Goodbye India

So here it is: my last blog post from India. Tomorrow I'm flying from Varanasi to Delhi, then Delhi to Newark, and finally Newark to LAX. At 9:30 AM I'll be back home. I've had the "Oh wow you're leaving! When will you be back?" conversation with my rickshaw driver, my co-workers, and my gueshouse.

At the beginning of my time in Varanasi, I was eating dinner at a restaurant near my guesthouse, and an Indian girl asked if she could sit down with me and talk. I said yes, and we had a conversation about our educations, what we were doing, etc. At one point, she asked if I was staying here and asked how much I was paying per night (Indians don't have the same hangups about talking about money as Americans do). After I told her, she started telling me about the dormitory she stayed in, and how much cheaper it was, and how I was only staying here because there were other westerners around and it made me more comfortable. Her tone was somewhat accusatory and made it seem like, because I was working in India for the summer, I shouldn't want to be around westerners. I've been thinking about that conversation ever since it ended, and I couldn't figure out what bothered me about it.

At first (in my head), I was defensive about my decisions and was angry about her accusations. But then I came to a realization. So what? So what if I want to be around foreigners? I did make a conscious decision to stay in a more touristy area in the hopes of meeting other westerners in Varanasi (that didn't really work out though). And can you blame me? I'm staying here alone for the summer...it's only natural to want to be around people from your culture, who you recognize. I came in to the summer after spending the semester in & around Jaipur. Yes, with a group of 21 other Americas, but our staff was Indian and so were our homestays. I had a group of people I could talk with and relate to. And I was worried about what would be like to be alone for the summer. It hasn't been bad at all - I've seen 3 friends from my program who were/are still in India, my Hindi teacher and her husband, met an Irishman working at an anti-human trafficking NGO, spent time with my boss at her in-law's home, met two women from Holland at the stencils workshop, met a guy from North Carolina who teaches in Seoul, had good conversations with my rickshaw wallah, turned "come see my shop" into somewhat of a friendship with a 14-year-old, etc. I think the only time I really felt lonely was during my time in the villages, and even then I was surrounded by people.

Anyway, this "so what?" has morphed in to a realization of sorts. I can do India. I can act Indian. But at the end of the day, I'm still American. I prefer coffee to chai and sitting toilets to squat toilets. I'd rather wear jeans than a sawar set. I'm not good at waterfalling. I like toilet paper and still haven't figured out how to get truly clean from a bucket shower. I wish there were crosswalks and that people on the road followed traffic rules. But just because I know these things about myself and recognize them doesn't mean that I don't like these things about India or that I don't like India as a whole. That's completely untrue - I already know that I would come back in a heartbeat. I still drink chai when offered and have gotten really good at using a squat toilet. I wear sawar sets (and haven't worn jeans since January). I've figured out a trick to waterfalling better. I can cross the street and not have a heart attack in a rickshaw. But at the end of the day these things I prefer or "would rather" are deeply ingrained in who I am and how I think things should be. And, as Dipti always tells me when we talk about Rangsutra's projects, "It takes time." It takes time to fully abandon your own culture and embrace a new one. Part of surviving in a foreign country, especially (I think) in a developing one, is mediating between "yours" and "theirs", "familiar" and "unknown". And mediate I do. If that means that sometimes I need pasta and apple pie for dinner, than so be it. I don't care. And I don't think I could've gotten through the semester if I couldn't have had the occasional meal at Anokhi Cafe, or worn western clothes (almost) whenever I wanted. Sometimes this need for mediation manifested itself in bizarre ways - like the time Andrew and I watched the U.S. men's figure skating championships over ISP, and got SO into it. Or like how we bought a coffee maker and ground coffee beans with a mortar & pestle so that we could have real coffee.

Anyway, that got kind of rambly, but you get my point. I've also realized that no matter what, Indians will generally see me as a tourist - a wealthy westerner with money to spend. Even though one of the first things our Hindi teachers taught us to say was, "I am not a tourist," it's easier said than done.

It's hard to separate my time in India with SIT from my time in India traveling from my time in India with RangSutra (though I will have to for the reflection paper I have to send to my school as a part of the grant I got to fund this experience). They are all very interconnected - I came in to contact with RangSutra through SIT. Even though I want to say that interning with them has been the highlight of my time in India, I don't feel like I can because that would minimize my other experiences or make them seem less significant than they are. This was just the experience that allowed me to focus specifically on what I'm interested in and has made me realize that this is the kind of work I want to do in the future. I've started looking at graduate programs in International Development & Business/Economics. Oh my!

I can't believe I'm saying goodbye to India after spending the past 6 months here. I know I'll be back someday, hopefully soon, and hopefully as more than a tourist.

I wrote a grand total of 45 blog posts while I was here. I was hoping for 50, but 45 is just as good.

Positivity

Ok so that was way too negative yesterday. I need to post about some happy things. In a list form.

1. On Saturday my co-workers and I went shopping. Enough said.
2. Also on Saturday, my friend Jessie from my program and her friend came to visit. They're working with one of the NGO's we visited in Jodhpur and is leaving India a few days after I do. We went to the Benaras Hindu University campus one day, and it was so beautiful! Everyone had been telling me to go see it but I thought it was much further away from my guesthouse than it actually is. Lots of colonial architecture in a tropical setting, one of my favorite things. Also we got shirts made.
3. Yesterday the lunch pack my guesthouse makes for me every day was really heavy, and I couldn't figure out why. When it was lunch time I opened it and saw that there were two bananas and a knife. I was SO confused. I picked up the knife, and underneath it was a mango! Instead of giving me a sweet they gave me a mango. I was SO excited. I felt like a little kid who had gotten cake for dessert in their lunch box or something. Also the manager of my guesthouse was so confused when I returned the knife that night.

Sweaty

On Tuesday I had a really frustrating day of fieldwork in Bhadohi, the other district that RangSutra works in. I was supposed to interview 10 women, but I only got 6 interviews that I thought were complete/of decent quality. At the first village, I was supposed to interview 5 women. Midway through my fourth interview, the woman whose house we're at's husband rolls up on his motorcycle and situates himself right behind us. Great. The women immediately ceased to be chatty and open like they had been. The woman who I began to interview next was really quiet and it was a struggle to even get her to talk. When I got to the question about what she thought could be done to improve business practices, she refused to answer, and the husband (not her's) got up, walked over, and yelled something at her. The other intern, who was translating for me, said that he said regular orders would be how to improve business practices. I went on to the next question, but instead of translating Saurauv said, "it's probably better if we go." Great. So we left, and went on to the next village.

I got to interview one woman here before they had to leave, and this interview was also really frustrating. I was immediately discouraged by the presence of a woman's husband, but he didn't seem to be disturbing the interview at all. However, all the women in the group would answer the questions for the woman I was interviewing. I felt really helpless because I don't speak the language, so I didn't feel like I could tell them that I only wanted to talk to the woman I was interviewing right then. After the first interview, they all started to stand up and started pressing to leave. I got about 4 questions in to my next interview when they said they needed to leave.

The day progressed like that. Dipti was in the village we did the stencils workshop in, paying the women for their participation and evaluating their work. We were supposed to pick her up on our way back to Varanasi, and Saurauv and I told the taxi driver this when we dropped Priyanka, the field supervisor who was with us for the day, off. But he forgot or didn't listen, and we were almost back in Varanasi when we realized this. After we backtracked (after getting lost) and picked Dipti and her husband up, it took us two hours to get back in to Varanasi.

Last night, it took me two hours to get back to my guesthouse from the office, normally a 20 minute journey, because there was such bad traffic. I felt so nauseated from all the exhaust fumes. And the power's been going off and on for the past day, and it's been incredibly hot and humid. Also I started to organize my things last night and found a ton of ants hanging out in my suitcase/clothes. Yuck.

I'm sorry that this is pretty whine-y but so it goes.

Victory!

