Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Monday night I witnessed my first desert sandstorm. I was just finishing up taking an online survey in a cybercafe around 6:30 when all of a sudden the sky turned orange and then pitch black. The wind immediately picked up and all the power shut off. The owners of the place shut and latched the windows and doors and scrambled to find candles. We waited for about half an hour in darkness listening to the banging outside. After the worst was over we opened the door and just watched the rain and wind blow for awhile. I had to walk about 10 minutes to get home and got poured on. We didn't get power back for 16 hours. My host mother, host sister, and Deva spent all day yesterday scrubbing the house and washing off the dust that blew in. The villagers we visited yesterday said that their clothes and food all blew away. All over town billboards and power lines were blown down and destroyed. And then last night it happened again!!! Only this time we were more prepared and shut the windows really quick and the power was only out for about 10 minutes. At least after the storms the temperature drops nicely.

Monday and Tuesday I went with Nazima and the two interns to the village of Kaperda. They have 4 anganwadis, so we did a lot of visiting and weighing. Yesterday I guess I gave the pot of rice mixture they serve the children too long of a look and before I knew it I had a plate in front of me. it seemed really wrong for me to be eating unicef donations but the workers were determined that I should try it. It wasn't bad--sort of like flavorless porridge. I felt so fat and spoiled.

Yesterday I was starting to get a little frustrated with my working situation because for the ninth day I was still just following these other interns around as they spoke hindi to the villagers and to each other. At the end of the day I had a meeting with the FSD staff and my organization head honchos and we talked about what I will be doing for the rest of the summer. I will continue doing the nutritional surveys in villages, but on my own with a translator. The point of the surveys is to come up with some nutritional data to put in a grant proposal for Unicef which I will present to Unicef's regional officer at the end of the summer. The more they talked about it, the bigger the project seemed to get. I'm kind of nervous, but I'm excited to be doing something concrete.

I don't know why, but it seems like everyone can say no to more food but me. When Indian women periodically go around the circle of people eating and try to force more food onto everyone's plates, I feel like I put up a pretty good fight. I say "No! No! Bas! Bas! (enough!)" and try to cover my plate up and then resort to "Later! I'll eat more later!!" but I am almost never successful at convincing them. Then the ladies continue around and if any other (Indian) person says no, they press for a second and then relent. I wish I could convey to them that I'm just trying to avoid heart disease. Also, I think that Ladyfingers are okra. I have just never seen fresh okra before. I will continue to investigate. For breakfast this morning I had fresh mango, a lassi, and three parathas. Three because this time I was actually hungry, but I think I would have ended up eating three whether I wanted to or not. For our other meals we've kind of gone into disaster mode thanks to the storm, so we have been eating winter food. Last night Anitaji made this sort of porridgey stuff that was dried chapati mixed with a soupy, spicy, vegetabley broth/gravy and then we also had mangos with cream. Delicious!! But it was my fourth or fifth meal of the day so I tried to take it easy.

I've been trying to wake up earlier in the mornings to enjoy the cool breezes that disappear after about 7;30 am, and it has given me the opportunity to enjoy new varieties of Old Indian Man outfits. They frequently putter about the house, yard, or terrace in an undershirt and a little wrapped skirt. Sometimes men fold the skirt into shorts, sometimes the skirt is a colorful towel, and sometimes it is just a skirt. On the other end, little Indian boys like to wear their shirts tucked in around their armpits with their little shorts or pants tightly cinched. It's pretty endearing.

On Sunday some men came by the house and after an elaborate sequence of weighing, sorting, indignant shouting and bargaining, my host mother sold all of the recycling for 130 Rs., or enough to buy vegetables for the day. I was intrigued. I told them, in the great land of America, we have to pay people to take away our garbage and recycling. In India, people come to you and then pay you for it?! Awesome. On the other hand, I do like our system b/c people use it. I'm not sure many people in India bother to do anything with their garbage besides throw it to the neighborhood goat herd. I saw a cow chewing on a plastic bag the other day, and that was sad.

I love that adventure is in the air everywhere in India. Just walking on the sidewalks you take your life in your hands; navigating through a roundabout is only for the foolish, or those under 25. My favorite necessary yet incredibly dangerous activity is taking public transit about town. I find autorickshaws a little overwhelming, and they are usually 10 times more expensive and slower than busing. The buses are absolutely reckless. They stop for no one except the cows, weave in and out of scooters and bicycles, stop and accelerate suddenly, and I don't think a single bus was built less than 35 years ago. My favorite driver/conducter combo commands the Number 4 bus heading Southwest around 6 or 7. The ride always takes under 10 minutes and it is 5 Rs. of pure thrills.

Coming up on 3 weeks of India! It's my new absolutely favorite country. Sorry, Iceland.

Livestock

Neighborhood Cow
Neighborhood Donkeys

Neighborhood Goat Herd

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.