Finally Current!

Kal bahut garam tha. Yesterday was very hot. I don't know if I can really tell when the temperature goes from just normal Rajasthan hot to extra Rajasthan hot, but my host mother didn't bother getting dressed yesterday because it was going to be so hot. It was 44 C, which I think is around 111 F. I spent most of the day in a village about thirty minutes outside of Jodhpur called Kherda. Maybe it was the heat, but I was pretty crabby for a lot of it. We weighed about 20 children all under 3. All of them were pretty lively. A lot of mothers here put eyeliner on their children. It's kind of cute, but it just gets really smudged so they look kind of raggedy. It's a look, I guess. The deeper into the village we got, the more picturesque it became. Happy goats strolled, cows relaxed majestically under big trees near thatched huts. I forgot my camera, unfortunately.

Last night Anitaji made Indian chow mein. It was delicious, just like everything she makes. She even made the noodles herself. Chow mein was followed by various yogurt/chutney smothered fried things, mango shakes, and syrup soaked donut holes. I really need to learn the real names of things; they always tell me, but hindi is hard for me to remember. We also had a Rajasthani special--take a chapati, pour ghee, chili powder, dried coriander, and salt on top, mix up the spices and ghee into a paste, and then dip more chapati in it! As my host father said, "It's instant vegetable!" I think we maybe have different ideas of what vegetables are. It was tasty, though.

Ajh bahut garam hoga. Today is going to be hot. Time to brace myself and head out into the heat.

Should Have Been Posted 10 June 2009

Today was my fifth day of work, and to celebrate my supervisor instructed the other two Indian interns to show me around Jodhpur! This was also after no one had bothered to show up to the police station/office until around 11 am. First Apana (my coworker) and I scooted back to her house, I met her (entire extended) family and enjoyed a cold coffee shake, her brother drove us back to the police station/office, picked up Sonu (my other coworker), and then dropped us off at Jodhpur's palace. Most of the palace is used as a five star hotel, and it costs a minimum of about $75 just to go inside. The Maharaja Suite room costs $10,000 a night. There were pictures of it in the little museum that we got to go into for about 30 Rs. Surprisingly, it was only built around the turn of the last century. It had all natural air conditioning and a completely underground swimming pool!

I'm settling into a nice little rhythm. I wake up to bed tea around 7:15, putter about journaling, hindi studying, bucket showering, and sun screening until 9. My room has to be completely tidy every morning so that Deva can easily clean everything. I don't know if I've ever lived in such an allergen free environment. At 9 Anitaji serves me a new sort of spicy porridge concoction (today was the first repeat--utbam, or something) with a milky shake. I approve my lunch, say yes to pickle, and fill up my water bottles. A fellow intern picks me up for work, and then I follow my coworkers blindly for a couple hours trying desperately to decipher their hindi. Sometimes we're in a village, sometimes we're in a police station. I rarely know what is happening. I try not to focus on that, though. For a little while I tried really hard to form Hindi sentences to ask the village women so that I could contribute, but I just learned that the village women only speak Marwari, so there goes that. Mostly I grill my coworkers for details on Indian life, village and city both, sporadically name objects in Hindi, and ask simple hindi questions that I generally can't understand the answers to. I get done around 3 pm, 4 pm at the latest, and nap until 6 or 7. I either stare at the ceiling or try to make up some little errand for myself until dinner at 9. After dinner I watch Hindi soap operas with my host family and then I fall asleep again around midnight. I like the work to nap ratio so far.

Shreena's 3 year old cousin, named Ishu?, came over today and he is darling. He demands toffees loudly in hindi and then yells, "dehko! dehko! (look)" while he copies everyone's standing positions. The first time he saw me, on Monday I think, he got really excited and said, "there's a barbie doll coming!" and now he calls me his barbie doll. Maybe that's why I like him so much.

Every day i am charmed anew by the roaming animals. Cows are everywhere, goats sometimes wander through, a donkey or two snack by the roadside, and bored looking camels drag even more bored looking drivers and wagons through the city.

I have only two pairs of pants. I think my project for the week/weekend will be to fix that. I really hope I find an internet cafe and get this posted soon.

