Life in India (2008 Year Out Volunteer)

Namaste!

I am writing this email listening to the sounds of the local boys playing cricket under the window of the volunteer house. I have got a couple of their names down now, but unfortunately I always confuse their real names with the names I give them in my head (ie – Ahnkush is uncomfortable… Un-cush(ioned)?? Or Supdeesh is soup-dish… but I called him Soup-bowl one day which was highly embarrassing!). They all come from the surrounding slum apartments where I live in Bedla, about 20 minutes tuktuk ride out of Udaipur (more about tuktuks later).


Home is an apartment with about 15 other people – although last night (Sunday night) all of the extended family came over and we probably had about 30 people in one apartment! I sleep on a bed (by bed I mean a wooden board on legs with some sheets on it. No mattress or anything like that) underneath our flyscreen which we have patched up using bits and pieces of cardboard boxes and blu tak! Surprisingly, I only have gotten bitten twice; once was at Delhi airport where I didn't really clue in that I was already in India and therefore didn't need fly spray, and the other time was last night playing poker with pebbles by candle light as the power had cut out for the second time in 2 hours (that's on top of the 3 hours that they put the power out each day to conserve energy! Except the sneaky thing is that they do it between 9-3, but they don't tell you when abouts they'll zap it…). No malaria to speak of yet!

There are two other girls from Australia in my room – Amber and Jane. Then there are about 7 people from Denmark (I loose count), 1 from Bulgaria, 1 from Germany, 1 from the UK, and then the local coordinators. There are Ritu, Neeraj, Himanshu, Meenaji (the cook!), Tulsi, Larki (Mr. Lucky to us) and Gaurov (Big G to us – and I'm little G!). Further to this, there are Himanshu's wife, their son, Himanshu's father, Meenaji's husband and mother, plus the boys who live in the apartments around us, the milkman, 3 tuktuk drivers, Chicken, her 2 puppies, and a cow. Well. The cow sleeps next to Neeraj's car.

Are we getting the idea? !!

The country is amazing. I've avoided talking about it first because I didn't really know how you can describe the outer areas of India unless you're actually sitting where I'm sitting and watching the community move around you. I often go for really long walks in the morning before it gets too hot, but I'm even being discouraged from that now as you just get stared at so much in Bedla! The immediate slums know that volunteers live here, but once you walk for 10 minutes, the people aren't used to seeing foreigners, and so you have a lot of strange experiences… So much as SMILING at a man is translated as you prostituting yourself to them; and you would know me well enough to know that not only do I normally smile at people I pass in the street, but I wave, say hello, and will have a conversation if the time permits! Well here, that is one of the things that I am finding the hardest to adapt to – not being social. The men see it as me being the town hussy, and the women see it as me trying to take their husbands away from them!

Children are different though. Oh my god the children… I have never met a bunch of kids who are so warm and welcoming. Thy make me feel as if I am their new best friend, nonetheless an alien… They will stand (often half naked) on the streets and scream "HELLOHOWAREYOU" and wave frantically. But as soon as you wave back or ask them a question, they shy away inside, only to peep out again a few second later to check if the alien is still passing by. I have never seen such wide, innocent eyes in my life.

Perhaps the only thing that can compete with their eyes is the landscape. It is as if someone has got a vibrant countryside, taken a picture, and then turned the sepia down. The colours are muted. Even the sky seems colourless. This is not to say that it is possibly one of the most stunning landscapes I have seen. Because what makes it so special is that the dull tones are punctuated by regular bursts of colour – the saris. Whether they are hanging on a tree branch to dry, placed precariously atop a young girl's head, being washed and beaten against a stone on the roadside, they contrast the view in such a way that makes the colours seem brighter and the horizon more surreal.

Everyone has their escapes here. I've worked out that the men have their cricket, the women have their saris and the people as a whole have their religion. I found myself late a few nights ago in a temple near the city centre. I didn't know it at the time, but it was a religious festival that day, and I walked straight into a traditional prayer meeting. It was possibly one of the most humbling experiences I have ever had. I am by no means religious, never mind a devout Hindu, but the devotion that these people show towards their God is simply breathtaking. Literally breathtaking. I found myself gasping for air at some points as I was meditating as I was so much in control of my own breath and being that if I did not tell myself to breathe, I simply wouldn't.

