End of Week 5

I have been having a rough couple of days. It seems like every time I am out walking I am attracting extra attention. Yesterday some guy grabbed at my backpack while I was walking and that really bugged me, then some guy yelled something obscene from his motorbike, and later I had to yell at another guy to leave me alone because he kept calling at me and was starting to follow me. And even if every guy on the street doesn't yell, "madam! madam! Hello!", just about every guy is staring or leering, and that just puts me in a bad mood.

I feel a little guilty. So, on the second day I realized that my malaria pills made me incredibly nauseous for an hour or two after I took them, so I immediately quit taking them. Another intern has been taking them this entire time, but didn't realize that they were why she felt so sick every morning. They had even made her vomit twice. I was like, dude, quit taking those pills. And so she did. And now she might have malaria. I feel terrible--I just hope her fever is caused by the bedbugs she caught during a stay at a nearby guest house (this has not been her week). Or mostly I hope she just feels better really soon.

Today on the bus my driver was singing to himself, and that was really sweet.

It has been so hot this week that the local schools are adjusting their hours to end earlier. I feel like curling up and sleeping until August. I hadn't realized that it had cooled off until just now when it has fired back up. It is almost unbearable this time. It didn't bother me as much at first because I was excited to be in India and experience the new climate, but after six weeks I would really like to be dry for 30 minutes. And not so salty. I'm sweating the prints off of my new Indian shirts! The three days of monsoon were just a cheap trick.

I also never thought this would happen, but I might be ready to branch out from Indian food. It is still delicious, and I enjoy it when I eat it, but I would love some fresh vegetables or fresh fruit, or normal cheese, or milk without sugar. The only salad I eat here is fresh onion and cucumber. I'm starting to miss bland! How crazy is that!

Here are some positives: I am buying kulfi almost every day, I found and then bought some fresh plums this morning, the public transportation system still fills me with excitement and adventure every morning and every night, I love having staring contests with the old, turbaned, sheet-pantsed village men who are on the bus with me, my host family is very accommodating of my napping needs, the other interns are full of other perspectives and help me be more reasonable, and yesterday I made friends at McDonalds with an Indian man who is now a french astronaut and back in India with his french wife to visit his mother . So my life isn't all rain clouds right now! Or maybe hazy dust storms?

Also, here are some pictures that probably should have gone with my last blog entry: Sorry about the layout, I don't have the patience today to make it look great.

My neighbor during the monsoon

Mandore Gardens

Review of Week 4: Business as Usual?

For a few days this week I felt like I joined Corporate India. I bused to the office and then did research and wrote some of my report on my laptop all day. Except at this office I was frequently interrupted by the 7 year old who lives upstairs. Sambhav is always excited to run downstairs and practice a little English with me and then lapse into rapid fire Hindi that I just sort of laugh along with. The other day after lunch I played Snakes and Ladders with him for about forty-five minutes and I got to practice counting and losing gracefully in Hindi. That same day I was encouraged by my supervisor to take a nap on the floor, so I did. Then Thursday I had five cups of chai in one day! So my corporate India is maybe a little different from corporate America.

In addition to working with women and children through the Anganwadi Center system, my organization works with leather artisans in Jodhpur. Meera Sansthan is trying to organize the artisans into Self Help Groups so that they can apply for loans from microfinance organizations. They also organize trainings on leather design development and quality improvement. They also are trying to help the artisans find a better path to customers. In any case, one day this week to break up the monotony of office life (which is actually usually pretty eventful) my supervisor decided to send me off to the leather cluster to see the leather workers in action and ask them some questions. They really do amazing work--Jodhpur is famous for producing Jutis, which are leather embroidered shoes, and the designs are sometimes quite intricate. What blows me away is the price of all these leather products. The Jutis sell for about 170 Rs., or $4. Handmade, all leather, hand stitched--such a labor intensive product for so little profit. Which is a problem--most leather artisans are barely getting by, and the men I talked to said they weren't letting their sons go into the family business because it was so much work with so little return. However, somehow one guy had the time and energy to build the world's largest Juti! It was 8 ft long, three men can sleep inside, and 12 children can sit inside. He said his next project was to build an entire room out of leather.

As part of my host sister's 17th birthday celebration on Friday we went to the McDonald's which just opened in Jodhpur. I was pretty curious what would be on the menu since this country is mostly vegetarian and almost completely beef-free. There were a lot of chicken products and then three or four veggie or paneer options. The whole experience was a little overwhelming--there were a lot of people and I'm not sure how familiar my family was with the American fast food process. They asked me for recommendations and I just had to say that the entire menu was new to me. I didn't elaborate on the American version--the last time we brought up the fact that Americans eat beef they all seemed pretty scandalized. We all got the Tikka Burger which had a patty of potato masala. It was nice, but not as spicy as the name implied. About an hour and a half later we went out for real dinner (burgers are just snacks, I guess?) and the place knew my family so well that when we sat down we didn't even order. The servers just brought out "the usual"--onion salad, roti, dal, malai kofta, and then some papad at the end. Dolly said that the dal here was the best in all of Jodhpur. I'm not experienced enough with Jodhpur or dal to agree or disagree, but it was really spicy and had about a cm of straight ghee sitting on top. Even my host family agrees that the food there is really rich.

