by shopkeepers in the mall Spencer's Plaza, and make the harrowing trek as pedestrians across Chennai's wild roadways.
So thank you for joining us on this journey! Until next time!
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