BY JOAN KIM

In print | November 15, 2007

Students may have seen Jess Engebretson ‘09 around campus planning for War News Radio and the Darfur Radio Project, helping coordinate the Bosnia Project (an extension of Engebretson’s project in Bosnia two summers ago) or advising students on spring semester courses as a SAM. Knowing Engebretson, her friends would not be surprised to discover that she spent this past summer in New Delhi, India as an intern for the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center.

Wherever there is work to be done, Engebretson is there.

The sweltering heat of 120 degrees every day with no air conditioning, bustling marketplaces with sundry items for sale, vibrant fabrics and blaring sounds of neighbors’ television shows are worlds away from a day on the Swarthmore campus.

According to Engebretson, she finally found the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center in the nation’s capital, New Delhi, after seeking to “do human rights work for an organization that was small enough … to do substantial work but big enough that they had interns before and that they’d know how to use [her] as an intern.” Engebretson joined students from the United States, Canada, Australia and Mexico in the intern program.

At the Center, Engebretson’s job included two types of work. The first was “more academic and policy oriented research … mainly working on a computer researching online and writing up policy papers on the organization’s stance on a variety of issues,” Engebretson said. The policy papers discussed a wide range of topics, from the Indian government and the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women to anti-conversion laws in India which allow the government to make it difficult for Hindus to convert to other religions. Other topics involved the debate on whether or not foreign governments refusing aid to the Sri Lankan government was the most effective way to stop the government from committing human rights abuses.

The other half of Engebretson’s work involved interviewing people for refugee cases and collecting data to iron out inconsistencies. She interviewed a “group of Afghans in New Delhi who fled Afghanistan and who came to New Delhi seeking refugee status but were rejected.” Appeals of these decisions go to the organization, and interns, like Engebretson, interview and re-interview refugees and form cases to eventually send to the U.N. Often, these cases will sit for years before any action is witnessed.

One of Engebretson’s most rewarding yet difficult experiences involved the interviews she conducted with the Afghans.

“There was a mother of five whose husband was killed by the Taliban and she was trying to get her family refugee status in India unsuccessfully. I interviewed her about three times and getting to know the family was really valuable and extraordinarily frustrating because her case had gone nowhere,” Engebretson said. “Her son has been deported since I left. It was aggravating and upsetting to feel that I wasn’t able to accomplish that much to help them.”

Being in a foreign country also meant a huge culture shock. For Engebretson, who had never lived in a city before, New Delhi was a drastic change. It was not only challenging to live there because of the heat and her limited Punjabi, but it was also an adjustment to “being so obviously foreign and being approached everywhere that I went and people asking questions about who I was and where I was from and being an object of curiosity to a lot of people.”

Of course, this could hardly discourage Engebretson from returning to India, She expressed her willingness to continue the same type of work, although possibly in a different part of the country, given that India encompasses both noisy cities swarming with people and peaceful mountaintops. She said she is particularly interested in exploring the diverse areas outside of northern India.

« RETURN TO LIVING & ARTS

« PREV ARTICLE | NEXT ARTICLE »