The interns got together to celebrate the 4th of July yesterday. We had some group birthdays this past week too, so we had birthday cake, biryani, mutton, chicken, egg curry, paneer, dal, salad, tons of fresh fruit which none of our host families seem to want to give us ever, and gaudy Indian birthday decorations. We even got some fireworks and shot them off in an abandoned lot across the street from the office. That attracted a lot of attention--a bunch of foreigners yelling and shooting off fireworks on some random night in July? But it was pretty exciting. Someone's hand almost got blown off (of course). And I forgot to take pictures.

Today was apparently the hottest day so far, and somehow we had decided to spend it outside touring Mandore Gardens. They are a popular picnic spot for Indian families, so on a Sunday they were starting to get a little crowded, even with the heat. Since Rajasthan is mostly desert, I was expecting the gardens to be sort of dried out. Instead everything was very green and lush with bright flowering bushes. We walked through some shrines to past maharajas, saw lots of monkeys, and wandered back to what we thought might be ruins of the original fort. One of the other interns also was accosted by a local old woman who really wanted to touch a white face.

I think this last weekend was my last quiet weekend. I have travel plans for the remaining three before I have to leave. Next weekend the interns are going to Mt. Abu which is a hill station not too far from here. Apparently it's a popular Indian tourist spot, which is intriguing. The following weekend we have an intern retreat in Udaipur. Then my last weekend another intern and I are going to try to make it to the Taj Mahal, which is about 12 or 13 hours from Jodhpur. And then the next weekend I fly to London! But it's India, so who knows what will really happen.

Expanding MyComfort Zone on the Indian Railway

Not many families in India have air conditioning, or at least not in Jodhpur. For the most part the Indians use fans and then also these giant coolers that force hot air through water to cool it down before blowing it into a room. They work pretty well as long as they have water in them, but the water dries up after a couple hours or so. So far Deva as been the one to make sure my cooler is always full of water before I go to sleep at night, but if I spend much time during the day in my room the cooler dries out and then I just sweat a bunch. Today, as I was sitting on my bed completely drenched, I realized that I could probably figure out how to fill the cooler up myself (I mean, it's only been what, 3 weeks?). I got out on the balcony, ready to apply all my super engineering lab experience and saw that it was super obvious. The hose was already inserted into the water holding tank. All I had to do was turn on the knob. When I turned around to come back inside, I saw that the family across the street was out on their balcony laughing at me. I gave a little wave.

This past weekend the other interns and I ventured to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan! We left Friday night for a 6 hour overnight train ride. We decided to save a little cash and go for the 320 Rs. round trip non AC sleeper car. I thought there might be sheets or something, but instead we just spread out on vinyl covered bunks, three to a wall. On our first day we visited the Hawa Mahal (Wind Palace), which was the Jaipur Maharaja's Playboy Mansion. He was the only man allowed inside, aside from the castrated Eunuchs who had to wheel the royal wives and concubines around (they were wearing too much jewelry to walk up stairs comfortably). Next we went to a collection of giant astronomical tools and sundials built by a Maharaja who was particularly into astronomy. The tools calculate the exact time and the exact position of the sun within the zodiac. Hinduism uses astrology to name babies and also to determine auspicious dates for things like weddings. We were all exhausted but we continued on to the City Palace, where the current Maharaja still lives. The museum part that we could see had cool garment and artillery exhibits. One Maharaja was 7 ft tall and 450 lbs, and they still had his old robe and a pair of his pants! Then we ate a lot of lunch, I took a nap, and we ate the most expensive meal I have had yet. Pizza Hut was 300 Rs. a person! Ridiculous.

Day 2 we had planned to wake up super early and climb a temple, but since everyone had only gotten about 4 hours of sleep on the train and we didn't get to bed until around one, we weren't travel ready until about eleven and it was already 105 degrees or something. We grabbed some rickshaws and headed up to Amber Fort. Ruins from the 10th century are visible behind the current fort, which was built in the 15th century. Unfortunately, most of the young male tourists seemed more interested in following our group around than enjoying the fort. I don't mind taking pictures with families or kids, but it is really uncomfortable to be learning how the Maharaja would meet with his concubines in this room and be given spoonfuls of wine before making glory (?? what does that mean?? I was too scared to inquire further), and then notice that four or five different cameras are pointed at you and your other blonde friend. At first we just tried to ignore them, but after some guy was videotaping Rachel for about 2 minutes straight we got a little more forceful. The Indian American interns were telling us that our ideas of politeness don't apply here, and that we should be just as rude as we need to to make them stop.

