INDIA: Week 2

Below is an update on week 2 in Delhi. Enjoy!

At the beginning of this week we met with our supervisor to finalize the plan for our internship. The majority of our work will be focused on working with the girls youth group. We plan to have three sections in the course we're teaching them, health, rights and how to conduct surveys. In the health section we plan to cover the different body systems and how they work, puberty and menstruation, how pregnancy happens, nutrition and hygiene. For the rights section we will teach them about their rights as human beings and young women as well as the various government schemes related to health. In the survey section we plan on teaching them how to conduct surveys and then assigning them to go out in their communities to do a short health assessment of a couple health facilities as well as households. In addition to the girls group we will also be continuing some of the community health worker training from last summer. Some of the topics they expressed that they wanted to learn more about were diseases that affect pregnant women, childhood illnesses and STDs. We have a lot of Google searches ahead of us...

We had our first meeting with the girls group on Wednesday and it went really well. The meeting was just an introduction meeting to meet each other and explain what we were going to do throughout the course and why they were chosen. We have 11 girls, ages 13 and 14. They are some of the brighter girls in the slum area and are all either in 8th or 9th standard (grade). They do know a very small amount of English but we have a translator to help us communicate and properly convey the material in Hindi. For this first session, we did an introduction activity where we grouped them in pairs and had them ask their partner three questions. Once they were finished they introduced their partner to the class and told us the questions they asked and the corresponding answers. It was funny to hear the questions/answers 13-14 year old girls come up with. After that we had them draw pictures of what they wanted to be when they "grew up". We told them they had 5 minutes to draw their pictures and they looked at us like we were crazy. We were crazy because we ended up giving them 30 minutes instead and some girls still hadn't finished. We have some future flight attendants, bank managers, doctors, fashion designers, teachers and painters in our classroom. The last thing we did was have them write down at least one question they had about health. I was both surprised and impressed by some of the questions they had. Most of the girls wrote down more than one. Below are a few of the questions:

1. Why is their pain during the menstrual cycle?
2. What is diabetes?
3. Sometimes my cycle is irregular; is that a matter of concern?
4. Why are boys considered 'good' and girls 'bad'?
5. What should we eat to stay healthy?
6. What is anemia and how can one become anemic?

It was really good to see some of the questions they had because now we know that what we were teaching them is something they're interested in and want to know more about. We will continue to have our sessions with them M-F from 2-3:30pm and in a couple weeks we will start our other training with the health workers in the mornings for a longer time frame.

Fortunately, it's not ALL work here in India and I have some time for sightseeing and fun things as well. On Saturday we went to a 4th of July Party hosted by the U.S. Embassy. It was fun to meet some other Americans and hear about what they're doing in India. I'm not sure where the beef came from but they had hamburgers, fries and apple pie and the party was held in a baseball field. I almost forgot where I was it was so AMERICAN.

Today (Sunday) we went to one of Delhi's most famous sites, the Red Fort. I won't bore you with the details of what it is and the history behind it. If you really want to know, Wikipedia will do a much better job than I can. We picked the perfect day to go since there wasn't a cloud in the sky and the sun was able to directly beat down upon us. It was only 97 degrees today so it was that bad...Surprisingly, there were more Indian tourists than foreign tourists there, but maybe that's because everyone else knows never to come here in the summer. A lot of them asked me to take their picture with my camera, which was amusing. I may start charging people for my services.