In the News...

Yesterday we gave a presentation to the directors of the company that's sponsoring the Micro-credit program. I think it went pretty well. Everyone asked us lots of questions about what we thought the weak points were, and since we've been working with all the stakeholders and beneficiaries for the past two months, we had answers for all of their questions. They liked the monitoring tools we created, and were happy with the fact that they would allow CASP to easily generate reports on the progress of the program. It was really nice to wrap that project up and to see what a positive response it got from everyone. Here's a link to the final report we created for that project:

link to the final report

I also wanted to write about how there was a story in the Financial Times of India about our work at Rajagiri...

From Bin

...but now there's a less upbeat story in the news. Here's an article from CNN.com, and one from The Hindu.

I don't know how big of a news story this has been in the US, but in case you hear anything I just wanted to let everyone know that things are fine here and we're all still safe and alive and everything. So, no need to worry! If you are worried anyway, here's the number you can reach me at: 91 (that's the country code) + 9745960925. But don't worry if you try to call and it doesn't go through because sometimes there just isn't very good reception

Endgame

From Bin

the other night we played chess for a bit in our room in the hostel. I realized I didn't have any pictures of my room. That's what it looks like.

Only one week left now, and we're finishing up the three projects we've been working on. Tomorrow we give a presentation to the funders of the microfinance program, and submit the final version of the report on the life insurance scheme. That leaves the health insurance, which has been the most complicated and tricky one to work on. at the end of the day, I think we have enough data to write a report that will be useful to CASP.
It's been a busy, crazy two months. Sometimes it seemed like we bit off more than we could chew, but now it seems like things are more or less under control now and I think we've managed to accomplish a lot and to provide CASP with some useful reports on the projects we've been working on. I'm ready to go home. Sometimes I feel like I'm mostly already back in Michigan.

Cubist Jesus

I've been thinking about this picture for awhile. It's in the front lobby of Rajagiri College. It's Cubist Jesus. why is that interesting? Well... see, it's interesting because Kerala is pretty conservative, and very religious. It's like 90% catholic. There are churches and little shrines with saint statues all over the place. It's funny though, because it's also got an elected communist government, and labor organizations hold a lot of sway. That means there are lots of holidays do to general strikes and saints days.

Cubism is kind of rooted in Marxist ideas about the need for a “critique of everything existing” like, don't just accept things because that's how it's always been, but taking them apart and trying to figure out why it's like that. Usually it led to questions along the lines of, “Why is the boss living in that mansion and not doing any work while we're slaving away in his factory every day,” but one of the ways that kind of idea made it into art was through this cubist movement, in which painters tried to break down a subject into the basic colors and shapes, to kind of try to understand how it worked, and how everything fit together.

Those movements weren't really known for their religiosity, so the Cubist Jesus is kind of unique. But around here they're big on this “liberation theology” and “Christian socialism,” so Cubist Jesus is kind of fitting. I like the way it kind of brings together those two aspects of the local culture that at first don't seem to fit together. Also, he's eating coconuts and doing yoga, so that's kind of cool.

Kathakali, Backwaters

When you go to Kerala, people say, “oh, you should see a Kathakali show while you're in Kerala” and “oh, you have to see the backwaters while you're here.” I guess those are the two big things that tourists do when they come here. Well, now I can say I've done them both. Kathakali is a kind of traditional dance full of super subtle movements that no one really understands. It's kind of interesting for a few minutes.

There's a bunch of characters with different distinct makeup and costumes. The most popular one is this King guy with a green face and a white beard. Apparently he was the first King of Kerala about a million years ago, and a right just ruler he was. Clare and I saw a show when we where here before and i think it was the same story, about an epic struggle against dozing off, but this one was the short 1 hour version instead of the usual 3 hour one, so it wasn't too bad.

The actual story was that some demon transformed itself into a lady to try to tempt the good king, but he discovered the truth so he killed her, basically. Here's a video of the King getting mad:



We also saw the backwaters. It was really relaxing and peaceful. There are all these tiny fishing and rice-farming villages connected by a series of waterways, and they have these houseboats you can take and float along and see the scenery. It was really good.







