As my last week of work comes to an end, I cant help but think about all the chai I’ve indulged in here. Once at 11am and then again at 3pm. Hey, You may have to work 6 days a week in India, but at least you get chai. It was hard at first not having coffee, but I can confidently say, the chai regime will continue on in the US.

This last week, I’ve been working mostly on the annual report for the 2024 cycle. Looking at the 2022-2023 report, I can tell they have done great work, but it’s wordy and hard to see what they mean at times. It is also written all in english so there are some areas that don’t exactly make sense. I’ve gone through it and added suggestions to what can be changed. The good information is all there, there are just some structural errors that can be shuffled around to look better. When writing up a case study I did in the field, I was instructed to use the STAR (situation, task, action, result) method, and i’ve implemented it into the structural change suggestions for next year.

Additionally, this week we met with representatives from Magic Bus India. Magic Bus is a giant NGO working in all over the world and in at least 8 states in India. They were meeting with us because they wanted to expand to Rajasthan and were looking to form a partnership. After introductions to our programming and theirs, we discussed what work they were looking to do. Primarily, a lot of it had to do with female and youth empowerment, especially through economic security. So the next day we went to the Chaksu block office for Magic Bus to see the self-help women groups CECOEDECON has established, as well as the loan system operations for rural female entrepreneurs. We then met with all the women to have a forum of sorts. And of course, chai and snacks were provided.