The India Programme

Programme location and general information

The India programme has always been in Kolkata (formerly known as Calcutta) , in West Bengal , where strong links have been developed with several NGOs. Volunteers have lived together in a guesthouse, with comfortable, basic facilities, and appreciated the opportunity to be with other travellers and volunteers. Kashrut is generally no problem in India as strictly vegetarian food is readily available. At weekends and after the programme volunteers have visited different parts of the country including visits to other NGOs, to the Jewish community and to various places of interest. As India is such a large country it would probably be impossible to do it justice in the short time most volunteers have after the programme, but favoured destinations have included Delhi, Agra and Kerala.

Placements

Please bear in mind that these are examples only, and we cannot guarantee that these placements will be available for future programmes. The information here is intended as a guide only.

*SPAN (Society for People's Awareness) – The organisation carries out non-formal education programmes, aimed at rag-pickers, as well as a children's rights project and other work targeting children and poverty relief. Past volunteers have written a report on child rights law which was discussed with the NGO and with legal experts, and developed educational programmes to be used with the rag-pickers.

*SEED (Society for the Environment and Educational Development) – SEED runs shelters and drop-in centres for street children, providing care and educational and recreational activities. Volunteers have devised, run and left instructions for a series of educational programmes, taken the children on recreational trips and helped workers at SEED with administrative tasks.

*Sabuj Sangha – Sabuj Sangha – The NGO runs non-formal education centres and night shelters, working to improve the living conditions of poor children in Kolkata. They also manage a water and sanitation project, as well as a women’s micro-finance scheme, in rural West Bengal. Volunteers have written reports about ongoing projects, drawn up a fundraising proposal, produced brochures and made a presentation to the Press Secretary at the British High Commission.

Hannah Glass – India 2004:

As I reflect back over the summer that I spent in India nearly six months ago, my experiences there seem to belong to another world, another time. India was for me a country of contradictions: rich and poor, past and present, East and West. The three months that I spent there were filled everyday with new sights and new people as well as a growing understanding of how life works there. The culture shock which was immediately apparent upon arrival seemed to lessen as I got to know the local community and became accepted into my working environment.

I spent about seven weeks working with an NGO named SEED, (Society for Educational and Environmental Development) based in Kolkata. The organisation runs various projects simultaneously which include drop-in centres for street children and those who live on the railway platforms, night shelters and separate homes for girls and boys who are either orphaned or who have run away from home. These centres aim to try and give the children an informal education and vocational training as well as providing them with food and emotional support. I was really impressed by the number of different developments run by SEED and the dedication and commitment provided for by the staff who worked there.

During my first week in Kolkata, I and another Tzedek volunteer were shown around the organisation's various sites so that we could gain a clearer overall idea of how SEED worked in practice so as to allow us to decide where our time and skills would be most beneficial. Many of the places had full-time staff and a comprehensive programme for the children, so we chose instead to concentrate on those areas which lacked a defined daily structure.

Over the next seven weeks, we decided to split our time working with the children in several of the homes and shelters. We focused on running activities which included teaching games and songs in order to give the children a basic understanding of English and to introduce them to new ideas. Although I did manage to learn some basic Bengali, a significant language barrier still remained but we were able to overcome this successfully by introducing different themes every week such as nationalities or animals for example, which made it easier for the children to understand us and grasp what we were trying to do.

The children who were aged from about five to fourteen years were an absolute pleasure to work with. I was deeply moved by their unflinching cheerfulness and enthusiasm despite having suffered so much already in their short lives. Moreover, we were made to feel like royalty by the staff at SEED who always welcomed our advice and input. Although we were only there for a relatively short amount of time, it was clear that our efforts did impact on the children, obvious in particular from the change that occurred in the boys who appeared notably calmer and more attentive as the weeks went on.

I feel honoured to have had the opportunity to have gained such a unique insight into the Indian culture and way of life, something that I do not believe I could have achieved by simply traveling around the country. I did travel for about three weeks after my placement finished and had a fantastic time and it is this balance between work and travel that really allowed me to appreciate some of the complexities and wonders that the country has to offer.

Matt Freedman – India 2003:

India was the second third world country that I had worked in, after my gap year in Tanzania with another charity. It is always funny flying from the orderliness of Heathrow Airport straight into the busyness of Calcutta . Surviving the frantic driving of the taxi driver, we arrived at our hotel, which despite having a décor akin to a prison, had a certain unique atmosphere, being home to anyone from a Bangladeshi bloke who looked like Danny Devito to volunteers for other charities from Chile .

After a few days of orientation, I was placed with a charity called Sabuj Sangha who specialize in both rural work and urban schemes such as night shelters for street children, and schools. Initially I went to stay at this charity's rural office in a picturesque village located in the delta of the River Ganges. From our room I could see waterlogged paddy fields stretching in every direction to the horizon. The village was remarkably peaceful, until market day when they played Indian music on a loud speaker so that it could be heard on the other side of town.

The bulk of my work was in the office, where I offered to design a leaflet detailing the work of the agricultural department. Most of rural India is reliant on subsistence farming; however, a number of threats to this way of life exist. As healthcare has improved (though it is still terrible compared to western standards), there has been a population explosion. This has resulted in family plots of land being shared between an ever increasing number of offspring. The agricultural department concentrates on improving the villager's farming methods and increasing family income from the sale of surplus products. Leaflets are important for charities hoping to gain funding from organisations such as UNICEF and Comic Relief.

