Volunteer with us.

Sanjeevani Booti needs a base of internet volunteers who would be willing to commit two hours per month to helping us help people in North India. The kind of help we need is wide in scope, but all the internet volunteer work has one thing in common: we can replicate, reuse, and share this kind of work product. Most people who contribute to us through the internet use English language, and that is good for us because all of us can translate it into local languages (especially Hindi and Bhojpuri).

educational materials

More than anything else we need lesson plans and training materials for our trainers, our volunteers, and the community. Our office works like this: Sanjeevani Booti has regular staff who do social work. The staff trains volunteers who help with social work but need training to do this. Often volunteers have limited time to help in our projects and many help for fun just on one project, then they do not volunteer again. We need to have more plans for more training programs so that we can continually attract new volunteers and also retain those people who volunteer primarily to get experience, education, or for personal growth. Both regular staff and volunteers ultimately work with the public, so whatever training we give to social workers has to be useful when actually talking to people who have never heard of AIDS or HIV.

We already have some written lectures and presentations for the purpose of educating permanent staff, some introductory materials for short-term volunteers, and some quick talks that we give to community members who we may never see again. But we need even more presentations; we need an entire library of learning materials, because different people learn things in different ways, and it helps to be able to explain things in many different ways.

Ideally for each lesson, there is a script that a teacher can use to teach some topic. Along with the speech there should be some pictures, diagrams, or charts, either for the teacher to show on a poster or to draw on a chalkboard. If possible the lesson should connect either to a current or historical event to show its importance. This is sometimes difficult to do because scientific and sociological papers often describe technical aspects of things without putting them in cultural context. If photos or short video clips (less than 2 minutes long) are available, then we can use those also. Finally lessons should have lots of comprehension questions to judge understanding of the materials. We need questions because sometimes it is not easy for a teacher to look at new materials and improvise calls for student input. Questions are the surest way to get students involved in a lesson, and more than anything that is what our teachers do: they present facts so that the students can begin their own discussions. Our emphasis in creating lesson plans is to have a moderately-trained person be able to pick up a lesson plan, study it for an hour, then understand enough to be able to get in front of a small group of people and have interesting things to say for a half-hour.

We need short, interesting lesson plans on many topics, and if any teacher or social worker is reading this then please consider sharing your organized notes with us even if you have expertise on a subject related to our work, but not on the below list. Here are some suggestions of things for which we need teaching materials. We need creativity in presentation so if you have ideas about teaching these things then please share with us. A big part of our work is taking existing English-language materials and adapting their information to local language and culture.

medicine – technical topics

• HIV and AIDS (particularly tasteful wordless pictures or comics explaining risk to illiterate people)
• syringe use
• blood contamination
• condom use (any good way to explain oil-based versus water-based lubrication?)
• pregnancy (especially the physiology, hormones, effect of birth control pills)
• fetal development
• effect of smoking / alcohol on baby in womb
• ante-natal care
• breastfeeding versus formula (including spread of HIV)
• vaccinations (controversial around Benares)
• genetics
• hereditary disease
• disease theory (the fact that bacteria and viruses cause disease)

social issues

• societal differences between men and women
• women’s rights
• Western dating practices (we see this in movies and there is curiosity; we used arranged marriages)
• public health care
• government aid for the homeless
• public schools
• sex education for young people
• illegal drug use
• prostitution
• rape and definition of consent
• abortion ethics
• abortion drugs and birth control pills
• AIDS as a worldwide epidemic
• societal norms for sexuality in your region
• gay male culture in your region
• lesbian female culture in your region
• sex education for males
• sex education for females
• sex education as part of pre-marriage counseling
• sex trafficking

Again, with any of these topics, we can use either scholarly insight or just everyday people’s opinions. We want to open communication channels between Indian cultures and Western cultures, because we think that both sides have a lot to learn from each other. Reading each other’s papers helps but it is not enough; we need to have people who we can ask questions to.

proofreading

Sanjeevani Booti produces large amoungs of written materials in English language during research projects. For those who do not know, India is a conglomeration of states much in the way Europe is a collection of countries. Each state in India has its own language and culture, just like countries in Europe have their own languages and culture.

When Indians travel around India we speak English as a common language. However, we all speak it differently, and frequently people make grammatical mistakes in their writing which are difficult to catch but would be obvious to a native speaker. We need native English speakers who can print out our reports, correct them with proofreader’s marks on paper, then either scan and email, fax, or physically mail the corrected papers back to us. We have an internet fax number based in Seattle Washington USA, so the fax phone charges would be to fax to Washington in America not to India.

We need the mistakes shown on paper rather than corrected for us without demonstrating the mistakes because it is an attraction for some of our volunteers to practice their English while volunteering. For a lot of people this is their first experience working in English language, despite having studied it in school for years. This is kind of a technical pen-pal project. We are encouraging people to write questions for themselves and reports for their own social circles, but at the same time since we do not have funds to pay everyone it would be helpful and beneficial to their education to