India

Hitching a ride on a 12-wheel "Dumper"

2009-06-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was the wedding of Ravi, the manager of one of my NGO's primary schools and a friend mine. At this point I've been to more Gujarati weddings than American ones, so a bit of the novelty has worn off. But I knew that a lot of the other teachers from the primary schools would be going, and they've all become such good friends of mine that I didn't want to miss it.

I made plans to meet some of the other teachers at the NGO's primary school just outside of Katariya, a small village in Surendranagar District, about 100 or so kilometers West of the vocational training center. Getting to Bavla, the town 8 kilometers Southwest of the center, is no problem at all, and just involves taking a shared rickshaw and paying the driver 5 Rupees. Getting from Bavla to the school, though, is slightly more complicated. You have to stand by the bus stop and try to flag down buses, trucks, or shared jeeps in the hope that one of them will be going to your destination.

I had no luck with the first few buses, none of which were going all the way to the school, which is about 12 kilometers just before Limbdi, a major town in Surendrangar. A man operating a small soda stand heard me asking the bus conductors where they were going. When a big, 12-wheel "Dumper" (the local term for a dump truck) slowed down to take passengers, the soda man told me that this truck would be going to Limbdi. I went over to the truck and confirmed that they were going there, and climbed in.

Generally I don't like to take rides in trucks alone, but at this point my Gujarati is good enough to navigate without any real problems. Plus I was in a bit of a hurry, because it was already 2:30 and I had told my friends I would arrive between 3 and 4 in the afternoon. I sat in the front cab of the truck with four or five other passengers, along with the driver. The other passengers were middle-aged men dressed in white cotton kurtas and loose slacks of the same material, and a few younger men in Western clothes. Surprisingly I didn't attract much attention at first, which was nice.

About ten minutes down the road from Bavla, the truck slowed again so the driver could talk with a potential new passenger who had flagged us down. I couldn't hear what they were discussing, but the driver seemed hesitant to accept. The man talking with the driver said he wanted to go to Katariya, and the driver hadn't heard of the village. I was surprised to hear that this guy wanted to go to Katariya, where I was going, but didn't say anything. Soon the man offered the driver 300 Rupees, which sealed the deal. He climbed in the cab.

I was caught off guard when the truck then took a left off the highway and into an area housing what appeared to be a series of large warehouse-like shops storing agricultural products. The truck stopped, and all the passengers got out. Next to the dumper, a huge semi was being loaded with dozens of 50 kilogram burlap sacks filled with rice. A wooden plank was set up on the ground leading into the rear of the truck, and two or three huge, sweaty men hauled the giant sacks up on their backs, dropping them on the floor of the truck.

This went on for about ten or fifteen minutes until the rice had all been loaded. As it was happening I looked around. Inside each of the shops there were huge sacks piled high, straight up to the ceiling. Some contained rice, others fertilizer, and others some other product I couldn't identify. Outside one of the shops a burly man was positioning a 50 kilo sack of rice on a giant scale of the type held by lady justice. A very large iron weight was placed on the opposite side of the scale so that the sack of rice and the weight hung in perfect balance.

Despite the assurance of the driver that the whole process would only take five minutes, the time continued to drag on. First one of the younger men wandered back to the street in search of alternative transportation, and then the cotton-clad middle-aged men did the same. I waited, taking into account the hassle of hailing a different bus or truck and going through it all again.

Eventually, the plank was moved to the dumper, and two men started climbing up and back down, tossing in huge sacks of fertilizer. Once that started, in only took 5 or 10 minutes before the dumper was loaded with all 28 sacks and was ready to depart.

"Majaave?" The driver, grinning, asked me as we climbed back into the truck. "Did you enjoy that?"

I smiled back and answered yes, I did. "Where are you going again," he continued, "Limbdi?"

"Actually just next to Limbdi," I said. "Katariya."

"Katariya!" That was one of the guys responsible for the fertilizer. "That's where we're going. Why are you going there?"

"It's my friend's wedding."

"Your friend? What caste is he? A Vankar?"

"I don't know."

"No, I mean what caste."

"I don't know."

"What's his name?"

"Ravi."

"And his surname?"

"I don't know. I just call him Ravibhai."

"Ravibhai. I wonder who that could be."

