Work, work, work...

Sadly, this post will likely be pretty boring as this week has been chock full o' office work and not much exploring. That said, it has been great to have so much work to do (as previously, I was forced to spend a fair amount of time twiddling my thumbs and always wanted to contribute more.

Strangely, two of my coworkers (one an administrator and the other a "social scientist" who went with the field team daily) quit without any notice last week. It was quite bizarre and, after asking around, I found out that this is quite common, but still considered to be extremely inappropriate. Weirder still, they came in Friday, announced they were leaving because they got other jobs with higher salaries, but said "if the new job doesn't suit me after ten days, I will come back."

On top of this, the head honcho has been out for vacation and will only be returning August 1st, so my other supervisor (the team's nutritionist), Rashmi, and I were basically the only people running the administrative office this week! It was insane and involved calling the ex-coworkers awkwardly multiple times in order to locate files on their computers and such. Extremely frustrating...

That said, we got a lot done this week.

I wrote (and rewrote) a grant proposal for the 2008-9 budget of our sewing program, which aims to give women skills that allow them to have an income, and therefore become more economically, and ultimately socially, independent.

I revised the latest edition of our Annual Report, and as the most computer-competent in the office now (now that the main administrator is gone), I was in charge of formatting the thing--a task that required hours of struggling with page numbers, low quality photos, etc.

And I was also in charge of planning a workshop and rally to take place in a different village daily next week in honor of World Breastfeeding Week. For this, I've primarily been working on a powerpoint that explains the benefits of breastfeeding, the how-tos, etc., while fighting some common misconceptions. As you would expect, most Indian rural women do breastfeed, but apparently, they have some beliefs about breastfeeding that could potentially harm their babies (i.e. they don't breastfeed right away--they give the baby honey or cow's milk for the first day; they stop breastfeeding--sometimes for a week at a time--if the mother has a mild cold; and they don't realize that everything that they ingest is eventually ingested by the baby).
The main struggle in my creation of this curriculum has been a way to visually depict everything. I don't know Hindi, but even if I did, it wouldn't help because almost all of the village women are illiterate. So, I am making a pictorial guide to breastfeeding, and Rashmi will then present it in Hindi. Finding photos that depict the fact that babies' immunity is strengthened by breastfeeding is hard enough; finding more culturally-appropriate images on Google (i.e. ones that don't show upper-class white women) is even more difficult.
I am pretty excited about the events that will take place though, and I think the powerpoint will be a useful tool, not only for these workshops but for the individual counseling that Veerni does with pregnancy women.

On top of this all, I've been working even more to understand the background literature about child marriage and HIV, for the ethnography I will be conducting. Fun, and fascinating, stuff.

Well, that is all. As you can see, work and no play has made Julie a dull girl...but I'm doing what I came here to do, and I do feel like I'm finally contributing, so I'm pretty happy.