BECA 580 Goes to India!

The BECA 580 class is on the move again! Fourteen students, accompanied by Rai Poquiz in the role of Director of Production, Professor Betsy Blosser, and Consulting Professor Vinay Shrivastava, are in Delhi, India, to produce a video for the Smile Foundation. Smile is an organization that focuses on education as the primary means of effecting social change. The Smile staff identify ongoing projects in India in which someone is accomplishing a great deal in the field of education. Smile then provides the project with support - financial and empowerment support to enable the project to be self supporting. To do so, Smile partners with corporate donors practicing Social Venture Capital; these corportations wish to give back to the community, but they do not have direct contacts in the community. Smile employs their funding to support the promising projects mentioned above. Smile is organized so that the group of 40 original founders provide the operating costs; this enables 100% of corporate donations to go directly to the educational projects.
BECA 580 students will be producing a video on one of the projects Smile supports. "Swabhiman" means "living with dignity." It is a project directed toward women - adults and adolescents - to assist women in doing just that - by acquiring an education and a livelihood; by improving their health care; by reducing the age of marriage; and by taking leadership positions in the community. This first week in India, we are learning as much as we can about both Smile and the Swabhiman project.
Meanwhile, we are adjusting to our surroundings. We are staying in a "backpackers' hotel" in the Paharganj area of Delhi, near Connaught Place. It is in the middle of a bazaar. When we come out of the hotel, we travel through a narrow alley, full of shops, to a street full of shops, people, animals, and much activity. Yesterday, several of us walked past a pallet being readied to carry away a corpse. As we walk along the street, people approach us to sell us things or to beg. We have to watch where we step to avoid cow pies, water, rats, and occasionally, people sleeping on the street. Today we passed two cows as we walked the 50 feet from the place we ate lunch to the alley where the hotel is located. We have become experts at riding in motorized rickshaws, paying 100 rupees (or about $2.00) to cross the city, three at a time. We have learned that it is better not to look at what is happening on the road. The traffic is unbelievable and the "close calls" happen all too frequently.
But the group is in good spirits - excited about the project, about being in India, and about the constant inundation with sights, sounds, and smells. It is HOT, and the sun beats down so hard. Sun screen and bottled water are our constant companions.
Stay tuned for more reports as the project develops!