Normally this summer I would have spent it trying to pay off my overdraft, going to a few festivals and maybe even a holiday, but instead I got a once in a life time opportunity to travel, help others and learn, which turned out it was the best summer of my life.
I got the opportunity to get out of Bromsgrove for ten weeks and travel halfway across the world to India with 45 strangers volunteering with Platform2. Platform2 is a global volunteering scheme for 18-25 year olds to travel to a developing country and get involved with global issues of justice and poverty. It is full funded by the Department For International Development and is free.
We spent the first week in India travelling around sight-seeing and acclimatising to the country, and the other nine weeks on the project - teaching and doing construction in our local community, Palampur. Although we worked Monday to Friday 9am till 5pm, everyday was so diverse and we learnt so much. I met the most amazing people and hopefully made a difference however big or small. At weekends we got the opportunity to travel around India, which was so amazing to see how different the country was.
At times we found it hard to adjust to the alternate climate and to accept the injustice and poverty, but this was all a part of the learning curve. Personally, I had never been to a developing country and had only seen mediated images, which we choose to consume but here we could not escape it was real and it was where we were living and working. There were so many highlights to my trip, the children we taught made the experience what it was and taught me so much. We saw them progress and once they became used to us they were so happy and well behaved, we painted the day care centre and the happiness on their faces was beautiful.
The hardest part of the trip personally for me was adjusting to the way in which women are treated and regarded in society, which we encountered first hand. Pawana, the manager of the day care centre, had three girls - two of which her brother looked after as she just wanted boys, and the other baby was left with her. She left the baby to crawl around the dirty floors paying no attention to it whatsoever, and when the baby weed herself Pawana rubbed her face in it, treating the baby like a dog.
‘In India 50million women are ‘missing’, 25 per cent of girls die before they turn five - mostly starved or neglected, buried alive in pots or drowned in milk.
The human population in most countries is 100 men to 105 women, but in India it is 93 women to 100 men. This epidemic of women being killed of is purely due to their gender, infanticide is still apparent in India as baby girls are seen as an economic burden due to the high cost of weddings. We visited many pregnant women in the community to ensure they had, had all their vaccinations and to take them food or help them with any issues. Women naturally give birth at home with very little government support or help. One pregnant woman dies every five minutes, during childbirth. We also found out that in India, they cannot find out the sex of the baby as it may be aborted. Our rights and freedom are taken for granted within the UK which is why I hope to share my experience and stories to make a change.
‘Some people wait for change to happen, other volunteer platform2’
Jenny
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