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.

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)