It’s been a year and a half since I was a UPenn junior and CASI summer intern, tucked into the lush foothills of the Himalayas for three months working for an NGO called Chirag. On the record I was there to assess their microfinance self-help groups, but as expected my time at Chirag ended up […]
I’ve been keeping a pretty two-sided internal dialogue about photography and ethics this summer. I was glad to see Becky’s last post echo a lot of my sentiments about the “rightness” of photography, that millisecond before you click when you ask y…
I received the invitation on one of my rainiest day of conducting interviews in Kasiyalekh village. I’d been walking from house to house with my friend and translator Tulsi as well as the president of the local Self Help Group, an active woman and…
Chirag and I are celebrating our one month anniversary today, and we couldn’t happier. Since my arrival in the hills, every hour has passed at a drastically different pace from the last. When I’ve been developing my research project I’ve felt a bi…
I’m going to go ahead and say that I’m not a very spiritual person. Not by intention really- I’m just a non-practicing believer in things being the way they are simply because they are. But these past few days I’ve had my dad’s words, spoken just …
Hello-ello…(-ello…) from 7,000 feet above! I’m writing to you from the Chirag headquarters in Village Simayal in Uttarakhand, up in the Central Himalayan region. Lucia and I arrived here late on Sunday night and have been spending our past few day…
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