It's really been seriously non-stop excitement since I returned to Bhorugram from Mumbai. Some of that I've detailed in previous entries. The latest bit was a visit of various high-ups from the Safe Water Network. I'm still working on fully understanding what SWN does, but it involves having a lot of cash. No, more than that. A large (not totality, but large) chunk of their funding comes from Pepsi and the Pepsi Foundation. They also have a board of various well-connected business and political figures, which means they've got a lot of opportunities for global reach. The website doesn't tell much about what they do, but I can say that at least in the Churu District, it's about building water structures. Specifically, a kind of rainwater-harvesting setup called a khund. I've taken some photos that I'll try to composite together to show you, but it's essentially a covered tank with a few inlets to let in rainwater. The fancy ones have gravel to filter the water a bit and maybe some pipes that let them collect runoff from nearby rooftops. SWN is giving BCT money to build them, both large-scale community ones and smaller household ones, and this is apparently the beginning of a project that's expected to scale up a lot.
Anyway, aside from meaning that I got to enjoy upgraded food for a day, the SWN visit also turned into my chance to play tour guide. I'd met one of their India-side execs at breakfast on my very first day in Jaipur, so when we ran into each other at breakfast again, it was inevitable that I'd be invited to join their fieldwork. So, after giving them a bit of a tour of my own REACH project (which potentially could measure the health outcomes of their water activities), I got packed into one of their SUVs and ended up serving as tour guide to the local landscape and the experience of being an expat in India. Can't say as I was sorry to go -- it really is nice to be able to just talk to someone in English without having to worry about the complexity of sentences or reducing my accent. Plus, trips like this are always educational.
Sadly, the village experience waiting for them was more song-and-dance than actual experience of village life. Once the cameras came out (they were trying to get some shots for the brochures), it mostly became everyone showing off their camels/children/whatever for the foreigners. There was what purported to be a meeting with village leaders to assess needs, but even my poor Hindi skills told me they were being taken for a ride. (Thankfully, so did the much better Hindi skills of their board member who's a former Pepsi India executive.) When they tried to ask the village spokesperson about things like average income levels, it was always "Oh, everyone here is very poor, we need your money," but somehow he could never tell exactly how much he or anyone else made for a day's work, or how they all afforded recharges for their mobiles, or how it was that they were still alive if it cost Rs 5000 per month to have water trucked in. The worst was when he got asked about illness in the village. He flatly denied that any children had died in the village that past year, and as far as ailments, the biggest concerns were sore backs and heart trouble[1].
So, for once, yours truly got to be a bit of a hero by steering our visitors in a new direction. Namely, offering them a chance to come five minutes down the road with me to the anganwadi. (Not that they couldn't have done it on their own, but it wouldn't have been on the normal itinerary, and I'm legitimately a semi-expert on the dang things now.) There was more song and dance here (literally -- the anganwadi worker basically made the kids dance for photos like circus animals[2]), but after that, I was able to show them something real -- the registers full of data that our project requires the workers to keep. The ones that show that yes, there were both infant deaths and stillbirths the prior year. Along with the health worker who can tell that yes, diarrhea is a very frequent problem here, and is sometimes fatal. They had video rolling the whole time for their PR work, so who knows? Maybe I'll be in a future Pepsi-sponsored video.
Even with the village numbskull, I'm still very glad they visited. They learned something, and I found out a few ideas along the way. I certainly got another example of how the REACH public health database model could be put to good use. Beyond that, it was interesting to hear about how Pepsi's starting to rebrand/rethink itself for the developing world. They've still got their traditional recreational beverage line, but they're also starting to realize that pre-packaged foods could have a very positive effect here. For one, anything Pepsi makes is an order of magnitude cleaner than any other available food. Second, most people here are undernourished. Supplying large numbers of calories (and maybe even some micronutrients) in a compact, well-distributed package is basically a core competency of soda companies. So, they might actually be able to help these villagers (in the short run) with just a slight twist on the formula that's rapidly putting Americans into an early grave. It's quite innovative and also mildly ironic.
[1] And this is why, despite the fact that women already do too damn much work in this part of the world, we run our project on the backs of female health workers. In anything having to do with children, village men have zero concern. Some of them can't even name all the children in their own family.
[2] You may be detecting a bit of an aggrieved tone here. I don't know why I was so bothered by the amount of photography that day. It's good that the level of poverty was being documented. I think it's that a lot of the human beings were being trotted around like showpieces. It's the same reason you might find it offensive that people around were snapping pictures of you just for being a white person in India. It's not the visitors' fault exactly, it's just that the whole thing got a bit distasteful despite their efforts towards cultural sensitivity.
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