Sunday, June 14, 2009

I'm discovering that it is just too hot to be glamorous in India. Everyone here has giant pit stains and streams of sweat. Luckily for Indian women, centuries of tradition and dealing with the heat have produced the sari, which manages to appear incredibly graceful in any situation. The majority of Indian women also wear their hair very long, pulled back and oiled, which also never seems to show the effects of the heat. I, on the other hand, am a hot mess. Too short to be effectively pulled back but too unruly to just hang straight, my hair never looks like I think it should. My Western version of Indian clothing is certainly modest enough, but not particularly stylish or feminine. Usually I just look mismatched, dusty, and a little lost.

Surprisingly, even though I'm pretty sure I've never looked worse, I am attracting the most male attention of my entire life. Walking down the street everyone wants to say Hello Madam, How Are You, I get offered scooter rides, and everyone is concerned if maybe I am lost. I only need to be sitting still for about 2 minutes before a young Indian guy suddenly appears asking, "What country? How long in Jodhpur? Where living? You have email address? Boyfriend?" It gets personal really fast. And maybe they're just curious. But it's bizarre and sort of draining to spend long amounts of time out on the town. It takes constant vigilance. A few of the other female interns already have phone stalkers; I definitely want to avoid any sort of invasion of my personal time.

India has a six day work week but FSD has workshops planned for about half of our Saturdays. Yesterday we met to have Hindi class and then discuss assessments. Vague, right? I guess by assessments they just mean the assessing of any sort of situation. Like assessing the health situation in a village. Or assessing the effectiveness of a particular organization. We ended up going on a lot of development-y tangents that got to be kind of draining to discuss, but also interesting.

Going back through past entries, I realize that I haven't ever explained what it is that my organization does. When I write that I don't know what's going on, it's more that I don't understand at any given moment what is being said or being done, but I do understand the general aim of our actions. Meera Sansthan works for the "empowerment and upliftsments of womans and childs". It was formed around thirty years ago by the first female elected official in Jodhpur (and maybe Rajasthan) and it is continued today by her daughter. It has multiple projects going on, but the two I've dealt with so far are 1) a training center for anganwadi workers and 2) a legal counseling center for women with domestic disputes. The Anganwadi Center Program was founded by the Indian govt. Anganwadi workers are responsible for monitoring the health and nutrition of all the children under 6 in a village and also for educating mothers on proper health and nutrition for themselves while they are pregnant and nursing. Anganwadi centers are also responsible for providing at least one (maybe two?) meals a day for children under 6. The Anganwadi workers are paid by the government and attend a month long initial training session and yearly 7-day refresher courses.

When I am at the Ladies Police Station, I watch my supervisor counsel women who have dowry disputes, husbands who drink, or disagreements with their inlaws. Even though dowries are illegal in India, 2 of the four cases I have seen so far were about dowry--one family wanted to get back the dowry they had paid to the husband's family years ago, and in the other case, the husband's family began torturing the wife 9 years after the wedding to get more dowry from her family. She ran away and was trying to get a divorce. When we go to villages, we visit the anganwadi centers, review the records they keep, and interview the workers. Then we tour about the village visiting individual households, interviewing mothers about their knowledge of general nutrition and anganwadi policies, and then we weigh a sample of children under 3 to double-check the nutritional status of the village.

Our program coordinator was telling us the other night about how refreshing it is to work with NGOs in Jodhpur. She worked for many years with an NGO in Bombay, and she said that the corruption levels in many large NGOs in the big cities are astounding. Often only 20% of the organization's funds go towards the people it serves with the other 80% going into "administration".

3 year old Ishu comes over a lot. Friday he came over before I was about to leave to meet some of the other interns for dinner. To keep him from wanting to come with me, his mom, Anita, and Shreena told him that I work at the police station catching and beating up burglars, and that I was about to go to work. When I saw the mixture of fear and admiration in his eyes, I actually felt like a superhero.

I've been eating so much fried food. Today we had plain parathas for breakfast, chapati with ladyfingers (a vegetable I have never seen before), green pepper, onion, and cooked cucumbers for lunch, and just now some sort of potato pancake-roti combination with ketchup and a little plate of yogurt soaked balls for dinner. I think I need to start eating more fresh fruit or something to combat all the ghee. Actually, yesterday at the FSD office, I saw a bottle of mango juice. In India it's common for people to just pour liquid from a communal bottle into their mouths to save dishes and stuff, so I took the bottle and poured a big mouthful. About halfway through, I realized it didn't taste much like mango but it tasted an awful lot like ghee. And guess what! It WAS ghee! Luckily I spit it out before I swallowed any. But it was gross.

And last night I had a nightmare that the zombie apocalypse had come.