On our way to Bikaner last Monday, we stopped at a girls' education camp run by the URMUL trust, a development NGO that started in the '80's. The camp brings in illiterate, uneducated girls aged 11-16 from rural villages in Rajasthan and educates them up to a 5th standard level in 6 months. In addition to an academic education, the school also teaches them basic hygiene (bathing and brushing their teeth daily) and socializes them in to group play. They didn't learn these things in their home villages because they were girls and thus not as valued in the family. 18 of them were married but hadn't gone to live in their in-laws' homes yet. We learned that poorer families will often marry off their daughters at the same time despite their age to save on the costs associated with a wedding. They looked so young for their age because they had probably been malnourished as children - no one could believe that the youngest girl there was 11. One of the teachers was an alumna of the program and working on her masters, and the director said that a lot of the alumna do go on to higher education or some kind of career. This past weekend URMUL had a reunion for alumna of the school. We didn't get to go but I like that they're actively promoting the success of the program not just to the rural communities but also to larger areas like Bikaner.
The girls showed us around the camp - their dorm rooms, their chests of clothes, soap, and toothbrushes, and then we went in to an open area and played Indian versions of Duck Duck Goose and Red Rover with them. We tried to teach them Down By The Banks but it got lost in translation and visual demonstrations weren't working in our favor. After we had exhausted ourselves playing, one of the teachers brought out tubes of henna and the girls sat us down and did henna on our hands and forearms. I thought of it as the Indian version of French braiding hair because it a) is really pretty and b) some girls are better at it than others. The girl who started doing mine couldn't get it right so she got up and called over another girl to do it.
After leaving the camp we continued on to our hotel and a few of us went out to explore Bikaner. Our destination was twofold: the Old City and a sweets shop our homestay coordinator recommended to us. Naturally, we made the sweet shop our number one priority. As we were walking there we kept asking people for directions, and the cool thing was that everyone's directions matched with the previous person's. We weren't getting led astray at all and I suppose it's enough of a well-known place for everyone to have an idea of where it is. We got these delicious toffee sweets that had cashews in them. I tried to describe them to my host sister yesterday to find out what they were, but she didn't know - I guess they don't use the word "toffee" in India and I couldn't think of another way to describe it.
The next morning we met with a man from the URMUL trust who talked more about their development projects and how they get their funding. Surprisingly, Canada's foreign aid agency is a large donor. As a whole the application process seemed very elaborate and, well, Indian.
Afterwards we went to the fair trade store that URMUL runs next door. Right up my alley, especially for my ISP because I want to focus on craft products. Except, none of the program staff told me we were going beforehand so I didn't really use it as a fieldwork experience. I just shopped. What surprised me the most was how much a lot of the designs resemble South American patterns and textiles that I've seen before. I can't think of any way that these two cultures would have interacted in history, and yet they're producing designs that are SO similar to one another. It blew my mind.
In the afternoon we visited a girls' college outside of Bikaner.
In our hotel, I'm rooming with two other girls. There were two beds between the three of us, and we didn't find any problem with this and assumed that everyone else had a similar situation. The next day we found out that that wasn't the case and everyone found it funny that we just rolled with it instead of complaining. Also there were pigeon eggs outside of our window.
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