So I say, if you're ever in Kerala, you do have to see the backwaters, but you can just watch the above Kathakali video and save 100 rupees.

Holy Cow

Does this look safe to you?

Mumbai

Mumbai is a nice town of about 18 million. It has some great Victorian architecture.

From Bin

The first thing you see when you fly into the airport is the biggest slum in the world.



It's big. Apparently about 1/2 of the city's population lives in slums.

We stayed in an area in the north called Vile Parle East. It's that yellow house on the map:


View Larger Map

From the airport we went to Shachi's aunt's house. She had prepared all kinds of delicious food that you can't get where we are in the south. It was all really good!



*(I can't claim full responsibility for all of these pictures)

Afterward we checked into the place we were staying and then went over to Juhu beach, which is a nice place to walk as long as you're wearing shoes. The first night we walked along the beach and ended up at the Marriot Hotel, which is right on the water and is super fancy, with lots of little book stores and coffee shops and stuff, and a guy who just sits there and plays the flute all day. There's a big restaurant and bar area with huge windows that overlook the ocean so you can sit in the AC and watch the sun set.



This picture gives an idea, even though there's a big pillar right in the middle.

We left the hotel after awhile and headed down to Colaba, at the southern tip of the city, to eat at this Japanese place:


Afterwords we spent some time in Colaba, then went back to the Temple/Hostel place we were staying at in Vile Parle.

The next day we took the train to Victoria Terminus. Those kinds of slums also line the railroad which goes into the downtown area in the south.



Victoria Terminus is actually called छत्रपती शिवाजी टरमीनस (Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) now. It's the very first picture at the top. We walked around a lot, and took a bunch of pictures. It was a good day. Here are some more pictures we took:

From Bin

That last one is the Gateway to India, which is right on the water, and was the first thing people would see when they arrived in Mumbai by ship. Right next to it is the Taj Hotel, where you can get a cup of coffee for 10 dollars:

From Bin

The next day we stayed in the northern part, and spent some time in a market area before catching our flight back to Cochin.




...and that's Mumbai in 2 days!

Surveys

We are pretty much finished with the microfinance-style project we've been working on. I submitted the final report along with the monitoring tools we developed. I think we've learned something about writing surveys. We've created about 9000 of them since we've been here. Since our time is limited, and since we wanted to create stuff that CASP would still be able to use after we leave, and since they don't have the enough staff to have someone dedicated to program monitoring and evaluation, we've tried to create surveys that get at the most important information in the simplest way possible. I think we've gotten better.

Our first one had a lot of short-answer questions. When we got it back we realized that it's not easy to encode a bunch of short-answers. Whenever possible, we've been trying to use multiple choice questions, and ones that can be answered with a simple yes/no or a number, such as “How much money does your family spend on health care each year?” or “Did you visit a hospital in the past year without filing a claim with the insurance company? If so, why: A. I didn't know I had insurance, B. I don't trust the insurance scheme, C. I don't know how to file a claim, D. Other reason: ______ “ That way it's easy to report.

We've also been perfecting our skills in using Lickert scales. That's the “strongly agree, agree, no opinion, disagree, strongly disagree” stuff. This way every answer had a numerical value, and if you set it up right, you can add the values to get a total. It's a useful tool (plus, the guy's from Michigan!). For example, the microfinance scheme had the objectives of helping the beneficiaries (all women) become more empowered and develop entrepreneurial skills. But those things are kind of vague and more difficult to measure than a straightforward objective like raising the household income by 50%. So part of our monitoring for that program uses the Lickert scale to get a score for how “entrepreneurial” a beneficiary is, or how “empowered.” We looked for sort of industry standards for these things. The definition for entrepreneurial skills is based on information from the Grameen Bank, which was the first to do microcredit, and the Microfinance Gateway, which is a good resource for all kinds of information on the subject. The definition for empowerment comes from a World Bank report on empowerment measures. So for empowerment, each item on the empowerment gets at an aspect of empowerment. Here is that scale:

Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with the following statements by circling a number:
1: Strongly Agree, 2: Agree, 3: No Opinion, 4: Disagree, 5: Strongly Disagree