Normally I take every possible opportunity to tell people that I work with a Dalit organization, but I was hesitant to in this particular circumstance. I was alone, in the front cab of a dumptruck with 5 men I'd never met before. I have not encountered much hostility from anyone who finds out I work with a Dalit organization, but I've heard that it's a possibility, particularly around the Navsarjan schools which were intentionally established in areas with high levels of discrimination. The man had probably first thought that I was going to the Navsarjan primary school, which he associated with Vankars, the biggest Dalit sub-caste. That was probably why he asked if my friend was a Vankar. But then again, maybe he was a Vankar himself, or was just curious. I didn't want to test it, so I lied.

I continued the lie when they asked where I lived and what I was doing. I told them I lived in Ahmedabad, stayed at Gujarat Vidhyapith University, and I was doing a doctorate in psychology, inventing it all as I went. It seemed to satisfy them.

The dumper moved quite slowly, about 60 kmph. Along the way we picked up a few more people, some of whom offered me some gutkha chewing tobacco and implored me to accept it since I was their American guest. I politely declined.

I counted the kilometers on the signposts that appeared ever kilometer as we approached Limbdi so I knew when to expect the school, and gave the driver 20 Rupees in anticipation of the arrival. (Hitched rides are not free -- you have to pay an amount comporable to the government buses). Eventually I saw tge school's green-domed outdoor science lab, built last year and hard to miss, and told the driver to stop. He did.

"No," the man going to Katariya said, "Katariya village is further down. You want to go there."

"No," I said, now outside the truck and feeling more confident. "I want to go here. Thanks. Bye."

That was that. I crossed the street, met my friends, and soon left to attend a thoroughly enjoyable wedding.

Wildlife in Gujarat

2009-05-08T07:08:00.000-07:00

In the wake of my experience with a large langur monkey that just chased me back into my office ten minutes ago, I have decided to write a post about wildlife here in Gujarat.

It seems timely to begin with monkeys. Unlike in other parts of India, most of central Gujarat is populated only with langur monkeys, and no other species of primate. Langurs are generally docile, or so I thought until recently. There is a troop of them that likes to set up camp in the big trees around the Ecosan (toilet facility). The biggest one, probably the dominant male I guess, chased me once a few weeks ago for the crime of trying to walk up to the Ecosan. I motioned to throw my roll of toilet paper at it, but that only made it bare its teeth and start to run after me. I panicked, and ran into a toilet stall and locked the door. And then tonight, I was going to throw away the plastic pouch of a recently consumed yogurt, when that same monkey (I can only assume) pulled a similar act. I yelled, "There's a monkey chasing me!" and raced back towards the office, surprising everyone in the accounting staff's office, since all they heard was a slur of words coming from a clearly distraught American. I must say, I'm losing a bit of my fondness for monkeys.

On the other hand, nilgai have risen in the ranks of my favorite animals, so all is well. That was not a typo -- nilgai , a kind of Asian antelope, roam around Gujarat in small herds damaging crops. When I was at one of the primary schools, a herd of 6 or 7 of them came by in a neighboring field. I had never heard of a nilgai, and was baffled by the children's translation of it as "black cow", so I ran out to the edge of the campus to try to get a closer look. The photo below serves as evidence. Anyway, apparantly some people hunt them as game, because some of the teachers and students mimed gunshots and told me the meat is particularly good. I inquired about buying some of the meat to try it, but it seems like the kind of thing that you can't really plan on. It's more like when the butcher has it, you can get it...otherwise your only options are chicken, goat, or the occasional water buffalo.

To round out the land mammals, recently I've noticed some wild marmots crossing the road in front of my rickshaw on the trip between the center and the town of Sanand. They're beige and pretty small, and seem to generally like to hide in the shrubs.

The selection of lizards is varied, but the most common are geckos. There are geckos everywhere. In this room alone, I'll bet there are at least 5 or 6. There is a little baby one not more than an inch and a half long on the floor next to me right now, actually. They generally stay on the walls or ceilings eating insects and moths, a service I am grateful for. The only time they bother me is if they jump on my shirt (that's happened twice) or die in a bucket of water in my bathroom (that happened once and was not particularly fun to dispose of). Below is a gecko on the screen window of my room here last year.

The second most common lizard is a kind of chameleon. These guys stay outdoors around bushes and trees. They have a spikey mohawked head and back, and look like little dinosaurs. They can get pretty long, at least 8 or 10 inches. I maintain a guilty pleasure in chasing them around, because they look hilarious when they run.

