In Delhi it is always dusk. The light is diffuse and granular and the sun is always orange and sharply defined against the gray. The six of us didn’t leave our crowded but blissfully air-conditioned hostel until 6pm today, confused about whether we needed sunscreen anymore, on our way to Lodhi Gardens for site seeing. This is our second full day in Delhi.
So far, the state of our team, in my opinion, is that we are an unfinished puzzle. We have all the pieces, and have been working through our letlag to get oriented, doing everything from learning how to travel by rikshaws to trying out our equipment to finally, hashing out our visions for our final products as far as our documentary media is concerned, which is the official purpose of our trip.
Somewhere between the struggle to plug in our power strips (Hey India, I would like to ask you to please choose one – yes just ONE – type of plug and have done. Thank you, please resume normal programming), wresting with the levels on the wireless mics and learning to eat rice with our hands (in private so that we won’t look like fools should we need to impress people in the villages we will visit with out lunch-eating skills), we have been earnestly fumbling to assume our positions both as members of a technical media team and as an energetic and invested group of six undergraduates who have never done anything quite like this before.
We landed late in the evening of June 2, piling into the single four-person hostel room we could get that had an air conditioner. We laid extra mattresses on the floor to make room for the six of us and proceeded to cover every last inch of space with our gear. The room has become our lair, and in the last two days, we have only left for meals and for an orientation briefing with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI).
TERI is the organization that is implementing the the solar lantern/social entrepreneurship campaign that we are documenting and promoting. The campaign is called Lighting a Billion Lives (LaBL), which despite its simplistic name, appears to be a truly grassroots effort with many many potential benefits. In addition to enabling new entrepreneurs who design and execute the lantern distribution and maintenance, the project provides lighting in areas where such a truly simple amenity as illumination is not available.
In our orientation meetings with TERI, we met with the director of LaBL. She described the benefits of the light as having such widespread applications as improving medical facilities, providing the opportunity for academic pursuits after dark, for livelihood development, and any other thing that having a light might make easier or doable in the first place. Really, having light should perhaps not even require any explanation, especially in India, where live one third of the 1.6 billion people in the world who do not have access to electricity.
With all of our zeal, we are offering our amateur services to document the personal experiences of the implementation of this project and to an adventurous project through which we are exploring the input and output to make a group international service project successful.