This is Nirmala, one of the artisans that works with Rangsutra (and one of her daughters, who officially wins the My Favorite Indian Child award). She's kind of a group leader, but kind of not at the same time. I hung out at her house for an afternoon when I was in Arjunpur, and we watched the wedding DVD of a girl who I didn't even realize was in the room because she looked SO different (meaning younger, meaning not even 18, but I'm really bad at judging the ages of Indian people) with all the makeup and jewelry and her sari on. Nirmala's husband was lurking around in the background, but I never really interacted with him. Dipti's told me that he is pretty awful and abusive to her, but he lives in Mumbai for most of the year, painting houses. Unfortunately even when he's there in Mumbai and Nirmala does something like leave their home, their neighbors will call him and tell him. Anyway, he had been back in the village for 4 months, and when he bought his return ticket to Mumbai he bought one for her too, and was going to make her live in a slum there with him. So she asked Rangsutra for work, any kind of work, so that she would have a valid (economic) reason to stay in the village. We gave her work, and he went back to Mumbai on the 5th without her. Minus points against distressed migration and abusive husbands.

Security

I forgot to mention in my last post about how intense the security was at the hotel. First, there were armed guards at the gate who we had to tell why we were there. They were from a security company called "Black Power Security", which I found really amusing, but had no one to share in the joke/fact that the phrase "Black Power" has a completely different meaning to me/Americans with. Then after walking down a huge driveway, there was another security guard, to whom we had to state our purpose again. Then we went through metal detectors and put our backpacks through a scanner (like at airport security) as well. I don't really blame them - the Taj in Mumbai was targeted in the 26/11 terrorist attacks - but I thought it was interesting.

"Too Bad it Was in Hindi"

So that meeting last week that my boss took me to with the UNDP? It was actually a day-long conference for all of it's IKEA Women's Social Empowerment projects in the area at the Taj Gateway Hotel, probably the swankiest chain of hotels in India. I'm glad I got to see the inside of one before I left, but I wish I had brought my bathing suit to sneak a dip in their pool before I left. It was held in their "Gulabi" (pink) room, was fully catered complete with two chai breaks, and was set up just like our ISP presentations from SIT - complete with a notepad & pencil at each place and glasses full of candies intermittently placed around the table. Lucky for me, one was placed in between Dipti and me, and I have a way bigger sweet tooth than she does.

Anyway, there were representatives from each project, which were either Technical Agencies - groups like my company that do value-chain intervention programs, or Community Facilitation Organizations (I think that's what CFO stands for) - groups that run women's self-help groups in the same villages that the TA's work in. The CFO's and TA's in theory work together to promote women's economic empowerment. Each TA gave a presentation on their projects. My favorite one (aside from Rangsutra's, but I'm biased because I made the power point) was a TA that taught women how to make papad and rear goats. I love papad and goats. I could eat papad all day, every day, and I want a pet goat like no other after coming to India. So I was very interested in this project for personal reasons. Too bad the presentation (and all the others) was in Hindi. All the power points were in English though, so I still got the gist of each organization & what they were doing.

Presentations were the first part of the day. Then lunch, which was delicious. Fully catered buffet and butterscotch ice cream for dessert.

The second activity of the day was what I've been referring to in my head as a "modeling exercise", but I think that's incorrect because the UNDP wants the "modeling" done in the exercise to actually come to fruition. I'll explain. The TA's and CFO's that work together got together in to three groups, and were given the scenario that they are to merge in to one group. They were to develop their institutional mechanism, their name, their scale-up plans, and their trainer's platform. I referred to this as a "modeling exercise" because I do things like this in my classes at Wheaton a lot - being put in to a group and given a scenario with specific points to hit, a set amount of time to do so, and a presentation to everyone else at the end. I guess it surprised me because everyone jokes that the liberal arts don't teach you about the real world, but there I was sitting in a conference being run by the UNDP and ready to dive in to this task. Too bad, again, it was in Hindi.

One of the things that struck me the most about the conference was the way the hotel staff treated me in comparison to everyone else. I was the only foreigner in the group - everyone else was Indian (and I was one of 3 women, but that's another issue). When it was time for chai, a waiter came up to me and specifically asked if I wanted coffee instead of chai. I appreciated this because I do prefer coffee to chai, but I was the only one he did this to. What's to say our caffeinated beverage choices are determined by our ethnic identity? For all he knew, I could've grown up in India too. After all, I was wearing a sawar kameez.

In other news, the Ganges is now super high because of the monsoon. I'm a little worried it will rise up and block the road that runs in front of my guesthouse, but Dipti told me that won't happen so I guess I'm just being paranoid. Also there's another road out so I wouldn't be trapped or anything if it did.

Village Livin'

Last week was definitely the best and hardest week of my time with RangSutra, and maybe all of my time in India. On Friday after a brief stop at Sarnath in the morning to get my Buddha on, I went to Arjunpur Village in the Mirzapur district outside of Varanasi. The plan was for me to stay there until Thursday, and then I would join my boss at a workshop she was running. On Monday, two of my co-workers were to join me in the village and serve as translators while I conducted interviews. But this is India. In June, the start of the monsoon season.

That Friday night I went to sleep on the roof of the home I was staying in, with my host mother next to me and her daughter-in-law less than 3 feet away. Earlier that evening she had massaged cooling oil in to my hair, shoulders, arms, and face. Which was wonderful but made my hair greasy and it took about 8 washes to get out. But that's another story. The next day, my host mother, Parvati, decided that my sawar kameez outfit was not ok, and dressed me in one of her sari's. There was literally a hush over the entire village when I walked out wearing it. It was one of her nicest ones - it came from a locked closet in her bedroom - and I felt guilty about that. That afternoon, one of RangSutra's field officers came and off we rode on his motorcycle to conduct interviews. Yes. I rode a motorcycle in a sari. Sidesaddle. It wasn't as terrifying as I expected it to be.

So things went south once we got to the interviews. He didn't ask the first woman the interview questions - he just told me what he thought she would say. It took about 5 rounds of me saying, "OK, well, can you ask her the question?" before he did. The next two interviews went alright - one woman's husband was right there and contributed to the answers she gave. Overall though I ended my first day pretty optimistic about how the rest of the week would go.

That night, right as we were going to bed, big fatty rain droplets started raining down on us. We moved to sleep under an awning - still outside, in traditional cots. Parvatti and I shared one - we were definitely spooning at some points. (Also, let me just say that sleeping in a sari when it's been wrapped by an Indian woman is the most unpleasant experience ever. I kept secretly loosening it, and she would notice and re-tighten it). It rained all night and for the next two days, so I just laid around the village not doing anything. Roads had been washed out so we wouldn't be able to get in between villages on a motorbike. My stomach was crazy-upset at this point too, and I was fighting a constant battle over being given way too much food. It went something like this: wake up. snack. another snack, with chai. another snack. breakfast: vegetables and rice. shortly thereafter, lunch: dahl, roti, vegetables, and rice. afternoon snack. pre-dinner snack. dinner. Oof. That, plus my stomach, plus being the only white person in a rural Indian village, plus my subpar Hindi language skills, plus really greasy hair from the oil, plus what I think were tons of bedbug bites on my feet, made me pretty worn out by the time Monday rolled around.

My coworkers showed up that afternoon, and after much fussing over me dressed in another one of Parvati's saris, I was told that I would be leaving the village that day because of the rain, and would be with Dipti for the rest of the week at the workshop she was running. So I packed my things and said my goodbyes. I was very sad to leave - don't get me wrong, the village was a beautiful place and the people there were really wonderful.

After making some quality check stops along the way, we made it to the house the workshop was being held in. We had stopped briefly there on Friday but I didn't really know what was going on. Come to find out, it's Dipti's in-law's home. And by home I mean huge compound - complete with a mango tree, temple, well, and three cows. Though it was by far the nicest home in the village, it was still very Indian in that the toilet was an outhouse, the shower was outside, and the electricity was sporadic. Dipti left soon after I got there, but I had mentioned that I was homesick so she called her husband (who was there) when she was on her way back to Varanasi and told him to put on CNN for me.

The next morning, the workshop started. We were training the women to cut stencils from designs given to them. The stencils would then be put in to a kit along with paints and an idea book, and will be sold in FabIndia stores and potentially overseas in the future. The idea is based off the fact that in rural Indian homes, people often decorate the exteriors of their homes with designs like those. But the kits will be sold in FabIndia, so the designs will ultimately be painted in upper class Indian homes. There's some kind of irony in this...or some notion of "bringing the village home" that I think is interesting especially in terms of development. But that's me being anthropological and overly analytical about it. Anyway, this project is a collaboration between RangSutra, Women on Wings, a women’s business and development organization based in Holland (that sounds really really cool and somewhere I'd want to work for in the future), Akzo Nobel paints, and FabIndia. RangSutra will train the women and oversee the production of the kits, Women on Wings will help create the business plan, Akzo Nobel will supply the paints and created the idea book, and FabIndia will market the final product in its stores. In addition to Dipti and me, there was a designer who works with RangSutra from Delhi, a woman from Women on Wings, and a woman from Akzo Nobel there as well. One of the best things (for me) about the team was that English was our only shared language, so that's what we spoke in. It was also really cool to hear about everything involved in making the project successful - packaging, materials, paint, marketing, costs, etc. The woman from Women on Wings really (I think) took some extra time to tell me about what she would be discussing with FabIndia in the meeting she had on Monday, which I really appreciated.

