mia in india

i leave mumbai in three days?

i guess this will be my last or penultimate blog entry. so, some closing or penclosing notes:

1. i finally did a bollywood movie. it was a 12 hour shoot, from 5 pm to 5 am. the movie is about last year's terrorist attack, so we, foreign tourists in mumbai, were playing... foreign tourists in mumbai. so postmodern. we spent about 6 hours waiting around, and 6 hours running up and down a hotel stairwell looking scared, while in reality we were trying not to laugh because the director was shouting "look scared! more scared! there are guns pointing at you! look at the guns! look at the guns alternately! you will probably die!" which i guess isn't funny at all, but it was absurd. it is a supposedly legit bollywood movie, but for that particular scene, "special effects" meant this guy making smoke with hot coals, and "makeup" meant this other guy spraying us in the face with water before each shoot. it was really fun.

2. everyone is freaking out about swine flu. i think literally 95% of the newspaper headlines include the word "swine," "flu," "h1n1," "hospitals," and/ or "emergency." the guy sitting next to me right now is wearing one of those masks.

3. another medical concern: leprosy. yesterday a doctor came to the school and all the kids had to stand on their desks while he checked them each for boils or whatever. it was kind of awkward.

4. even after 4 1/2 weeks, the kids in my class don't get the i-don't-speak-gujarati thing. i mean, they're six, so it's okay, but i feel bad when they come up to me and tell me these stories and i'm just like "ok!" or "why are you out of your desk?" i don't think i've missed any vital information, though, because a couple times when there's been an older kid around to translate, this is what my students were trying to desperately to tell me:

"i didn't finish my tiffin." --jatin, after dismissal, three hours since lunch had ended.
"this room is for small babies." -- prerna, sitting in the sr kg room, which is one grade lower than her own.

5. tomorrow i am hanging out with ISHANEE. in INDIA.

6. in retrospect, i probably should have gotten a membership at the internet cafe where the internet works, rather than the one where the employees are nice. they are really nice though.

i think i'm starting to like bollywood music?

 but bollywood and i are not on good terms right now. today was a
school holiday (it is both rakhi and coconut day) and i was supposed
to do voice dubbing for a bollywood movie (white people/ westerners
are basically instant d list celebrities in this city, and being an
extra or doing voice-over for a bollywood movie is an obligatory
tourist activity) but when i got there, after the cab/ train/ auto
ride and an hour of waiting, not to mention skipping my wednesday yoga
class, they were like "oh, we need a 35 year old" and sent me home.
classic mumbai.

 anyways, who needs school holidays. i love school. it's always some
kid's birthday and they give me chocolate. my favorite kids in my
class are ayesha, the girl who actually understands english and can
communicate with me, which makes a nice change, and sahil dupte (there
are two sahils in the class -- sorry other sahil, you're nice too),
who is really naughty and responds to everything with these goat
bleating sounds. i always try to yell at him but instead end up
laughing because they're such funny sounds and he has such a round
little head. yesterday i was handing out name tags and we had this
conversation:

 me: sahil dupte.
sd: sahil dupte!

 i can't believe that my 3 months in india are almost over. time flies
when everything runs 30+ minutes late. i don't think i am ready for
post-michael jackson america.

my daily routine in mumbai:

(about 75% of this is in the rain, but always a different 75%)

7:30 breakfast at the salvation army. same every day: three pieces of white bread, butter & this terrible sweet jam they serve everywhere, 1 hardboiled egg, 1 small green banana, chai

9:00 run errands, buy cheap pants on the street, check email, etc.

10:30 get takeaway lunch, put in tiffin box

11:30 bus to churchgate railway station

11:45  train to dadar

12:15 walk down the street where they slaughter the chickens and everything is in hindi (marathi?) and everyone stares at me

12:30 school

6:00 walk back down the street where they slaughter the chickens and everything is in hindi (marathi?) and everyone stares at me

6:15 train to churchgate

6:45 bus to salvation army

7:00 get dinner/ go on adventures with people from the hostel

12:00 s.a. curfew, bathe in the unheated water of the dormitory bathroom

but now things are changing, as my 7-day-limit at the salvation army has expired and i am moving to the ywca. despite the bad jam and cold water, i'm glad i spent my compulsory mumbai-traveler's week there. everyone was so cool, besides this one russian lady who woke me up at 1 am to ask something about laundry, or windows, or electricity, i'm not sure.