Should Have Been Posted 7 June 2009

So far I have survived my first two days at work, and I am now enjoying the Sunday holiday. Meera Sansthan, as far as I can tell, is an exciting organization doing many very beneficial things for the women in the Jodhpur district. Unfortunately, my inability to speak hindi might keep me from doing anything too exciting for them. Most of my coworkers and supervisors speak English, but only when I ask them questions; most of the time they speak amongst themselves in hindi and I just tag along. I think they are just shy about their English ability. I wish they would remember, though, that my hindi is so much more basic than their English! Also, most of the work that Meera Sansthan does is with people from the villages who speak absolutely no English. Therefore, until I can speak hindi, I can't really contribute to any of the direct work of the organization. I'm trying to pick the language up, but I'm not sure how fast I can expect that to go. Instead I am going to focus on just soaking up the Indian culture I am going to be exposed to. Any work that I will be doing for this organization is going to have to be in revising and writing English documents for them, but I'm not sure they even need that. We'll see how this goes.

My host mother continues to prepare delicious and inventive vegetarian meals. Last night we had chapati with an exclusively Rajasthani pickle, veg. Biryani, a little fried snack pocket, mixed chaat (fried chapati covered in yogurt and chutney), and then a syrup soaked donut hole for dessert. I think my host mother wants me to gain 5 kgs before I leave. In fact, she said that, so she definitely wants me to gain 5 kgs. I don't know how I feel about that. On the one hand, it's hard to say no to the numerous sweets, pineapple shakes, watermelon juices, cups of chai, and fried Indian delicacies offered to me throughout the day. But I also don't want diabetes. Hopefully after my novelty wears off they will stop offering?

The weather is hot, the food is spicy, and I constantly fight the urge to nap. I've been on three scooter rides, driven into oncoming traffic too many times to count, and narrowly missed walking straight into a cow. Life is good!

Should Have Been Posted Friday, June 5

Somehow by some sort of crazy good luck I have ended up in India for the summer. With Notre Dame funding I have enrolled with the Foundation for Sustainable Development for a summer internship. FSD is an organization that coordinates volunteers to come to different countries around the world and volunteer in local grassroots NGOs.

I arrived a week ago on 30 May along with 6 other summer interns. We spent this past week adjusting to the time difference (12.5 hours ahead of PST), getting oriented in Jodhpur, discovering new Indian foods, learning a little Hindi, and trying to prepare ourselves to join the Indian workforce.

Jodhpur is still a very traditional city. Walking the streets, almost all of the women still dress in saris or salwar kameez suits. Rajasthani women enjoy wearing bright colors with loud patterns in creative combinations. My favorite right now is acid green with violent magenta. In most other settings it would probably hurt your eyes, but the desert backdrop needs those refreshing bursts of color!

Because Jodhpur is still so traditional, FSD has advised that we dress in Indian salwar kameez suits, or long pants with a loose tunic with a matching scarf. We have done a little shopping but I still feel like I look awfully mismatched. It wasn't so bad when all the interns traveled together and we all looked a little off, but now that I am about to start working, I'm getting self conscious again. Hopefully people will be too distracted by my hair to notice my clothes? Apparently only school girls wear bangs. Oh well.

Last night we all transitioned to our host families. I think it was supposed to happen around 6:30, but I ended up being the last one dropped off and I didn't arrive until around 9. My family is so nice! I feel terrible that I cannot remember their names 100%. I think it is Sushil (the dad), Anita (the mom), Shreena (daugher), Srhinuj (son), and Dedeji (grandma). They are Jain and strict vegetarians. I missed dinner with everyone, but Anitaji and I ate together last night and we had mungdal (lentil soup), chapati, onion, fresh vegetables, and amrus, which is mashed mango mixed with dood (milk) and sugar. I am trying hard to learn Hindi, but it is hard when the native speakers laugh at you. My skin will harden yet.

I woke up early for my "bed tea", which was brought to my room by Deva the servant. He looks about eleven, is from the village (which village? I don't know), and speaks only Rajasthani and Hindi. So we will probably not communicate much beyond facial expression for a few weeks. That is good practice for me too. I am trying to get mentally prepared for my first day at my NGO, Meera Sansthan, which I think means "My Organization". I'm not really sure what the NGO does (no website) or what I will be doing there. I probably won't know for a couple more weeks. I'm ready to show up and start observing and enjoy the numerous chai breaks FSD has told me to expect. They phrased it like, "you'll probably have to stop and enjoy the chai". I was like, bummer--frequent hot drink breaks are only one of my favorite things!

I'm definitely still in the honeymoon phase of culture shock (It goes Predeparture, Honeymoon, Adjustment, Being Happy, and then Reentry. Actually the fourth one is something else but I can't remember. Mainly the third one is where you get angsty). I love the food, the beautiful colors, the pace of life, the emphasis on family, the wandering cows, and all the mustaches. I am nervous that the pace of life might start to drive me crazy, though, and that the language barrier will start to get extremely frustrating. I just need to remember that Mai Hindi sikh rahi hu (I am learning Hindi), and they are also learning English.