Next we took a jeep to the largest cannon in the world (only fired once, just for practice), I got some ice cream for myself and bananas for the group, and then we went to the Sun Temple. The Sun Temple is up on a mountain where wild monkeys also like to have shenanigans. We chilled up there for about an hour and a half and we saw monkey families, monkey wrestling matches, monkeys not caring about our existence, and we also saw the temple caretaker's toddler daughter get totally owned by a rogue monkey. We ate another expensive and leisurely dinner at a Chinese place (but no lunch besides bananas and roadside fried goods, so the cost was okay). We raced to the train station but it was delayed (surprise!). We didn't leave until 1am or so, but every seat on the train had three or four different numbers on it so no one knew where to sit. No one as in no one on the entire train. Kind of chaotic, but so Indian, which is why I came, so I tried to keep calm. We got into Jodhpur again around 7am. I decided to take the day off and I slept from 7:30 to 1:30. Longest nap ever!

Having hindi speaking interns made this trip so much easier. I'm really curious about what would have happened if we had tried to go without them. I'm thinking that we would have paid a lot more to do fewer things with so much more confusion! I think another intern and I might head to the Taj Mahal soon, maybe by ourselves without any hindi speaking crutch, and that might be quite a bit more adventurous.

Indian ice cream is the best. More specifically, this frozen milky dessert very similar to ice cream called kulfi is the best. It's kind of chunky and you can get it in the best flavors, like pistachio, or chowpati, or cardamom dessert flavored. I need to start making a bigger effort to eat it b/c I don't think I'll be able to get it outside of India.

Coming Up on a Month

I was just outside hanging up some of my kurtas (Indian tunics) to dry and a little girl waved at me and said, "hello, auntie!" It was super cute. I'm really bad at remembering to call people auntie and uncle and stuff. I'm trying to remember to call everyone ma'am or sir or add ji to the end of their name, but it feels really unnatural. Maybe it's just my American accent. It's charming in Hindi laced English! I've started to speak English in a little bit of an accent so that people can understand me more easily, especially on the bus. I roll my r's so hard!

I just spent about half an hour trying to find some English TV channels. There were some news stations, but the one I stopped on was showing a special on the luxury SUV with the best off-roading capabilities, so I moved on. I ended up watching The Father of the Bride for about 15 minutes before the channel turned into static. It made me kind of homesick! The US has some cool traditions.

On Sunday five other interns and I went to Jodhpur's fort for a touristy day. We got the two of the Indian-American (and Hindi speaking) interns to buy us all the discounted Indian admission (50 Rs. vs. 250 Rs. for foreigners) and then we hired a guide for the day--200 Rs. (plus 50 Rs. tip) for about 2.5 hours of walking us through the museum and telling us about the fort. It's massive, built around 1450. From what I understand, all of India was traditionally made up of princely states loosely controlled by various conquerers until the most recent independence. the city of Jodhpur was one of those states. The Marwari people, or the people traditionally from Rajasthan, are known for being fierce warriors, and the ruling caste, Rajput, was a warrior caste. The fort sits on a little mountain, and it seemed pretty impenetrable. It had thick walls and giant doors for the warrior elephants to walk through. The Maharaja of Jodhpur and his family (brothers, wives, concubines) lived in the palace section of the fort, which is where most of the museum is. One of my favorite exhibits was the elephant seat display. It made me want to make best friends with an elephant so bad! The Rajput women aren't allowed to leave the four walls of the home without being covered by four walls. This means that they either need to be carried in a box type carriage from place to place or they need to wear a full body veil. In the villages, the Rajput women are still bound to the four walls of their house. Usually this includes their yard, but that still isn't very much walking space.

Monday and today (Wednesday) I went to the village of Salawas to continue the nutritional survey. Salawas is only about 25 km from Jodhpur, so it is doing really well. They have four schools, a hospital, good water and irrigation systems, enough electricity, and their anganwadis seem to be working well. I love that in every village after a frantic hour of shouting and weighing we spend at least an hour in someone's house drinking tea and chatting. Usually I can't contribute much, but since I have a translator now I have been learning a lot about village life and politics. I have also been practicing my Hindi. Today at the bus stand, instead of just smiling at the curious crowd of children I usually attract, I struck up a limited conversation with them. They understood my questions (I think) but I wasn't totally sure what they responded with. Basically, they were going to a village with various members of their extended family to visit other members of their extended family and they either ate something or nothing for breakfast. Success!!! Plus, one of the little boys, Rakeesh, was just the cutest smiley thing ever. 4 years old, still covered in powder from his bath, and with his shirt tucked into hiked up pants.

Food report!! Last night my host maternal grandfather turned 67 so we went to a family gathering celebration. My host maternal grandmother had just come up with a new recipe called "Mango Vegetable" which was maybe the most delicious think I've ever eaten. It was mango pits with some meat left on them, swimming in buttery, savory, spicy mango puree. We also had a couple different vegetables, chapati, vegetable biryani with graham flour dumplings, sweets, cakes, and cold drink. For lunch today I had a Rajasthani vegetable with lots of chilies mixed in that made me cry. I can still feel it burning in my stomach. The spicy food is so fun!!

Today I saw a mother-in-law who was 104 years old. I hope to God I don't ever make it that far. She looked miserable.

The other interns and I are taking off for some sight-seeing in Jaipur this weekend. I'm so excited! But not excited to spend money. India has made me so frugal. Soon I will be out collecting bits of wire to sell to the scrap collectors like the rest of the old ladies.

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.