And then there are the snakes. I'm not particularly afraid of snakes, but maybe that's because no one I've known has been killed by a king cobra, which is something not everyone here can say. I've yet to see a wild cobra here, but I've seen a bunch of other kinds of snakes. The following story is relevant but pretty gross, so if snake death bothers you, you might want to skip it. Last year I was coming back from Sanand at night, maybe around 9 o clock. I was riding with a teacher at the center, when he saw something on the road and stopped. It was a snake that had just been run over by a huge truck, and had been snapped in two. Both halves writhed around for about 15 seconds before staying still. The snake had been full of eggs, the majority of which were scattered on the road. Some were even still intact, though most had cracked.

The birds around here are amazing. There are all different kinds, of all different shapes and sizes, making many, many different calls. The biggest and most impressive is, of course, the peacock. There are a lot of wild peacocks around here. The idea of a wild peacock still seems a bit odd to me, because peacocks are absurd animals. Today on the ride back to the center from Sanand, I saw one peacock with his tail feathers fully extended and displayed, which was surreal. Another was on the roadside just watching us drive by, the little palmtree bob of feathers on his head wobbling in the evening breeze. It seems appropriate to me that the peacock is India's national bird. Indians have a penchant for unnecessary shine and glimmer, sewing tiny mirrors into pastel clothes and wearing giant gold umbrella earings. The peacock represents that attitude perfectly, for no good reason (other than to show it off) possessing a really, really ostentatious tail.

There is also a great woodpecker here with a black and white spotted mohawk crest on its head, tiny black hummingbirds, beautifully colored kingfishers, storks and cranes, doves, sparrows, and all kinds of others whose names I don't know. There is a bird sanctuary about 50 kilometers away, so it's a real treat to get to watch some of these birds.

There are probably other wild animals here that I'm forgetting. There is also a whole variety of giant wasps, hornets, and bees that I don't feel like writing about. I hate wasps, and there are so many of them. And there are just thousands of wild dogs, which all look the same and are filthy. And of course there are plenty of domesticated animals (cows, water buffalo, camels, sheep, goats, donkeys, horses, chickens, etc.). But I think the above gives a pretty good picture of most of the interesting wild animals I've seen around here.

New students at the vocational training center

2009-05-06T20:35:00.001-07:00

I’ve been back at the vocational training center for about a month now, since summer vacation starts at the primary schools in early April. Over 300 students are now enrolled in the current batch, making it the largest group the center has ever had. Over 100 students come from Dharampur, a hilly forested area in Southeast Gujarat populated mostly by Adivasis, also called Tribals. Adivasis are generally considered to be India’s indigenous population. Because they traditionally lived in more isolated parts of India, they did not absorb the caste system and do not practice untouchability with Dalits.

Adivasis, which I think are about 8% of the Indian population, are one of the most marginalized communities in India. Many have been forced to migrate to urban areas in search of labor because their previous source of livelihood—the forest—has been increasingly sold off by the government to private companies, or degraded by encroaching non-Adivasi industrialists past the point of its ability to support a population.

11 of the 12 students enrolled in the Secretarial Training course I am helping with are Adivasi. Most of them just took their 12th grade exam, and are waiting to hear about the results. Their schools were in Gujarati-medium (meaning the language of instruction was Gujarati), so they all know Gujarati and Hindi. But they also know Marathi, the language of Maharashtra, the state just to the South of Gujarat, as well as Khokani, an Adivasi dialect of their region. All four of those languages are similar, but distinct, and it continues to impress me that they can move fluidly between each one.

Last week they taught me how to say “My name is David” in Khokani. It sounds like “Manha nau David aha”, whereas in Gujarati it is “Mara naam David che” and in Hindi, “Mera naam David hei”. You can see how they are all related, but still different.

The other AJWS volunteer, Abbie, has been teaching a spoken English course. There are 31 students in her class, which is quite a challenge considering the difference in English levels. All of the students in the Secretarial course have some foundation in English, but there are some in Spoken English who struggle to write the alphabet. I’ve been teaching those students (there are 6 of them) for about 90 minutes a day, which helps Abbie’s class run more smoothly and gives those 6 students more tailored instruction.

All 6 of them are girls who just took their 12th grade exam, and 5 want to become nurses. I asked them in Gujarati how it happened that they got this far without learning English, and the girls were quick to answer. “The teachers aren’t good in the government schools,” one said. “They just teach for the salary,” another added. “Most don’t know English, and don’t care to try.” Unfortunately, these are common complaints for students at government schools. But now that they’ve finished upper secondary school, they’ve reached a point where they need English to move forward, since English is required at all nursing schools here.

