I’m Jade Brady and I’m from Ireland..Here is my experience about India..

Well…were to start with India….from the minute you exit the airport every sense is overloaded. There is just so many people, so much of noise, lots of color and smells. There are just so many new things to see in India, it is almost hard to concentrate as your eye is constantly being caught by something new and interesting. It is by far the best people watching place in the world! Everything about India is completely different to home or even Europe as a whole, and there is definitely a big adjustment to be made when living and volunteering here but now almost 5 weeks in I have begun to settle and enjoy the chaos that is India.

The biggest difficulty for me was learning the many customs India has especially around food, for the first 3 weeks I really felt like a small child learning to interact and eat socially. In India, people eat with their hands and by hands they mean only their right! As a lefty this was a huge challenge for me and a big adjustment in general as we spend our childhood in Ireland being scolded for attempting to eat with our hands and learning to dine with a knife and work so this was a total rewiring of my Irish brain! Although learning the many new customs is difficult at times and you are always hoping you are not offending people this is really what makes the culture so special here, it is truly unique and the polar opposite to Ireland. Now that I have a grasp of it I am beginning to appreciate the many differences that India offers not just from home but the variety of different customs and religions that reside here in India.

           

Indian people of all creeds and traditions share this wonderful quality of acceptance, there is nowhere in the world were 1.2 billion people can live with such varying religions and castes and get along in Peace while living so close together. It is a wonderful thing to observe and this Indian nature of acceptance also extends to foreigners, no matter what situation you are in it is very easy to find someone to help you along the way, even when there is no common language. This is especially true of my host family, they really care about me and ensure that I am happy always; they even make my food is a little less spicy than theirs as they know too spicy is difficult for me.

           

I am now two months into my work and I can truly say for me I have the best of both worlds working with PPDS a small NGO that works in small rural villages outside of Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu. My main role is to help with project planning for women’s empowerment, general administration and Facebook but I also get to visit the projects which PPDS oversee and visit the many people and children they help. One project PPDS operates in schools in very rural villages and from now until the end of my stay I will get to do some activities with the children. I also have younger sisters who are in Primary school in Ireland and some of the children in the PPDS School are they same age so I have contacted my sister’s teacher and she has agreed to start a pen pal programme. I will help the children here in India write letters to my sister’s class at home and this will hopefully start a class friendship for many years.

Time really does fly here and every weekend I have free I am visiting new and wonderful places with other volunteers I have meet. It is the perfect balance of work and play and I would encourage everyone to visit India it truly is like another amazing world.