Someone on the inside

The summer before I was scheduled to embark on my Fulbright, I started realizing I needed help preparing. It had been decades since I had lived internationally, and back then I was a student. Now I would be teaching at a law school and navigating an Indian institution.

So I started having coffee with every person I could think of who had lived and worked abroad. I was lucky to get a wonderful piece of advice from a sailing friend and United Nations consultant, Steve Glovinsky, who advised me to make sure I had a relationship with someone “on the inside.” He explained that in all the countries he worked in, he always made sure he had developed a friendship with someone who worked in the institution.

Thanks to the Fulbright network and Jane Schukoske, the former Executive Director of USIEF (United States Indian Education Foundation, the organization that runs the Fulbright program), I had been introduced to another lawyer and professor, Bharti Yadav, at the National Law University Delhi who was committed to access to justice and who was also active in the Global Alliance for Justice Educators (GAJE).

Our relationship began with our work together for our presentation at the GAJE conference in South Africa, and continued through the course of my stay at National Law University Delhi. Our friendship and good working relationship — and Bharti’s innovation and relationship with Dr. Feridun Yenisey, a Turkish lawyer and educator — led to the development of a week long online Advanced Legal Skills class that was offered to Turkish law students as well as law students all over India.

This was the first teaching I did in India, and having this week-long interactive seminar to deliver the first week of February gave me a great opportunity to focus, meet students, and work closely with Bharti. Bharti and I split the daily 3 hour lecture and developed an interactive format with break-out rooms so that the Indian students and the Turkish students would get to know one another

Although the class was online, we got to interact with the students quite a bit, and one of my favorite things that happened was getting to know two students better: Abhay Shukla (on the screen above, lower right-hand corner) and Helen Thomas (picture with me). Abhay had graduated from Delhi University Faculty of Law, and invited me to lunch at the Carnatic Cafe in Greater Kailash, where we had a wonderful conversation and he presented e with a great biography of Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar, the Dalit intellectual and activist who wrote the Indian Constitution. We kept in touch and it turns out he was already friends with some of the young Fulbright Student Researchers! Helen Thomas attends National Law University Tamil Nadu and flew to Delhi to stay with family so we could meet for lunch and talk about different ways she could navigate the legal community for internships in human rights.

I was indeed fortunate to have “someone on the inside,” and Bharti continued to help and support me at NLUD, and was instrumental in my teaching the Research, Ethics and Publication course to the NLUD Ph.D. cohort. I look forward to our continued collaborations!