International Development

By Nehama Rogozen
University of Maryland

Development is one of those words with many different meanings. It can refer to financial development, such as fundraising and long-term planning for organizations and businesses. It can refer to the environmental movement, inventions or personal growth. However, one form of development, international development, is an area which is not discussed frequently enough for my taste. Very few people have a true idea of what international development is, and even fewer people have personal experience with this field.

While its definition is often debated, international development refers to a multi-disciplinary approach to creating a better quality of life for people in underdeveloped areas, where basic needs are often unmet and social problems are rampant. It can be carried out through financial assistance from governments, non-governmental organizations, intergovernmental organizations or individuals. It can also be carried out in a non-financial manner, by individuals or groups seeking to bring skill, expertise or labor to a specific project or area.

This past summer, I chose to travel to India with American Jewish World Service, or AJWS, on a program called Volunteer Summer. Sixteen of us lived and worked outside of the town of Kanchipuram, in rural southeastern India, on a project to build a school for former child laborers. We worked with an organization called RIDE, or the Rural Institute for Development Education, which works to free children from labor in stone quarries, silk looms and factories, as well as to empower women and provide health services and education to those in villages.

The work we did was difficult and could be extremely mind-numbing. I had never imagined that I would spend entire days of my summer simply kneeling, pushing sand into a bucket, sifting it through a strainer and doing it over and over and over again, until my back ached and my muscles were sore. Sometimes, I wondered why I hadn't stayed in America for the summer, where I could have watched TV and slept away half of my days. The beginning of the trip was immensely difficult. In addition to the work, we were witnessing extreme poverty all around us and at times it was too hard to handle emotionally. While one may see homeless people in America, or those living in hard and dismal conditions, what I saw on a daily basis in India was nothing close to poverty at home.

However, once we began to get settled in, my experience improved. As part of our program, we had a curriculum from AJWS that explored the connections between social justice and Judaism. I immediately assumed that I would not learn anything new from it, since I had been very heavily involved with Jewish social justice causes in the past. It turned out that I was wrong and that almost every piece of the curriculum was new to me. We discussed these sources, questioned them and probed them together as a community, as a community that was trying to deal with the meaning of the work we were doing and the poverty we were encountering. We couldn't always come up with answers to explain all of our questions, but sometimes the questions simply had no answers. Today, after being back in America for more than four months, I still don't have answers to all of these questions. But there is no doubt in my mind that we as Jews are responsible for helping others, all over the world, Jewish, and non-Jewish. We ought not to live with the knowledge that our fellow human beings are living in such dire situations, especially when almost each one of us has the ability to help in some way.

RIDE took us on field trips all over the area to show us the work that they were part of. When we visited villages and met the women of various self-help groups, I no longer focused on the huts, the skinny cows walking around or the other obvious aspects of poverty there. Instead, I focused on the women, many of whom had amazing stories. As part of their self-help groups, they saved up money collectively in a micro-finance program and then used it to purchase small items for their family or to start a small business. They also supported each other as women, as they tried to send their children to school, to keep the household together, to deal with abusive husbands and a variety of other problems. Many of them initiated new projects to deal with the issues they faced in their communities and they had the support of RIDE and of the other women in their groups.

The more I saw and the more I studied, I realized just how amazing the people I met were. While their accomplishments may not seem like much to those of us who consider accomplishments to be graduating from a prestigious school, getting a good job or buying a big house, I was so impressed with what these women had managed to do until their conditions. I began to see the links between the experiences of these women and that of the children whose school we were building. Most of these children had been rescued from labor jobs and were now being given the chance to have an education. However, they ranged anywhere from the age of two to ten and had never been to school. Thus, they needed to learn basic skills such as reading, writing and paying attention in class. The school we built for them was for that purpose. As I continued to work, I was no longer sifting sand for the purpose of sifting sand. I was sifting sand for the purpose of turning that sand into cement, to smooth that cement between bricks, which made up a wall, which made up a building, which then made a school. Judaism places a high value on education, and I was proud to know that bucket by bucket, I was creating an opportunity for children to explore, grow, and learn.

Nehama Rogozen is a junior majoring in government & politics with minors in philosophy and leadership studies at the University of Maryland. She is a gabbai for KoachUMD, and a Nativ alum. She participated in AJWS's Volunteer Summer program in India this past summer.

[Posted 12/27/08]