We live in an extremely nice part of Pune. Every building has a solar panel, and most of the families have cars in addition to motor bikes. Aside from the solar panel/car thing, the homes at first seemed to my inexperienced eye to be similar to other areas in Pune- small living space, relatively dirty (when you compare it to Canada!), with wild dogs, cows, goats, and pigs running around. The inside of each home is, as I’ve found to be typical so far of a house in India, spotlessly clean but not really decorated. There is garbage everywhere on the streets.

Pretty typical forest/side of the road

But the roads are paved here, there are more gardens, the parks are cleaner, and there are significantly more shady areas (the more shade the neighbourhood has, the more expensive it is generally).

The Deep Griha house is run by a woman we call Auntie. But we mostly interact with Munda, the door-minder... who has sort of appointed herself to be our mother. Going out at night usually results in hand-wringing and cries of “be back by ten-thirty, understand? Teeeeennn thiirrrtttyyy”. When we are out, she worries. When we (aka I) do something stupid, she is unafraid to chastise us.


Becky, Jemma, and I got back from our first shopping expedition on Saturday, glowing with excitement. We had gone off on our own and survived! We had haggled (we were terrible at it), and bought beautiful cloth (to take to the tailors and get made into a few salwa kameezes for a pricey $4), and taken a rickshaw without falling off or dying. We had eaten our first non-Deep Griha food without consequences. We were on top of the world.

Left to right: Me, Jemma, Becky

Munda was waiting for us when we got back.

"Oooooh! So pretty, very pretty!" She exclaimed when we proudly showed her our purchases. "Kitne hai?" (how much?).
"100 rupees." (About $2.25)
"Noooo!!!!" She wailed, shouting in her distress, wringing her hands. "Too expensive! Oh oh oh! Very bad job!"

Munda picked up the next purchase: a gorgeous quilt Gemma had bought. "Kitne hai?"
 "200 rupees"

"SO EXPENSIVE!"


Later, when I crept down to the kitchen to get a glass of water, she pounced on me. I was to haggle better next time! I was to be insistent and crush every extra rupee out of the price. Munda was so concerned, so worried, that we were being ripped off- she is such a good representation of most of the people we have met here. These people are determined that we enjoy our stay, that our trip remains hassle-free and, most importantly, that no one ever rips us off. The other minuscule percentage seems to see dollar signs popping out of me every time I enter their radar. And I can’t really blame them- as a white person walking around with a nice backpack and a camera, I must represent wealth.

Walking down our neighbourhood- our house is just to the left of that huge truck

Morning starts at 7:00. I wake up (this is involuntary mind you—it’s when Pune traffic starts and the street dogs are at their loudest!) and either go for a walk or try and brush up on my Marathi and Hindi. The cultural centre (where I stay) usually makes us breakfast and dinner, but I’ve taken to opting out of both. I get my one portion of fruit in the morning –I buy pomegranates at a market nearby- and the lunch portions at Deep Griha are so huge that I don’t need to eat for the rest of the day. For many people lunch at Deep Griha is the one time they get to eat, so the food portions you get are enormous. The lunch ladies also like to sneak in an extra spoonful of food, or another chapatti, if you’re not paying attention!

Munda in particular always seems to worry that I'm not eating enough. She still makes extra food for me, and checks to make sure I'm eating enough at dinner time.  I get a good telling off if I eat less than two chapattis!

The food we eat is amazing. Chapattis are kind of like bread-y pancakes… there is no other way to describe them! We always get mounds of rice covered in a liquid curry, and then some kind of vegetable curry on the side. You eat with your right hand, rolling your curry into a ball. I’m absolutely terrible at it, though now that I’m on week 2 in India I’m getting less food on the floor/my face and more in my stomach.  I had my first experience feeding the children today though, and that was a disaster. Putting food in the mouth of a 6-month-old is way different than putting food in my own mouth!



