And I'll admit, I was more than a little mesmerized. You can tell by that strange, strange look on my face (which I've tried to recreate in front of a mirror with no luck.)
Thursday, February 26, 2009
It happened.
And I'll admit, I was more than a little mesmerized. You can tell by that strange, strange look on my face (which I've tried to recreate in front of a mirror with no luck.)
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Peas and Soybeans and Bananas!
HELLO! I have been gone for a long time. Gone from the blogosphere that is. My internet has been spotty at best and has not allowed me to upload ANY pictures at all. I'm sorry, few few people who read this blog. I actually have some great pictures too! Next time I'm in the office for a long time without a lot of work I'll be able to upload the pictures. Keep waiting.
First things first, last weekend I went to a village about three hours outside of Lucknow. The two places we ended up going were Bahraich and Payagpur. I think Bahraich is more a "town" and Payagpur is more a "village," technically. But either way, both very small.
We stayed with a family. It was the family of the uncle of the cousin of Gabrielle's dad's younger co-worker. I felt an immediate connection.
They were by far the richest people in this town. They owned a farm a bit outside of Bahraich that grew soybeans, bananas, wheat, mustard, peas, tomatoes, guavas, mangoes, cabbage, cauliflower and a few littttle tiny marijuana plants that they were embarassed we spotted. We arrived at the farm and had a great lunch out under the trees, then got a tour. The farm itself was not large, only an acre perhaps, but the few people working on it were very kind and welcoming. I ate some shelling peas fresh from the vine and they were the most delicious I have ever popped into my mouth. All in all, I want to own a farm.
The biggest site we saw all weekend was Sravasti, where Buddha started his teachings (I think) or where he was enlightened (maybe). There was a HUMONGOUS Buddha statue there. Probably 100 feet tall, maybe 200 feet tall (I have terrible height judgment). I would assume not solid gold, but I sure hope so. There was also a newly built meditation center that we were invited into. This was mildly awkward...because I am surely not Buddhist and I don't understand any Hindi. Afterward a German (a Caucasian!) picked me out of the crowd and tried to convert me to Buddhism. She even gave me books for free! It turns out that she arrived seven years ago as a tourist, decided to stay - leaving her family and job - and has stayed as a volunteer and student ever since. As she handed me the books, her grasp hesitant and her eyes hopeful, I could not have wanted to get out of Sravasti more.
I haven't converted though, don't worry! And I'm giving the books to Liju - right up his kind of crazy alley.
That evening we went to a 25th Anniversary Party - certainly the biggest, most extravagant annivesary I have ever been to. More appetizers than I could imagine, 12 different main dishes and 6 or 7 different desserts. For some reason, Indian food has taken away my ability to stop eating when I'm full. I think I ate three or four dinners worth of food. I was full for 28 hours straight. I'm still kind of full to tell you the truth.
Those are the highlights!
This past week has been great at work. Sketched out a rough financial model of the toilet loan. Should be meeting with the contractor tomorrow to finalize details and go out in the field once again to meet with the final group of clients for the pilot program. Shovels in by March 7? Let's hope!
First things first, last weekend I went to a village about three hours outside of Lucknow. The two places we ended up going were Bahraich and Payagpur. I think Bahraich is more a "town" and Payagpur is more a "village," technically. But either way, both very small.
We stayed with a family. It was the family of the uncle of the cousin of Gabrielle's dad's younger co-worker. I felt an immediate connection.
They were by far the richest people in this town. They owned a farm a bit outside of Bahraich that grew soybeans, bananas, wheat, mustard, peas, tomatoes, guavas, mangoes, cabbage, cauliflower and a few littttle tiny marijuana plants that they were embarassed we spotted. We arrived at the farm and had a great lunch out under the trees, then got a tour. The farm itself was not large, only an acre perhaps, but the few people working on it were very kind and welcoming. I ate some shelling peas fresh from the vine and they were the most delicious I have ever popped into my mouth. All in all, I want to own a farm.
