A couple days ago, I stood in my new bedroom, surrounded by the dozen or so boxes I have been lugging around from house to house for the past three years. I picked up piles of junk and, unable to decide what to do with them (do you throw away some chap stick when you […]

I, like most people, tend to romanticize the personal past. I think the grass was greener during some previous stage that is over and done with and exists only in my unreliable memory. During my last weeks in India, however, I constantly thought to myself, “You are going to miss this.” This summer was one […]

I sat cross-legged on a mud floor looking around a room, taking in the little trinkets sitting on shelves and the colorful array of posters covering the walls. Beside me sat Sarika, my supervisor and translator at Chirag. She talked to two young boys sitting on the bed. She did not translate word-for-word what all […]

The first thing I do when I visit a foreign city is go to a grocery store. Nine times out of ten, I don’t even buy anything; it is reflexive. I delight in weaving through the aisles and seeing what foods are similar and what foods are different, peeking into carts and seeing what people […]

Last weekend, a group of Chirag interns went to a wedding in a nearby village, Kasiyalekh. It was not only my first Indian wedding; it was my first wedding period. Sangeet On day one, we were greeted warmly. No matter where we walked, chairs seemed to appear out of thin air so that we did […]

Two weeks ago my fellow interns and I took a trip. (You have probably already read my co-interns posts about this trip, and I apologize for the delay; I have been having some serious laptop/Wi-Fi issues.) After four days of travelling, we arrived in Haldwani late in the evening after a nightmarishly long, crowded, and […]

On the seemingly endless flight from New York to Delhi, I braced for what I imagined would be an awkward couple of days. My father had arranged for me to spend my first three days in Delhi in the Defence Colony with his good friends’ parents, whom I had never met. As per usual, however, […]

My name is Mary Stachofsky, and I am from Reno, Nevada. I am in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and will be graduating in 2015 as a double major in Economics and Visual Studies. This summer I will be interning with the Central Himalayan Rural Action Group in the […]