We (Jane and Amber, as it was Amber's 19th birthday ad we had been out to a rooftop restaurant that overlooks the Udaipur lakes – my paneer masala parantha and aloo mugdesh korma cost me $2.40 Australian) started off watching from the wings. It was in this little hand carved temple, with about 6 of the 32,000 Hindi Gods decorating the walls, plus a giant Ganesh statue covered in Gold leaf at the front. People one by one would pray to their respective Gods, and then douse their heads in holy water and give their children rose petals to crush. But the prayer was what was phenomenal.

There were maybe 20 women in multifarious coloured saris swaying and chanting in unison with each other in the corridor of the temple. Once it opened out, there were a few elders, and one bearded man in traditional dress leading the chorus and rhymically playing a hand drum. Dotted around the outskirts were men, some playing finger cymbals in a hypnotic fashion, others with bells. One blind man just simply clapped along in synchronization with trembling fingers that looked like they would break with each sound.

I felt a set of eyes on me, and I caught the sight of a woman who must have been 85. She was in a lime green sari, but her head was covered all expect her eyes. She shuffled backwards with excruciating slowness, and patted the tiles next to her. I would have thought I would have been hesitant, invading on such a magical ritual, but something beckoned me next to her. Before I knew it, the gap had closed around me, and I was in the middle of the chanting, swaying women. Some looked at me as if I should know the words, and I was half expecting to be handed the finger cymbals at some points. I sat in the lotus positioned with my hands outstretched on my knees; and as I fell into a lulled state of meditation, I became aware of the layers of sound around me. I could distinguish between the different vocal qualities of the warbles, and the pulsations of the drum. It was 40 minutes until we realized any time had passed.

At one stage, I felt a different presence in the temple, and I saw a tourist (note how I don't consider myself a tourist – nor are we considered them by the population. In town, they know the volunteer teachers from Bedla from the tourists and it mean we get treated like humans, and also aren't subject to inflated prices…). She was wearing a singlet top, and without even thinking what I was doing, I told her to cover her shoulders. It has got to a point now only after 5 days that I can't even walk around the comfort of home with a high necked tank top on and feel right, nor wear a skirt that shows my ankles! (however, there is a HUGE contradiction in the culture here – the saris that most women wear show the upper part of the stomach all the way around, and have low scoop necks at the front and the back! Needless to say the Bollywood clips are like soft porn…) But the covering up of our bodies isn't purely out of respect anymore – it truly is because I don't feel right. You can feel yourself being looked at differently, and I now watch tourists be talked about by the merchants as they walk past. Imagine what it's going to be like back home! I am going to be suffering from some severe reverse-culture shock… especially the materialistic possessions back there. Even a sleeping bag in a tent would be luxury, because it would mean warmth and shelter.

It's taking awhile to get used to things over here – some little bits and pieces are going to take time, not just understanding. I thought that I would be picking up Hindi quite fast over here for an example! But although I understand the grammatical structure of the language (if you give me a dictionary and a transcript of the Hindi script, I can read very VERY slowly), it is SO hard to speak!! They have a whole bunch of sounds that we don't have in English (although Japanese is helping with some…) and the lax Aussie tongue quite simply just doesn't want to make them! Then every vowel can be pronounced 3 different ways depending on where in the mouth the noise comes from (nasal, alveolar and glottal for you linguistic nuts out there…) but you can't really tell which is which unless it has context. Then there are hard consonants and soft consonants… and I haven't even MENTIONED the feminine / masculine verb/adjective agreement with the corresponding noun and plural… It's hard to change the sentence structure when you don't know if Indians consider "cup" to be a "male" word or a "female" word (it is female for interests sake).

So for now I'm sticking to stock conversation sentences and commands for my kids… I'm finding that 'shaitahni nahi', 'buut jao' and 'chup rhahout' are coming in very handy ('don't be naughty', 'sit down' and 'SHUT UP!')

