Rustgi Fellows Pursue Projects in Public Health and Post-Conflict Identity

Bibhav Acharya (right, sitting) and nurse Gauri Sunar conducting a training for Community Health Workers at Nyaya Health Center in Achham.

The South Asian Studies Council awards several fellowships every year to fund summer research by undergraduate and graduate students. In 2008, the Rustgi Fellowship funded the research projects of three Yale students: Chris Baker, Bibhav Acharya, and Grace Oedel.

Chris Baker, an Anthropology major in the Class of 2009, spent four months in rural Nepal in the fall of 2004 as an English teacher and returned three years later to spend a semester abroad at the School for International Training in Kathmandu. During his 2007 trip, he saw how the Nepali civil war had changed both the mechanics of the state and the more abstract idea of the Nepali nation. Baker was awarded the Rustgi Fellowship for a project titled �jat: Ethncity and Political Identity in Post-Conflict Nepal.� Baker�s fellowship research formed the foundation of his senior essay in Anthropology. The following is an excerpt from his fellowship report:

With the support of the Rustgi Fellowship, I was able to return to Nepal in the summer of 2008 to examine the ways in which these forces [class, caste, region, and ethno-linguistic identities] were shaping the national political discourse. My project�was centered around answering three primary questions: 1) How is ethnicity (jat) defined in Nepal? 2) How is jat used in the formation of political identity? 3) How has the current janajati discourse been shaped by the preceding �People�s War�?

Arriving in Kathmandu in June, I begin my research at the School for International Training where I conducted preliminary textual research using their library resources. At this point I also began to establish contacts with researchers, journalists, and individual Nepalis which I would later draw upon during my interviews. This initial research period allowed me to build a vocabulary with which to discuss the issue of jat while also rooting my inquiry in the existing anthropological literature. After two weeks of literature review and language study, I began my interviews. I spoke with Christina Monson, Director of the School for International Training and a long time resident of Nepal. I met with Rhoderick Chalmers of the International Crisis Group whose own dissertation had examined the role of ethno-linguistic identity in Nepal. I also corresponded with a number of local journalists and researchers at the United Nations and World Bank. Of special assistance in my own research was the work of Lynn Bennett in her World Bank study, �Unequal Citizens,� a look at the unequal distribution of resources across caste, gender, region, and ethnicity. However, the most valuable source of research data was the city of Kathmandu itself.

In the weeks before my arrival in the capital, Nepal held its first elections in nearly a decade and the newly-elected Constituent Assembly declared Nepal a secular republic–abolishing the Shah monarchy that had ruled the nation for more than two centuries. Over the course of my stay, the Assembly grappled with fundamental questions of representation and elected Nepal�s first president and vice president. The protests that often paralyzed the city offered a unique opportunity to witness firsthand the growing pains of governance. While my travel throughout the country was restricted due to the frequent strikes that shut down transportation for days, the heightened political atmosphere allowed for direct observations within the capital of Kathmandu.

Bibhav Acharya, Yale School of Medicine Class of 2011, also traveled to Nepal with support from the Rustgi Fellowship in the summer of 2008. His project was entitled �Launching a Community Health Workers Program in Rural Nepal.�

Achham is one of the poorest and remotest regions in South Asia. A population of 250,000 is served by only one medical doctor. Nyaya Health is the non-government organization (NGO) that employs the doctor and runs a regional health center with a pharmacy, a diagnostic laboratory, a 24-hour delivery suite and an out-patient clinic, all free of cost for a population where the average person makes about $150 a year.

Rustgi Fellowship allowed me to travel to Nepal last summer to volunteer with Nyaya Health in Achham, Nepal. I worked in the capacity of Program Manager, which included operating the health center and launching a bold community health workers’ (CHW) program. Although my original plan was to study the effectiveness of this program, the launching of the program was delayed by Nyaya Health due to organizational and monetary reasons and I arrived in time to start the CHW program.

I traveled to several villages, spoke with hundreds of women, solicited nominations from villages, conducted interviews and written tests, selected the CHWs, trained them and oversaw their work and trained a local nurse-midwife from Nyaya Health to become the coordinator of the program after my departure.

Given the lack of roads in the difficult, mountainous terrain of Achham, and given that Nyaya’s patients walk up to 8 hours on foot to arrive at the health center, CHWs play a critical role in promoting health, providing follow-up and encouraging the sick to seek care.

