May my list come true

The day I decided to do an internship in India, I was at the beach, about to leave Peru to start my second semester in HKS. The day I told my family, we were all together having dinner, I remember the happiness in the face of my brothers, the surprised face of my mother and the worried face of my father (his face of: “Que ganas de complicarte la vida, no había algo más cerquita?”). The day I departed to India, I felt nervous and excited at the same time. The day I landed, I felt overwhelmed and I had not yet assimilated the fact that I was actually there. One week after I started working, I could not be more happy with my decision.

Before starting this adventure, I spent 2 weeks in Perú, visiting my family. When I told people I was leaving soon to start my internship in India for 8 weeks the most common reaction was, working in India?? Why??

To be 100% honest, at the beginning, when I was trying to figure it out what to do for my summer internship, I only knew two things: No more working for the government. No more Latin America. And working for an NGO in India seemed to fit those conditions. It was as simple as that and of course, personally, India symbolized a super far away place. I wanted to do something different from what I have been doing for the past 5 years.

But how did I end up in India finally and not another far away place?. As always, I did “THE LIST”. What should my perfect internship look like? trying to check all these points was my premise*:

Ancient civilization: working and living in Peru my whole life made me realize how the legacy of old civilizations is a great determinant of the way they feel, the way they think and the way they make decisions. I have always been interested in understanding how a multicultural diverse population is an asset instead of something that weighs us down. I wanted to witness firsthand how other countries deal with this and how their day to day looks like.

Far away place: before HKS, I had never been outside the American continent. Living and working abroad was something I’ve always had in mind due to always wondering how different things could be in two different cultures. I wanted to understand how the same policy problem looks like in a country that at first glance, has nothing to do with Latin America (size, different races, religions, among other factors).

Exploring gender issues: I have always worked in the peruvian government, dealing with several policy problems (from education to credit access). In my mind, these were policy problems that affected (even though heterogeneously) the whole population, so trying to deal with them, somehow, was helping women and men equally. While doing that and with my time in HKS, I convinced myself that this is not entirely true. Yes, you help both. But as the problems affect people heterogeneously, the solutions we proposed needed to be heterogeneous (taking into consideration how men and women faced different realities). Most of the time, policies are designed for the average person that is facing the problem. However, because we are human, we always have a biased and as most policymakers are male, we all know how their average person looks like. I wanted to understand how to integrate a gender focus in national policy reforms.

NGO: simple, I want to return and work in the government, but like with most corrupt countries (Peru, perfect example), the time-span of a policymaker in the government is short term. Working in an NGO has always felt to me as a more stable and complementary plan and I want to experiment how working there is.

*My list, of course, did not have all this explanations but I thought it was cool to explain the reasoning behind.

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After a long flight from Perú, I have finally arrived to Delhi, India. Picking my bags and taking a taxi in Delhi seem surreal. I keep thinking about the last conversation I had with my family before starting this trip: did you ever think that you will be travelling the world and working so far away? I guess it's something I always wanted and somehow life took me here and I could not be more happy :). May my list come true!