On to school! It's been a little hectic with arrangements (I won't go into all of this because I'm still confused myself) but originally I was going to be teaching 3rd grade, then 4/5th grade, then aangbari (a little like kindergarten), but now I'm teaching 2nd grade, and I LOVE THEM!!! Well… all one lesson I've had with them so far….

My class was very small today (only 6) which I'm told is pretty abnormal. Normally there can be up to 15 boys and girls there at a time. I think that it was small today because it was cooler this morning (only about 30C), so the families sent the children to work in the fields. Yes, the fields. At 7 years of age. The community that I'm teaching at is called Bhilawara, and it is full of children from the lowest caste in the Indian system. They are land labourers, and the more hands they have on the fields at a time, the more stock they can cultivate and the more chance they have of being able too put pulses on the table 3 times a day. It is about another 20 minutes out from Bedla (which is 20 minutes out of Udaipur, which is 2 hours out of Jaipur, which is 8 hours out of Delhi… Get the point?) and for the middle 10 minutes of that trip on the tuktuk (again, I'll get to the tuktuk!) there is nothing but land. Dirt and rocks and shrubs and the occasional plantation. And then as you're rearing up this one hill in particular, gripping on for dear life, you look down and you can see the most beautiful valley, and in the far corner of that valley you can see a lone, salmon coloured concrete block. That it Bhilawara.

The level of English in the class varies greatly, and I can tell it is going to be hard to keep the smarter children occupied whilst trying to spend more time with others. For an example, Jagdish is already somehow attempting to write his name in joined up letters and can read a list of animals like 'elephant' 'lion' and goat' and point to the corresponding pictures; where as Mohnala can hardly write at all, can only count to 5 with prompting and doesn't know the colours even in Hindi. However, it was very satisfying for me to sit with him at the end of the lesson and for him to count to me the number of spots on the ladybird (but I think that Golap was whispering words in his good ear…). I can't wait to meet the girls! I really want to see if I can get them speaking, because apparently they're painfully quiet because the culture in the area (well, all over India) has made them believe that they don't deserve to have an education, and therefore are shameful to be at school. The main reason that the parents send the kids to school and don't make them do labour is because the governments provide them with one school uniform a year and a rice meal at lunch. However, today the meal didn't arrive and we had to go… that was a little heart breaking…

Tuktuks!! Oh god the roads… They are everything you see in the movies and more. Here's an idea of what you will normally find sharing the road (no left and right off the main roads by the way – it's just whoever veers left/right first takes that side). Trucks, vespas, motor bikes with up to 4 people on them, buses with 30 people on the roof that file down the window like they are rolling out of a clown car, goats, dogs, boars, cows that people would rather swerve into another person rather than hit, elephants, merchants rolling fruit carts, vegetable carts, ice cream carts, pakora carts, gulab carts, milk carts, brick carts, taxis, auto rickshaws, and… tuktuks…

Tuktuks are the closets thing to public transport that we have here. They have 3 wheels, just like that car in Mr. Bean – and it feels as if its going to tip over just as much! The one that we catch to school each day I refer to as the 3WD (3 wheel drive… going over ditches is definitely an experience…) I didn't think that I have an unbruised spot on my head, and a place on my left arm is permanently bruised at the moment from holding onto the bars that adorn the one window it has. They don't have doors, and the record for the number of people in the one time that a volunteer has been in is 24. 8 sitting bums on seats (you fit 6 normally VERY snuggly) another 4 somehow in the same compartment, 3 in the front seat, 3 hanging out the side, 2 on the bumper bar and 3 on the roof. The most I have had was 11 (6 sitting, a girl on my lap, a woman on the floor, 2 in the front and one hanging out the side). Ad I thought that THAT was an effort! No wonder it takes only 5 rupees into Udaipur and 3 to Fatty Boombar (that's not actually the name, I just know it sounds like that, and when I say that he rickshaws know where I mean…). With about 38 rupees to the Aussie dollar, that's less than 5 cents! It's set fee on the tuktuks, and then you bargain with the rickshaw drivers (the closest thing you'll get to a taxi. Still 3 wheels, but smaller). I got it down to 80 rupees ($2 or 50c when you divide it by 4, as we only take them at night when we're out in groups of smallest 4) from town the other day (can be about 160 normally), but he got lost… but the great thing was it didn't cost extra coz it's a bargained set fee! I just got a little scared….

