June 18-21 - Delhi & Palampur: Introducing India

It is 6-21 (and it's actually 6:21 pm too; how strange) and it is my first time on the internet since I arrived in Palampur. I'll share excerpts from my journal entries from the past few days.

6-18-07, Delhi

We have a few hours before we quickly eat and then head for the bus, which will take us to Palampur. 1 hour to the bus, 10-14 hours on the bus, and then another hour in a car. I think the small village life will be a welcomed change after the chaos of this city. It's a lot to take in. It's a crazy city.

We just ate Southern Indian food for lunch. Supposedly it's easy to digest and a good thing to eat before the overnight bus ride. But it was mostly all starch so I'm not convinced. What else? My suitcase got hit by a car right after I got here! I was rolling it behind me and suddenly it was almost thrown from my hands! It's fine - no fractures or even bruises! One of the girls turned on the light in the bathroom and the lightbulb flew out of the socket! Little things like that are what make the experience so delightful. ;)

Our orientation this morning was really interesting. Bela (who remembers everything about you, Ahnya!) talked about our placement and Indian culture. One of the things she talked about was time and the lack of consideration of it. She said there is no room for times like "3:22"...you either say 3, 3:15, 3:30 or 3:45. She said with her thick accent "in your country you run after the time. Here, it runs after us. Enjoy it, because you'll go back to living by the clock in a few weeks."

We bought our first outfit yesterday, a top (kurta), pants (salwaar) and scarf thingy (dupatta). A few of us also took a taxi tour of three sites in Delhi: the Qutb Minar, the India Gate and the Lotus Temple. The most interesting thing to see, however, was a huge fountain with kids playing in it. You won't understand my fascination with it until I show you the pictures. While we were there some women went in, with their full outfits...I guess they wear them in the water at the beach too.

There are a lot of kids begging on the streets. Yesterday a little girl holding a baby tapped us on the arms. The baby's head was just hanging off the girl's arm. I learned that gangs will drug babies and force kids to beg and then collect the earnings. Bela told us you'll also see kids on crutches, with band-aids and blood all over them. Later at night you'll see them playing without the crutches. She was fooled once when two women knocked on her car window. They begged her for money because another woman was about to have a baby and they needed to take her to the aiport in a rickshaw. Bela saw the woman who really looked like she needed to go to the hospital, so she gave them money. After she drove away she noticed that there was a hospital on either side of the street. The good acting is not only in Bollywood, I guess...

6-19-07, Tuesday -- Palampur

Yesterday evening we boarded the bus bound for Palampur, where I'll be for the next four weeks. I feel so lucky to be spending time in such a picturesque place! It's unreal. The home-base has a large patio on the top level (where I have spent a LOT of time so far) that looks down onto the city on one side and up to the Himalayas on the other. The peaks have snow on them! The weather is so nice! I was expecting it to be much warmer...Delhi was so hot but the weather here in the mountains is very comfortable. We got a taste of the monsoon rain this afternoon. As it fell, the scenery became even more mystical. In pictures it just looks foggy and blurry. But it's magical to look at. The other side of the house looks out onto acres of rice paddy fields.

After breakfast our whole group tackled a nearby mountain. It entailed waddling on poles over rushing water and trying to communicate in Hindi with those we met along the way. It was a great hike that we'll definitely do again.

I just returned from our planned activitiy at the Palampur bazaar. It's an outdoor market with everything you could want except toilet paper. My group of three was assigned the task of purchasing 6 bananas, 7 eggs, a newspaper, a glass bottle of pepsi, a bottle of water, bag of potato chips, and toilet paper, all of which totalled the equivalent to $4. I was joking when I said they didn't have toilet paper - there were two rolls in the market. They simply don't use it. There is a small bucket by the toilets for water-washing. We had to drink the pepsi in the storefront and return the bottle. We got a lot of blank stares. Sam: no elephants yet, but we've run into monkeys, goats, and cows in the streets.

The cow. He shares the road with the cars, pedestrians and autorickshaws. Every family owns one. In villages they sometimes build houses with its dung, (together with mud and straw,) which keeps the house cool and keeps out insects. In a medical book (one of the volunteers is doing medical check-ups) it says that if a child is sick at birth, they rub cow dung on the open wound where the umbilical cord was cut. A sacred animal indeed.

Tomorrow begins our volunteer work. I've heard about what it will be like, but like everything here, even if I'm aware of it, I won't be prepared for it!

6-20-07, Wednesday

Megan and I are going to be working at an aanganwadi (day care) with kids ages 1 through 5. Right now we are at another volunteer placement where two others will volunteer. The kids are around 7 and 8 years old. They are so cute! They stare with wide eyes...probably thinking how strange I look. It's hard to get a smile out of anyone here; the children smile most often. I asked Lalit (one of the CCS staff people) how I should greet passersby. To an elderly man or woman I can nod my head out of respect. To a girl or woman I can smile or say "namaste". To a man I shouldn't smile or say anything. It can be interpreted as an invitation. To the kids we can wave, smile...peek-a-boo seems to work!

Indira Gandhi was quoted saying something about the country being full of contradictions. Don't try to describe it because you can't. A guide book used the following examples: a silk weaver confirms his orders by cell phone, international law students at Delhi University volunteer to have their marriages arranged by their families, women in saris sellings vegetables next to an internet cafe. There are more millionaires in India than in the US, and yet the signs of poverty are ubiquitous. I've seen, and surely will see more of, these types of baffling juxtapositions. I wrote a poem called Elephants and Contradictions. Sharing that is for another day! :)

We've had a number of power shortages and today in the Hindustan Times I was reading that this problem "may short-circuit India's ambition of double-digit economic growth." Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called for a campaign to eliminate shortages by 2012. I will read the newspaper everyday, which means more interesting facts are to come!

Later in the day...

We had a delicious Indian meal tonight consisting of rice, dal, potatoes and yogurt.

There are 14 kids, most of them aged 3, at our placement. There is a teacher and an aid. No one speaks English and while my Hindi is slowly improving, it is nowhere near being conversational and seems to not be well-understood at all. I must have a very thick accent or as Jaggi said, maybe they are just surprised to hear a foreigner speaking Hindi. The kids were really shy; mostly they just stared at us. A few stood up to count in English or sing a song about a dirty boy who didn't wash his hands or face. Two had names of classmates at Punahou (Amit and Kavita) which I found exciting!

6-21-07, Thursday

I just returned from getting measured for a traditional Indian outfit! I already have one that I bought ready-made in Delhi. This time I actually picked out the fabrics and went to a seamstress a few doors down to get measured and pick out a style. It was a lot of fun and cost only about $14 all together. To sew the hems of the scarf was about 10 cents. I got to take that home and I'll pick up the rest of the outfit on Sunday.

The kids I work with are very shy but absolutely adorable. Today all the women from the village came to the day care because they heard we were there. The teacher's niece was there, who spoke some English, and invited us to her home for lunch next week. She is 20 and studies literature at the college here in Palampur. We went to her brothers' wives' house for tea before coming back to the home-base for lunch and our Hindi lesson. And now it's time to take a rickshaw back to home-base for dinner! Bon appetit!