The 20 participants traditionally got employment from weaving, agriculture, bamboo crafts, riling yarn for carpet weaving, housework, and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. However, none of these jobs gave the women enough income and an alternative, sustainable form of livelihood was needed. In addition to creating employment for these women, they are coming out of their homes and actively earning their own money apart from their husbands. Also, one of the women who had worked in NREGA told (and showed) us that her right hand had become really swollen after working with them. It sounded like she had a pinched nerve.

I could write a day-to-day breakdown of everything we did every day, but that would be boring and unnecessary.
Some of the women had been to 12th grade, some had never held a pencil. One woman had exams on her wedding day, and made her father-in-law let her finish high school. Some had gotten married before they were 18. Some didn't know their exact ages. There were Hindus and Muslims. Some were related to one another. There was one mother-daughter pair. One woman dropped out on the 3rd day because she wasn't doing well. We got a woman who had fallen ill right before the workshop started to replace her. She had completed 12th grade and by the end of the week was one of the best students in the workshop.
At the end of the week, Dipti's husband had me, Liza, Willeke (the woman from Akzo Nobel), and Karen (the woman from Women on Wings) plant mango trees on their property to commemorate the workshop. It will start producing mangos in 5-6 years...I hope somehow I can be there to eat. them. all. Oh, I should also mention that Dipti's husband is incredibly supportive and sweet and caring - he served us lunch every day and Liza, Willeke, and Karen didn't even know that he was her husband, or that we were at her in-law's property, until we told them one day. It was funny. At lunch that afternoon he goes, "Sometimes, I am a journalist who oversees an office of 93 people. But sometimes, I am a waiter."

Ironically, it didn't rain for the rest of the week and it was hot, hot, hot by the end. One room in the house had a cooler, and we all slept in there after a few days: me, Dipti, her husband, his mother, her mother, and Dipti's 15-year-old niece.

Next week, Dipti and I will go back to the village to check on the women. They were supposed to be coming every day from 10 AM - 2 PM to practice. We put the best student in charge of keeping track of attendance and the paper/knives allotted to each woman. The 2nd-best student has the key to the practice room. A woman whose husband works on the property is in charge of collecting everyone's supplies. Oh, and my field interview project isn't completely lost - I interviewed 11 of the women who participated in the workshop, and will interview the other 9 when we go back next week. I'm actually happier about this because I feel much more invested in the stencils project.

On Saturday evening we came back to Varanasi. On Sunday morning my friend Roz came to visit and was here until Tuesday morning. I had a really great time just being a tourist in Varanasi...and I can now say I've been in the Ganges. It's risen a lot because of the rain, and at one point we were walking along the ghats and part of it was under water, but there was a step right there so we all just walked through it like Indians. It started raining heavily again on Monday and again on Tuesday and Wednesday. Tomorrow I'm going to a meeting with people from the UNDP. I'm leaving for home in 18 days.

I'll post pictures from the workshop next time, but for now:
Top 3 Questions I Was Asked in the Village:
1. Are you married?
2. Why isn't your nose pierced? (ahem...take note Mom & Dad)
3. Why don't you eat meat? (this was based on the assumption that all Americans eat meat. Indians are always shocked when I mention that I'm a vegetarian. Also: cooked soybeans look like small meatballs (but taste DELICIOUS). That one threw me for a loop my first night at Dipti's in-law's. She had told me before that they're veg though so I ate it without knowing what it actually was.)

Happy Monsoon Season!

Today we had the first rains of the monsoon season...about time. The past two days have been around 100, cloudy, and humid. Das, my morning autorickshaw driver who knows every shortcut imaginable in Varanasi, and Dipti have both told me that now that the monsoons have come, the mangos will be even better! Here's a shaky video I took on my camera of the rain from our office.

Indirectly Relevant

Too Young to Wed: The secret world of child brides

Badi Women of Nepal are Trapped in a Life of Degradation

Caste & Cooking

I forgot to include this in my last post:

Because we had spent the night at the office & wouldn't be able to bring food for lunch like usual, Dipti asked Sunil, the office boy, to bring lunch for all three of us on Saturday. He only brought enough food for two people, though. Dipti asked him why and he said that he didn't think I, a foreigner, would eat food prepared by a lower-class (caste) family. Appadurai would have a field day. It made me think that "Gastropolitics in Hindu South Asia" is still relevant. So now I'm hoping that Sunil hasn't been misinterpreting my insistence on doing things myself (ie. refilling my water bottle, plugging my computer cord in to the wall socket) as me not wanting him to touch my things. I'm just uncomfortable with someone doing things for me that I'm entirely capable of doing myself.

Week Two, Sleepovers.

On Friday night my boss and I had a sleepover at the office. Yep. She wanted to work late, her husband was out of town, and she doesn't like to be at the office alone. So she asked me to stay on Friday night with her. We spent about an hour or two talking about our families and showing each other pictures of them. Except the most I could really do was show her pictures of me & Patrick (happy 19th birthday!!) because I don't have any family photos on my computer. There was also a wedding across the street, so we watched the procession, which I really enjoyed...especially because she had just shown me pictures from two of her siblings' weddings. And this isn't procession in the American sense - first, there was a kid with a giant sparkler on a huge stick. Periodically, he would stop and set off fireworks. Then, there was a marching band walking down the street in two lines. On either side of the lines were big light fixtures being held up by members of the groom's family (I think). Then there was a big van that I think was providing the power for the light fixtures. But it was also playing contemporary Indian music out of the back side. So naturally, behind the van were a whole bunch of men who I assume were related to the groom, dancing with one another in the way only Indian men can. I could've sworn a few of the songs were sampling M.I.A., but then I realized it was probably the other way around. Then there was a less active procession of men, and a horse-drawn carriage that the groom (and maybe the bride too, I couldn't get a good look at who was inside) in it. When it pulled up to the venue, guests would climb inside the carriage to give the groom gifts. At this point it got boring so I stopped watching but it was the first wedding procession that I actually got to sit and observe and figure out so I really liked it. It was very bright and loud.

Anyway, we've been working on an Ashoka Changemakers grant application that's due on Wednesday. She told me yesterday that my name is going to be included on the proposal because of how much I've been helping her with it. Whoa. She's also definitely the Indian person I've bonded the most with. No offense to my host family or anything, they were wonderful, but they've been hosting students forever. Same to the program staff. All wonderful people. But she & I get along really well.

We didn't end up going to a village this week, which I was a little bummed about because it definitely would help me to prepare for living there. I'm a very visual person when it comes to these things. I have a really, really hard time visualizing situations like this and anticipating what to expect. However, Dipti and Natasha, the business manager, will now be coming with me on Friday to drop me off in the first village. And will be in the second village at the end of the week, too. So I'm glad I won't be going in alone. Also, they're going to go with me to BHU and Sarnath before we go to the village. I was talking to Dipti about wanting to go to those places and she goes, "Well, who will you go with?" "I guess just by myself." "No, we will go with you. It's much better going with people."

I didn't sleep well on Friday night though, because I was in a new place (for sleeping at least), and it was windy, which would've been great except the windows kept slamming shut, and it was hot. I spoil myself with air conditioning in my room at my guesthouse. The wedding, surprisingly, wasn't loud at all. By any standards, not just Indian. So by the time we left the office at 8:30 PM on Saturday, I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was go home, buy a chocolate bar (I found out that Cadbury gets all (I'm pretty sure it's all) of the chocolate for their Dairy Milk bars fair trade and that sparked an intense ethical chocolate craving. Or, it validated the chocolate cravings I was already having. Though I wouldn't be entirely surprised if this wasn't the case for the bars they sell in India), take a shower, watch Gossip Girl on my computer (please stop judging me) and go to bed. But there's traffic in India. Lots of it. My cycle rickshaw driver took a different route to avoid the traffic, which I was very grateful for initially. Until it was so bumpy and he wouldn't pass other cycle rickshaws going slower than we were, and we had to stop so he could load up on chewing tobacco. Oh, and I'm pretty sure he was younger than me. I realized about halfway through the ride that I wouldn't hold up very well under torture, so let's hope that never happens.

