PVS

I just finished my third full day of work (that's right, Indians work on Saturday).  We had a few meetings before that, but really got started on Thursday.

The organization that I am working with is called PVS.  It was started in 1999 to provide aid to Hindu Pakistani refugees living along the border, particularly in the process of getting Indian citizenship. They have been fairly successful in getting villagers citizenship, and now are hoping to broaden their services.

For our project, we will be doing an an assessment of three settlements around Jodhpur.  We will look at broad demographics, access/quality of education, access/quality of health care, job availablity, women's rights, etc. Then we will compare it to district and national data to see where government services in the settlements are lacking.  And hopefully with this information PVS will be able to better fight for the necessary services, and create settlement specific programs.  It's a large project, but we planned out our remaining five weeks and are excited to get started.

In addition to lots of meetings, we visited the first settlement on Thursday evening. It was a powerful experience. Perhaps most depressing was the water situation... There is a pipe that runs through the settlement carrying water to the city. It sprung a leak and that is where they gather their water.  Where it pools below, that's where they wash their clothes. There is no electricity. There are no latrines. There are schools, but the teachers never come. The people in the settlements are agricultural laborers used to migrating according to the seasons.  Now their land is so dry and rocky, they can not cultivate it. They held a community meeting to introduce us and let them know what we were going to be doing over the next weeks. They begged us to help them.

I hope we can.