Anyway, it's been interesting to learn a bit about a group of people I hadn't really been exposed to before. It helps to provide additional perspective.

Google Earth and Sky

2009-03-16T22:02:00.000-07:00

Summer vacation is coming sooner than I realized, and exams at the primary schools are now less than two weeks away. As a result there is less room for me to teach English classes that I’d hoped for, though I’ve still had formal classes with each grade a few times. And just being here inspires the students to speak a bit of English as they walk around the campus, so I’m satisfied.

The science teacher here, Mukesh, had heard somewhere about Google Earth, and wanted to know if I had it on my laptop. I didn’t, but I have a portable modem that connects to the internet the same way a cell phone does, so I downloaded the program two days ago. It didn’t take long before we were able to find his village in rural Gujarat, and Mukesh was beyond excited when he found his house. One by one, we then found the villages of all the teachers here, despite the slow connection speed of my modem.

Apparently Google Earth has added two new features: Mars and Sky. Mars isn’t too exciting, but you can see where those little robotic vehicles landed and moved around. Sky, however, is incredible. They’ve added all these high definition photos of galaxies, stars and nebulas (nebulae?), and you move around and choose what you want to see. The only thing I’ve had trouble with is using it to tour our solar system.

Anyway, last night after dinner all the students and teachers gathered in one of the classrooms, sitting in rows on the floor in front of my laptop, which was set on a desk. First we used Google Earth to find Dhanduka, the town nearest to the school. We looked at the bus stand—which had busses all lined up—and followed it past the main traffic circle and out on the road towards the school. Mukesh narrated the journey so that all the students could understand what they were looking at. We followed the road east, and Mukesh pointed out the train station and two local restaurants.

The aerial photos for this section of Gujarat were taken in 2004, and the school was built in 2005, so we weren’t able to see the school buildings. But we could see the land on which the school stands, and a big tree that all the children recognized. Then we moved into the village next to the school, and pointed out where two of the teachers live.

Next the kids wanted to see my house, so I showed them North America, Canada and the Great Lakes, and gradually moved closer into New York State and Buffalo, and finally to my house. I pointed out my high school, and the tennis courts I played on when I was on the tennis team. I also pointed out a restaurant, the post office, and a “petrol pump”, as they call gas stations here.

Then we switched to Google Mars for a few minutes, and found a picture of a recent vehicle NASA sent there. There isn’t as much to do on Mars, so we soon moved to Sky, the majority of the photos for which were taken by the Hubble. Mukesh is now in the middle of a Bachelors program in Biology, and has been studying his textbooks in the little free time he has, so all this astrological information is fresh in his mind. We looked at a detailed photo of the sun, and he explained what sunspots are, drawing a diagram on the chalkboard. He also explained the concept of a light year, and how far the sun and other stars are away from the Earth. We moved to a few different galaxies, and he explained how large a galaxy is in relation to our solar system. I also clicked on several nebulae, and Mukesh pointed out the young stars and how they are born from hydrogen and helium. There was one “deep field” photo taken by the Hubble of a field of galaxies, and we could zoom in on each galaxy and see its spiral shape, even though from a distance it just looked like a star.

The students were enraptured the entire time, and Mukesh had to keep telling them to sit back down because they wanted to move closer to the screen. It was the first time in their lives they’d seen anything even remotely like Google Earth or Sky, and it seems to have made a big impression.

This morning one of the boys pointed up at the rising sun, and then moved his hand towards the center of the sky. It was early, and I wasn’t thinking clearly. “What,” I asked. “What is it?”

“The universe,” he answered, smiling.

Leaving Katariya school

2009-03-14T02:18:00.000-07:00

I arrived two days ago at the second of the three primary schools I’ll be staying at. Leaving the first one, Katariya, was hard. I was only there for a little over a week, but when you spend 24 hours a day with the same people day after day, relationships form fast. The photo below is of me and all the students and staff. (Where's Waldo?...)

