Reflection On Our First Two Weeks

Hello! This week has flown by with lots of work and afternoons at the bazaar. I unfortunately succumbed to the dreaded “Delhi belly” yesterday, but the anticipation was much worse than the actuality and I’m feeling close to a 100% again. We went down to a local market last night to get crackers, peanut butter, Gatorade and sprite to soothe my tummy and satisfy everyone’s tastes for home. We had a great time walking around the little shops and cooling ourselves down in the fat cool drops of rain that made their way through the sandy wind storm. We’ve had a few of these storms throughout the last few days and it’s cooled the area to the low hundreds. It’s almost a blessing that it was so abnormally hot when we first arrived, because now anything lower feels like heaven.

Work is going great and we’re in the final stages of preparation before our week in the villages. It’s getting more and more exciting as we prepare our surveys and plan for our exit from the city. We are each responsible for creating the surveys and information we want to collect and I’ve ended up with four different ones! Luckily, it’s by choice and I’m really happy with the content I’ll be covering. My surveys are targeted for the district officers, teachers, students, and parents. The schools are out for summer unfortunately, but they are arranging meetings for me and I’ll hopefully be able to visit the local school and tour even though the students aren’t there. The students and teachers all live locally so meetings should be convenient for all.

We are all getting more and more used to India life, though India does not make it easy. Every day you are blasted with sights, sounds, and smells that are enough to make the strongest of us falter. But nonetheless we assimilate. Last night, on a mad rickshaw ride home from our grocery run, I actually thought to myself that it was really rude of my driver to have not honked at another car…a sure sign you’re figuring things out. :) More importantly though, is the shock factor wearing off. Seeing the torn down shacks, piles of trash, crumbling infrastructure, children begging, the crippled, families living under the overpass...or more commonly under a tarp, weather beaten skeletal dogs scrounging for food, men sleeping on the sidewalks…or is it a body, ….it all wears on you in the beginning. You feel yourself tensed up and exhausted after just a few hours of trying to make your way. Before I arrived I thought to myself, “I really want to make sure I see the slums of the city too, so I don’t get a skewed view of what city life is really like for people.” As though I were in L.A. and wanting to see skid row or something. I simply laugh at the thought now. It is everywhere. It is in your face every day and there is no ignoring it. I also had heard, “People will stare at you, and try to scam you” and I thought oh, well, it will be weird but no big deal. I had this vision of easily walking down the modern, clean street to a grocery store or bank and then “going to visit” the old style bazaars and places in need where I would feel out of place and on guard. I had visions of learning the local customs as I glided through the city visiting all there is to see. And then I find myself here. Faced with the pollution, walking past sewage, facing a little girl covered in dirt asking me to buy a pen, a young boy sitting on the median barricade with no left foot, men with only skin stretched over their bones rambling some Hindi as they reach out to you, piles of trash and half finished construction at every turn, and people looking at you…because I’m western or because I’ve infringed into some community space where I’m not welcome…how can I know. Of course there have been amazing moments throughout as we see all there is to see, sharing moments of laughter with my companions, smiles from our trainers, and the happiness of our new friends, but it only fills the gaps, until you make your way back to your hotel room to wash your dusty feet, sit down and try to figure out how to get something for dinner. And then you would sit down to think, reflect, try to make some sense from the madness, but your body and mind are done with that for the day so you collapse into bed and sleep a dreamless sleep until you wake up at dawn with a quiet resignation to move.

Over time, though, while it’s not something that disappears completely from your mind, it is at least something that begins to grant you reprieve. You are able to see more now that your mind has accepted the new information as true. It’s time to accept it as reality and begin building. And so you start to see the trees again, the street children laughing with each other while on a break from pandering, a group of kids playing cricket out in a barren lot, parrots and hawks swooping overhead, a particularly lush and clean shaded block of the city, a tranquil garden with an ancient tomb looming over you somehow making you feel safe in your smallness, a woman with a beautiful sari walking with her goods balanced gracefully upon her head, the beautiful art and goods only India can make (a bizarre fact of life that such extreme contrasting visions exist in one place) a family settling down to take their meal in their lean-to, a father throwing stones with his daughter by the construction heap… and slowly you feel yourself slip back to your place in humanity…to where you belong…no longer peeking through the window with uncertainty and fear. So, signing off tonight with my feet placed firmly in India, and with a lighter spirit, promises of good dreams, and a strengthened heart. A toast to life I raise to you…Goodnight my friends :)