This is great.

The only all-American Cricket team is from Compton. What?!

Interning in India

So I figure I should say something about my internship aside from the fact that I work Saturdays...which I really don't mind. And I will say that I was given the option of not coming in & having a two-day weekend, but for the sake of cross-cultural immersion, count me in.

rangSutra (the website only talks about their Rajasthan division) was started in August/September through a grant given by the UNDP and Ikea. They work in two rural districts in Uttar Pradesh, outside of Varanasi on women's empowerment through business initiatives. The grant is for a 3-year pilot program that they are hoping to replicate in rural districts throughout eastern U.P., making it a sustainable business and development model. The UNDP/Ikea grant created women's empowerment and self-help groups that run savings and credit programs, village workshops, and campaigns about issues facing their lives. RangSutra focuses on using the traditional craft skills that the women have through capacity building initiatives including organizational building, management training, product development/marketing, and skills training to gain access to western consumer markets.

For the first two weeks of my internship, I'll mainly be working on building a big list of potential western companies for them to partner with in the future. I'll also be working on getting them organic cotton & fair trade certified.

Then, I'll be living in their artisan's villages for two weeks doing fieldwork for them. I'm going to be talking to them about how they think the business model can be improved on the village level, what challenges they face, and what they think about the future of the company. When my boss Dipti told me she wanted me to do this last week, I very quickly said I would, even though I was (and still am) nervous about it. Mainly because of the language barrier, but she said I'll have access to translators. Plus, non-verbal communication is equally important for rapport building. And Dipti keeps telling me that all the women are nice. It'll be a challenge, but will also be really u fieldwork experience.

When I finish in the villages, I'll be back in the office for a week preparing a final report for them. At this point I should also have some ideas about their U.P. branch's specific brand identity and how they can incorporate that in to rangSutra as a whole.

Tomorrow we're going to one of the villages I'll be working in, and I'll get to meet one of the women who will be hosting me, so I'm sure that will put me at ease. I'm really excited that Dipti and Natasha, the business & accounts manager, are letting me come with them.

I've definitely learned a lot already about the amount of fair trade retailers out there...before starting this research I thought that companies like Ten Thousand Villages were basically the only fair trade retailers. Wrong. Though they are the only national one I've found so far, I've found tons of great small retail outlets. And partnerships between small businesses, in my opinion, speak more to the values of fair trade. I've also learned a bit about organic/fair trade cotton production in India, since they're looking for organic cotton suppliers. Did you know that Gujarat produces a lot of organic cotton? I didn't, and I lived there for a month.

Did you know...

that the Indian workweek is 6 days a week? Yep.

Call Centers

Last night I had to call Bank of America to unfreeze my debit account, despite the fact that they have been told multiple times that I'm in India. About halfway through the call I realized I was probably on the phone with someone who was also in India, working at a call center. Until the woman I was speaking with pronounced Delhi "Del-hi".

South in Photos

really freaky Hindu carvings, Elora Caves


sleeping-or-dead Buddha, Ajanta Caves


stray dog & the Gateway of India, Mumbai


dobi ghat, Mumbai


this is what we rode motorcycles through, Hampi


holding up the Golden Chariot, Hampi


the beach!, Allaphuza


backwaters, Kerala

South in Mouth

South India was amazing.

The first stop was Aurangabad, which was nothing special but about an hour away in each direction are caves (Elora & Ajanta) with Buddhist & Hindu & Jain temples carved in them. The train there was about 16 hours long, and our tickets were for general class, which means "everyone cram in as tightly as you can", but we got on in the sleeper class anyway to see if we could find beds and ended up paying the janitorial staff 500 rupees for one of their beds. Aside from that though the train ride was really beautiful.

From there we took a sleeper bus to Mumbai. It was all of our first times on an overnight bus and we were really excited because it looked super nice & comfy and like we'd actually get sleep in the beds. And then we started moving. It was super bumpy since Indian infrastructure isn't great. Neither is Indian driving. Anyway we made it to Mumbai after an essentially sleepless night at like 5 AM and went to our hotel, who said we couldn't check in until later. It was right on the harbor and near the Delhi gate so we walked down there and hung out with some stray dogs. The Delhi Gate was built for "their Imperial majesties" King George & Queen Mary, but it wasn't finished when they came so the architects just put up a cardboard facade of what it was supposed to look like for their visit in 1911, and it wasn't actually finished until a little over 10 years later. In Mumbai we also took the bus to the world's largest Dobhi Ghat, which is an outdoor laundry. We paid a sketchy guy that lived there 100 rupees each to give us a brief tour of it, which made me uncomfortable but it was cool to see inside. That afternoon we went on a super legit tour of Asia's largest slum, Dharvai. Our guide was an 18 year old college student and he was so smart. It felt like something I would've done with SIT, since we actually did visit a slum in Jaipur. This was definitely better in terms of information learned though. I think the guide was a little surprised about Andrew's & my knowledge of Indian policies/social issues/etc. from the questions we asked. That night we went to a restaurant called The New Yorker, which was funny. It was trying so hard to be American...they gave all the customers coloring/word search place mats, regardless of their age. And all the upper class Indian adults eating there got so in to it. Everyone around us spoke English (we were the only foreigners), which was interesting and funny to hear their accents.

The next morning we took an all-day train from Mumbai to some random city that was close to where we needed to be to go to Hampi. That was a beautiful train ride too. Like the other, we were in sleeper class, which has beds but the windows are completely open except for some bars across them so there were some beautiful views and also a lot of dust. But we actually had tickets so it was all good. It was the Indian school holidays too, so we were with a ton of Indian families who had been on vacation in Mumbai. We finally got to the random station at like 1 AM, and the train we needed wasn't coming until like 2:30 so we hung out with some giant cockroaches until then. We didn't have tickets for this train so we figured we'd just try our luck and climb on in the AC 3-tier car and see what happened (just like sleeper, but with closed windows & is air conditioned & they give you blankets and pillows). We didn't find any empty bunks there so we kept walking back and ended up in AC 2-tier, which is the nicest class on the train. And found 3 empty bunks. So we climbed in but were all too scared to sleep because we were afraid of being thrown off the train. Someone did come to the cabin but it was to tell us that we'd be getting to the stop we needed at whatever time. How they knew that we needed that stop will remain a mystery. But no one questioned our being there because it was totally where they'd expect the white people to be.

So then we got to Hampi, which is this city with a ton of old ruins. It reminded me of Tikal and Pompei all in one but cooler. We spent the day riding around on motorcycles looking at the ruins, and went swimming in a river that afternoon. We got a hotel room for the day to keep our stuff & shower in, and it was run by the most adorable Indian woman EVER. She ran that place so well. I wish we could've stayed longer for many reasons, one of which being to spend more time with her. That morning after we checked in, we went out for breakfast and I ordered a honey dosa. Sounds delicious right? It was, until I found a ton of ants in it that had gotten in to the honey. Anyone who knows me knows that I hate ants more than ANYTHING, so I was really grossed out. They gave me a new, ant-free one though, and brought the jar of honey (actually in a recycled Officer's Choice whiskey bottle) out to me as proof of its antlessness. Random, but there were a lot of cats in Hampi, including at this restaurant. We heard it meowing, and I was looking behind me to see it and our waiter goes, in the most deadpan Hindi-accented English ever, "cat". On very few hours of sleep, it was the most hilarious thing ever.

That night we had another sleeper bus to Bangalore, where we didn't want to go but had to to get to Kerala. I was so tired that I slept a bit more on this bus but the road was super bumpy again and I swear I bumped about a foot in the air at some points. So we had a random day in Bangalore, and I convinced the boys that it would be a better idea to cancel our 3-day train tickets in sleeper class from Kerala to Delhi and fly back instead so we could have more time in Kerala. We bought plane tickets & Andrew's friend did some souvenir shopping and then we took a semi-sleeper bus to Kerala that night. Semi-sleeper meant that there were no beds but the seats reclined and we got blankets & pillows. We were in the very back which was nice until the people in front of us put their seats back. Then our legs got crushed because we were slightly elevated. However, we almost didn't make it to the bus. Our rickshaw driver told us that it was very far away, and we hadn't left much time. However, after he called the bus company and performed some crazy driving moves we met the bus at what I believe was stop number two and happily climbed on.

