I guess first I should explain “Lesleyabad.” When I was going through training as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan back in late summer/early fall 2003, I lived in the Russified (post)industrial town of Chirchiq. My language class of 3 had homes spread out over the town, and as a class exercize we made a map of the town with our homes. To make it fun, we gave our respective neighborhoods new names, and I thus transformed my community of Azorchiq into Lesleyabad. I’ve kept the nickname around ever since…
To back up, I like living abroad. To me, the world is too big to spend too much time in one place. (I think this is, in part, a reaction against the fact that I spent the first 18 years of my life in Vienna, VA, a suburb of Washington, DC. ) I’ve tried to make up for it since then by studying abroad, first in Paris and then in Brussels, and then by living abroad: after graduating from Emory University in Atlanta, I taught English as a Peace Corps Volunteer just outside of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, for almost 2 years. My geeky obsession with all things Russian embraced the chance to live in a Post-Soviet country. Service there was cut short due to political violence and the worst indiscriminate massacre of inncocent people in a (formerly) Communist country since Tiannamen Square in May 2005.
I returned to DC after 6 years of being away, and spent the next three years being a live-in tourist while also working for several international development organizations. The scene was good, but I was restless, and the first place I wanted to return to from past travel was India.
I was fortunate enough to secure a place in the inaugural group of Sandbox Fellows sponsored by the Deshpande Foundation, a family foundation that gives back to the “native place” of its founder, Gururaj Deshpande, and his wife, Jaishree. Committed to spurring development through social entrepreneurship, the Deshpande Foundation gives grants to local grassroots NGOs as well as runs a series of programs to nurture the social entrepreneurs in northern Karnataka, a south-west Indian state which is most well-known internationally for its capital city, the IT powerhouse of Bangalore.
Each of the 12 Sandbox Fellows was selected for their background and paired with an Indian NGO that had corresponding needs. We arrived in Hubli on June 20th and were there for a year, working with our organizations to strengthen their ability to keep doing good work and ideally scale up.
Based on my range of international development administrative skills (as well as international experience), I was paired with the Water Literacy Foundation, a small water conservation NGO that is committed to bringing water conservation knowledge and technology to the people of India, with a larger goal of turning India into a water-efficient nation. My goal was to build the internal capacity of this organization to attract more funding and scale up its activities.
