I did a veterinary Projects Abroad trip in India last summer, and it was awesome! If you do a longer-term project (I did 1 month) you get to live with a host family in a village, and shadow the village vet who mostly treats cows/bullocks, some goats, occasionally dogs, one time a horse... they also arrange for you to go to Madurai for a week to see how a city vet works (more dogs, still plenty of cows, temple elephants), and at the end they take you on a tour of various farms. After you've put in your hours shadowing the vets, the rest of the day is yours to do with as you wish. Every other weekend, Projects Abroad sets up an organization-wide trip, so you get to mingle with other interns in different fields. During the weekends in between, you can also arrange with your friends to go on trips of your own. You really get to see the aspects of India that aren't available to tourists that only go train-to-train to the cities - I much preferred village life, and taking the buses and rickshaws meant going through a variety of smaller villages and towns and really seeing the sights.
The two-week veterinary project has you stay at Projects Abroad's headquarters, where they have a dormitory, and from what I gathered it's much more regimented, because they're cramming a lot (nearly the same amount of stuff as above) into a short amount of time.
Interning in India is really exciting, though, because it's very hands-on - the vets teach you how to artificially inseminate cows (which is about 80% of what they do!) and you start by sticking your gloved arm up the cow's rectum. XD Goat castration, vaccinations (stabbing an 18-gauge needle into a cow's rump), all sorts of stuff. The village vet I shadowed was also super friendly and would seek out opportunities for me and the other vet interns I lived with - once he arranged for us to see the corpse of an elephant that had died in the mountains under another vet's jurisdiction (the other vet autopsied it afterward - which we didn't get to see, but the corpse had been there for a couple of days already so I doubt we would have wanted to stick around, curiosity or no...)
The thing about India is, well, it *is* a much different culture - having lived in Taiwan most of my life (with Taiwanese parents/appearance), I know what it's like to live in a monoculture, but being on the other end of that was kind of a shock. Most people are friendly and intensely curious, but being a foreigner and standing out also makes you a target for pickpockets and scammers (especially since there's the idea of "foreign = rich", and in the city people are used to stupid tourists). Also, I could stand the heat and humidity fairly well, but it's not for everybody. As for the program itself - my biggest beef with it was that the people running the program there (all locals) were terrible at explaining things, so there was sort of an oral culture amongst the interns teaching the newcomers what to expect and what to do XD;; Food poisoning isn't exactly guaranteed to happen, but, well, it's fairly common.
The program is kind of expensive, true, but that's the price you pay for having the entire infrastructure in place for you to just gallivant in and not have to do any setting up yourself. It's a good program for going straight into a really different place/culture without much/any prior experience and hitting the ground running.
