Namaste!!

So I've officially been in India for one week, and I am loving it! I'm here for the rest of the summer with the organization HELP International doing humanitarian/development work. We've been meeting with other local NGOs for the past few days, and they have so many awesome projects to work on! As of now, I'm planning to help teach a tobacco and alcohol class, work on a campaign to raise awareness about missing children in India,  assist one of our other volunteers’ GLOW group that helps empower young girls in the slums, and help to do case studies that highlight the lives of young children in bridge camps. I quickly realized that doing sustainable projects here is not going to be easy, but I think it will be very rewarding.

In the meantime, I’ll let some pictures show some of the things I’ve experienced in the last week…

I was scared to get in a rickshaw for the first time because I was convinced we were going to crash. Everyone weaves in and out of traffic like crazy, and the honking never stops.

Oh, and we fit 10 people in one once.

 We’ll be coming to the slums regularly for Alee’s GLOW (Girls Empowering Our World) Group. Some of the young girls who attend are in school, and others work in domestic labor jobs. Often times their parents can’t afford school for them or they send their sons instead. It’s a humbling place to visit, for obvious reasons.

These women are in desperate need of more water and will wait long hours to fill just one bucket for their family.

It's hard to imagine how people live in these kinds of conditions. 

You could probably have guessed this, but India is not exactly known for its cleanliness and sanitation. Trash is everywhere, and I’m now accustomed to seeing men pee on the streets frequently.

I’m feeling more and more grateful that I don’t have an extremely sensitive sense of smell.

After two days of hot weather, we got to experience monsoon season at its finest. The streets quickly flooded, and we got to walk through it all—hello trash, sewage, and lots of human waste…

In addition to stray dogs and the occasional cow roaming the neighborhood, I saw a monkey on a street corner while walking home from church. Enough said.

I don’t think the individuals where we live have seen too many white people before, so we attract a lot of attention when we go most places. People will often stare, smile and wave, or ask to take pictures with us. I’ve never felt like more of a celebrity than when we visited Golkonda Fort, a historical site here in Hyderabad.  Men, women, and children would come up to us and would say, “Photo? You from where?”

 Life is not easy here. Just walking along the main street we see beggars, individuals with ragged clothes and no shoes,  people with physical deformities that likely could have been prevented, and those who are struggling and in need of help. I know that despite all these things, many people here are happy, and I’m amazed by it.

To be honest, I’m not sure how good I’m going to be about this whole blog thing, so make sure to also check out our team blog! :)