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!