And last but not least the India experience is likely to boost one’s self confidence……………

 

As a volunteer at PLANT India in Chennai, I learnt many things on the professional, intercultural and personal level. The work I was doing was not very closely related to the field of expertise I learned at university – Media and Communication Science. Working at PLANT is more about social work and maintaining relationships with many officials, partners and most important with the people PLANT works with – people in the coastal area of Tamil Nadu. The organization’s good relationship with the rural people here and their ability to mobilize them for different projects is PLANT’s most important asset. This is mainly possible because of the very humble and down-to-earth staff. But due to lack of my Tamil language skills and some intercultural issues (e.g. officials get skeptical when white people they don’t know) I could accompany the 3 core staff of PLANT rather rarely to their meetings. But there were also many preparation works where I got involved in. These activities can be enumerated as: searching for interesting tenders in newspapers and online, over helping to formulate project proposals for these tenders and other projects, writing reports about different activities, creating a brochure about PLANT, doing online research, helping with hard and software issues, setting up an online system for reporting the daily staff activities, proposal status, addresses and other small activities in office maintenance.

 

And of course, I also met people in the villages that we are working with, did a small interview for an eco-tourism brochure with the help of a translator, did boat trips with them, helped them to measure different variables of the sea water for pollution control and enjoyed their hospitality several times. The documentation work of traditional culture and practices which was part of the FSL India description of “eco-tourism” projects, which PLANT was defined as one of them, was not very active in these six months of my stay. So I did some small pieces of research on this topic on my own and wrote about that on my weblog.

 

The level of busyness changed from day to day but it never got boring. This is precisely because I could travel in times of less activities or use the good equipped IT of the office to get busy with various personal organizational things over the internet. Second the office is in the same house where my guest family and me used to live which gave opportunities for many interesting discussions about the Indian and German culture and to do some free time activities with their two children. Work and free time, office and family merged to one integrated whole while it always was clear that everything I do is voluntary, and it was always alright to have a break or to be off for one or two days. What kept me being motivated to do my work was not only the good cause – even though it’s hard to say which impact it made – but also the positive bonding with the guest family.  

 

Of course, my intercultural experience with India will be very valuable as soon as I want to work for an international firm because of its economic importance due to one of the highest growth rates worldwide. But even more important is for me to see how a country successfully deals with such a high degree of diversity in cultures, languages and religions. And last but not least the India experience is likely to boost one’s self confidence since you will get used to the fact that nearly every Indian will watch you as a white stranger with lots of interests.

 

Fabian Bethg

FSL India Volunteer from Germany