Orientation, 10K, Photons and SIMs. We have arrived!

Its been an exhilarating five days! All of us arrived safely on Thursday, May 20th.  We are well ensconced in the safety of the United Theological College’s (UTC) guest house, surrounded by a neatly kept garden, attentive staff, and a busy and active seminary community including the Archbishop who Moledina says he saw on a stroll. UTC is in a fairly green part of the city, but still a very actively traversed part of town (read traffic!). We are central to everything (on a map), but this does not seem to matter because most things take about an hour to get to.

On Friday, bright and early at 8am, we began with an orientation session organized by Naina Lal of Experiential Travels. She put together a scavenger hunt so we could get to know the city. A bus ride or two, autos (three wheelers), camels (more about this from Lauren), and a crammed car-ride to our Punjabi dinner were the transportation choices as we got around the polluted city. Constance remarked at how Bangalore is much calmer than Delhi despite the traffic and Prachi and Gitika peppered us with similarities and differences between Bangalore and Calcutta. Aside from the great dinner and the safety training from Naina, the highlight of the day was meeting with Prathna of i-volunteer and Vikram and Krishna of Sattva consulting. Getting to know more about how organized volunteer engagement has become in Bangalore was really neat because there do not seem to be parallels in Ohio. Also, with Sattva NGO and social enterprise consulting, practicing in Wooster as a teaching tool, is a professional endeavor here in Bangalore. It was exciting to experience Krishna and Vikram’s drive to succeed in this space.

On Saturday, our teaching host, the Center for Social Initiatives and Management (CSIM) organized a visit to three different NGOs. We were escorted by the dynamic Mr Pani, Dr. Meena Jain and Ms. Varsha Avadhany. CSIM is our local partner led by local practitioners that work in the social, government and corporate sector. They agreed to familiarize our team with local social entrepreneurs, NGOs and also teach us SE content specific to India. We visited three organizations. The first,  Association for People with Disability, is a large 50-year old organization that has been helping differently-abled Indians with therapeutic services, training and employment, education and advocacy. Our visit there, led by Ms Gurleen thier public relations and volunteer management officer, illustrated the synergies between the different services. Also what was evident was the reach of this organization in rural areas where most differently-abled Indians live.

The second organization was Mithra-Jyothi, an organization that supports education for the blind with one of the largest or perhaps only audio library in India as well as provide employment readiness and job placement for the blind. This is a dynamic organization led and founded by Ms. Madhu Singhal, a woman who is visually impaired. We also had the opportunity to attend a graduation ceremony at Unnati Bangalore, a vocational training program for underprivileged youth. “Unnati equips the unemployed youth with vocational skills, life-skills, and assured employment in a reputed organization at the end of 90 days’ training.” All the students that had graduated had been placed. We left with the promise to return in June when classes for a new batch of children will start.

This visit to different organizations really gave us a sense of the diverse organizational models that exist to provide services that enhance livelihoods and dignity. As we returned home in our blue bus, Ms. Jain reflected on the differences between process organizations and organizations whose evolution follow the growth of the founder.

On Sunday, five students participated in the SunFeast 10K run. This is a 10K that has one of the richest purses in the world and so it does attract world class talent. Most of the key long-distance talent comes from East Africa and in this case, Titus Mbeshi of Kenya won, (I wonder if East Africa is not just the cradle of mankind but really talented people?).  Students participated to raise funds for Dream A Dream in the Maja run, a 5K walk/run populated by a gaggle of young Bangaloreans supporting different causes. Prachi won the unofficial award for most vocal participant. Please see our Flickr stream.

After the run, most of the day was spent ensuring all had cellphone SIM cards, and the new TATA Photon, a 3G device that allows you to have internet anywhere! In typical Indian style, it took up to Wednesday to get us all connected thanks to the dogged persistence of our “mobile-global-preneurs”. We have arrived! The journey begins.