27 days
27 days ago I arrived in India. In my bag: a month’s worth of clothes, toilet articles, laptop, tablet, mobile phones, headphones, powerbank, pictures of my family, presents for my client, and a lot of hopes and worries. Excitement.
27 days ago I started this journey into the unknown: a new continent, colleagues I had never met before, a scope of work of 12 pages, glad to leave behind my daily life and work for one month.
27 days.
27 days full of “first-time” things, meeting new people, adapting to a new culture, working in a different business context, and seeing a lot of exciting things, for example the Taj Mahal, or a wild male tiger in his natural habitat from a 3-meter-distance (without any protection). Trying out new food (food poisoning included!), and new means of transports (Rikshas and Camels, to name just two).
A few days ago, we did the final presentation of our deliverables at our client’s. My team mates and I put together what each of us had prepared in the days before. Introduction, the evolution of the scope of work, our research, our findings and, finally, our recommendations.
We had a good conversation with our client after our presentation, and I hope they will put into practice at least some of our recommendations.
The other day I happened to find one of the essays I wrote to apply for the SAP Social Sabbatical. The task was to describe what skills and competencies I hoped to bring back to my job at SAP as a result of participation in the Social Sabbatical. I talked about handling the unexpected, about increased customer focus and the awareness about how non-profit or social responsibility is compatible with corporate business. Within our group we often discussed what makes this sabbatical social. Some of our clients are for-profit organizations. Others are involved with the beneficiaries of the social startups’s products only indirectly. Is it enough to sell diy science kits to well-off schools? Is it enough to help students become entrepreneurs?
I think there is more than one answer to this. Considering that many well educated college graduates leave India to find jobs overseas, it is certainly valuable to help them establish their own businesses here in India — whether it is in the social sector or not. But does it help those without a home? Without access to clean water?
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Change only happens slowly.
It needs more than a film like Padman to break taboos such as menstrual hygiene in India. But it is a start.
My fellow SoSa colleagues Natasha and Renata created a fantastic social media campaign for Vishakha to help them do away with myths and misbeliefs about menstruation. Their target group: rural communities. But how do you approach families who cannot read or write with a social media campaign? And then there is the project Vatsalya, founded as a school for orphaned or abandoned children. We went to see their campus, admired the self-assembled solar panels, sat on the ground with the children during lunch and heard about the challenges of building a school out of nothing on a stretch of dirt land.
This is my last night in India. Tomorrow I will fly back home into the arms of my family, who I missed much more than I could ever have imagined. India is a country full of challenges. This Social Sabbatical made me aware of many things, professionally and personally. In our team, we used to say “What happens in Jaipur, stays in Jaipur”. But it’s not true. Being put together with 10 complete strangers, in a home stay exclusively for us, in a country such as India is probably something that will never leave me.
Good night, Jaipur. I wish you all the best of luck.
