Want to learn what Development Really Is?

Get paired with a grassroots NGO for the wildest ride of your life. Your 11 month Fellowship will show you the pitfalls and successes that grassroots development faces in India. Whether your interest be the environment, human rights, health, animal, local artisans, or advocacy, the AJWS World Partner's Fellowship has a plethora of partners that place you right in the thick of development programs.

Working alongside a rural health access NGO, I saw first hand how local communities were finding solutions to issues of infant and maternal mortality, access to basic health care, and women's empowerment issues. Over the course of my Fellowship, I was able to bond with local village health workers and understand the underlying causes that created the conditions of poverty, inequality, and health disparities - be it socio-economic inequality, caste, or language/cultural barriers.

I do not want to make it sound like it was easy. It is very difficult to integrate yourself into a community that is genuinely very distant from your own - where barriers in culture and language challenge even your basic daily activities. But the strength of the program is the length of your Fellowship, where over the course of 10 months your placement truly allows you to get past these impediments and form substantive relationships with your community.

Overall, a great program and formative to my future interests. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in development or international work - even at the peripheral level.