My experience, which was made possible with the help from the Rustgi Fellowship, allowed me to learn uncountable skills to start and operate a robust healthcare program in one of the most challenging and resource-denied places in the world. This experience nicely complements my training at the medical school and will provide a strong framework for my career in global health. Currently, I provide remote guidance and assistance to the CHW program and several other programs at Nyaya Health by the team in Nepal. I serve as a volunteer member of the Board of Directors, which includes several Yale students and alums. Since my return from Nepal, I have recruited several other students to volunteer for Nyaya and we also keep the larger Yale community updated and engaged through our blog: www.blog.nyayahealth.org.

Grace Oedel, a Religious Studies major in the Class of 2010, traveled to India in the summer of 2008 with the support of the Rustgi Fellowship to work with Sampada Gramin Mahila Sanstha (SANGRAM), a Mumbai-based NGO that combats HIV/AIDS in prostitutes through prevention education and awareness.

Working for SANGRAM also taught me so much, although in a different manner than I had expected. When I first got to Sangli, where I had initially thought that I would be living, I found out that there really was not much work SANGRAM had for me to do there. My boss and the head of the organization, Meena Seshu, asked me to come to Kolhapur with her and work on a specific project that needed more work than the two people in the Kolhapur office could handle. SANGRAM is currently working on another program entitled Casam that makes resources and educational information on sex work, violence against women, and human trafficking, easily accessible and free for whoever wants to learn about these issues. I was assigned to work specifically to help create an online database. Around two hundred articles, pieces of law, and books or excerpts from books needed an abstract written about them before we could upload them to the database. I spent my time reading these books and articles and then writing up a brief abstract along with a set of keywords for each.

My work taught me first and foremost how little I knew about issues surrounding trafficking and sex work. I was horrified that such a hugely widespread and appalling practice as human trafficking hardly ever gets discussed. I personally knew hardly anything about the extent of global human trafficking. I read many different laws put forth by different countries around the world that attempt to combat trafficking and found them all equally lacking. Because of the difficulties of enforcing international treaties, no real counter-trafficking international effort has succeeded. If a person is first sold by her family and then trafficked from country A into country B by a person from country C, which one of these countries is responsible? Whose country should do the prosecuting, and under which country�s law? If the trafficked victim is returned home, her family will likely sell her again. Where then should she live? Whose country should pay for her rehabilitation? These are some of the perplexing questions that seem to arise around the issue and make it very difficult to battle. I was honored to be able to be working on issues such as these with leaders in the field. Without the Rustgi fellowship, getting to work with Meena Seshu would have been impossible for me.

Although it was wonderful to work with Meena, I did found it challenging to discuss trafficking openly with other people who worked for SANGRAM. Currently the US is championing lots of new anti-trafficking law, but my organization saw this as thinly veiled, moralistic, anti-sex work law. At SANGRAM, they view consensual sex work as a person�s right, and completely separate from trafficking. Because the organization was constantly working to defend its funding and separate itself from trafficking, I found it difficult to discuss the horror of trafficking without making the other workers feel like I was threatening the organization or the idea that women in sex work have basic rights, too. In some ways I felt that I completely agreed; consensual sex work does seem decidedly different than trafficking. Yet I think the line grows very blurry when using the term �consent� and not �choice;� if a woman is forced to enter sex work because she has been sold into slavery, this is clearly an attack on human rights. If a woman consents to enter sex work, however, because she lives in extreme poverty, is this not simply another form of coercion? Could systems of government that allow dire poverty to pervade be, in a slightly different form, trafficking their own people?

Besides from the creation of the online database, I also did some editing for my boss. I helped to edit articles that had been written by non-native English speakers, press releases, fact sheets, detailed case studies, descriptions of programs that SANGRAM has run, and emails. I had the ability to read over my boss�s shoulder as she wrote letters to Sonia Gandhi and helped her edit a presentation for the Global AIDS Conference. Simply getting to spend time around her and learn about how to run a non-profit organization successfully changed my life. I could never have had this experience if I had not had the support of the Rustgi program, and I am endlessly grateful.

Near the end of my time in India, I finished all the work that SANGRAM had for me, and had a little extra time to travel to Delhi and finally Mumbai by train to visit before I flew out. I have only been back in the US for a little over a week, and I am still processing and attempting to understand all the ways in which my summer in India affected me. All of my experiences, but especially my work at SANGRAM was so interesting and eye-opening. I am so thankful to the Rustgi program for helping to make the whole incredible experience possible.

The South Asian Studies Council at The MacMillan Center offers Rustgi Fellowships for summer research grants to students with a demonstrated commitment to the field of South Asian studies. The purpose of these grants is to increase understanding of the region among Yale students. The fellowship is made possible through a gift from Anil Rustgi (Yale �80), Vinod Rustgi (Yale �75) and his wife, Eileen Boyle Rustgi (Yale �77) in honor of their parents, Moti Lal and Kamla Rustgi.