Anyway, we wanted to go to Kochi, and were told we'd get there at about 8:30. False, we rolled through at like 6:30 and no one told us. So we got off about an hour later in a little town called Allaphuza, which was small but really nice and I'm glad we ended up there instead. We went to the beach on day 1. Enough said. The second day we took a boat ride in the backwaters, which was beautiful. it's this network of canals that are there naturally and there are villages there. I kept on expecting to run in to a Mr. Kurtz all of a sudden...it was very Heart of Darkness-esque. Our hotel really, really wanted to get in the Lonely Planet, so when we got back from dinner on the first night the owner sat us down and gave us his whole backwater boat tour shpiel...but we stuck with our original plan of just going to the docks & getting a boat, which worked out just fine and saved us money.

The next morning we caught an early bus to Trivandrum, the capital of Kerala, and flew to Chennai. After a 6-hour layover, we flew to Delhi and arrived at about 11 PM. The next day, we visited the temple of the Hindu sect that Andrew studied in Ahmedabad for ISP. It's crazy huge and being marketed as a tourist attraction for Delhi in general, which I think is interesting. After going back to Jaipur very briefly to pick up my luggage, I went back to Delhi for two days jam-packed full of sightseeing before going to Varanasi.

And now I'm in Varanasi. Now that the tourist season's over, it's SO quiet. I didn't realize just how much of the town revolves around tourism until now. It's amazing. However, on the flip side that means that a lot of the good cafes, where you can get real coffee, are closed.

The internet won't let me upload pictures right now, so I'll save that for later.

The End of SIT

So it would appear that I never left Ahmedabad. That's false. I happily packed up my stuff and left on an overnight train back to Jaipur. and by overnight, I mean that it left at 5:30 PM and arrived at 2:30 AM. But like most trains in India, it left late so we assumed that it would arrive late as well. False. It was early. What?! Luckily I was having trouble sleeping and realized we were rolling in to Jaipur when I started seeing "Jaipur Junction" signs. So I harassed Andrew until he woke up & we jumped off the train and in to a rickshaw to the program center, where we slept in the meditation room. Where they had conveniently put two really comfy mattresses.

The last week in Jaipur was spent editing, printing, binding, turning in, and presenting on my ISP, which I never really wrote about on here. But basically, I worked with a fair trade producer group in Ahmedabad called Saint Mary's, and studied how the structure of their organization promoted peace & communalism between the different women that worked there.

Our program moved us to a super nice hotel for the final banquet and presentations. It even had a swimming pool & really great showers. I hadn't felt that clean since January. I started calling it the Jaipur Marriot because I felt like I was at the Palm Springs Marriott. It was actually called the Hotel Gold Palace, and its logo was a dollar sign. All the girls dressed in saris for the final banquet, and mine was definitely one of my favorite things I've worn. I wish I had a reason to wear it again. We'll see.


(we call this the "Mafia Family Portrait")

The banquet itself was really fun too. My host family was one of the first ones to show up and my host sister immediately told me it was time to "get the party started," so we went up to the DJ booth & she requested some songs & we went on to the dance floor. I had no idea she loved to dance that much! It was really great. The DJ's played a mix of Indian & American music but got super repetitive. At the very end, when all the host families had left and it was just us, someone requested "Telephone" by Lady Gaga and we all danced to that. Great way to end the program.

The next day we bussed back to the program center and had a re-entry in to America session, which really freaked everyone out. My friend Aviva and I were more upset, because we're both staying in India longer so are trying to avoid the "going back home!" mindset. Then we went around in a circle and said nice things about each other, which made everyone start crying, watched a slideshow from the semester, got funny superlative awards, and had pizza & cake for lunch. It felt like the last day of school for sure.

That evening Andrew, his friend from home, and I left to travel in South India. But those are different stories for a different time.

Palitana

On Saturday we went to Palitana, a mountain with 800-something Jain temples on top of it. It was one of the most beautiful and best-smelling places I've been to in India so far. Yes, best-smelling. There were tons of fragrant carnations, jasmine plants, and also something else herb-y that I recognized but couldn't place. Palitana is about a 4 hour busride from Ahmedabad. We left at 7, got there at lunchtime, ate, and headed up the mountain. Like Junagadh (and Gujarat in general I've concluded) isn't well known to western tourists, so we were once again the only foreigners there. At only 3,600 steps, this was nothing compared to Junagadh...except we started at the hottest time of the day. The views were beautiful though, and the non-temple architecture made it feel like a Greek isle.




We spent a few hours wandering around the temples, then hiked back down, bought some much-needed water, ate a really nutritious dinner of potato chips and ice cream, and got right back on a bus for Ahmedabad. At one point on the bus ride back I was sitting in the aisle seat and dozed off briefly. The bus hit a bump in the road and I flew foreword across the lap of the Indian man sitting in the seat across the aisle from me. Whoops.

Hurricane Sangeeta

This is Sangeeta, the 3-year-old feisty/adorable Nepali girl whose family lives & works at our guesthouse. Last week she & I made friends, and this week she figured out what room I'm in. So now she comes banging on the door to play/go through my stuff any time between 8:30 AM and 10:30 PM. She is currently napping next to me on the bed, cuddling with my sunglasses and drooling on my pillow.

Bringin' it Back to the Weavers

World price of gold is at a record high. It's crazy to think that a month ago this article would've meant nothing to me.

Week One in Ahmedabad

First week of ISP is over and the 2nd week is well underway. I got off to a bit of a rough spot with my ISP, considering my contact was out of the state until Thursday. And on Thursday when I called to set up our meeting, I found out she was actually a part of a different organization than I though - and that I had written my whole ISP proposal around. Needless to say I panicked a bit, but am now back on track and know what I'm going to do about it.

I'm here in Ahmedabad with one other guy from my program, and our guesthouse is crappy - in that our toilet and shower are Indian-style and the walls could really, really use a coat of paint - but endearing. It's located in a good spot, around lots of good, cheap restaurants and bazaars, so I'm happy with it. I'll just need to find somewhere else to go when it's time to crack down and write this 30 page paper.

We've done a good amount of general exploring around Ahmedabad, including a Heritage Walk around the Old City that went through a bunch of these little neighborhoods that all had bird feeders in them:


this lake/park that reminded me a bit of Balboa Park in San Diego:

Ok, you can't really see the park here, but an interactive Indian census display? Pretty great.

Gandhi's Ashram:


Stepwells:


and afterwards we met an Imam who collected foreign money and took us to the roof of his mosque:



This weekend we went further west, to Junagadh and Somnath. Junagadh is home to a 10,000-step hike to the top of a mountain that holds Hindu and Jain temples. Our train got in at 4:30 AM and we went straight to the base of the mountain to try and make it up before sunrise. False. I'm really bad at doing physical activity without proper rest/caloric intake, so we made it about 2,000 up before sunrise. Ultimately, we made it up 5,000 steps because by that time we had spent about 4 hours on the mountain, had reached one peak and seen some beautiful scenery:


And we were tired, thirsty, and hungry. Also, the hike has yet to make it in to the Lonely Planet, so we were the only foreigners there. This resulted in taking many photos with random Indian men, including a father and son who paid a professional photographer to take their picture with me. Best friends? I think yes. After going back down the 5,000 steps we had just climbed (so we actually DID hike 10,000 steps...) and eating a huge thali lunch and climbing too many more stairs to internet cafes that didn't actually exist, we made it here:


Which is just about the coolest thing I've seen since being in India. It's a mosque, in an incredibly understated area, and there was a group of little kids playing cricket right in front of it. Luckily, it was also right near the train station, since the next stop on our journey was another town, Veraval, about an hour and 40 minutes away by train. When we got to the ticket counter, our train was at the platform. When we finished buying our tickets, the train had started pulling away. So we ran. And jumped. And made it on just fine! And proceeded to take the most beautiful train ride EVER - it felt like we were going through a tropical paradise. Also, we were in general class so there was no glass on the windows, leaving the views unobstructed. And then, after arriving in Somnath, getting a hotel, showering, and napping, got ice cream and went to the beach. I was SO happy to see the ocean. It looked really similar to the South Bay, complete with jettys and power plants if you looked to your right (in this case, the west). But this picture is facing east:


So the next day we were beach bums all day. Somnath isn't western-touristy either, and Indians generally don't know how to swim (they mostly pull up their pants/saris and stick their toes in), so we were the only ones actually in bathing suits and going in the water. Needless to say, we attracted a lot of attention from the locals. When we first got there I spent about 10 minutes sitting in the sand, fully clothed, uncomfortable, and angry at the fact that I was a girl/that I felt so uncomfortable/at India in general. But then I got over it and jumped right in. And it was GREAT. I was so happy. I left the beach that evening very sunburned and, for the first time, really homesick. Which is really the wrong note to end this post on but so it goes.