But I feel very safe at the same time. Town is a little different, but in Bedla, everyone knows each other, so to commit a crime would mean that you would be ostracized from the community. In that sense, the crime rate is very low because it is so socially unacceptable to do something wrong and be publicly shamed for it that it acts as a deterrent. Interesting, huh?

But then the horns… THE HORNS!! Everything has 'sound horn' or 'please make horn' written on it, and everyone seems to follow!! I'm not sure if it's an Udaipur thing, but when you pass EVERY vehicle, you sound the horn about twice… Not to warn them that you're there, but just because!! But within al of this, there is actually an oddly comforting sense of fluidity in the chaos. Fluid Chaos. I have learnt that the best way not to die is to always keep moving – NEVER stop… Because that's when things get tricky and unpredictable. According to the in-housers, there are a set of unspoken rules that govern the tarmac (scratch that. That govern the DIRT) that would make it unsafe for us to ever drive here, but make it safe for the drivers to. Didn't believe it at first, but I'm starting to see what she means…

And the food… I now know the difference between roti, naan, chapatti, parantha, papa, pati and papadam! We are provided breakfast, lunch and dinner here by Meenaji who is possibly one of the sweetest older Indian women I have met. You can sit in the kitchen ad watch her cook for 2 hours and just chat to her in broken English and large gestures about what life used to be like for her. The entire she talks t you, she'll be chopping with an uber sharp knife, but not watching what she's doing – just talking straight at you… it's really distracting because you're terrified that she's going to slice something other than the pattar! Lunch and dinner are mostly the same, with a wet curry/dhal, a dry curry, rice, tomato, cucumber, chapatti, ghee and yogurt at lunch. All of the ingredients are from the fields that surround the slum, and the yogurt/ghee is home made! Fresh and Organic. And of course she cooks everything from absolute scratch, including the chapatti and grinding her own masalas…

We go out to dinner every now and then if we're spending the afternoon in town, but you have to be very very careful. I am currently the only one in the entire apartment who has not been sick (touch wood), and I tell you what, it is not a pretty sight… I've been in a room for the past 3 days with one girl who had it coming from one end, and the other had it from the other (I'm not going to write an elaborate euphemism for this). As a result, our toilet blocked, and yes, I have video footage of us trying to unblock it ourselves… the toilet doesn't flush, it's just something that looks like a toilet that you need to manually put water down… expect 'things' got stuck and no more water would go down… I'll have to abandon my dream of being a plumber I think.

But people seem to be getting sick from meat (as Meenaji doesn't serve it here aside from Sunday dinner, so they go out and order it) and Western food cooked by Indians (ie, tuna pasta/apple crumble). And because I have no desire to eat meat, and there is too many yummy Indian things fro me to try to even consider eating lasagna, I should be fine. What might get me is the fruit – it's generally safe to buy off the streets as long as you wash it in bottled water and peel it… but it might get me. That or the street food – we've been told it's fine as long as you see it coming out of the vat fresh, but there's always that chance…

But street chai is fine! And DAMN it is fine in both senses!! I also make it at home when Meenaji isn't here… crushing my own cardomn pods and snapping cinnamon sticks etc etc!

Aside from the fact that this email is 5 pages long in word and you've probably lost interest by now, I need to go and make some lesson plans for class tomorrow! The school starts earlier tomorrow as well, due to the fact that it is starting to get really hot here, so I need to be extra prepared because the 1 ½ hours earlier start will probably translate to a lapse in concentration.


Please email me back, and forward this on to anyone who you think I may have promise to email, but aren't on my list! And PLEASE tell me what's going on back home because the hardest thing at the moment is not being able to see you guys face to face and hear some normal news that doesn't involve stepping in elephant dung in town, seeing tigers in the Bhratipa Park or who has the latest round of Delhi belly…. I want to hear what YOU'RE doing!!

I'll write every week or so when I get the time. Photos on my facebook soon!

Daanyavrd aur namaste!

Georgia