At the time of their marriage, SR had told her that he planned to return to India to do social work in his native Dharwad district in a few years. It didn't take him long to persuade his wife-to-be to relocate to India. A stint in Africa as a peace corps worker just a short while earlier, followed by a visit to India, had convinced Hiremath that she could easily carry her social service skills to her husband's homeland.

``I had worked in smallvillages in Africa, compared to which India seemed such an advanced country,'' Hiremath, who was in the US to receive an award from the San Francisco Bay Area-based non-profit organisation called Indians for Collective Action (ICA), told the California newspaper, India-West. ``I had always thought working in India would be wonderful.''

Sacrificing the creature comforts of her native land, Hiremath donned a saree and a pair of sturdy chappals (slippers) and worked to pull scores of people in rural areas of the state out of the cycle of poverty into which they had been born. Before setting out for India, the Hiremaths founded an organisation called the India Development Service International (IDS) in Chicago and took away to India the Rs 5 lakh they had managed to raise through it.

This fund served as seed money and helped them get some of their India projects off the ground. They also took with them their four-year-old son and two-year-old daughter, knowing the two would have to attend Kannada mediumvillage schools. Both Hiremath and her husband received a token salary of $100 each from IDS International, which was supported by the ICA. For the next five years, the Hiremaths worked for the IDS, designing and implementing programmes for the uplift of the villagers.

They managed to arrange funding from overseas organisations such as Oxfam and Christian Aid so that they would not have to depend too much on the government for money. ``We have to be careful about which grants we go after because we want to be able to design our own programmes,'' Hiremath said.One of their more successful progammes is the cooperative style `sangams' the villagers organise themselves into, as it gives them collective clout when seeking micro-credit from banks. The `sangam' then loans out the money to its members to run cottage industries. Barring the leather and sheep rearing trade, most of the `sangams' comprise women, Hiremath said.

``They not only become self-sufficient, they also come to understand the world of thriftand credit,'' she said. In 1984, SR switched to working for the ICA-supported Samaj Pareewartna Samudhaya, an environmental policy and activist group.

Hiremath continued working with IDS International, adopting a simple lifestyle and winning over the villagers with her pidgin Kannada and unassuming ways. ``She's so totally Indian, so totally genuine,'' said ICA member Lata Patil, who has visited Madileri village where Hiremath and her family live and observed her in action. ``It's remarkable how many changes she has brought about even without being able to speak the language very well.''

Today, IDS International has a staff of close to 75 people, most of them recruited from among the villagers themselves, who work in some 200 villages in Karnataka. Hiremath now wants to spend the rest of her life in India ``watching villagers take over programmes and learning to be self-sufficient''.