The Vegetable Market

My host mother has been out of town since before I got back from Varanasi, so it's just me & my host sister in the house. It's given us a lot more opportunities to talk and to bond with one another...we've cooked dinners (& breakfasts...Dosa pancakes mmm) together, which I've really enjoyed.
Last night before temple (and after meeting/tickling the feet of an ADORABLE two-month-old baby named Neda that apparently lives behind me), my sister tells me that we don't have any food for dinner, so we'll stop by the market to get vegetables quickly. For some reason I believed that this would actually be a quick outing - have I learned nothing in the past two months? - and we set out (after a neighbor dropped in for a quick chat, and after I changed my pants from leggings to looser sawar pants, at the instruction of my sister, to deter potential harassment) to buy vegetables.
But wait! We were almost out of petrol. So after a brief detour to the petrol station in the opposite direction, we were actually off. I had no idea where we were going - I had kind of assumed that since we were in a time crunch we would just stop by a supermarket, but no. We went to a full-on fruit & vegetable market. Open air, tons of vendors, tons of people, lots of noise. It was GREAT. I loved seeing all the vendors with their fruits and vegetables laid out in front of them or on carts. We went through the whole market looking for the best quality of everything and filled our bags to their brims (Banana, Chikoo, Grapes, Cabbage, Okra, Capsicum, Eggplant, Papaya, Potato, and Tomato). It reminded me of the Moshi marketplace, but just for produce. I wish I had my camera...but it was probably for the better - having a bag to look after would've just made the whole process more difficult.
The best part? One of the vendors asked my sister if I was Indian.
The second best part? I could understand the gist of the conversations my sister and the vendors were having (and the same went for when the neighbor came over earlier). Even though understanding a language and speaking it are very different levels of comprehension and knowledge, I was really excited to realize that I actually have absorbed some Hindi in a meaningful way.
By the time we finished, it was about 8:50, and temple ends at 9. But we went to say hi to Sai Babba (and collect the box of treats they hand out at the end...reminds me of getting donuts after church) anyway.

It's weird that this is essentially my last week in Jaipur. On Sunday I'm night-training my way to Ahmadabad for my month-long ISP. Classes are over - we took our Hindi finals on Monday & Tuesday, and turned in our final ISP Proposals yesterday. The program threw us a going away party yesterday night too, this time on the deck of our program center. They put up all these colored lights, set off fireworks from the roof, and gave us McAloo Tikka burgers from McDonalds (again...surprisingly they tasted better this time though). I'm ready to go but I'm also nervous. Today in class we did some "stress releasing" activities where we said "HA" and threw our arms from side to side. It didn't really work, considering there were about 28 of us total in the classroom. Our academic director told us that she hopes we come back more empowered.

Varanasi Weavers

Last week, four of us interned with the Varanasi Weavers Foundation, an NGO founded in 2007 that works to support the weaving community around Varanasi. VWF works as a bridge between the weaving community and the world market - their initial start was an order from a Danish company, Bestseller, for scarves for all its employees as Christmas gifts. The NGO has two main leaders - Dipti, who is involved with the social justice and development side of the organization, and Uma, who runs a clothing company called Upasana that buys a lot of the weavers' products to produce garments for western consumers. VWF also facilitates orders between the weavers and other traders; they are not directly involved in the market. In five years, they will no longer need funding from Bestseller or other international donors to sustain themselves. In addition to facilitating the weavers' market, VWF also helps the weavers apply for Health Cards and Weavers Cards to ensure they can get the government benefits they are entitled to; the weavers make too much per day to qualify for a Below Poverty Line Card, but make too little to fully support their families. Right off the bat, we were told that weaving is a community-based, small-scale industry, and everything I saw throughout the course of the week only reinforced this idea.

Weaving came to Varanasi with the Moguls from Persia, so it was traditionally a Muslim craft. The Muslim weavers then taught the craft to the local, lower caste (class) Hindu community as a way for them to improve their livelihood; it's a deeply-rooted tradition in both communities. It's funny that we've talked so much about and had firsthand exposure to the Hindu-Muslim tensions that exist in contemporary India, and yet the trajectory of weaving through Varanasi is a perfect and quite literally beautiful example of religious pluralism. Weaving is done only by males, so it's usually the sole income for a family.

The silk market went down in 2000 primarily because of an influx of cheap Chinese silk and synthetic goods flooding the market and loss of the traditional socio-cultural status that was once associated with wearing a Varanasi silk sari (especially at your wedding). The silk market is incredibly unstable too, so the weavers could never count on a steady price for silk (the instability comes partially from the fact that in order to make zari, a particular type of silk yarn that's used in Varanasi silk weaving, you need gold, so the silk market is linked to the gold market). Weavers began to commit suicide or change professions in 2003. Today, the weaving community consists of about 50,000 weavers, down from 500,000. Dipti estimates that in about 20 years weaving could be completely extinct because in addition to the weavers changing professions, India's child labor laws prevent children from learning the craft. Weaving requires incredibly deft fingers, as well as intense concentration. We were told that children had to start learning the craft between the ages of 7 and 15, otherwise they will be too old to train themselves to have the mental and physical capacity required to weave.

On our second day with VWF, we went to the Muslim area of Varanasi and walked through a whole bunch of alleways to see the entire process: a (Hindu) raw silk salesman, who buys silk from Bangalore and Calcutta; the silk dyers who work on a completely open street corner; and a man who has looms on the whole first floor of his home, where his family can all weave. All the businesses we saw were family-owned and had roots going back for many generations. It was amazing to see (almost) the whole supply chain contained within one square mile of each other. I think that for all of us this day really made us begin to realize how much the craft is intertwined with Varanasi's history and culture; it's one thing to be told the story in a history lesson/NGO briefing, but actually meeting the men involved in the process - men whose fathers, and grandfathers, and great-grandfathers did the same job they do. Men who are the present manifestations of a much larger cultural, historical trajectory.



The next day we went to two villages outside of Varanasi to visit weavers in their homes. This was an equally amazing experience, as we got to see how important weaving is to the families. Weavers often live in one-room, dirt-floored homes. Half of the home is taken up by the hand loom, and the other is the living space for their families. Weavers usually have 5-12 kids though, so it's very cramped quarters. Though it's preferable to weave at night, without all the distractions of family life, the villages will only get electricity for 12 hours a day - one week, during the day, the next at night. We got to watch weavers weaving in their homes - as the craft has traditionally been done. Watching and hearing them weave was such a soothing experience - in the second home we visited all of us just sat in silence for about 5 minutes listening to the sound of a weaver weaving on his loom. At the end of the day there was a freak rain/wind storm, so we all ran in to one of the weavers' homes to wait for the storm to break. Consequently, the India-Pakistan Cricket World Cup game was was just starting, so we got to watch it on the weaver's tiny, grainy TV. It was pretty incredible to think that the same scene was being played out in villages all across India. Minus the four white girls.



On Thursday we saw a completely different mode of production. After sitting in over an hour's worth of traffic (on the shortcut we had taken because there was a "jam" on our original route), we crossed the Ganga and met with a business man who was from a weaving family, left Varanasi to get a law education, and returned to the community to help support the weavers. One of the main things he does aside from acting as a trader for their goods is providing them with a space to weave. He as a room on his property with about 7 looms in it, and weavers can come to weave on them without paying a rental fee and earn a fair wage for their labor. This is great for weavers who have had to sell off their looms, but want to keep working in the craft. I saw it as a bridge between what weaving is now and what weaving used to be since it provides the weavers with a support system for their work and is reintroducing them to the market. I think one of my favorite parts of this site visit was that the businessman who facilitated the whole workshop returned to his community and is using his education to work for their benefit. It really drove home the community-based, small-scale industry point that Dipti made to us on our first day, and also showed that getting a higher education is not synonymous with leaving your family, village, and traditions - a problem we had seen in many villages we had visited in the past.