and akanksha! i am working at the actual school, not an after-school center, which is nice because i get to spend a longer time there each day. it's a primary school, jr kindergarten - 3rd standard, and i am working in the first grade classroom. the teacher is precious and has a strange but kind habit of bringing me food and/ or making me try her food. the children could not be cuter. this week i've been pulling them out individually for assessments ("what sound does M make? where do fish live? draw a circle") but monday i start teaching phonics to the whole class. sometimes i have to affect an indian accent so that they understand what i'm saying ("where do fish live? no, not face, feeesh. stop pointing to your face.") also, akanksha is run out of the same office as teach for india. the 3rd standard teacher is a tfi corps member and got his masters at UT! so small, this world of ours. ALSO, akanksha is totally kipp-ed out. apparently they had some kipp people come over and do trainings or something a few years ago, but it's still weird to see kipp culture in india.

anyways, mumbai is great. i wish i could stay here longer, and all of you (amelia, my mother) who were convinced i was going to spend this month getting lost and kidnapped can apologize now. the only thing that's hard to get used to here, as in the rest of india, is that every store/ restaurant/ etc is way overstaffed, and everyone is way overhelpful, so sometimes when you order a veg club sandwich the waiter points to every item on your plate and tells you what it is (maybe he thought they don't have carrots where i come from?) and then watches you attentively as you eat the sandwich. and after all that, i still didn't get an answer to my only real question: why are there maraschino cherries on this?

i only have 17 minutes left at the salvation army internet cafe so this blog entry is not going to involve any mental editing or spell check. the past 10 days have been a whirlwind. onita and i took a trip with her cousin and random extended family which covered amritsar (hasn't changed too much in a week), chandigarh (a "planned city" which basically looks like new jersey), shimla (mountains, cool weather, paradise compared to delhi), and dharamsala/ mcloud ganj (same + tibetans). we slept on lots of buses and trains and drove on terrifying mountain trails for ten hour stretches. then we returned to delhi for one day before heading to mumbai. mumbai is the best. i got my hair cut at a salon where hrithik roshan was getting a tattoo, and then we saw two more bollywood starts at a place called zenzi. that's three in two days. but now i am alone in south mumbai, without onita and her friends to point out bollywood celebrities for me. i'm probably surrounded by them right now at the salvation army and don't even know it.  i'm staying in the dorm here until the ywca has an opening, so pray that i don't lose all my possessions (they're chained to the bed but who knows) or get bed bugs. but really it's not bad here. mumbai is my favorite city in india, probably because it is really modern and has many of the comforts of home, such as no cows on the road. oh, and everyone was lying, it's no that hot here. it hasn't been too rainy yet either, but it's not officially monsoon season for a few more days, so i'll reserve comment. i am now being glared at by this internet cafe employee. but i start at akanksha tomorrow, so updates soon!

1. website up, content being added: www.seechangenow.org

2. although we are usually doing work or otherwise occupying ourselves, not having my own computer has given me too much time to read. finished the god of small things (best) and the road (how did they make a movie out of this??) and i'm making my way through the collected poems and plays of rabindranath tagore (thanks garland) in my spare time. seeking suggestions for more india-related books.

3. yesterday we made what might have been the last visit to notki village for the non-photographers (me), which was surprisingly sentimental. we gave the children and the family we've been following gifts, and the mother of the family gave us woven-bread-cover things. other bread-related events which occured in the village yesterday: (a) we watched the  mother make bread, (b) a very old lady came up to us and wanted to know how we make bread. non-bread-related events: while keeping kids out of the schoolyard so juan could film in peace, i had a 30 minute conversation with a group of kids and young men who spoke about ten words of english collectively. we taught each other the words for goat, cow, bull, friend, pants, jar, gate and tree. we also discussed religion and marriage customs.

4. we have finished the bulk of our filming and are about to take a weekend trip to agra and jaipur. taj mahal! no internet till sunday.