The biggest site we saw all weekend was Sravasti, where Buddha started his teachings (I think) or where he was enlightened (maybe). There was a HUMONGOUS Buddha statue there. Probably 100 feet tall, maybe 200 feet tall (I have terrible height judgment). I would assume not solid gold, but I sure hope so. There was also a newly built meditation center that we were invited into. This was mildly awkward...because I am surely not Buddhist and I don't understand any Hindi. Afterward a German (a Caucasian!) picked me out of the crowd and tried to convert me to Buddhism. She even gave me books for free! It turns out that she arrived seven years ago as a tourist, decided to stay - leaving her family and job - and has stayed as a volunteer and student ever since. As she handed me the books, her grasp hesitant and her eyes hopeful, I could not have wanted to get out of Sravasti more.
I haven't converted though, don't worry! And I'm giving the books to Liju - right up his kind of crazy alley.
That evening we went to a 25th Anniversary Party - certainly the biggest, most extravagant annivesary I have ever been to. More appetizers than I could imagine, 12 different main dishes and 6 or 7 different desserts. For some reason, Indian food has taken away my ability to stop eating when I'm full. I think I ate three or four dinners worth of food. I was full for 28 hours straight. I'm still kind of full to tell you the truth.
Those are the highlights!
This past week has been great at work. Sketched out a rough financial model of the toilet loan. Should be meeting with the contractor tomorrow to finalize details and go out in the field once again to meet with the final group of clients for the pilot program. Shovels in by March 7? Let's hope!
Friday, February 13, 2009
Surveys
Hello everybody!
Sorry I have not updated recently. We've been out in the field every day this week and the wi-fi in my apartment has been down, leaving me little time online. We got back early today (Friday), though, so I'm using this time to upload as many pictures as I can (it takes about 10 minutes per 5 pictures...so I want you to look at each of those pictures for at least 2 minutes) and write this little update!
First, last weekend I went to Delhi. I didn't see as much of the city as I hoped because we stayed with a few Dartmouth friends there and really just saw the inside of their apartment. But I did notice how different Lucknow and Delhi. Comparing the two Delhi seems like a bustling metropolis, a western city stuck in an Indian body...or something. Lucknow appears to be a city stuck in the past: cows still roaming about on main roads, people wearing clothes that were popular in the 70s (seriously, it's the strangest thing). Either way the comparison only made me love India more. And the train was more comfortable than the bus to Varanasi...if not a bit small and high off the ground (see pictures.)
Surveys started on Monday and have been going very well. Gabrielle and I conduct the surveys with the help of Rina and Anil, our faithful Hindi-speaking, English-"speaking" friends from the office! Communication is very difficult. Most of the time when confronted with a problem we try to talk, then just fall back on smiling, nodding, laughing, and hoping the problem passes us by. So far that has worked pretty well.
I spend the majority of my day either on the back of a motorcycle or in a slum neighborhood. Some days we have to walk kilometers to get from house to house (this is when the neighborhood is on the outskirts of the city and is much more rural) and other days we meet all the women crammed into a small, dimly lit room on the third story of a confusing, complex of tenements.
Yesterday was perhaps the best survey day to date (today was, despite our preparation, foiled by a late start and a group of really sassy women who refused to answer questions and insisted on ganging up on us and forcing chai down our throats). In an area called Hari Om Nagar, a more rural slum, we surveyed the most amazing group of women I have seen. They have been with the firm for 3 years, so they have been taking loans since the very beginning, and they have never defaulted. They have not missed one single payment. This became all the more impressive when we saw their homes. No water connection or bathroom. Walls made of plastic strapped to bamboo and loose brick. Tin roofs that covered a quarter of the living space. They had to walk 1 kilometer to go to the bathroom and collect cow dung and scraps of wood to make a fire. But still, after three years, they had never missed a payment. We decided then and there that these women would be included in our pilot program.
I may as well update you all on what the pilot program will be and what we hope the timeline will look like, also. Our funding, from the FWWB, actually just fell through. They wanted to do a pilot program of 1000 people, whereas we thought it would make more sense to do a smaller pilot program of about 20 people and scale up over time. They needed the larger numbers so they could continue to get funding so they told us they would have to use another MFI. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Without the FWWBs constraints, we are moving faster for this smaller group and hope to break ground on the first toilet/washroom facility by the first week of March. Nirmaan Bharati has promised to put up Rs. 1 lakh to start the project before the new fiscal year (April 1st over here), by which time the infrastructure development project as a whole will have its own funding from investors.