That afternoon, after going back across the Ganga - this time on a terrifyingly rickety "floating bridge" (we were later told by our Hindi teacher that her husband was once driving across it in a rickshaw in a rainstorm and the bridge split in two) - we were given a task: after being exposed to all the different aspects of the organization that week, we were asked what we thought VWF could do to improve their business and development models. At first, this seemed like an incredibly daunting task - who were we, four college undergrads with no training in business and the teeniest training in development, to determine what this organization should do? But we got over our identity crisis and had a really great time brainstorming ideas for VWF. Surprisingly, business was a lot easier than development, even though this program has exposed us so much more to the development side of things. Our main idea was that for the weavers, development and business are linked - they need the market to keep their livelyhood. So we wanted to capitalize on the high quality, incredibly local nature of the craft through big tags that tell the story of VWF and a personal story of the weavers, create an online presence for VWF to sell products directly to the western consumer market, and a store in Varanasi for VWF to sell products and offer a tour through the weaving community.

Dipti is starting a new organization though - rangSutra, a fair trade craft company that is providing women in the villages surrounding Varanasi employment (and empowerment) through stitching, embroidery, and patchwork. And, she's giving me an internship for the summer! I'm so excited to work with a company that's just getting started and getting hands-on experience in the field. Also Varanasi is definitely my favorite city that we've visited so far, so I'm really excited to spend the summer there. It feels like a very beautiful, livable city with just enough westerners/western cafes to keep me sane. But also a delicious South Indian restaurant that I plan on frequenting. We went for dinner on Monday night and were the only white people there - definitely a good sign. On Sunday morning we took a sunrise boat ride on the Ganges:



Then hopped on a night train back to Jaipur. India won the Cricket World Cup en route, and sadly there were no celebrations on the tracks.

Internship-Workshops

Tomorrow I leave for Varanasi for my internship-workshop for the week. This is where I'll be...I'm so excited!

Colors, Colors, Colors

This past weekend is better described in pictures than words.


Elephant Festival

Holi fire on SIT's street

Holi at Shri Niwas

Adventures in Indian Healthcare

The 4 of us in the chair car stayed up until about 1:30 AM talking & listening to music together. After everyone went to sleep I started getting really intense stomach aches, and ended up spending most of the night in the bathroom vomiting. Let me tell you, though the only place on an Indian train you can get privacy, the bathroom is probably the least appealing place to spend your time. By some miracle there was a brand new, completely wrapped roll of toilet paper in the bathroom, and that definitely saved my life (or at least the cleanliness of my clothes). By the time the train rolled in at 6 AM I had gotten no sleep and felt awful. I made the executive decision to sleep through Hindi and try to get to school by 11. My decision was supported by getting a huge hug from my homestay sister when I told her what happened and she said, "Oh, I was so looking foreword to seeing happy Sally this morning!" I made it through the rest of the day, came home, and went straight to sleep. My host mother called me down at one point for dinner but I told her I didn't want food and promptly went back upstairs to sleep. My sister came up at about 10 and brought me a few biscuits, which I ate before going back to sleep until morning. I got dressed, ate a banana, and pulled myself together to go to school only so that I could ask to go to a doctor to see what was wrong.
At 10:30 Minojji (one of the program staff members) and I set out for the hospital. I guess there's no intermediate in India (at least for foreigners) - the hospital was the only solution to my problems. We walked in and I felt like I was back in the U.S. (except, of course, there were Indians everywhere) at, say, the U.C.L.A. hospital. We were at the Fortis Escorts Hospital, a nice private hospital that looked pretty new. We checked in at the front and then in the specific wing that the doctor I was seeing worked in. It was about 11 at this point and Minojji told me my appointment wasn't until 12:30, but he'd try to get it moved up. All of a sudden a family gets called in and he goes, "Ok, we're next." They were in & out in about 10 minutes, so I saw Dr. Gupta in no time. The visit was weird to say the least:
1. His first words to me were asking me how to spell my name.
2. He didn't take my temperature, even though I told him I thought I had a fever the day before.
3. He automatically assumed I was sick because I had eaten street food, and subtly chastised me for it, even though that wasn't the case.
4. The actual examination consisted of me lying down on a bed and him pressing on my stomach. When I told him it hurt he seemed satisfied that I had a stomach bug. Actually I think that part was actually pretty normal but I figured I'd include it.
5. After the examination, I sat back down at his desk expecting to be told about what he thought I had and what he was prescribing me. False, he spoke to Minojji in Hindi the whole time. All of a sudden we were walking out of his office and Minojji was telling me that he had suggested these other tests for me but it was my call if I wanted them or not. How am I supposed to know if I need these tests when the doctor won't even talk to me? After I said that I didn't want them Minojji said he agreed so at least there was that.
6. We went to the pharmacy and I got 3 prescriptions for about 100 rupees each (About $1.50). Again, no one told me what they were - Minojji just told me when to take them. (I did some Googleing today though - they're all for stomach/GI tract infections and are working so I'm fine with it)
At the pharmacy there was a husband & wife with their newborn baby. I think it was a girl because it was wrapped in a pink blanket. I melted a little bit.
After that we went back to the SIT center, where I caught most of that day's lecture (somewhat ironically on Public Health) and had an appetite by lunch. After lunch though things took a turn for the worse. I went to the meditation room to take a nap and when I woke up I felt really hot, sick, and dizzy. Deirdre and Aviva took me home, put me in bed, and somehow communicated to my host mother what was going on. When my sister got home she had me come downstairs where it was cooler and lie in the king-sized bed in one of the rooms. I spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping and reading in the bed, and Deirdre came over for a little bit later which I really appreciated. I also ate all of my dinner (curd, rice, and toast), which I considered to be a good sign. I went to sleep shortly thereafter and woke up this morning feeling much, much better. I even had enough energy to shower! When I came downstairs for my breakfast, my host sister even said, "Oh I've been waiting to see that smile!" which definitely made me feel better. Also when I got home today I asked my host mother how she was doing in Hindi (aap ke se hay) and she goes, "no no no, first I ask YOU how you are!" so cute.
So all's well now - I'm taking my medicine and slowly re-entering the world of real-people food and keep getting more and more strength back. And I got all caught up on the Hindi homework I didn't do while I was sick.

Udaipurfect

Last Friday 8 of us hopped on a night train to Udaipur for the weekend. (For those who don't know, Udaipur is where they filmed the Bond movie Octopussy - we later found out that nearly every hotel has a nightly showing) 4 people had been able to get sleeper class seats, which have beds, but 4 of us were in the AC chair car, which is like a standard train car with upright seats. It wasn't so bad on the way there because the cabin was nowhere near full and everyone could stretch out over a couple seats. We got to Udaipur around 6:30 AM and had a nice and greasy breakfast at the train station on the super cheap. We then rickshaw'd to our guesthouse that was right next to the lake. Everyone remarked about how nice and clean the air felt and how there were virtually no horns honking. In retrospect that was definitely due to the fact that it was around 7 AM...Udaipurians love honking their horns just as much as Jaipurians do. After checking in to our hotel, we walked down to the lake and I thought to myself, "this is exactly where I want to be." It was so nice to be next to a body of water. We then visited the major temple (with incredibly intricate carvings on the exterior) and got some real (!) coffee in to our systems before going to the City Palace. Somehow we managed to swing the 30 rupee student group price to get in, which was GREAT. There was a 200 rupee camera fee though, and I couldn't hide mine well enough so it had to be checked. Some people snuck theirs in though so pictures exist. The City Palace was absolutely beautiful...the views were amazing and the colors in every room were so aesthetically pleasing. It was maze like - we kept on being led through various corridors to different parts of the palace we didn't even realize existed. From the outside it definitely doesn't look as big as it is. All in all I think we spent about 2 1/2 hours there, and could have spent longer had we not all gotten hungry. So we left and took a leisurely walk down the main bazaar road, across one of the bridges, and to a restaurant called the Food Club for lunch. Despite the very American-sounding name, they served delicious Indian food (but when isn't Indian food delicious?), had cushions instead of chairs, and was right on the lake. Yum.



