Oh, Hai There.

My name's Viraj, and although Jill mentioned me in her post, I've never written on this blog myself. And now, on my second-to-last-day, Suneil has demanded blog posts from both me and Chelsea, so here goes nothing.

As usual, my experience with Maitri has been interesting - in the good way. This organization is amazing in the amount of responsibility it gives meager high school interns like myself, especially with it's own diligent team of employees and college-level interns. It's a little intimidating, but enormously fulfilling to see something you start and work towards become a reality. That's the feeling I got while contributing to Project Jagriti (for a description of the project, look at the previous post by Jillian). WE determined the content of the workshops. WE put the presentation together. WE led the seminar. And WE created the closing reports to give others insight into the project.


That's me trying to answer a question. I hope I got it right.

One thing I loved about these workshops is that despite how much I might tell myself that I'm the teacher in these workshops, I'm often the one who ends up learning more. All of the students we interact with have such a different background from mine, and offer perspectives through their stories and beliefs that I've never considered. I learn about their culture, one that despite my skin color, I still consider foreign. I learn about the Indian approach to dealing with certain topics that aren't as taboo in the states. I learn about what sort of pressures these students have (because all teenagers feel unbearable amounts of pressure, globally), what kind of families they come from, what their mindsets are. And I'm always surprised.

Back to our job: teaching. I loved these workshops because they provided us with immediate satisfaction that we were helping. I found that the students we talked to were, for the most part, lacking in knowledge on certain key topics involving sexual health. Watching their clueless faces turn to those indicating comprehension was definitive assurance that on an extremely small scale, we were making a difference. Which is a cool expression. In my mind, it means taking the difference (what's been subtracted), and filling it. In our case, that's filling in certain essential pieces of information which the excessively conservative taboos in Indian society restrict.
We bring these issues to light.
We talk about them.
We increase awareness.
And we make this acceptable, hopefully encouraging discussion and getting change off the ground.

This is all starting to sound a bit idealistic. But hopefully it made some semblance of sense. Thank you for an amazing experience this summer, Maitri, and I hope that I'll continue to be able to work with you in the future.

- Viraj

P.S. Here you can find the reports from our two latest workshops: