EduCARE India

When I first arrived in Naddi after resigning from my comfortable sales job at a tech giant in Mumbai, I had limited knowledge about the development sector and the catastrophic environmental challenges daunting our planet. The radical decision to leave a prosperous career in advertising technology and join Educare as an intern was fueled by my persisting urge to find a deeper purpose in my professional life. I started the Solid Waste Management project of resource recovery with my two…

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On the move – Chemical to Renewable Engineering Making a portable solar light   After studying Chemical Engineering in UK, I got interested in renewable energies. I came across the internship opportunities offered abroad in India by EduCARE India NGO in micro-scale renewable / alternative energy projects in EduCARE India. I spend the month of July in induction training and settling down. Prof Kalia, a resource person / mentor with EduCARE India listened to my interest and ideas. He gave…

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To give you all a bit of a back story to myself my name is Ethan Donovan and my mother Rachael Donovan moved to India to work with EduCARE in 2011. I have been a part of and known EduCARE for a long time now and watched the organisation develop and grow. But only this year, after I graduated secondary school, did I take a gap year to follow my mother’s footsteps and undertake an internship with EduCARE myself. I…

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Did the time fly or did it crawl? I honestly can’t tell. The last six months have not always been easy. I’ve cursed India, I’ve loved India, but in the end I’m leaving EduCARE feeling pretty good. I didn’t always embrace this experience, but about half way through my internship my attitude started to change for the better, and I think this can best be demonstrated by my very different coordinator’s retreat experiences. Back in July I attended my first…

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Being part of EduCARE weaves some sort of spell – It constantly requires you to grow and change. Unexpectedly, several things have left a lasting impression on me. In no particular order: Cows, dogs, birds, spiders, leeches and slugs. Enough said. Girl’s Club While working on the field for a grassroots organisation in particular, it is hard to see progress unfold in front of your eyes… Unless it’s Girls’ Club. When I met the young girl’s in early July I…

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Gajner has got a treasure, a treasure that not a lot of people take care about. It is unique, huge, beautiful, amazing. I am talking about the desert and the wildlife sanctuary. My experience in the dessert started during my first week as an EduCARE intern in Gajner. Léa Monin, the SWASH coordinator when I arrived there, used to run for an hour twice a week. She told me about the wildlife sanctuary in the desert, which seemed to be…

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Gajner has got a treasure, a treasure that not a lot of people take care about. It is unique, huge, beautiful, amazing. I am talking about the desert and the wildlife sanctuary. My experience in the dessert started during my first week as an EduCARE intern in Gajner. Léa Monin, the SWASH coordinator when I arrived there, used to run for an hour twice a week. She told me about the wildlife sanctuary in the desert, which seemed to be…

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Even after 1.5 years of EduCARE India Internship, I have laughed, cried, been thoroughly stressed, and also overjoyed many times in what feels like a blink of an eye throughout my internship in India. Now that it is time for me to move on, reflecting on what I have learned has showed me that I am leaving EduCARE India as a completely different matured person than the girl I was when I first arrived. I wanted to first join EduCARE…

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Seven months ago I remember saying to a fellow intern, “wow, time is going by so slow,” and he responded, “wait until you start working.” He was right. The past few months in Educare have flown by and it has been an amazing experience. For someone like myself who didn’t join Educare as an internship requirement for university, my reasons for coming to India were a little different. I wanted to leave the regular 9 to 5 job in the…

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The retreats for Coordinators were developed during 2015 as an opportunity for the management team to come together and talk about changes that might have come about in the organisation, what they want to change, issues they face, their job roles, etc. This was the third Coordinators retreat of the year, but it was my first. I had come back to EduCARE after three months in Nepal and decided to take up the role of Centre Manager in a new…

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After 2 months of intense nutrition work with the community, the cooking competition in Chenni successfully finished one part of the project, opening the door for more workshops and raising of awareness amongst the girls and women. Everything started months ago when, after one more dinner with a family, I could not walk home because of all the rice I was fed. I decided that it was time to start a nutrition project. After some planning and discussions with Mr….

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During the whole time I have spent in India or any country, I have never experienced anything like what recently occurred in a rural town of Punjab. It was the biggest and most extreme protest I had ever seen. It all started because someone had ripped pages out of a holy book. People started protesting about that and while the police was trying to deal with the situation, one officer shot into the crowd and killed two people. The protest…

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If there is one thing to know about India, it’s that they love a good festival and celebrating in style. Luckily, we got to experience every first hand and on a quite a personal level. We started small and by the second day, it turned into one of the most intriguing events in my life so far… We spent the first night (Saturday), at a small celebration in Janauri, there was some delicious free food, a makeshift temple near the…

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I have a tradition of sipping a freshly brewed coffee on the brisk mornings of a hike to take in the sun rising over the beautiful view in front of me. However, after a cold and unexpected trek to Indrahar pass with Mr. B, Rachael, Daikin, Jakob and fellow interns, all I needed to wake and warm me up in the morning was a hot, spicy chai. It all started with a call from B early on a Thursday morning…

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One of the nicest aspects of volunteering in EduCARE’s Gajner office is the seemingly unlimited options for travel on the weekends. Situated in a central location in Rajasthan, Gajner has access to more interesting places than imaginable. A short overnight train or bus can bring you to the blue city of Jodhpur, the white city of Udaipur, the pink city of Jaipur or, my personal favorite, the golden city of Jaisalmer: I decided to do a short weekend trip to…

