Cogan was interning at an orphanage in the city of Gurgaon, located just outside Delhi.
The philosophy major ultimately spent eight weeks at the orphanage, which housed 22 boys aged 8 to 18.
“If you want to get one thesis of how I felt about my trip, I felt like I was a time traveler,” Cogan said. “I felt like a lot of the cultural mores and a lot of the economic conditions I was experiencing were consistent with the experience of someone in the United States 80 or 90 years ago, during the Great Depression.”
Cogan’s internship was coordinated by the International Internship Program, which this year placed 183 interns in 45 different countries, said Luisa Duarte-Silva, the program’s director. Internships range from studying architecture in France to stolen artifacts in Egypt.
Cogan worked with an organization called Udayan Care, which seeks to better the living conditions for the underprivileged throughout India, according to the group’s mission statement. Udayan, the organization’s name, means “Eternal Sunrise” in SanskritFounded in 1994, the organization is funded by a family of wealthy car seat manufacturers.
The orphanage Cogan worked at opened six years ago and is one of nine run by Udayan Care.
But Cogan explained that “though [the boys] lived in what I considered poverty, they lived better than most people I saw in the villages.”
The boys in the home were comparatively lucky not only because of their better living conditions, but because of the educational opportunities they received, Cogan said.
The orphanage pays for the boys’ private schooling through the 10th grade at a cost of about $20 a month, Cogan said.
After 10th grade, the boys either begin to train for a profession or go on to finish high school and attend college, if their grades are high enough.
“I talked to them a lot about how they should work hard and go to college,” Cogan said.
At the orphanage, Cogan’s day usually began at 5:30 a.m., when he helped prepare breakfast before waking the boys up.
“I tried to convince them to brush their teeth and put on their clothes every day and explained to them why they needed to go to school every day,” he said.
Once the boys came home from school, Cogan would spend the afternoon teaching and tutoring them in a variety of subjects.
One of the most memorable moments of the internship came on July 4, when a monsoon flooded the orphanage, forcing the boys to evacuate. “You could see the rain creeping up, closer and closer to the house, the water starts coming from the toilets ... and it’s like a race against the clock,” Cogan explained.
Because the orphanage is situated at a level below the rest of the village, it floods annually at the start of the monsoon season. But, Cogan said, “the boys do this every year, so it’s fun for them.”
After securing his belongings by putting them on his desk, which he placed on his bed, Cogan went to help the boys, some of whom were too small to stand when the water rose.
“I would take up boys and carry them to safety on dry land,” he said.
The boys then piled into an auto-rickshaw and drove to a farmhouse, owned by the family that funds Udayan Care, where they stayed for 30 days.
Looking back on his experience, Cogan said that the boys were sweet, helpful and — as incidents such as his language lesson illustrated — a little mischievous.
Cogan still stays in touch with the boys at the orphanage through Facebook and e-mail, as they have access to a computer lab once every two weeks. He also maintains direct contact with a boy who lived at the farmhouse they used during the flood.
The boy, Cogan said, had not been in school for the last two years because his father could not afford the cost of books and a uniform — 600 rupees, roughly equivalent to $12.
“I told him, ‘That is ridiculous. You are not not going to school because of $12,’ ” he recalled.
Cogan gave the boy’s father the necessary money and said he plans to continue sending payments to the family in the coming years.
Cogan added that he also plans to visit India in the future and return to the orphanage.
“I’m a philosophy major and I’m studying ethics,” he said of his motivations. “And so I thought, I can’t just learn about this in the classroom. I have to practice this in real life.”
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly characterized the size of Gurgaon.
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