Story by Emily Wilson
Photos provided by Ashleigh Zosel-Harper
For most people, a jam-packed journey thousands of miles away from home requires a second thought. Standing on that edge between the comforts of home and the adventures abroad is daunting. But Planning, Public Policy, and Management (PPPM) undergraduate student Ashleigh Zosel-Harper took the plunge. A five-month-long internship in the heart of India gave her newfound lessons about the importance of policy programs that implement healthy, safe, and effective means of helping women and children around the globe.
“It was very emotionally taxing work,” says Zosel-Harper of her time with women and children in the Indian state of Maharashtra. “At some points you feel so helpless. You want to help these women but it’s just not that easy. But this whole experience gave me a purpose. Women can make sustainable development; we just have to empower them to do so.”
Zosel-Harper’s stay in India was split between working in Malavali, Maharashtra, with the Community Aid and Sponsorship Program (CASP), an organization involved with helping children impacted by HIV/AIDS, and Mumbai, Maharashtra, where she worked with Prerana, an organization dedicated to stopping second-generation prostitution.
“She was extremely confident and cared so much about the people we encountered,” says Angela Kohama, who interned and lived with Zosel-Harper while working with CASP. “At the end of the program, the social workers we worked under confided to us that they were HIV positive. Her reaction showed how much she truly cared about the women; she offered them her support, her friendship.”
In Malavli, Zosel-Harper evaluated the performance of micro-financing endeavors of families supported by CASP. The second half of her work in Mumbai, which has the world’s largest red light district, dealt largely with social work focused on learning how to support the children of commercial sex workers.
“The amount of inner strength needed to overcome the emotional obstacles from such responsibilities is tremendous,” says Andrea Herling, the UO Study Abroad Program Coordinator who oversaw Zosel-Harper’s internship.
“She’s just amazing,” Herling adds. “An internship like that is challenging and not everyone can handle it. The level of initiative and perseverance needed is advanced. She had all that and more; she just dove right in. When you do that, you find out about things you never knew existed. You learn about yourself, you learn about the world around you.”
From the rural outskirts to the commercial urban epicenter, Zosel-Harper’s international experience highlighted the extremes of working with non-profits in India. Disparities between the rich and the poor, the stark contrast of rural versus urban life, and the intensity of working with women’s rights in a far corner of the world left an ever-lasting mark on Zosel-Harper.
“I feel like I’m still learning what I learned,” she says. “Working with the actual people afflicted by HIV/AIDS and sex trafficking put a face to what I was trying to stop. These people weren’t just some statistic; they became my friends. It made everything so much more real.”

Gallery • 1 Photos

The second is from Mumbai. The girl by my side was my friend and boss at the organization I worked with in the red light. We did a city beautification project on one of our days off. A caption might read, “Bombay beautification with colleagues and friends.”