We decided that we would take an evening hike to the Monsoon Palace to watch the sunset, so after lunch we went to a travel agent to ask for directions and how far it would be. Turns out the base of the mountain was pretty far away, and the hike was equally far up, so we decided to walk to the base and then rickshaw up. We set out and ended up going through the outskirts of Udaipur. I appreciated being able to see that side of India - it felt more real than central Udaipur did. Along the way we picked up a pineapple to enjoy at the top along with the wine we purchased earlier. The palace was more fort-like than anything else, and was part of a wildlife preserve (we didn't see any of the wildlife though). But the sunset was absolutely beautiful. We were so high up - we had a great view of Udaipur as well as the surrounding countryside. We noticed a group of about 6 guys while we were up there, and were trying to guess what country they were from. After the sun set and we were being yelled at to leave, someone finally asked and we learned that they were from all over, had gone to high school in India together, and were having their 10 year high school reunion. We said our hello-goodbyes and thought that was that. False. We were in the car on the way down when we passed them walking down. The driver decided to stop and let them in. So in came 3 - making our already packed car absolutely stuffed. It was one of those hilarious "oh, India" experiences. I ended up on the lap of an Argentine named Miguel who was living in Japan. After we got to the bottom of the mountain we attempted to find a rickshaw to take us back to central Udaipur so we could find dinner. That took a while - a group that had gotten down just before us had claimed the last 2 rickshaws waiting at the base. So off we went in to the dusk in the hopes of finding a ride to dinner. Eventually we succeeded, and got a bus-rickshaw hybrid to drive us to our restaurant. Again, right on the water with beautiful views. I guess there was a wedding going on somewhere in the vicinity (when isn't there?), and at one point fireworks went off over the lake. Our waiter jokingly told us they were for us, and it felt a little bit like they were. I had a paranta (fried bread) stuffed with cheese & tomatoes - delicious, tasted like an Indian calzone. Surprisingly everyone made it through the day without any naps and with high energy. I was impressed. The real coffee might've had something to do with it...
The next morning I walked to some gardens with my friends Deirdre & Hannah. We spent a couple hours just wandering around and met a Canadian tourist named Jamie. This is how our interaction began:
Jamie: Hey.
Us: Hi.
Jamie: If you walk down this path and go to your left, there are a whole bunch of monkeys everywhere.
Us: How long have you been in India for?
Ok so it was a lot funnier when it happened than when I wrote it just now, but the novelty of monkeys definitely wore off a while ago - probably around when we learned that they would steal from us. Anyway we ended up talking to him for a bit - it's nice to have a conversation with another traveler & talk about all the quirks of India you've experienced separately. (He had been in India for 4 days just in case anyone was curious)

That afternoon 4 of us took a cooking class at the Spice Box - the oldest cooking school in Udaipur. Our teacher spoke with an Italian cadence to his voice, which I found hilarious. We learned how to make a paneer dish, a potato dish, chapatti, and chai. He gave us the recipes in a packet that had a few other dishes in it as well, and afterwards we asked him how to make a couple more things and he told us. Oh and we got to eat the food we made. The class was at a semi-awkward time (1:30-4:30), so I spent the rest of the afternoon playing rummy in our hotel's rooftop cafe with my friends.

After journeying out for (a light) dinner we came back and went to the train station to catch our night train back to Jaipur. If everything was on time, we would get home around 6 AM, leaving me enough time to go home, change, eat breakfast, and get to school at 8 like usual. Our train left late on the way to Udaipur so I was hoping it would be on time to Jaipur, and it was. But the ride definitely didn't go smoothly. (Bum bum bummmm)

Ranthambore Tigers

On Monday we journeyed to Ranthambore to visit some NGO's that work on conserving the forest and tiger population in the area. Ranthambore was India's first national park if I remember correctly (started by Indra Gandhi) and their main industry is tiger tourism. This was immediately evident when we entered the town. All of a sudden hotels lined the roads and there were tons of advertisements for safaris. Immediately after we got to our hotel, we were carted off on our very own tiger safari. Our group split up in to two cars, and my car broke down. The second safari I've been on in the past year, and the car I'm in breaks down for the second time. In Tanzania it was a flat tire, this time it was something with the engine. Since that's not as fixable and it was at the beginning of our adventure, we waited for another car to be brought and switched vehicles. The safari itself was interesting....our guide stopped the car for every deer we saw, but sped right past the peacocks and monkeys - you know, the things we don't have in America. Some other highlights include two crocodiles sunning themselves, a mongoose scurrying around the path, and a kingfisher bird. Oh, and a tiger. That's right, we saw ourselves a tiger. It was at the very end of the safari...all of a sudden our car kicked it in to high gear and we sped towards an undisclosed location. Soon enough, we came across about 8 other safari cars all piled up and everyone inside trying to get pictures of what looked like some intense foliage. Behind the leaves and branches there was indeed a tiger. He was lying down and kept bobbing his head up and down. At one point he rolled over and stuck his paws up in the air. Cute. Unfortunately the shrubbery was too thick for me to get a picture, but I swear it actually happened. I think someone else might've gotten one so I'll try to track that down as evidence. Anyway after fully immersing ourselves in the pileup we sped our way out of the park and back to our hotel, where we were given one bottle of beer each after dinner. Minus the 2-3 someone saw a hotel staff member walk away with. Oh, India.
On Tuesday we visited with the Prakartik Society - an NGO that works on developing the communities around the reserve so that they're less dependent on the forest. They've built an amazing school that a lot of the children attend on scholarship/for free and emphasize environmentalism and saving the tigers. While we were touring the school we met Jim & Sue, a retired British couple that comes to the school for 4 months at a time to give individualized tutoring to the students. When they're back in the UK they do a lot of fundraising on behalf of the school. They seemed like such a cool retired couple - I want to be them when I'm older. As opposed to the other schools we saw in Bikaner, I felt really inspired by this school and what Prakartik was doing for the students. It seemed to be a really well run institution and everyone involved was very invested in making the school succeed. Their first class of students is in the 10th Standard right now, but the school is equipped to have students up until the 12th Standard. There are science labs and other classrooms equipped & waiting for the students to be old enough to use them. Afterwards we drove out to a rural village that has Prakartik-initaited programs in place: biogas systems (taking cow patties and transforming them in to gas) for cooking and lighting and aforestation initiatives. Though this part of the day was really interesting, it was also really hot out and I was dressed in all black, so I lost steam really quickly. They receive money from J.P. Morgan's climate change fund for the biogas programs - I thought this was really interesting, especially because when we were in Bikaner we found out that Merrill Lynch donates money to the URMUL trust. I never thought I would encounter either of those firms in rural India but such is globalization.
That afternoon we visited the hospital Prakartik built in the area as well. There was a ton of art in the lobby that emphasized/promoted the fact that the people of Ranthambore are dependent on the tiger population being alive and thriving. The hospital itself was definitely not up to American standards in terms of cleanliness and privacy issues, but we were told it was way better than a government hospital. I'll take their word on that one. At one point we walked in to the delivery waiting room in the maternity ward. We had previously been told that all the doctors were gone for the day and in my mind I associated that with us not encountering any patients either. However, to our left was a curtain drawn. Someone asked what was behind it and our guide goes, "oh, there is a woman in labor." Uh, why would you let 22 college kids who had spent the morning with a whole bunch of cow dung in to your maternity ward? Oh, India.
The next morning we met with the Tiger Watch, Parkartik's sister NGO that works on the forest conservation side of things, including anti-poaching initiatives, habitat restoration, and community awareness. They started their presentation off by saying that people and nature walk hand-in-hand, but I don't think they followed through on that statement, considering that they called the indigenous community in the area, the Mogya, secretive, semi-nomadic, cold-blooded killers because they poach the tigers. This was definitely an instance of new colonialism - the people in the position of least power are being made to pay for society at large's destruction of the forest. It's so much easier to make these villagers move and change their lifestyle than going in to say Jaipur and making our host families drastically change their consumption patterns. Because the Mogya are poaching the tigers it's a lot easier to point a finger of blame at them rather than acknowledge the fact that the tiger reserve was once the private hunting grounds of the royal family of Jaipur.
As a whole though, I really enjoyed the excursion. It definitely had a summer camp-y feel to it for some reason, I think because it's been getting way warmer out. On Wednesday night we went to a much nicer resort for dinner. It's owned by a cousin of Ramaji, our homestay coordinator (also a cousin of my host sister because she & Ramaji are cousins), and as an elephant on the property. It was a part of his wife's dowry, and we got to meet her. And pet her. It was SO cool. He said that she's been in the family for 60-something years. Also there was pasta for dinner. Enough said.