Longitude

Q. What can we do from our home countries to support the Longitude Uncaste India Campaign?

A. This is an awesome question! There is a lot our volunteers can do, before, during and after their work camps in India.
As you hopefully know by now, you, the Volunteers ARE Longitude. Longitude is an international network of [...]

Q. Why aren’t there more vegetable gardens in the villages? Are the villagers lacking in knowledge? Seeds? Fertilizer?

A. Regarding Gummallapadu Village (GP), the main reason why there were not more vegetable gardens is because the surrounding land has been terribly degraded by the omnipresent aqua-culture farms. Essentially, the local communities surrounding Kolleru Lake were [...]

Hello to all Longitude supporters.

The subsequent posts represent a Q and A session extending from the request I made to our supporters before my April 09 Evaluation Expedition I made to our project sites in India. There are some very good questions, and I tried to give as much detail as possible to help illustrate [...]

I woke up to a phone ringing at 6am this morning, as I have most
mornings this week. Sometimes the call is earlier, later, doesn’t come
at all, or in the case of this morning, the sleepy young man
inexplicably rings again one minute later to say “Hello.” “Hello”, I
respond. “It’s 6 o’clock.” “Thank you.” A few leftover [...]

The villagers here are amazing to say the least! The people here have shown a resilience and a natural happpiness with their lives that I never experienced first hand before. Just today, Ken, John, Kristin and I played with four little boys in there home- a one room bamboo hut and had a [...]

I’ve come to India with mixed feelings - some of which roots from the anticipitation of something new and never experienced but also in a sense even a small bit of anxiety. I would even go far to say that at times I wondered how much of a difference grassroot internationlization can really make. [...]

Before coming to India, I was often asked by my co-workers in Japan as to why am I going to India, why am I so interested in helping people who I know virtually nothing about and how much do I think I could change by going there. The truth is, I really don’t know [...]

The May 2009 JET volunteers arrive at Gunmmallapadu (GP) village!
It’s the morning of Friday, May the 1st and the hot Indian sun is blazing down on a bus filled with my group of JET volunteers. Although most of us have been in India for at least two days, this bus ride is just the beginning [...]