Fighting for social justice has always been a passion for me and this summer the LILAC program offered me a chance to follow my passions in an incredible environment. I am living in New Delhi, India, working for the Naz Foundation, and sharing an apartment with a Naz coworker from Chennai, India. I first visited this amazing organization through my study abroad program last fall and followed up through email and Skype to develop the internship.
The Naz Foundation addresses multifold issues through many programs, including GOAL, a girls empowerment program where coaches teach netball (a popular variation of basketball) along with life skills like finance, health and communication. At their Care Home, Naz houses, educates, and nurtures 31 HIV-positive orphaned children aged 5 to 19. The Naz LGBT activism program works to decriminalize homosexuality and offers services to gay people with and without HIV/AIDS. All Creatures Great and Small, a 鈥渞escue sanctuary,鈥 takes in over 400 abused and injured animals, from dogs, cats and cows to goats, sheep, donkeys, ducks, geese, and emus.
When I left the U.S. I thought I would spend most of my internship helping coaches at GOAL Program sites, but I soon learned how much more I would do!
Every morning, I barter for a good price with a passing rickshaw driver then careen through the steamy 110-degree streets of Delhi to work. Walking into the GOAL program area at the Naz office, I am greeted by the relief of air conditioning and the intensely fast-paced atmosphere of this organization where a dozen coaches scramble to prepare their daily GOAL sessions, speaking rapid Hindi.
On my second day in this chaotic passionate environment I was asked to prepare Quarterly Reports for all 25 GOAL Program schools. This meant figuring out which questions to ask, finding the right people to question, and deciphering rapidly spoken, difficult for me to understand accents. Since then, I have also written case studies of individual girls in the program and interviewed one (with the help of a translator) specifically about what she gained from participating in GOAL. Now, I am coordinating fundraising plans and writing grant proposals with five people, some of whom are rarely in the office or who work four flights up un-air-conditioned stairs. However, after seven weeks in this tumultuous but electric environment, I am gaining ease with accents and understanding how to carve out my niche in the office and at the Goal sites.
When not in the office, I travel with the Goal coaches to the different sites around Delhi, bumping along in a rickshaw. Cars honk their horns and rickshaws and bikes swerve to miss collisions in the crazy traffic of Delhi. We pass empty lots of garbage with cows, pigs, dogs, goats and people wandering through. In the outskirts of Delhi, children laugh and run through the dirt streets, dodging the old women sitting out on the stoops selling everything from corn on the cob to clothes to jewelry.
When we arrive at the field, mostly dirt with two netball goal posts on each end, girls usually wait for us excitedly ready to pump up the balls and prepare the field with white powder lines. At one site, an assistant coach asks me to teach her English while we play netball, so we talk and I give her readings in English between sessions. At another site, I coach a group of 20 of the 120 participants. Even with the language barrier, we learn a little of each other鈥檚 languages and I demonstrate to them how to throw and catch a ball, helping them gain confidence in their athletic skills.
Teaching ESL has also been a big part of the work I鈥檝e done at Naz. I work with a group of about 10 kids, all HIV-positive. Every time I walk up the stairs, I do not know where we will have class: the conference room with air conditioning or gathered on the floor of the kids鈥 room, with a fan barely stemming our sweat. Sometimes the cleaners arrive and we move to perch on the bunk beds. Because neither the conference room nor the kids鈥 room upstairs offer internet, and a white board and paper are not easily available, I have gotten creative with activities, writing English vocabulary words on recycled paper I find in the trash and helping the kids act out or write sentences using the words.
My personal and professional growth these past seven weeks has been incredible. Assisting this multi-faceted, high-energy NGO make a difference in individual lives has empowered me in many ways. This internship gave me the opportunity to witness the power of sports-based programming on young girls鈥 lives. As participants gain body awareness through netball and through lessons on menstruation and body image they learn what their bodies can do. They will grow to adulthood as more self-aware young women: healthier, more confident, and with skills to transform their own lives and the lives of those around them. Teaching English and teaching netball taught me how to write lesson plans and how to deliver classes in very different situations, but also offered me the joy of the smiles from the Care Home kids and the Goal participants every time we arrived.
Living in Delhi has been an incredible experience--from my internship at Naz to simply figuring out where to buy milk at the local market, to exploring beautiful temples and gardens around the city. This valuable NGO experience in such a historically and socially complex country has challenged me in new and interesting ways. The Naz Foundation fueled my passion for social justice and offered me important real world experience to understand nonprofit organizations, a direction I hope to continue after my 今日吃瓜 graduation.