Indi(end)

After three months of living abroad, I'm home. Being home is good. I have all the luxuries of food, culture and friendships I so sorely missed, and I benefit from the perspective I'm slowly developing from being plucked out of the thick of my former Indian workplace.

As I had mentioned in a previous blog post, working in India was extremely hard. There were parts of my experience I loved and others I loathed. But when I lay down in my bed on my tempurpedic pillow, inside my apartment with regular electricity and water, in a city where I can get a decent cup of coffee, its easy to forget all the past hardships. And I think its with good reason because I can now see more clearly what my team and I accomplished and what I learned from the experience.

Did we finish our project? No, but we are still moving along. Over our time we met and interviewed nearly 30 people, from school teachers and NGO leaders to government officials and villagers, capturing over 25 hours worth of video footage, allowing us to complete three five-minute documentaries each portraying a specific challenge affecting the region. Currently, we are working with a team of web developers in Bangalore to construct our wiki-based platform, which we hope to launch by early January 2011.

Did I learn anything? Yes, a lot. I come away knowing how to take an idea and execute it. When I first proposed the idea for the project - before it was ever funded - it was a theoretical concept, lacking any roadmap. Technically, the project is still theoretical until it launches and proves successful, but my team and I still designed the mechanisms we hope will give us the best chance to convert this idea into a reality come January. Throughout this project, I also began to learn how to quietly manage a team. I had initially proposed the project and was the most senior person on the team, but the way the program was constructed, there were no clear lines of authority - it was a group effort through and through. But on a team with a range of experiences, from undergrad to graduate students, it was important that the group had direction, but just as important, an opportunity for every member to assert and develop their own leadership skills. Striking this balance of knowing when to step in and knowing when to let others take the lead was something I could never learn in a classroom. It was a life skill I was afforded by this opportunity.

The experience was hard and it was humbling, but I'm home, I'm happy and I can reflect positively, without regret, on my time working in India.