School, etc.

So I do actually go to school here. My hardest class is Hindi, which we have for about 2 1/2 hours every morning. The first hour is a lecture, then we have a chai break, then two drill sections. Though I see myself improving every day, I'm definitely struggling and am behind where I should be. That homework takes up most of my evenings at home, but I live with two fluent Hindi speakers so I'm not out there on my own tackling the language.
After Hindi we have another break, then our Sustainable Development and Social Change seminar. This week has essentially been India 101 with an introduction to development with a focus on India yesterday. This class has a lot of potential so I'm excited to see where it goes.
I'm also taking a field studies seminar, which is a field research course. We don't meet every day but it's a mix of lectures & excursions. On Wednesday we visited a slum (basti), and did some fieldwork. Our group was split in to two and went to two different ones in Jaipur. When we got there, we were lead through the area just observing the living conditions, etc. The assignment was to then decide on some specific "Development Needs" that could help the community. We picked a sanitation system, a garbage system, plumbing, and good food storage. Then we went around to different houses and asked people what they thought. The woman my group met with said that she wanted a real home - the basti is illegal and the government considers it occupied land - and for her family to find employment in the puppeteering trade. Jaipur has a big puppeteering tradition and we were at the slum that most of them live in. We found out that there are two doctors practicing in the community, and found our way to one of their offices to talk to him next. He's was from the basti but came back after he went to medical school to open up the office, and is currently treating 15 cases of TB, which really struck - though didn't necessarily surprise - me. The basti is very narrow and crowded, and there are about 20-25 members per family with 10,000 families living in the colony. That's a recipe for widespread disease. It was a little uncomfortable to basically be a "slum tourist" or at the very least a western student - I don't have any kind of resources to give back to the people there and yet I was talking to the residents and gathering data from them simply for research/classwork.
The last month of the program will be spent doing an independent study project. I talked to my academic director today about how I wanted to do something with fair trade and she gave me two contacts to email. One is in Jaipur, so I could easily go meet with her, which is really great. I was a little discouraged about the viability of doing fair trade research because I went through the library & old ISP archives and didn't find anything relating to fair trade.

Outside of school, I've done a few things this week:
1. Went to a bazaar in the Old City of Jaipur, where we paid too much for the rickshaw rides to & from, and shoes.
2. Have been the 6th person in a 5-person rickshaw. One of the most cramped (though not as terrifying) experiences of my life.
3. Registered my passport with some bureaucratic agency since I have a year-long visa. Indians appear to have a never ending love affair with bureaucracy.
4. Yoga. A friend of the homestay coordinator is going to come to the center every day to teach yoga to whoever wants to for Rs 50/class. That's a little more than a dollar.
5. Crossed the street multiple times. Crossing the street/driving in India walks a fine line between being total and complete chaos and incredibly logical. Cars, busses, bikes, motorcycles, autoricksaws, bicycle rickshaws, and pedestrians all coexist. The trick is that you go for it when you see a gap in the road, and oncoming traffic will slow down enough for you to get by without actually stopping. So you have to be confident and assertive. Anyone who's ever crossed a street with me - especially in Boston - knows that I don't really have those qualities when it comes to j-walking. But I'm getting better. I did pretty well coming home from school yesterday afternoon.

I'm going to my first Indian wedding tonight! It's wedding season here, and some people have been to a few already. I've seen them being set up and/or have heard them from my house just about every day I've been in Jaipur. My extended homestay family is somehow involved in hosting this one, and I'm really excited to finally see how this unfolds.