If you want to get in touch with me, I will have internet at work, so emails/facebook/skype/@tweets, whatever, will all reach me. I do not have internet at home, though, so I might be a little slow responding, but I still would love to hear from you! I'm trying to figure out how to register my new Indian cell phone with Indian twitter so that I can be really plugged in again. Everyone has a cell phone here--I'm surprised twitter isn't bigger. We'll see how it goes.

That's it for now! Mujhe work jana chahiye! (I should go to work)

Dropping the Ball

Oh, Man!
I don't know what happened! I was doing so well, posting every week or so, but all of a sudden, here we are, three weeks later with no new posts! It may have something to do with a couple smartass Australians crushing my confidence with derisive comments about blogging and those who blog, but it's mostly been that I haven't done anything too exciting. I guess I'll sum it up in bullet points, just to speed things up and get up to date.

Kalgoorlie pts 2&3
We spent a day driving through the outback and saw kangaroos, emus, eagles, an incredibly endangered bush turkey, and tons of sweet bush plants that will probably cure cancer someday. Or at least solve acne. The next highlight of the trip was our visit to a real, working sheep station, where we learned about the struggles of modern agriculture in Australia and enjoyed my new favorite Australian barbecue specialty, roasted pumpkin! We also got to eat skewers of kangaroo and goat--delicious.

Half Marathon
Totally didn't happen. Sorry to get you all excited to meet the new, fit, slightly-neurotic, half-marathon running Elizabeth, but she blinked out of existence about a month ago. I'm just totally better suited for body building--I need to quit fighting it.

School
Isn't really why I'm here. It shouldn't even be a subtopic. But it's chugging along.

Thailand
We leave tomorrow! Thailand has been going through a little political unrest the past few weeks, so we were concerned that we might not get to go. Luckily, though, things have calmed down and I'm back on track for eating five Thai meals every day for ten days.

Wine Appreciation
That's actually a class I took, and it just ended on Monday. We enjoyed some nice fortifieds and sparkling wines. The sherry and port were gross (I'm not cut out to be a fifties housewife or 18th century English gentleman, I guess), and we had a sparkling Shiraz, which was very different. Not my favorite, but not bad. However, St. Thomas More College as a whole appreciated wine very enthusiastically last Saturday at our College Ball. It was a lot like a prom, only with an open bar. Australians know how to do things right. It was also the first ND home football game, so a bunch of people stayed up all night to watch the game. I crashed early and missed most of the game, but I got up for the last few minutes of the fourth quarter.

This is Krysta and I waiting for the bus to go to the ball.

That's about it for now--thanks for being patient!

Signing out!
Elizabeth

Kalgoorlie Part One

To help us get a better understanding of the Australian culture, Notre Dame organizes a special class for the exchange students. It's led by two University of Western Australia professors, one Anthropology and one History, and they take us on three weekend trips to different points of interest around Australia. Last weekend we had our first trip, and we went to Kalgoorlie. Kalgoorlie is about 7 or 8 hours from Perth by car, but luckily Notre Dame decided to spring for 45 minute plane ride. Right now Western Australia is going through an economic boom, mostly from all the mining that's taking place, and Kalgoorlie is one of the big mine sites. We went to Kalgoorlie to see the real, raw, red dirt Australia, where men are men and sheep run wild.

The entire weekend was extremely sleep deprived. It started off with a 4:30 am bus ride to the airport. I didn't talk to anyone who got any more than about 3 hours of sleep. Straight from the plane we went to the Superpit, which is a giant hole visible from space with a lot of gold mining happening in it. One of the head mining engineers gave us a presentation about the operation of the mine. He fit the mining engineer stereotype pretty well, since he spiced up the pretty dull presentation with multiple profanities and he looked pretty hungover. The main gist of the presentation was: they blast the rock into smithereens, haul tons and tons of it around to different processing buildings, boil out the gold, and it is very, very expensive. I asked him what percentage of the mining engineers in Kalgoorlie were female, and he said 30%, but I'm not sure I believe him.

From there we were bused to various mining attractions where we shuffled around, rubbing our eyes and trying not to drool too visibly. We went to a museum with replicas of old tyme buildings, like a typical miner's house, a bank, and a police station. To the right is me, experimenting with being a miner's wife.

