Mehr Foundation

Our place is at House No. 45 in the Awas Vikash Colony area. Most people around here call it Bairihwa or Gandhinagar, near Amhut in Basti. It’s a residential-feeling spot, so it’s not as loud as the main market areas. We’ve been using this house for Mehr Foundation’s work for a good bit of time. The rooms are a bit small since it was built as a home, but we made it work for an office. We have files stacked in the corners and some desks squeezed into the main room. It’s a 272001 zip code area, and it feels like a real neighborhood. You can hear the kids playing outside in the afternoons sometimes. We don't have a big corporate lobby. You just walk up to the door and knock. The front porch gets a lot of sun in the mornings. Sometimes the power goes out for an hour or two, so we just sit and talk until it comes back on. It’s a simple way of doing things. We know the people living next door and across the street. It’s better than being in a big cold building where you don’t know anyone. We’ve got everything we need right here in House 45. It’s not a big setup, but for what we do in Basti, it’s exactly where we need to be. We just get on with things and try to keep the paperwork organized.