Six Years in India
Though short of Heinrich Harrer’s “Seven Years in Tibet”, my six years in India have been an incredible, transformative experience; it is not hyperbolic to say that this has been the most significant stretch of years in my life, both personally and professionally. I moved to India in February 2012 on a six-month visa and, at the time, questioned whether or not I would be able to last even that long. I can remember distinctly cautioning family and friends to not ruminate on my move too much as I could be back in a matter of months, if not weeks. Though there were certainly challenges faced during those initial months trying to adjust to life here, I will be eternally proud of myself and grateful to those here for not letting those, relatively speaking, minor issues persuade me to leave. India is many things all at once, but it will always have a special place in my heart for it is here that so many things in life seemed to “click”; as I recently said to my friends (who by now are more like family), in reflecting on my journey here, I arrived a boy and will leave a man. That may seem a bit cheesy or whatever, but I’ll attempt to articulate what I mean by that herein.
As I’ve written plenty about over the years, I arrived in India in 2012 after a year in Cambodia, which itself was born out of an identified need to drastically change my life’s trajectory. Simply put, I didn’t like the direction my career was heading in, nor did I believe in the person that I was becoming. Somewhere along the way I’d gotten away from where I wanted to go and who I wanted to be. Life has a funny way of transpiring like that: the daily realities of being a responsible adult leads to concessions being made along the way, and these micro-sacrifices of ideals and principles suddenly manifest in one day looking at a stranger in the mirror. I have always envisioned myself as a writer of some sort, who would contribute towards improving the human experience for others. I had become something else entirely and felt the need for significant change.
I should pause here and say that the course of action I took is certainly not the only way to attain this degree of change in one’s life. One could even make an argument that the manner in which I approached it, at least practically speaking in terms of personal and financial sacrifice, was in fact ill-advised. That said, the path I chose is intrinsically representative of my approach to life: jump in with both feet and then take a look around to see what it is that I’ve gotten myself into.
I came to India because I knew it would be very difficult. I’ve visited a lot of countries in my life and can generally find something I love about each. That was not the case when I first visited India in 2009. Simply put, I just didn’t like it here and couldn’t wait to leave. After the experiment living in Cambodia, and following a job offer to work on a sanitation project here, the compulsion to both investigate why I didn’t like India and to push myself to take on something that on its face was going to be personally and professionally difficult was too much to ignore. This is likely born at least partly out of my Irish-Catholic upbringing in the United States: suffering is somehow tied to salvation, and i felt I could use a little saving at that stage of my life.
My initial role here was to be the communications person on an aggressive undertaking: to improve the user experience of people in India’s urban slums forced to avail community sanitation facilities owing to a lack of other options through an innovative redesign of infrastructure, business models, operations and maintenance approaches, and communication strategies. We set out to design and build 100+ of these facilities in slums in two small Indian cities in the east. This was to be a 20-month mission, but one that would persist for nearly 4 years before our work was done.
The first 6–12 months of the project, from my perspective at least, was incredible. I worked with a fellow American in leading the communications activities, and we pretty much had carte blanche to do what we felt was best. This led to developing and implementing a robust communications strategy that included a website-cum-blog, social media channels, representing the project at conferences, making films (including a documentary that called for us to stay with a family in one of the slums we worked with), and a host of other activities. I traveled to the host cities many times to embed within communities to document their lives and then share their stories. The contexts certainly weren’t/aren’t easy, but this confluence of communications and development work was exactly what I was seeking, and I loved every minute of it.
Our project ran into many issues, unfortunately. We worked directly with government agencies on this, and it became abundantly clear that the public sector simply doesn’t move with the same speed or urgency that the private one does. As delays continued, I was asked to step in and take over the day-to-day management of the project, which necessitated spending upwards of 25 days a month living at our field office in one of the host cities. The hope was that after a few months, we’d be back on track and I could head back to Delhi where I was living. I ended up spending 15 months “in the field”, spending most days bouncing from one government office to another, desperately trying to get things moving. We ultimately were able to translate our designs into brick-and-mortar realities, but not before sacrificing a great deal. It stands as the most significant professional challenge I’ve ever been a part of, but one that was ultimately a point of pride: we were tasked with representing marginalized communities, fighting for their rights to avail life-changing technologies that most of the “developed” world completely takes for granted, and we overcame.
