Volunteering in India: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

grikoo

good point there.

certainly.

Yes, in areas that have tourism or international business, it's fine. My concern is in rural areas, where there is absolutely no use of it. Often, men will be the ones to take advantages of such schools, specifically so they CAN go to a city and find a job. This leaves the women and children without men or proper families, and makes them reliant on their husbands income in the city. Not a good situation in my opinion. If anything, they should start rural women's schools, taught in the native tongue, in order to teach basic first aid, sanitation, household budgeting, basic math, trade skills, etc. Basic home economics in other words.

Absolutely.....

dzibead

My two cents' worth about volunteer English teaching: I think a lot a casual, short-term volunteers from the West say they want to do this because it's the only "skill" they have to offer -- never mind the fact that there may be no real need for it, or the fact that India already has a substantial number of Indians who are essentially native speakers of English and English teachers and who could teach the language when and where there is a need. Quite frankly, most volunteers have no training whatsoever in how to teach English (or anything else). Just because you can speak a language doesn't mean you know how to teach it to somebody else.

grikoo

Yes, I think it's silly for an untrained english speaker to expect to be able to teach english better than an english speaking Indian.

For one, the Indian will at least be able to explain the difference in grammar between english and the native tongue.

And of course, the only areas lacking Indians capable of teaching english are those areas that don't need it.

capt_mahajan

Some interesting statistics about English speakers worldwide.

Of the top two countries in numbers, the US and India, my guess would be that many in both don't really speak English

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ing_population


Ps, yep I know its wiki

grikoo

As an american, I can agree with that.

From the southern US midwest- "wees jist cummin frum the crick. You uns got sum lemnade fur us?"

Just barely recognizable as english.

Nick-H

...sounds like Yorkshire to me!

__________________
.


Just one member of the IndiaMike Mod Team

grikoo

Basic brutalizing of common words the same. Accent quite different.

Nick-H

I'd like to assure all yorkshire folk that it wasn't me that said anything about brutalising words. Not at all. Never even thought it.

It was Him!

grikoo

Just for the record, I had 7 years in Texas as a child, so brutalize a few common words myself.

poipleshadow

We get lots of volunteers and I think only a third, maybe less have skills in teaching, but with us as we concentrate on children mainly under the age of 10 I think they pick up the English language well, even if they're not being taught it properly as the are hearing it every day and also in various different accents. The younger they are the better they pick it up. They certainly do a better job at English than I do at Hindi and the other 4 to 6 languages they speak!

I think more and more volunteers are doing basic Tefl courses if they are volunteering, which is good.

Thanks

__________________
Rob
Trying to make the world a better place is really hard...

Nick-H

cyhiraeth, I'm moving your posts and replies to a new thread of their own.

Done. You can find it here -->So Far It's Only Been Bad

gorigirl

Except that you'd have to pay the Indian, and the American will do it for free.



I also want to say, as someone who has supervised something like a hundred volunteers in the past 10 years, 90% of them aren't worth the time and effort (which then translates into money) that you put into them. They're a necessary part of the NGO/not-for-profit work force because these organizations are severly under-funded, but many American volunteers have a lot of good intentions without a lot of useful skills. They lose interest in what they are doing very quickly, which then turns into laziness and unreliability. Add on top of that the lack of knowledge about cultural norms/history/etc and how to live daily life, and it's a little surprising that Indian NGOs want American volunteers at all, particularly on a short-term basis. My opinion is that places like the American Indian Foundation have the right idea (creating a fellowship program to match volunteers who have professional skills with NGOs that need someone with those skills) in order to American volunteers in India to be the most useful and effective in their work and for Indian NGOs to get back what they put into these American volunteers.

carlaeb

I call this the "you could be suffering from cancer in a refugee camp in Darfur after watching all your family die" argument. The point is that there is always something worse happening somewhere. You can not tackle all the world's problems. All you can do (if you care enough to do anything at all and most people don't) is try to help out in whatever way you can to assist in making the world better in whatever way you can do so.

If you are helping animals, that is a positive thing. That is more positive than being a marketing director for a corporation, for example (although plenty of those people do things in their spare time that help the world- I don't mean to generalize, just to make a point). And yet you never hear people say things like, "why are you working as a marketing director when people are starving?" or "why are you spending money on a fancy dinner when people are starving?"

For some reason though, when people help animals, this argument always comes up.

No matter what you do, you could always be doing something to help people in a worse situation. There is misery everywhere. If you choose to acknowledge it, your only course of action is to help alleviate it where you can. And there are many ways to do that.

As far as thousands of children dying in the streets, this is simply not true. It might have been true 40 years ago, but it is not true now. Urban poverty in India looks horrible (and I don't mean to romanticize it- it IS horrible) but it is not as bad as it looks to people unaccustomed to it. People are all eating in Indian cities. You don't see naked people- everyone has clothes. You don't see starving people either. You see people who are sick and wait too long to go to the clinic, but they do have access to medical care in the cities. In the slums themselves, people even have electricity (albeit stolen) and own lots of things like televisions and stoves, etc.

The serious poverty, I hear, is in the villages where people do not have medical care and where some don't have enough food. But to Western eyes, it doesn't look nearly as bad. Still, I've never heard of children dying of hunger, although many are malnourished and dying of disease.

By the way, this is all based on what I've been told or seen with my own eyes, and like everyone else, I could be misinformed or adding my own interpretation to events.

I think these questions you are asking are all normal and valid responses to poverty and suffering. I think the topic is fascinating.

I think also at the bottom of this matter is that animals are easier to care for and provide for. There are no overwhelming social situations to grapple with. They simply want food and petting.

Haylo

And neutering.

Nick-H

Thought this was the thread about what women wear and how to stop men staring for a minute.