Hello, here's our first WAVE update!
At the moment, we're neck deep in emails and happy to be working around the clock to try our best to receive applications from every state in the country, which is a huge challenge! I think that's because we're a new program and initially hoped to reach people through email which is a faster and cheaper communication method than calling long distance around India. But we soon discovered that non governmental organizations (NGOs) in many parts of India don't have working emails, or don't check email regularly, or are simply busy or out of town. So now both Angana and I call 15-20 organizations every day and send about 200 emails between us.
However, on the bright side, we've received 40 applications from 17 (out of 28) states in the country! We're still waiting on applications from most of the north eastern states (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Tripura), which are fairly remote; northern states like Uttarakhand, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh; and one southern state - Tamil Nadu. So please email us if you have friends who can help in these states.
We've also received emails from abroad! One was from a community media organization in Nepal (Forum for Information Technology), asking if they could send someone to our training in Goa, and the other was from a women's group in Kenya called Jumuiya, asking if we could do a similar program with rural women in the north rift valley there! FYI, we replied to Nepal saying they could attend the training if they paid for travel as we haven't budgeted for that, and to Kenya saying we would keep in touch and try to work something out in the future.
There's a lot more to share, but I'll save it for the next blog entry. Thanks for reading :)
Sapna.
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