5. the apple juice here tastes different but is really good.

those of you who are my mom or onita are beginning to complain that i don't blog enough. in my defense, i've actually been blogging every (other) day, part of my official students of the world duties, for the s.o.w. website. only problem: the website isn't up yet. so currently georgia and i are blogging into a black hole, but it will all be posted one day.

of course, that blog is all business and can mostly be summarized with "today we went to a village. the sehgal foundation is great." though sometimes it also says things like "today john almost fell into a well."

he really did. it was scary. though it would have been scarier for me if i had actually seen it and not been distracted by the mob of literally 60+ children that was surrounding us at the time. this was yesterday at a village called nawli. since my last update we have pretty much gone to villages everyday. usually notki, the foundation's "demonstration village" where they have successfully implemented all of their interventions. we are focusing on a family in notki for our documentary and in the past week we have been interviewing family member and village leaders. (my other s.o.w. job is interviewer.) yesterday we went to nawli, where the foundation has not yet intervened, to see the contrast. nawli is covered with trash and their hospital, for reasons i still don't understand, is filled with dead trees.

no matter what village we're in the children follow us in hoards and are obsessed with our film equipment, but yesterday was insane and almost dangerous. children were scaling walls and beating each other up just to stand near us. we have a translator for interviews etc, but we really have no way of communicating with the kids, so we've discovered that animal noises are the universal language. also universal is the tone that adolescent boys use when they are talking about you, and they are extremely surprised and amused when you turn to glare at them.

in retrospect, yesterday was completely absurd. after recovering from our morning in nawli and near-well experience, we attended (crashed?) the engagement party of the sister of one of the women who works for the foundation. we got there awkwardly early and ate way too many hors d'oeuvres. at first we felt out of place because everyone was wearing saris or nice clothing and we were in jeans. also, we were white. but then our friends from the staff got there, and then there was a dance floor, and then we took a picture with the engaged couple on their fancy stage, and then there was a huge buffet but we were too full from hors d'oeuvres, and then there was ice cream. after the party we went back with val from the research department and hung out in his posh apartment. our next day off: pool party at val's.

actually our next day off is today and we're going to the red fort and dilli haat.

we also recently discovered that the sehgal building/ our guest house is right around the corner from a huge arts center/ gallery. this is strange because we are located in a business park in gurgaon, surrounded by office buildings and construction worker tent cities, but apparently our little block is a cultural hub as well. the other night we attended a traditional hindustani vocalist concert.

finally, a rated list of fruits/ vegetables i've eaten in india:

mangoes *****
litchi (think plumb + grapefruit + eyeball) ****
bitter gourd *
watermelon with chaat masala (cumin-y) ***

so much has happened since we last spoke, blog. highlights: yesterday we made our second visit to the community center that the foundation runs for the mewat villages. we filmed a big meeting of leaders from different villages, and then we went to see the school in one of the villages that the foundation has made a lot of progress in. it was a relatively cool day but it was still sweltering in the village. i don't know what to think of the rural schools. each time we walked into a classroom (there were 5 or so) all the kids would stand up and salute us and shout something really loudly. other than that they were shy. i've attached some pictures, photo cred georgia dealey: 1) one of the volunteers from the village preparing mid-day meal in the school kitchen. 2) second grade classroom. 3) some kids outside of the school gate. they are either not enrolled, or they just wandered out because their teacher was out of the classroom -- not uncommon, our translator said. on the way back to gurgaon (2 hour drive on perhaps the bumpiest roads on earth), one of the women from the village rode in my car because she had an errand to run in the city. she is perhaps the coolest person on earth. she got married at age 12 and wanted to run away. but she didn't, and later she won a national women's achievement award for leading healthcare programs in her village. she shared dried channa with me. she also shared a selection of indian pop music, via an earbud plugged into her cell phone, which was apparently also an mp3 player, and considerably nicer than my samsung. she is an exception.

last night and today we had a break from our work. we went to delhi and did some sight-seeing (india gate, rashtrapati bhavan, chattarpur temple, sai baba temple, qutb minar), some shopping (palika bazaar), some eating (punjabi by nature and a random sweets shop + restaurant), and generally embraced being tourists. several families asked to take pictures with us. also, i bought some sparkly nail polish and a small hair scrunchee, both necessities, for a total of 25 rupees (about 50 cents).

tomorrow we have a full day of work, and before breakfast i am going to sneak into the kitchen and learn how to make paratha.

     

Click here to download:

may_31_haryana.zip (12722 KB)

so, i'm in haryana. the flight from chicago was just a 16-ish hour nap, punctuated by 4.5 meals and a stop at the frankfurt airport which we were not expecting, but  which was apparently planned, so it was ok.

if i didn't fully explain why i'm here: i'm making a documentary/ promotional material about this through this (to be updated soon) with 5 other UT students for one month. we're staying at the institute of rural research and development guest house. it's solar powered, and air conditioned, and really, excessively nice, but the wireless network doesn't allow facebook access so we're roughing it.

i'm going to go brush my teeth with mineral water now.