hello india!

the Himalayas

As some of you may know, this summer I received a research grant from UVA to work with Arpana, a non-profit organization located in the Indian Himalayas.  So last week I left dear ole France and flew to Delhi, India. 

For the next 6 weeks, I – along with 3 other UVA students – will be interviewing students, teachers, and employers in the surrounding villages.  This is one of the poorest regions of India.  Most villagers make the equivalent of about $100-200 dollars a month (5,000 to 8,000 Indian rupees).  Many are farmers (corn, peas, rice, radishes) and have to hike down steep rocky trails along with their backs and donkeys laden with baskets of vegetables to send their produce off to market. Yes, many of these villages don’t even have a road .  You have to hike up the side of a mountain to get there.

In these remote areas, its hard for youth to get a good education past middle or high school because the schools are often too far away to walk (8 miles each morning? Yeah I think that’s a little much) and too expensive for their families to afford.

Computers are really starting to gain popularity in this region.  Sill only the most privileged families have computers in their homes, but many industries give preference to job applicants with computer skills. 

So where do we come in?  Arpana (the non-profit) wants to start up a new computer training center at their base in Gajnoi.  Our job is to interview local villagers, potential employers, and coordinators of existing computer centers in order to assess the discrepancies between the skills of the villagers and the needs of the employers. Then Arpana can create a program that will best serve the people.

After spending a couple days in Delhi and meeting up with other team members & lost luggage, we set off on a nice little 12 hour road tip to a little town called Gajnoi.  Its actually not as far from Delhi as it sounds, its just that there isn’t really a interstate/highway system in India.  We were going between 15-40 mph the whole way & dodging cows and on coming vehicles on the sometimes one-laned mountain roads.  Haha, it was really an adventure.

Chamba Town!

Don’t even bother trying to google map Gajnoi, it wont show up J It doesn’t even have a postal code, and when I asked if my mom could send me a birthday card, they said she could try, but it probably wouldn’t get here, the postman doesn’t come up this far, and we don’t really have an address. Hahaa, totally serious.

Gajnoi is a tiny tiny village in the most northern state of India – Himachal Pradesh. The closest google-able town is Chamba, and we’re about 8 miles southwest of there.

Yummm oh the food here is so spicy and wonderful! Well, it was for the first couple days—then I got pretty sick. Sooooo now I’m on a strict diet of rice and yogurt and honey. Yippee. 

Our internet here is kinda limited at this point (we were unable to buy internet cards for our laptops because we all use Macs and apparently the Apple craze hasn’t reached this hemisphere quite yet).  So I can’t upload as many pictures as usual because we’re using a friend’s computer and have a monthly megabyte limit. BUT I’ll try to put up as many as I can!