The last of the students to return to USI, senior Jordan Whitledge came home from India just days before school started.

His “home” from July 6 to August 18 was Jaipur, home to more than 3 million people, but the region he lived in was considered a slum area, he said.

He lived in a gated community in a six-room house which held four beds to a room.

“All the volunteers were never in harm,” Whitledge said.

He said they were blessed with a small TV and access to the Internet, but they did not have hot water.

“You did your laundry in a bucket of water, wash it and ring it out,” Whitledge said.

He taught children ages 6-12, which was difficult due to the different levels of education, he said.

“One of the young kids that I was teaching had no prior knowledge or anything,” Whitledge said. “I worked with him every day and taught him the ABCs, 123s and how to count and how to write. … (It) was very rewarding.”

The children listened to Whitledge’s lessons while sitting on the ground – the one-room classroom did not have tables or chairs. He had a chalkboard to write on and the children had notebooks.

During his time in India, Whitledge found out the Indian government was diverting electricity from the city to farmers in rural areas, he said.

“They shut off that power for an hour or two every day,” he said. “And when you’re in the school in a room that just had one light bulb and a fan, … it was really bad.”

At one point, 22 out of the 28 Indian states blacked out, leaving 625 million people without power.

Whitledge said the blackout lasted in his area for about a day, although in other states it lasted a few days longer.

He found out shortly upon his arrival that he would work with the women’s empowerment group.

“These are women who had no formal education,” he said. “You meet a lot of impoverished people who had some education, but these women – they got married very young and had children and started families, and they didn’t have any chance to learn any skills.”

These women touched Whitledge’s heart because he wanted to help them gain independence.

“They wanted their husbands to actually respect them, and they wanted to be able to help their children with their homework and schoolwork whenever they came home,” he said.

Whitledge said he chose to go to India over China, Ghana and Scotland because it is the world’s largest democracy.

“I was very interested to learn about their political system, their cultural norms, their economy,” he said. “They will be rising up as one of the leading economies in our lifetime.”

He said he was treated differently while abroad because he is a white American.

“I was walking down the street one day and this Indian man was walking the opposite direction,” he said. “We stopped and talked for a couple seconds, and he was like, ‘Where are you from?’ – ‘I’m from the U.S.,’ and I just talked to him a little, and he was like, ‘Ah, you must come and take tea with my family.’”

Drinking tea with a family in India is a very respectful and polite custom, Whitledge said.

“I think about this a lot now that I’m back, but the simplicity back in India is something I miss,” he said. “It’s very basic, everything is around families and social values, and I really miss that.”

Whitledge said he had always wanted to travel abroad.

“I never had the money to,” he said. “(The Global Engagement Internship) is a great opportunity for students to go abroad and experience a different culture. It definitely changed my life.”