Work – Kam Karna
2009
Hey folks,
as many of you asked me „So, how’s your project going?“ I figured I should write a little bit about the project itself, what I’m doing here, what I will do and what problems have occurred so far…
Well, basically what I’m doing here is nothing else than working on a paper. The difference this time is only that I’m not basing all my research on the literature I find but rather try to widen the scope through interviews with stakeholders. My topic is e-waste and thus I read so far lots of documents that deal with e-waste in general or in India in specific. The question I try – together with my project group – to answer is, whether the Basel Ban (an amendment to the Basel Convention on Transboundary Shipments of Hazardous Wastes) provides an sustainable and effective mean to the problem of e-waste shipments into developing countries. To this end, it is crucial for us to have a database on which we can draw conclusions. From what I’ve found so far, the biggest problem is that simply no reliable data is existing that could be used. Thus what I now gonna do instead of dealing with national data (that doesn’t exist) is trying to assess the situation here in Delhi and down in the south, in Bangalore and Mumbai. This is important, as there is no formal sector present in Delhi but a huge informal sector treating the e-waste. In Bangalore and Mumbai some projects are running to transform the sector into a formal one, thus I hope to do a comparison between the two.
Aside from that being here I learn a lot about India, its people and cultures, which is to me as important as to get the project done! 🙂 To this end, speaking the language of the country you’re in is essential and that’s why I started learning Hindi right after I arrived. It’s not an easy language to learn, but I get better and better every week and I’m really happy that I’ve reached the point that I can argue in Hindi with the Rickshaw drivers and moreover, approaching them in Hindi makes bargaining way easier as they figure that I’m not a „dumb tourist“ 😉 I’ve Hindi twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday for 2 hours. Last time our teacher (a nice Russian women, teaching us Hindi in English… 😉 ) started to write down everything only in Devangari, the written language for Hindi. Ouch, I’d say I can half the alphabet by now (the whole got 42 letters) and I guess I really have to learn the rest of it fast in order to keep up with the pace we’re having… Now, being only 3-4 in class, it really matters whether you learned the things from the class before or not – other than that you’re lost! So I’ll have to start learning for real at home and not just do it the „It’ll work out somehow without actually learning“-way 😉
Alright, tomorrow I gonna get a totally different perspective on Delhi as Ana and me decided to go for the „Walk into the street life of Delhi“, which is organized by the Salaam Balak Trust, a local NGO some friends work for. Thus I’ll get an insight into Old Delhi from the perspective of a street-kid. I guess that’s going to be very interesting and I’ll tell you about it afterwards 🙂
Take care,
Strothi