Then we went to the Mining Hall of Fame where we watched a guy pour what we thought was a gold brick until he started passing it around the audience. It was totally false advertising--it said everywhere that it was a "gold pour demonstration", but it was just some bronzey mixture metal. I mean, sure, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a brick's worth of pure gold just out in the open at some random Mining Hall of Fame, but we were too tired to think about it analytically beforehand, so it was a let down. After the "gold" pour, we went on a mine tour to get a feel for what it was like to mine before machinery. Basically, it was every bad thing you can think of. Mining sucks now, and it sucked even worse at the turn of the century.

We were staying at a "Camp School", which I think is Australian for "giant dormitory building with no heat and really spread out bathrooms". I think it's how Notre Dame could afford to fly us out there. I don't know if it's just a Western Australia thing, but very few buildings are heated. That's one of the reasons the weekend remained sleep deprived. Anyway, they provided us with food for a do-it-yourself Aussie BBQ, and the meal was 75% meat. Steak, sausage, chicken kebabs, but no kangaroo.

To the right is a traditional mining bathroom (bucket with threadbare curtain).

After dinner we headed over to The Trots, which sounds very uncomfortable, but in Australia it means horse races. One of the professors said there was nothing more Australian than "a bet and a brew", so we all gave it a shot. I don't think anyone came out on top, but most people won at least once. I didn't win anything until the very last race when my horse, Kapow!, blasted to the front unexpectedly. It's amazing how even just $2.20 can produce a pretty sweet winner's high.

Shoot--I don't want this to get too long, so I'll post in installments. That's it for the first day!

Operation MEET AUSTRALIANS

This week my goal was to branch out and meet some more Australians. At first we tried to set some Australian traps at dinner by sitting only 3 or 4 Americans to a table with a bunch of empty seats for brave (or unsuspecting) Australians. However, we only ever caught other Americans. That's when we realized that to meet Australians, we'd have to do a little infiltrating. It sounds so easy, but when it's time to sit down at a table of all Australians, 2 times out of 3 I chicken out. I don't think I'm cut out for a life of espionage. Electrical Engineering is a good fall back, I guess.

Speaking of electrical engineering, classes continue to be boring. I had my first homework assignment due Friday, and Thursday night all my suppressed memories from last semester came flooding back. On a cheerier note, I have successfully switched into a different Robotics class that I think will be a lot more interesting. I think for the first half of the semester we'll be working on simulating Soccerbots, which are little robots who play soccer (no, really?!) and we'll move on to programming real robots. The real robots are supposed to navigate an obstacle course using information from a GPS system. I think it'll be hard, but really interesting. Our professor seems really excited and knowledgeable about robots, so I think it'll be a good switch.

Right now everyone is planning our fall (spring?) break which comes up in mid-September. Half of the group is going up to Ningaloo reef, which is supposed to be comparable to the Great Barrier Reef, but on the West Coast. Another big group is going to hang around Perth and go backpacking for a week along some trails in the bush. My friend Tricia and I bought our tickets to Bangkok a few days ago, and we have been trying to convince a few other people to come with us. So far we have successfully enlisted Tricia's boyfriend Jeff and his friend Marty, and we have another girl, Krysta, who is still on the fence. The main reason I decided to go was for the food, but I've also started doing a little research, and I don't know how I can stay away now. I think we're going to spend a 2 days in Bangkok, go up to Chiang Mai in the north mountains for 4 days, and then spend 3 days at the beach. The itinerary is all still up in the air, though. All I care about is eating as much authentic Thai food as possible in 9 days.

We had two birthdays in our group this week, and on Friday night we had a combination Birthday-Olympic Opening Ceremonies party. We all split into teams of two and dressed as different countries. We had groups from Kazakhstan, Antarctica, Vatican City, Jamaica, Kenya, and others I can't remember. Nicki and I dressed up as Canada. We basically just dressed up as lumberjacks. It was a fun night.



The training for the half marathon continues. My legs are really tired. This is the determining week; if I can run 10 miles by next Monday, I'll sign up.

This weekend we're going on our first Notre Dame Weekend Trip. We're going to Kalgoorlie, which is a big mining city. We're going to visit some ghost towns, the Superpit, which can be seen from space (awesome), a sheep station (EVEN MORE AWESOME), and go to an authentic Australian horse race thing called "the trots". Apparently Kalgoorlie is also well known for their brothels and brothel tours are one of the must-do activities, but it's not officially on our itinerary. If it's part of the culture, though, I don't think we should miss it. We'll see if we can work something out.
Here's a picture grabbed off facebook of my friend Lindsay and me at the formal dinner last week. I need to get better at taking pictures. Maybe that will be my goal for this week. Operation Take Pictures of Australians.

That's all for now--
SIGNING OUT!