Work at Asha (Cait)

Week of July 5

We finally met Dr. Martin, the founder of Asha this week, as she'd been out of the country since our arrival. She took Shalini, Sam, and I to lunch at Barista and talked with us about ourselves, Asha, and our experience here so far. She also told us what she had in mind for us for the next couple weeks. Since this year has been a huge milestone for the slums in terms of students accepted to college, she wanted the three of us to put together a workshop to prepare the university-bound students for college life. She also asked us to help out with putting together the annual report for Asha. We agreed and headed back to the office to start working. We hope that this will be a good opportunity to get to know the full scope of the organization better.

On Thursday, we got to meet Mr. Chidambaram, India's current Home Minister and former Minister of Finance. We were very privileged to have this opportunity, as the Home Minister is the most important and powerful person in the country after the Prime Minister. Mr. Chidambaram is a special friend of Asha's since he backed a scheme during his term as Finance Minister that provided slum dwellers with access to low-interest loans through Indian banks. This was revolutionary, as most slum dwellers at the time didn't even have a bank account and had no knowledge of basic financial services. Any time they needed to borrow money to invest in their business or pay for medical bills, they were forced to turn to money lenders who charged exorbitant interest rates. The microfinance scheme designed by Asha and Mr. Chindambaram changed all this.

We went to his office with Dr. Martin, Sam, and two slum dwellers who were recently accepted to college. Because he's so very busy and important, we had to keep our visit relatively short, but Mr. Chindambaram talked with us very graciously for about 20 minutes and allowed us to ask questions. He was very thoughtful and well-spoken, and we enjoyed the visit immensely. We feel lucky to have had so many wonderful experiences over the past weeks.