Summer Abroad

Each summer the Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) provides funding and support to undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania to conduct independent research and volunteer internships in India. Featured below are excerpts from two CASI student intern blogs:

Amy Summer, a Cultural Anthropology major working with Shahi Exports in Bangalore India.

When I lived abroad in Ecuador, I could never pick up a word just by hearing it. I always had to write it out and see its physical manifestation. I would carry around a tiny notebook that was eventually filled with words. The same has been true with learning Hindi and Kannada. But, other than the standard Namaste/namaskara, there’s one word that I remember purely from hearing it so frequently—aloo. In our interviews with migrant workers living in hostels provided by Shahi, it was a disappointingly common answer. Every time I heard it, the word popped out from the rest of the rhythmic syllables that I could make no sense of. What do you have for lunch? Aloo. Dinner? Aloo. What did you eat back home? Aloo. Aloo means potatoes, which are often eaten along with rice as a staple dish. This type of diet, amongst a variety of other environmental and cultural factors, has led to malnutrition amongst many of the female migrant workers from Orissa.

You can view the full collection of Amy's experiences here.

Kurt Koehler, a Health and Societies major working with CORD-Sidhbari in Himachal Pradesh India.

My supervisor at CORD, Narender, has had extensive discussions with me about research versus action. At first, I thought he flat-out despised research, whenever he would voice his skepticism on gathering data for the sake of data. When I discussed my plans for collecting quantitative data on health measures in the farmers and young children, he would say “Ok, just don’t give me any sigma’s or pi’s or anything like that. This is about improving their lives, not about statistics.” He is clearly more concerned with action than with data. Coming from Penn, where so much value is placed in research, I probed further for his thoughts, and he expressed that research is more often than not “pure,” or done simply for the sake of generating knowledge itself. “What good is the data if it won’t be used for anything useful?” he’d argue. I would probe further, stating “Some people would argue that action can’t be taken unless the facts are straight,” and cited the example of my nutrition project, where, at least to me, it seems CORD can’t make an effective intervention unless accurate data is to be gathered on nutritional intake and health measures among farmers. Narender clarified, stating that research is indeed essential, but that there is often a disconnect between research and action.

You can view the full collection of Kurt's experiences here.

To learn more about the other 19 students currently in India this summer, visit the CASI Student Programs page here.