Research and Innovation Project
September – October 2017
“This journey began with the aim of doing a thesis project, volunteering and visiting places that I would not have seen otherwise. In my life I have never thought that one day I would have gone to India and instead this country, slowly, day after day, changed me.
I spent a month and a half in Calcutta at IIMC, Institute for Indian Mother and Child, with the purpose of doing surveys among the women involved in the microcredit project and the Women Peace Council in order to be able, once back to Italy, to study the impact of these projects in their lives. Thanks to that, I had the opportunity to see places and people that I would not have met: it is wonderful to go to rural villages with Alim, the microcredit manager, to meet these women who transmit with their faces so much willpower to improve their situation. They are the proof that things can change.
At IIMC there are different voluntary activities: medical, economic and educational. When you are there, you learn to do everything even if not of your own competence because you want to help as you can.
The first week was difficult because you are in a completely different world. There are a lot of noises, unpleasant smells, chaos, poverty, dirt, a different culture but slowly you can understand the volunteers’ words of the previous month that have welcomed you saying: “The first days you will wonder who made you do it and it will be normal to want to leave, but in the end you will be sorry to leave”. So it was.
It has been two months since I came back but my thoughts are still there and there is the desire to return to India one day, not to have a holiday but to help and be helped because in the end I think they leave us a lot of more than we do to them.”
Alice
