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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
YOUR VOICE
In this section:
Virginia Foley, Awed by India, Tells Stories
of Its People
Virginia Foley, Awed by India, Tells Stories of Its People
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Virginia Foley listens to workers from USAID-funded
Care’s Integrated Nutrition and Health Project
in Andhra Pradesh.
USAID/India |
When USAID’s India mission invited me to visit and
work on the Telling Our Story Initiative—writing up success
stories and teaching staff how to do it—I was so ready.
I last visited India in 1966, on my way home from the Peace
Corps in the Philippines. I knew there were stories to tell.
Furthermore, my husband Larry was a Peace Corps volunteer
in Andhra Pradesh, and I wanted to see for myself where the
stories I’d heard for so many years actually took place.
On my return, with around 25 stories ready to be banked
online, the image of 24 tiny rescuees from human trafficking
singing “Don’t mess with the rights of children”
resounds in my head.
There also is Avdesh, the 10-year-old runaway who just wants
to live on the streets and collect enough saleable garbage
to go to the movies.
And there is the sweet face of the Chennai housewife whose
husband infected her with HIV/AIDS. USAID-supported NGO workers
actually donated blood for her transfusions.
I’ll always remember the shelter started by mothers
of dowry-burning victims and the resident I interviewed, who
said she was there because she was “well brought up and
not used to being beaten.”
There is Rasoo, standing in lush fields outside of Noida,
proud that now all he had to do to water his fields was to
switch on the pump. That same electricity allows village women
time for literacy training and television at night to “broaden
our minds,” they said seriously.
Three weeks visiting five cities had my head reeling. My
heart and mind were so full I had to come home to download.
I’m chuckling over the spunk of a girl who dressed
like a boy in order to live on the streets. And I chuckle
remembering the village educator whose job description said
she had to be married to keep her job.
I have photographs in my head of what is probably India’s
roughest road, which we took to reach a first-aid training
course for volunteers preparing for natural or manmade disasters.
Each photograph brings back a sense of awe at the scope of
USAID’s investment in India.
In an Ahmedabad village, I sat in on a family planning discussion
between a female health worker, later elected village chief,
and women dressed in saris so colorful they looked like flowers.
These were women who, until recently, had never left their
houses.
Older women sat in chairs while younger ones sat on the
ground. The seats rotated as more women came in. I must have
looked pretty old, because I never got unseated.
I sat on the floor with community health workers in Andhra
Pradesh to discuss the progress of local Head Start-like programs,
admiring visual aids created for illiterate mothers by child
development teachers.
I sat among families unaware they were victims of the HIV/AIDS
virus until someone died, and among drug users, truckers,
commercial sex workers, and other vulnerable members of a
slum fighting the spread of the virus.
And I sat in the packed waiting room of a hospital in Lucknow,
where patients flocked around a television that had been awarded
to the facility in recognition of its expanded programs and
improved facilities.
In the police department’s school for runaway boys
in the New Delhi train station, a student gave me the picture
he’d been drawing of a house. Another had drawn a portrait
of me. “She’ll just throw them away when she leaves,”
my guide interpreted.
You won’t find these particular pictures on the Telling
Our Stories website, but they’ve been placed in my precious
collection, right alongside the picture of a chicken that
possibly descended from those Larry introduced in Nellore
decades ago.
Virginia Foley was in India September 2004, researching
and writing Telling Our Story pieces for the USAID website.
Her husband Laurence was assassinated by terrorists in Amman,
Jordan, in 2002, the last USAID staff member to die in the
line of duty.
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