So in the end the loss of funding has been a welcome change. We're more invigorated and have set a schedule that is bound to challenge us in the next few weeks. While we survey the next couple hundred women, we will be developing a toilet/washroom design with an engineer and constructing a rough business model to present to the directors. I, for one, hope to be able to be out in the field to help the women of Hari Om Nagar install their first toilets, so we're going to try to finish all the planning by March 1st (I'm leaving March 10th).
All right, I'm off to the good old Pashupati Apartment complex! Tonight I'm learning how to cook egg fried rice from Vishnu!
Sorry I have not updated recently. We've been out in the field every day this week and the wi-fi in my apartment has been down, leaving me little time online. We got back early today (Friday), though, so I'm using this time to upload as many pictures as I can (it takes about 10 minutes per 5 pictures...so I want you to look at each of those pictures for at least 2 minutes) and write this little update!
First, last weekend I went to Delhi. I didn't see as much of the city as I hoped because we stayed with a few Dartmouth friends there and really just saw the inside of their apartment. But I did notice how different Lucknow and Delhi. Comparing the two Delhi seems like a bustling metropolis, a western city stuck in an Indian body...or something. Lucknow appears to be a city stuck in the past: cows still roaming about on main roads, people wearing clothes that were popular in the 70s (seriously, it's the strangest thing). Either way the comparison only made me love India more. And the train was more comfortable than the bus to Varanasi...if not a bit small and high off the ground (see pictures.)
Surveys started on Monday and have been going very well. Gabrielle and I conduct the surveys with the help of Rina and Anil, our faithful Hindi-speaking, English-"speaking" friends from the office! Communication is very difficult. Most of the time when confronted with a problem we try to talk, then just fall back on smiling, nodding, laughing, and hoping the problem passes us by. So far that has worked pretty well.
I spend the majority of my day either on the back of a motorcycle or in a slum neighborhood. Some days we have to walk kilometers to get from house to house (this is when the neighborhood is on the outskirts of the city and is much more rural) and other days we meet all the women crammed into a small, dimly lit room on the third story of a confusing, complex of tenements.
Yesterday was perhaps the best survey day to date (today was, despite our preparation, foiled by a late start and a group of really sassy women who refused to answer questions and insisted on ganging up on us and forcing chai down our throats). In an area called Hari Om Nagar, a more rural slum, we surveyed the most amazing group of women I have seen. They have been with the firm for 3 years, so they have been taking loans since the very beginning, and they have never defaulted. They have not missed one single payment. This became all the more impressive when we saw their homes. No water connection or bathroom. Walls made of plastic strapped to bamboo and loose brick. Tin roofs that covered a quarter of the living space. They had to walk 1 kilometer to go to the bathroom and collect cow dung and scraps of wood to make a fire. But still, after three years, they had never missed a payment. We decided then and there that these women would be included in our pilot program.
I may as well update you all on what the pilot program will be and what we hope the timeline will look like, also. Our funding, from the FWWB, actually just fell through. They wanted to do a pilot program of 1000 people, whereas we thought it would make more sense to do a smaller pilot program of about 20 people and scale up over time. They needed the larger numbers so they could continue to get funding so they told us they would have to use another MFI. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Without the FWWBs constraints, we are moving faster for this smaller group and hope to break ground on the first toilet/washroom facility by the first week of March. Nirmaan Bharati has promised to put up Rs. 1 lakh to start the project before the new fiscal year (April 1st over here), by which time the infrastructure development project as a whole will have its own funding from investors.
So in the end the loss of funding has been a welcome change. We're more invigorated and have set a schedule that is bound to challenge us in the next few weeks. While we survey the next couple hundred women, we will be developing a toilet/washroom design with an engineer and constructing a rough business model to present to the directors. I, for one, hope to be able to be out in the field to help the women of Hari Om Nagar install their first toilets, so we're going to try to finish all the planning by March 1st (I'm leaving March 10th).
All right, I'm off to the good old Pashupati Apartment complex! Tonight I'm learning how to cook egg fried rice from Vishnu!
