Incredible India
Below, FIUTS Trustee and dedicated homestay host Greg Siegler recounts the captivating story of his recent family trip to India, spotlighting the overall enrichment of FIUTS in our own lives and the lives of others across the world.
Greg and family visiting a local school for Adivasi girls.
I have had the privilege of working at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for 11 years now. And I have been volunteering on the Board of Trustees of FIUTS for 16 of the past 18 years. My life is at its best when these two passions of mine intersect, and that happened in a big way this spring.
Of FIUTS’s many activities that connect people across cultures, my favorite is “homestay hosting,” which is when residents here in our Seattle area get the chance to briefly (typically anywhere from just two days to two weeks) host a student or teacher from another country who is newly arrived in Seattle, and, importantly, to do so on a voluntary, uncompensated basis. My family and I have been hosting FIUTS students for many years now, typically welcoming a student when they first arrive for study at the University of Washington, just until they can move into their own housing for the term. In this way, we have received students from many countries into our home, forming lasting bonds with thoughtful people from all over the world. Most of these students have in due course returned to their home countries, while a few have stayed on in Seattle for work or further study.
In the fall of 2018, our homestay guest was a graduate student from India named Turam, then age 29, when he arrived to start a master’s degree program in the UW’s Information School (the I School). When I greeted Turam at SeaTac International Airport at the end of his long flights from home, I was the first person he ever really met outside of India. That was a big responsibility for me – and so much fun.
Recently, for the first time in my years at the Gates Foundation, one of the program officers whose important Global Health work I get to support invited me to join a visit to a grantee’s work site – in Hyderabad, India! I had never been anywhere near India, and I jumped at this chance for several days of meetings there, and I also tacked on a day of work in the Gates Foundation's office in Delhi so that I could get to know people there a bit better, too.
With this opportunity in sight, I called up Turam, who is now working toward a PhD from the UW’s I School, to ask if he might be open to a visit home to India on either end of my work trip. As it happened, his spring break from the UW aligned with the end of my work in Hyderabad and Delhi, and an amazing opportunity was born.
It turns out Turam is a master planner and executer, and he constructed and led us on a two-week adventure through the north (in the state of Himachal Pradesh and in Delhi), south (Karnataka), east (West Bengal, Odisha, and Jharkand), and west (Maharashtra) of this most populous country in the world, following my work time in the more central Hyderabad (Telangana). We traveled by air, by intercity rail, by local train, by metro, by ferry boat, by private car, by Uber, by taxi, by auto-rickshaw, by motorcycle, and more. Our lungs filled with the filthy air of Kolkota and other major cities, and our eyes, ears, and noses with the colors, languages, honking horns, and incenses of everyday life in tiny villages and megacities, in mosques, temples, meditation centers, and UNESCO World Heritage sites (such as the Sun Temple in Konark and the former Victoria Terminus in Mumbai). Our visit to Dharamshala was a few days too early for the cricket test series there against England, and our visit to Mysore did not coincide with the Dasara festival there in September/October, but hey, nobody said we could have everything.
“Tiny villages” -- am I exaggerating? I am not. Turam’s family is not from one of the dominant population groups in India, neither Hindu nor Muslim, but rather they are indigenous/Adivasi, members of the Ho tribe of Jharkand and Odisha in eastern India, in which his parents are highly respected leaders and educators. I can imagine wonderful possibilities for Gates Foundation employee resource groups (e.g., the Indigenous Communities and Cultural Confluence ERGs) to collaborate with Turam’s tribe and the nonprofit organization they run there (www.asrasocial.in). In fact, never before had I felt like a celebrity or dignitary, but I definitely did on the day we visited the school for Adivasi girls that Turam’s family founded, which received us as though we were visiting heads of state (see the accompanying photos). I know our foreign-ness and light skin are sadly inextricable from this context, yet even so we were moved to tears.
In fact, we experienced India’s extraordinary hospitality from so many people, including Gates Foundation colleagues and FIUTS alumni. I hope they all read this and understand how grateful we are.
So why am I sharing all this here? Three reasons:
1. FIUTS needs more homestay hosts. Hosting a FIUTS student is such a light lift, so short-term, and does not require any special space or accommodations, just small openings of your front door and your heart. I can’t promise it will eventually lead you to a tiny village in India or anywhere else as fascinating, but now we know it could.
2. FIUTS needs new donors and more support. At the height of the Covid pandemic, after 75 years of symbiosis between the University of Washington and FIUTS, the UW abruptly discontinued this longstanding relationship, and FIUTS is adapting to the loss of that revenue stream that was long a pillar supporting how FIUTS helps connect Seattle with the world.
3. I have some longstanding ideas for how FIUTS could help the Gates Foundation to better support our employees and their loved ones who are living and working across borders. If you are in a relevant position of influence at the foundation, I would like to talk with you about this.
Please reach out to me if any of this interests you. Thank you.
Greg Siegler