1. The number of people I interact with on a weekly basis has increased since I began this project.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

2. My husband and I determine the size of our family together.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

3. If I disagree with my husband, I usually tell him.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

4. I am actively involved in a religious, political, or community organization.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

5. The decisions I make tend to result in the desired outcome.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

6. I do not have a say in how my household's income is spent.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

7. I do not have the able to improve my family's quality of life.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

8. I usually do not vote in local, state, and national national elections.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

9. I am not involved in our family’s decision making.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

10. I do not feel like an active member of my community.
1-------2-------3-------4-------5

Each item is worth 1-5 points. So a score of 50 would be “fully empowered” and a score of 10 would be “not at all empowered” The CASP social workers only have to give the survey every 6 months, and see if the scores improve over the course of the 3-year program. Such a simple survey wont establish causality, but it's easy to use, and can at least show a correlation. If there's no improvement in entrepreneurship or empowerment after 3 years, it would be a good sign that the program failed in meeting those objectives.

We also gave them tools for tracking the women's costs and revenue associated with the program, and an excel sheet that they can easily enter data into which automatically generates a report each month. Here is a copy of the full report if you want to see it.

Tomorrow morning we're going to Mumbai. We made a map of the places we want to see on google. I don't know if we'll have time to see everything since we're only going to be there 2 days, but I think it will still be fun, even it it's raining nonstop!

Elephants!

Yesterday we went to this elephant rescue park. Apparently when it rains hard, mudslides cause baby elephants to get washed away from their family, and then they get lost and wonder around in town, or in the highway. I say let them wander. The cows do. But they round them up and bring them to this park. It was kind of sad, even though I guess they treat them ok, more or less. Anyway, elephants are pretty cool. Here's a picture:



We hung out with one of the elephant for a while, and then the keepers took them down to the river for a bath.







Afterwards we walked around in this park along the river. It was a nice area in a sandlewood forest, with swings hanging from the trees and funny tree houses you could go in.

woohoo!!

My kiva.org loan is repaid! Now Eunice Egharevba of Benin, Nigeria can keep her pharmacy open.















She took out an interest free $400 loan through kiva a few months ago that I contributed $25 to.

on another note, I'm going to Mumbai next weekend! Shachi's aunt is a yoga teacher at this school for, um, mentally challenged kids. These kids do handicraft stuff to earn some income, which they get part of and part goes to support the school. So Shachi's been thinking about how to help out. We're working on a website that they can use for publicity and Shachi is also putting together a brochure they can give to potential funders, because they don't have anything like that. Shachi and Ashika are going thursday to take pictures of the school, and I'm meeting them on saturday, because the ticket is half as much if I go then.

We're using this website creator called weebly.com, because A.) it's really to use, so we can create it and they can edit it later without having any technical know-how. I guess that's the only reason we're using it, really. But it will be fun to see Mumbai and to have a weekend away from the school. My roommate Jeremy and one of the girls from Maryland named Jessica are also going. Jeremy's hoping to find a sushi place but I don't know if I would trust sushi from Mumbai. A burrito would be nice, though.

The internship is coming along well. There's only three weeks left! We've started working on our final reports for 2 of the 3 programs we're working on. Tomorrow we're hoping to finish up the monitoring stuff for that cow/goat/quail project. In the next few days we're also going to go to as many houses of people who are enrolled in the "universal" health insurance plan but haven't used it to try to find out why.

Independence Day!!

Yesterday we had a 4th of July party! It was on the roof of the house where all the girls are staying. We had fruit salad, spaghetti, and garlic bread! We had pringles, and cookies, and pepsi! We had beer and port and rum! ...and e had fireworks!! Now that might not really sound like a huge amount of stuff for a 4th of July party, and you might even be thinking that's no big whoop, but you should understand that it took 9 people a week of planning to pull it together.

It was a lot of fun! First the family wanted us all to sing the national anthem for them, which was funny, then we ate food, then we set off the 'works. Here's what we had to work with.



We also got a stereo on the roof and plugged in an ipod, so there was music. Here are some more pictures:





...good party!!