It would have been easy for me to leave India as that project wrapped. I’d already been here for 3+ years, far beyond what I had committed to. I felt a sense of accomplishment and self-confidence that I realized I’d long been searching for. I’d come here alone and made it not months but years; there would’ve been no shame in wrapping things up at that point and moving on. But I couldn’t seem to make that jump. Perhaps it was the intensity of the experience, or the relationships that I’d developed along the way, but I was hooked on India and wanted to see what else she could throw my way.
Interestingly enough, though, following the sanitation project, it wasn’t India that presented the next challenge, but various countries throughout Africa. You see, the company I work for has an international scope; we work throughout developing countries to work with people in their contexts to co-create solutions to their problems. This translates to projects throughout Asia and Africa, which can broadly be bifurcated between corporate and social impact domains. It was in the latter category that my next largest projects fell into, and found me visiting countries in crisis, along with one of the world’s largest refugee camps.
We engaged with a humanitarian agency on two distinct projects that I was a significant part of: to design and test a diagnostic toolkit for severe acute malnutrition and to develop programs to instill social emotional learning opportunities for refugee children. The former found me first in Mali before spending a month embedded in a small village in war-torn South Sudan; the latter necessitated multiple visits to Tanzania to work with Congolese and Burundian refugees.
The sanitation project was challenging in that you bore witness to people enduring shameful living conditions due largely to public apathy. The humanitarian projects were a different flavor of challenging: the work we were doing had a pervasive sense of urgency; lives literally hung in the balance. I had the opportunity to see the effects, and affects, of a genocidal civil war. I heard mothers in agony describe the horrors of being impotent in being able to save their children from starving to death. I saw firsthand the impact of decades spent living in a tent amongst 100,000+ others in a remote refugee camp in the thousand-yard stares of people just desperate for some semblance of comfort and regularity in their lives, to have a semblance of permanence after a lifetime in perpetual state of transience.
In each, we were afforded the opportunity to bring to bear the principles of human-centered design to develop solutions. Though I am happy to say that our efforts were effective in doing so, engaging with people in their contexts to accomplish this also opened my eyes to the sheer scale of the challenges people in such face, and the proverbial drop in the bucket our work’s impact would ultimately have in the grand scheme of things. One has to work very hard to keep perspective and to take some solace in the knowledge that some positive difference, any really, is a much-needed step in the right direction.
Working in such extreme situations is clearly emotionally challenging. Owing to this, there is an inevitable closeness that emerges with those that I worked with on each project. My colleagues became my friends before transforming into my family. We often reflect on the fact that each year is defined by the work that you are a part of. Spending year after year working to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges leads to familial bond not so easily broken.
In the last six years I have experienced much in life, far more than I could have ever imagined when I first accepted this job. Practically speaking, I have learned an incredible amount with respect to things like design thinking and design research. I’ve had the opportunity to work with people to translate their stories and experiences into tangible products or services that address pressing challenges. Doing so has required considerable up-skilling in many areas, which has been both challenging and incredibly rewarding. But to view my life experiences here solely through the lens of professional accomplishments and growth would betray the people that have made such opportunities possible.
As I said, several of my colleagues have at this point become family members. They took a chance on someone they didn’t know, from the other side of the world, and trusted in me to act as a steward of both their company and the vitally important work we do in service to those at the “base of the pyramid”. We have triumphed and failed, celebrated and cried, laughed and screamed, and we have done so together. I selfishly came here to challenge myself, to grow, to learn more about myself and improve. What I have learned along the way, and this is likely a reflection of the work that I have been lucky to be a part of and contribute towards, is that we can only move forward by doing so together; my growth is tied to our growth, and that is powerful to learn.
My time in India is drawing to a close. It’s scary to say that as I don’t really know what’s next, other than a return to the United States after nearly 8 years living abroad. It is heart-wrenching to think that those here who have been so integral to my Indian experience and all that I have learned and experienced these years will not be a part of my daily reality, but I know that their love and tutelage will long be a guiding star for my future adventures. I hope that this is not a “goodbye” to India but rather a “see you soon”, but the physical separation will not blunt the impact that this crazy country has had on my life. I simply wouldn’t be who I am today if it weren’t for the experiences that being here as afforded me, nor without the people that have become my Indian family.