Deep Griha was founded in 1975 by Dr. Neela Onawale and her husband. Neela, now over 67, is still here every single day (!) running Deep Griha. She left Wednesday for a month-long trip to the States and the UK to visit various donors.  To my surprise, she actually seemed to recognize me when I briefly saw her on- hugging me and asking how my parents were. Her memory must incredible… she hasn’t seen us for 10 years!­

Neela’s project initially started with her feeding children in a nearby slum from her own pocket. The project has since expanded to include schools, nutrition centers, HIV education, and women's empowerment programs in three large slums in Pune. There are also two large centers located in villages outside of Pune. One, the City of Child, was built to give children a place to stay, proper nutrition, a safe play area, and counseling. The other center, the City of Knowledge, works to combat the lack of ­­­education in rural areas. It provides children living in rural areas with an opportunity to get city-level knowledge that otherwise would never be available to them.

Both the City of Child and City of Knowledge are reasonably far from Pune, so I haven't had the chance to visit yet. City of Child is far enough away that you usually stay there for a few days. I'm making plans to stay at City of Child for a few weeks in about a month.


I had plans to visit City of Knowledge on Thursday, but decided at the last minute not to go. Sahara, a sister organization to Deep Griha, had been nominated for an HIV/AIDS research funding program from the States. They desperately needed someone to write up a concept paper detailing their research proposal. Gemma and I stayed behind to come up with some sort of plan- everyone working for an NGO here is extremely overworked, the people of Sahara being no different. They gave Gemma an extremely basic idea of what the research they were doing before running off to yet another meeting.

It was fascinating to write a charity research proposal- when you do it, you have to be able to provide budgets, staff numbers, huge piles of statistics detailing the number of people you treat, success rates, mortality rates, etc.

We weren’t given any of these numbers, so I spent a very interesting (and slightly depressing) afternoon looking over old Deep Griha and Sahara budgets, research grants, and statistics in order to get a better idea of the kind of numbers Sahara would be dealing with. Both organizations are extremely understaffed, and their budgets are tiny in comparison to some of the smaller organizations I had worked or volunteered with in Canada. And yet they deal with three times the number of patients. Doing this proposal gave me a real appreciation of the huge challenges that Deep Griha, and other organizations similar to it, face.

The view down Rametikidi, one of the education centers

Wednesday I enjoyed my first experience in the crèches. The crèches were set up in the slums for younger children whose parents both needed to work in order to make ends meet. It was obvious which kids were newer to the program than others- their limbs were emaciated, their stomachs bloated… tell-tale signs of malnutrition. Some of the children I played with probably as old as two, and yet they weighed and looked no older than a year old. They were extremely cute and extremely naughty- some of them didn’t know what to make of me! They climbed on to my lap, pulled at my curly hair, and peed on my clothes. But at least I didn’t step in poo like Sneha, a local volunteer.

Children in the creches... sorry about the terrible picture! My memory card got deleted so I'm left with pretty slim pickings

Sneha had told me about a movie, Salaam Bombay, showing for free at the National Film Archives of India. ­The other volunteers were exhausted, so I went to see the movie alone. I actually remembered to take my shoes off before entering the cinema, and then found a place to stand in the movie theater before the previous movie had finished. About 20-30 people were standing there as well, waiting patiently for the movie to end. The movie theater itself was packed- people sat up and down in the aisles, and stood up against the walls. It was a very long movie, so I can’t imagine standing was very comfortable! I sat in the aisle with Sneha and tried to hide after a few well-intentioned but still uncomfortable attempts made by people to give me their seat.

The movie was excellent. I think it has been nominated for the Cannes Film Festival. Should you get chance to see it- it has English subtitles- I highly recommend it. Bring tissues- it’s about the life of a street child in Mumbai.


Since arriving in Pune I’ve been dying to get the chance to ride on the back of a motorcycle. Sneha offered to drive me half way home, and I jumped at it. Looking back, this was probably an extremely stupid thing to do because of the whole no-one-wears-a-helmet thing, but I wasn’t particularly bothered by it. The traffic is crazy, but I’ve yet to see an accident.

Every few blocks we would encounter a particularly large pothole and I would bounce up a few inches in the air- it was a lot of fun. I told Sneha that I wished that I had a motorcycle, but I would never be allowed to get one because my parents think it’s too dangerous. She replied that she wished she had a bicycle, but there’s no way she would be allowed to get one because her parents think it’s too dangerous! Funny how the world works.