Captions

I added captions to most of the pictures I've posted, which are here.

we're planning a big 4th of July party. We bought all the ingredients to make spaghetti, and we got pringles, pepsi, and beer too!

Now this blog has everything

check out the music over there! =>
(or stop it if you don't like it)

Clare

This is what Clare looks like from here:




















I haven't been able to talk to her in a few days because they haven't hooked internet up in the new place. I miss her.

Score!

...after that we went to the United India Insurance Company office to meet the regional director, who gave us a bunch of data on the beneficiaries of the "universal" health insurance scheme for low income families that we're working on with CASP. They couldn't give us an electronic copy of their records, for security purposes. They could only give a printout of their electronic records. They let us use one of their computers to enter the data into a spreadsheet so we could have an electronic version.

While we were there we met the owner of Veega Land itself. That's a themepark in this area. He set up a fund to pay the premiums for this health scheme for everyone below the poverty line in his home town. After we finished entering all the data we took some pictures, and then he and the director took us out to lunch. So I pretty much had lunch with the Indian Walt Disney.



Once we got back to the CASP office, we told them about how friutful our meeting had been, and in the course of the conversation they said we could use the official CASP logo on all of our future documents. I consider that a promotion!

feeling blue

We went to this temple the other day. It's in Thrissur, which is one town where all three of the projects we're working on happen to be opperating. The temple is dedicated to Shiva, whose Cosmic Dance shakes the Universe. This is a big temple, and is the center of celebrations during a holiday called Pooram, which does not involve drinking.

Don't ask me what the place looks like on the inside. They wouldn't let me in on account of my not being a Hindu. I don't know how they knew that I wasn't a Hindu. At first I thought it was old fashioned racism, but then I remembered that Lord Shiva himself is blue:

...so I don't know, but I had to wait at the gate while Shachi and Ashika walked around inside.



I was really sad about it at first, but then I met some other untouchables who were really nice, so it was ok.

Terps

Aside from me and Shachi and Ashika, there are 6 students here from the University of Maryland. It's good that they're here. There are 5 girls, named Erika, Jessica, Katlin, Ingrid, and Sara. Also there is one guy, named Jeremy. We're pretty much buddies. He's also my roommate. Everyone else here is coming from India.

One more thing. We have an office at CASP!! It's on the third floor. We have our own desks, and fan and light in the office, and every day a lady brings us coffee or tea. Here's a picture of us in the office:

Transcend

...on a lighter note, I got an mp3 player yesterday. It's pretty nice. It has 2GB. This is what it looks like:

I got it because my CD player broke when it hit the floor after falling out of my bed while I was sleeping. There's this electronics market called Pentameneka or something. The market is three stories high, and most of the places there sell cell phones. It features the first escelator in Cochin, which was pretty awesome to ride on. There's one going up and one going down. I rode on both of them. Other than that the weekend has been pretty uneventful. Well, my roommate and I did go to the bar last night with another student, Libin. That was fun. It was pooring on the way there and the street looked like a river.

"N-deal"

Have you ever heard about this? I know I hadn't. It's big news here, and it's actually an interesting issue. The current government might collapse because of it. If World War III was a T-Rex, this would be the ripples in the glass of water on the dashboard!!!

NEW DELHI: Unrelenting in its opposition to the Indo-US nuclear deal, the CPM
has blamed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for triggering and prolonging the
political crisis over the contentious issue. In a signed article in the latest
issue of party organ 'People's Democracy', CPM general secretary Prakash Karat
has written that the cause for plunging the country into a political crisis once
again "lies squarely in PM's renewed bid to go to the IAEA" to get the deal
approved.
...The schedule set by the US, Karat said, was "impelling the PM
to go ahead regardless of the consequences". The reason for the urgency was "the
insistence of the Bush administration that India complete the procedures for the
safeguards agreement with the IAEA so that the Americans can take the step of
formally initiating the process in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to get the waiver
for nuclear trade with India", he said.