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September 30th, 2015 is a day that we, the Naddi interns, won’t forget. Everything had to be removed from the office/intern house of Dal Lake on this day, after months of waiting for the new houses to be built. There, some facilities are still not available and the shower room has apparently no wall to give intimacy in one of the houses… But the houses are built and most of the rooms are ready to welcome interns. So, in the…

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“I’m not going to make it, I’m not going to make it,” I kept thinking to myself as I focused on my feet while trekking uphill. I didn’t want to look up because I knew it would be hours of uphill until we reached the pass. In fact, there was so much uphill I couldn’t even see the top.  I was trekking through the most beautiful part of India, and I was dying. During the two weeks of holiday I…

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I have been in EduCARE long enough to see two dozen interns come in my life and leave it. Most likely forever. No hard feelings there, just a cold fact. The life of every EduCARE intern flows more or less the same course: confusion, understanding, hard work, leaving party. In between, the glances at the life we all know back home are few. Some search for them harder than other. End of the line, everyone had to abandon such things…

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Sitting on the rooftop of the Gajner intern house, I hear religious melodies travel across the desert’s horizon by speaker. The horn of a passing train blows in the distance, as below, the engine of a tuk tuk shakes in anticipation of its next customer. Looking up, the moon illuminates a slowly dimming sky. Looking around, I see hues of green, blue, and brown— Gajner is decorated with buildings of brick and cement, sandy roads and footpaths, isolated trees, and…

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Before I arrived in India at the beginning of June 2015, the news at home was displaying stories on a near daily basis about the insane heat waves across India. The south was experiencing temperatures nearing 50’C, Delhi was a toasty 44’C (112’F for my fellow Americans), countless photos of people guzzling water crossed my BBC news app. My friends and family loved to alert me of these temperatures, but I assured them I wasn’t going to places mentioned in…

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First of all, I’m not pregnant. Gajner is not one of those places where young people go and parents are scared their girls will come back with a baby in the belly. No sex, drugs and rock n’ roll around, trust me. Still, somehow a monster came to live in my stomach when I arrived to India, and it’s always hungry. I used to eat a lot back in Spain, but I never reached the levels of the monster. NEVER….

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I find myself at the end of a six-month internship with EduCARE India. As I was saying my final goodbyes, finishing up the last monthly report and making travel arrangement, the Project Director, Mr B, asked me if this internship met my expectations. And I had to say no. Not at all. Any undergrad, recent graduate or anyone at the “entry-level” of their career knows the importance of experience and how hard it can be to get that experience on…

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My intern flatmate Lea and I sat upon the marble wall fencing in the Birla Mandir from its gorgeously kept gardens below, looking out at the busy streets of Jaipur. Nightfall in big cities is always such a rush; I’ve almost forgotten the feeling after being in the village for so long. The streets are always jammed with auto rickshaws, cars, scooters, bikes and young lovers and friends setting out to drink chai at nearby, trendy tea spots or local…

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I am here above my past, above negative people, I am here in search of new learning, some good friends and exposure, I am here to serve people, understand myself & to deal with my fears, I am here to make a change, I am here to listen to every word so I can make a change, I am here for a beautiful world of sustainability, I am here at EduCARE. I have always been a family boy, born and…

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While working on my project at EduCARE, I’ve found that many days are emotionally draining and challenging due to my interactions with the local culture. Yesterday was definitely no exception. I’m based in Gajner, a little village in Rajasthan, and my project is to implement a waste management system. I only started two months ago, but I’ve managed to set up a system in the Intern house and Manoj’s shop, a neighborhood restaurant. After I’d implemented a sorting system in…

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Over the past 6-months, EduCARE India has seen a lot of development and improvement, and many incredible interns to help lead the way. Job roles have been given more clarity, more resources and tools have become available to interns and overall it has really strengthened the team dynamic across all clusters, from Himachal to Rajasthan. Although the entire COM (Collaborative Operations Management) team strives to ensure this happens, there is one position above all that seems to have a lot…

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 “It happens, it will happen again. It’s complex, it’s India.” ~Mr B Hai, my name is Bruno. One of my strengths is that I’m flexible: I easily adapt to new environments, I am able to blend into unfamiliar cultures and lay contact with people unknown.” At least.. that is how I used to reflect upon myself. ‘Self-reflection’: a major aspect in my studies ‘Regional Development and Innovation’. Flexibility.. I’ve never been so wrong. I arrived in India somewhere in the…

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This past week, the Bikaner cluster had to say a tearful goodbye to a wonderful intern who has been staying with us over the past four months, Lachlan Alexander. A spunky Australian with a wonderful personality, great beard, mind full of creative ideas and wisdom and a huge heart. While Lachlan has been here, he has been working on the MPAT survey (a survey created by IFAD) helping our cluster measure the levels of poverty in the migrant community of…

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  Living in India comes with many challenges; I am constantly being pushed outside of my comfort zone and forced to adapt. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines adapt as changing your behavior so that it is easier to live in a particular place or situation. I think the ability to adapt is the most important characteristic in order to be successful here at Educare. At home, I live in the comfort of a city that maintains a pretty constant 20- 28 degrees,…

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Living and working in Gajner has its perks and its challenges, especially when you are used to a big city like Toronto where you have unlimited space and privacy, and work and home life are completely separate. When working with EduCARE, it’s important to think of yourself as a role model and a leader in the community, because you are. The moment you are accepted as an intern with EduCARE you are representing the organization, its values and helping develop…

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