june 7 haryana
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) ***