This is what's going on: the main party in the ruling coalition (Congress) and some others in the coalition are working out a deal to get material from the US to set up some nuclear power plants. But some parties in the coalition don't like the plan, because they say it would give the US too much control over India's supply of energy, and would have too much influence over India because of it. They want to see another deal go through with Iran, which would involve a fuel pipeline from Iran to India and Pakistan. Apparently they think that if India has to be energy dependent, it's better off depending on Iran. For some reason they don't seem concerned about letting Iran control India's fuel supply. Here's a Pakistan perspective:

As articulated over and over again, one of the chief reasons for the US dangling
of the nuclear deal to India was to tuck India into a strategic partnership to
suit the geopolitical aims of the global hegemon. And that of course meant that
India could be used in a web of relationships that would be positioned in
opposition to whomever the US sees as a threat in the Asian region. And it does
not take too much brainpower to realise that rising economic powers China in
east/ southern Asia and Iran in west Asia are seen as the primary poles of
opposition to American hegemony in the continent. As such, the Americans have an
intertwined relationship with the Chinese, with the latter’s manufacturing base
dependent upon the purchasing power of the former and the former servicing its
economy despite huge fiscal deficits through Chinese holding of US treasury
bonds...

So basically, the parties that want stronger ties with the US support the nuclear deal, while the parties that want stronger ties with Iran like the pipeline. Something's got to give.

Meanwhile. the day after we got here there was a national strike of transit workers. They were striking against an increase in the price of gas. A few weeks ago we visited this waterfall area. It was pretty scenic. They want to build a dam up the river, which would stop the waterfall, as well as the river that a bunch of farmers in the area depend on for irrigation. There are a series of communities and villages along a 20 kilometer stretch of the river that would be hurt by the dam, and the forests world dry up, too. On the bright side, the dam would supple 1 hour of electricity per day to a few hundred households. We visited the area with an economist who has been working to organize people in the area to do nonviolent protests against the dam, because it would take away their source livelihood. They've actually been protesting the issue for 6 years. For the past 100-some days they've been holding a sit-in at the entrance to the waterfall park, in an effort to raise awareness. So far only the local media has taken note. Yesterday they announced that there would be nightly 1-hour power outages because the monsoons haven't brought enough rain to fill the reservoirs to power the generators, etc.

Art Deco

I left Ann Arbor on May 31st. On my way here I got stuck at the Newark airport for a couple days. One complication led to another, which led to me in New York, looking up at the Empire State Building. The building has these etched art deco patterns that you don't see until you're up close, like in the picture below that I didn’t take. It's sort of old-fashioned and modern at the same time.


I'd talk about how that's also a good description of India, “old fashioned and modern at the same time,” because that would make this post more on topic. But I'm not sure that it is a good description of India. The truth is that I like art deco architecture, and that has nothing at all to do with India. But now I'm up to two posts!

First Post Ever

I set this blog up when I first got here, and haven't used it since. Yesterday I was riding in a car. It was the typical, stop and go, near misses with huge dump trucks decked out like pinball machines, etc. We passed by some of those concrete and rebar structures could either be buildings under construction or long since abandoned. I was watching the auto rickshaw in front of us as it weaved in and out of oncoming traffic, then onto the shoulder for a bit, then back in front of us, and I got a weird feeling. At first I thought it was the prescription cough medicine the pharmacy down the street had sold me for 40 rupees. They told I should take it with food, but we had to leave at 6 in the morning, so I had missed breakfast. …but then it dawned on me. I noticed that everything I was looking at was starting to look kind of normal. That made me think about how I’ve been in India for a month now, and then I remembered that I had set this blog up, and thought that if I was going to do anything with it, I ought to get started. So here it goes...

I was in that car because we were visiting a branch office of the United India Insurance company in Thrissur, in Kerala. We took the train there in the morning, and had a pretty busy day. We also visited a beneficiary of the micro life insurance scheme we're working on, to get some input on a survey we're creating to help CASP get a better idea of the beneficiaries' perceptions of the program, presented some program monitoring tools we created for a microcredit-type program, and visited a hospital where CASP is running another program. Actually, CASP has a lot going on in the area. It's also running a medical camp and a child sponsorship project. It wasn't the first time we'd gone to Thrissur. We took the train there two weeks ago, too. That's when I took this video: