This time last year I was bundling up the kids to walk home through the snow after Christmas Eve candlelight church service, Silent Night still echoing in my head. Never did I expect my next Christmas would be in New Delhi instead of New England. Funny what life throws at you.

I’ve had a lot of blessings this year (it’s hard to have even a Christmas in India without thinking of one’s blessings). A big one of which is that I started a job at GlobalGiving. With a little more than six weeks of work under my belt I couldn’t resist the opportunity to check out some of these amazing projects I have read so much about and meet the impressive people behind them. Having spent the better part of my career in international development, I easily become frustrated with the short descriptions of the projects on our site. They give the basics, but it is hard to really feel the difference they are making. I want to learn so much more about them. What makes these people want to start such projects? What is an example of a story of someone’s life that was completely turned around as a result of this project? What was a failure, and how did that project leader learn from it and, as a result, improve the program? And, the biggest question of all- SO WHAT?? I don’t ask this in a callous manner, but rather–what is the greater good that this project is creating—what is the systemic change? Such big ideas are hard to sum up in a 200 character paragraph, and even if the project leader wrote diatribes of text, would we really read it when there are 450 other projects on the site to explore? So, I’ve come to India to help us at GlobalGiving become better storytellers and help the project leaders learn how to tell their stories more effectively.

Here I am, with my lovely colleague Saima, the ideal traveling companion who speaks Hindi, has memorized almost all of the GlobalGiving projects and does not snore, which is important during a 14 hour flight. Today we visited two projects. Sharan is in a difficult situation. Although the organization’s programs for adult drug abusers (started 20 years ago) are successfully gaining funds and becoming integrated into government services, their program for child drug rehabilitation is closing due to lack of funds. Rajiv, the Director, expressed his sorrow that these children who have such a complex set of challenges are losing the only sense of home and family they have. We met the last five boys still living at the center, and were moved by their accomplishments of seeking to get off drugs in the first place, surviving detox and the reticence they are now experiencing about leaving the center. This project is now seeking funds to place these boys with other organizations to finish their schooling and develop skills for the workplace.

More tomorrow, in my Christmas Day post.

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Tags: Children, Christmas, globalgiving, HIV, india

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 2:22 pm by Stephanie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.