Friday, February 6, 2009
And so it begins...
After a two weeks of writing a demand assessment survey from scratch and meeting with engineers, architects and financiers around Lucknow, we have finally reached the pinnacle of the first phase of our project: the field!
Here at Nirmaan Bharati "the field" has a kind of mystical quality to it. All the work that is done in this office is for the benefit of "the field." People ask you if you've been to "the field" as if it is a far off land that changes you, changes everything. Mention of "the field" ignites a fire in people's eyes and excites a lilt in people's voices. Where did you go in the field? What did you see? What did you do? What did you think?
This is all true. The field, meaning the slum neighborhoods where our clients live, is harsh and eye-opening. My first two days in India were spent in the field, walking silently behind the center manager I was shadowing, understanding nothing and, in a way, only then understanding everything. I had arrived in India to work at a microfinance firm, and that was all I knew. I had no idea what I would be doing or why. But in a rush, a two-day whirlwind on the back of a motorcycle, I was introduced to everything that Nirmaan Bharati is, everything that Nirmaan Bharati does and why. The field.
For the past two days I have hopped on that motorcycle again. We've been going out to a few different neighborhoods to get an idea of the state of people's sanitation facilities and to ask them some informal questions. Generally, we enter the house ask to see their toilet and take a few pictures. I think this is strange as a visitor so I cannot imagine how strange they must think I am. After we have a look, we ask them about their water connection, sewage and drainage connections and any problems they face with their current facilities. We then ask how much they would be willing to spend to get it all upgraded, if they would be willing to do it themselves and what, in the best case, their new toilet/washroom would look like. We get a range of answers to all of these questions, but generally people have seemed very willing to take out a loan to improve their facilities. This is great news for us because that is what we're trying to do: create a loan product we can give to these families to help them rebuild something as basic and necessary as a toilet.
This was all informal and the formal survey should begin on Monday. Gabrielle and I will be going out separately with translators and aim to interview 20 people a day combined. Our target for the survey is 200 - so we're hoping to be done in two weeks. Along the way we plan on uploading the data to a database we're creating so at the end of the two weeks we can jump right into the final loan creation process. By mid-March we hope to have our first batch of clients.
Here's hoping.
Here at Nirmaan Bharati "the field" has a kind of mystical quality to it. All the work that is done in this office is for the benefit of "the field." People ask you if you've been to "the field" as if it is a far off land that changes you, changes everything. Mention of "the field" ignites a fire in people's eyes and excites a lilt in people's voices. Where did you go in the field? What did you see? What did you do? What did you think?
This is all true. The field, meaning the slum neighborhoods where our clients live, is harsh and eye-opening. My first two days in India were spent in the field, walking silently behind the center manager I was shadowing, understanding nothing and, in a way, only then understanding everything. I had arrived in India to work at a microfinance firm, and that was all I knew. I had no idea what I would be doing or why. But in a rush, a two-day whirlwind on the back of a motorcycle, I was introduced to everything that Nirmaan Bharati is, everything that Nirmaan Bharati does and why. The field.
For the past two days I have hopped on that motorcycle again. We've been going out to a few different neighborhoods to get an idea of the state of people's sanitation facilities and to ask them some informal questions. Generally, we enter the house ask to see their toilet and take a few pictures. I think this is strange as a visitor so I cannot imagine how strange they must think I am. After we have a look, we ask them about their water connection, sewage and drainage connections and any problems they face with their current facilities. We then ask how much they would be willing to spend to get it all upgraded, if they would be willing to do it themselves and what, in the best case, their new toilet/washroom would look like. We get a range of answers to all of these questions, but generally people have seemed very willing to take out a loan to improve their facilities. This is great news for us because that is what we're trying to do: create a loan product we can give to these families to help them rebuild something as basic and necessary as a toilet.
This was all informal and the formal survey should begin on Monday. Gabrielle and I will be going out separately with translators and aim to interview 20 people a day combined. Our target for the survey is 200 - so we're hoping to be done in two weeks. Along the way we plan on uploading the data to a database we're creating so at the end of the two weeks we can jump right into the final loan creation process. By mid-March we hope to have our first batch of clients.
Here's hoping.
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