I started off by taking a tour of all the activities that the agricultural department were involved in, taking digital pictures on the way. I then returned to the Calcutta office and designed the leaflet on PageMaker. In between, I helped with the other staffs' English and Microsoft Office skills and made a critical assessment of one of their night shelters funded by a partner charity. Once back in Calcutta , the journey to work was a comical ordeal itself. First I took a taxi from the hostel to the train station followed by a quick haggle. The train was a quick half an hour trip to the suburbs, with entertainment supplied either by the chickens that people hid under their seats or a group of Indian style drag-queen beggars dressed in saris. From the station I was bicycled to the office on a 3-wheeled bike.

I was overall happy with my work for Sabuj Sangha, but remarkably jealous (in a nice way) of my 2 co-workers whose success was phenomenal. Having set up a youth club in our beloved village, they called a press conference, which resulted in an article on the front of the main regional English newspaper about Tzedek's work. Inspired by this, the members of the youth club were propelled into continuing running the youth club after the volunteers had returned to the UK .

The Tzedek volunteer programme provided me with the ideal way of seeing real India beyond the youth hostels and tourist restaurants. There is simply no way of living in remote villages, meeting local people and visiting night shelters without volunteering with a charity. In comparison, my post programme travelling looked quite placid.

Tamara Glassman – India 2000:

It's five months since I returned from Calcutta where I'd been a Tzedek overseas volunteer. It was a fantastic experience which I would recommend to anyone. But there's a problem: since my return I've constantly been making comparisons between Britain and India . And worse, I've been driving my friends mad by prefacing everything I say with ‘when I was in India '. The volunteer experience is unforgettable!

Tzedek has been running programmes like this for six years and every year they have to disabuse participants of any illusion that they will be heading overseas to change the world. Tzedek knows that each volunteer's host community knows and understands its own needs, and how these might be realised, much better than any programme participant ever could.

My placement was with The Sir Syed Group of Schools (SSGS), a West Bengal Non-Governmental Organisation which runs 25 community projects including schools, vocational training schemes and health programmes. They were very welcoming, inviting me to visit their different projects. I felt I had most to offer in their schools and my placement was with SSGS's Multi-Purpose Workers (MPWs) who teach young children and liaise with their pupils' parents. The children receive individual sponsorship from groups in America and Europe .

There were two main areas to my placement. Firstly, the MPWs invited feedback and I spent some time working with them, observing the way they operated. I wrote a report for them about the content of their teaching and how they went about teaching.

My second assignment was to review and rewrite the MPW's Early Childhood and Development Manual. This document had been written by an American sponsoring charity. The MPWs found its language too complicated so I worked on simplifying it which had the added benefit of making it more easily translated into the locally spoken languages (Bengali, Hindi and Urdu). I was gratified to see that, once it was rewritten, the MPW's were able to use it in the work with the children's often illiterate parents, giving them some insights into their children's educational and developmental needs.

I thought I'd had a good idea about the role Of a Tzedek volunteer. But my expectations were someway off the mark! I thought my hosts would set out what they needed and how best I could support them. In practice I had to observe their work, negotiate with them about my skills and experience and do all I could to carve out a role I felt I could fulfil. That was quite a challenge.

I also had to confront my expectations of my hosts. For example SSGS thought that they were successful just by taking children aged 4-6 off the streets and into care. I, on the other hand, could not understand why they didn't give the children an intense education as they would soon come under a lot of pressure to go back on the street and earn money to keep their families. Volunteers can share their insights but crossing continents and cultures requires that they at least check where they might be making assumptions.

I'd also expected to be working in a much more hands-on way. Other Tzedek volunteers had done so and I thought my work would be much the same. But there were great rewards to be had working behind-the-scenes, and I think my contribution will have a far more lasting effect. Anyway, even if the MPWs' performance could be enhanced, and I may have assisted with this, I don't think I could ever achieve anything like as much as they do.

My placement was a real opportunity to gain an insight into the way that developing country NGOs adapt in subtle ways to meet the needs of their community. I saw one example of this when I visited a very basic clinic for women.

The health workers told me that they had to charge for any treatment or medicines even though they could, if they wanted to, provide the services for free. The 5 rupee fee they charged was equal to an eighth of a daily wage labourer's earnings so could not be seen as cheap or nominal. But what SSGS had found was that the women believed that nothing of value could be gained without paying for it.

With hindsight my placement was also a chance for me and my host to learn. SSGS had had no previous experience of working with overseas volunteers. Like me they made assumptions. For example, western women are thought to be promiscuous, something they've ‘learnt' from seeing western films. So I dressed in the locally worn salwah suit and learnt some Bengali. I made genuine attempts to understand my host community's circumstances. It may have taken a little while but it worked. On reflection, it doesn't matter where you are in the world but if you make an effort to respect the local culture that respect will be returned.

I realised that it was only after there was this shared understanding and acceptance that I was really able to learn about my hosts' culture and religion. At the same time I was able to prove to myself that I can adapt to some pretty harsh conditions and I have definitely come back from the programme more confident and determined about life in general.

Since the summer I've been studying in Germany and share a dormitory with an Indian woman who had never previously left her home town. She really appreciated someone under standing why she had no idea how a power shower worked or why door locks had been made to be such a challenge!

I'd recommend applying for a place on Tzedek's volunteer programme to anyone in search of a unique experience. You'll need to be creative, committed, adaptable, patient and, above all, have a very good sense of humour. If that describes you then you will be in for an amazing and unforgettable time.

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