In a previous blog I mentioned one 6th grade girl, Mina, who has a particular talent for English. When I’m studying Gujarati I have to hear a word at least three or four times, in addition to seeing it written, before I can remember it. Mina remembers each new English word she hears or reads just once. She’s by far the best English student in her class, and wants to be a doctor. She also seems to be the happiest; I hardly ever saw her face without a smile on it. She and one of her friends, Sonal, are inseparable, and walk around the campus attached to each other. In the photo below, taken in the 6th grade classroom, Mina is in the front row on the left, and Sonal just next to her on the right.

One of the other English teachers told me that last June, when the monsoon rains began, Mina started to cry. Apparently she was worrying about her parents and little brother, who live in a hut set next to a field they work in but do not own. The heavy rain makes life difficult for them, and Mina felt bad that she couldn’t be with them to help.

My last night at Katariya was on Wednesday, so the school manager arranged a chicken dinner for everyone in my honor. (Usually all meals are vegetarian, which is cheaper.) Mina was not her usually smiley self at first, and one of her other friends explained that it was because she was sad that I was leaving. Mina yelled at her friend for telling, and then stomped away. By the time the food was served, though, she was back to normal, and was happy to sit with me and the teachers to eat.

On the day I left, the English teacher told me that he didn’t think Mina would be able to become a doctor, which caught me off guard. Aren’t teachers supposed to be supportive and optimistic about their students’ future? “I mean,” he said, “she is totally capable of becoming a doctor. She is brilliant, actually. But her parents have no money. How can they pay for her education?” The Katariya fees are heavily subsidized; other private schools cost substantially more, especially considering that the children eat and sleep at Katariya. And if a child goes to government school, the quality of education will almost surely not be good enough to get into medical school.

At the risk of sounding like a “Save the Children” infomercial, that interaction made me think. When I see an 11-year-old child who is very clearly of exceptional intelligence, and see her excel in and out of class, I tend to think, “This child will become something great.” I don’t see the child in her village context, and I can’t see what the future will bring for her. But when someone explains to me how a child lives when not in school, and how other children with outstanding potential but who don’t have money are routinely denied access to opportunity, it is thought-provoking indeed.

Holi

2009-03-11T22:14:00.000-07:00

Today is the Hindu holiday Holi (that was an unintentional alliteration), the festival of colors. If you saw the movie Water, it's the holiday when everyone throws colored powder at each other.

Last night I went to the village of one of the primary school teachers, Suresh. Suresh is married to a fieldworker of the NGO, and they live together in the village of Tokrala, a 2 km ride away, with their three-year-old son, Ashok. The school and village are both right off Indian National Highway No. 8, which bisects Gujarat from the Arabian Sea in the Southwest, to the Northeast where it extends into Rajasthan. It's one of the only decent roads I've been on in Gujarat, though it still slows as every other road here does for tremendous herds of sheep or water buffalo, or Hindu revelers dancing as they push a shrine-on-wheels.

We arrived in the village a little after 5 in the afternoon, with the sun low enough to provide a respite from the heat, which had been around 100 degrees a few hours earlier. The main road of Tokrala is unpaved. We passed by the Bharvard (shepherd caste) and Koli Patel (another "mid-level" caste) communities before reaching the Dalit locality on the far side of the village. Suresh’s house is part of an enclave of five or six houses, all packed in around a narrow path. A few cows and buffalos were lounging around the front of the enclave, and Suresh’s home—a one-story concrete structure with two rooms, high ceilings and a clay tile roof—was two or three in on the left. One of the NGO’s village libraries was sitting in the corner of the first room, next to a portable blackboard. The NGO runs these informal education centers in several hundred villages, and I’ve written about them for several reports. Last year I rarely got into the field, though, so I was curious to hear about how this one was working. Suresh said that they run programs every day, and close to thirty children, of all castes, come to play educational games and reinforce the lessons they learn (or, in many cases, don’t learn) at school.

I had tea with Suresh and his wife, and then had more tea at the house across the way, home to one of the students at the primary school. We then walked for about five minutes to Suresh’s in-laws’ home, just outside the enclave and down the way a bit.

I hate to sound like I'm idealizing village life, but the scene there was almost absurdly beautiful. Two grown water buffalos and one calf were relaxing next to a fence in the evening light, which made everything seem to glow. Suresh's father-in-law was just coming back from his farm, and was riding on the back of a bullock cart with one of his daughters and a few grandchildren, all of whom sat on top of some white sacks overflowing with freshly-picked cotton. Two gigantic bulls, their massive horns extending upward and back towards the cart, bobbed their heads under the weight of the yolk.

After his family got off, Suresh’s father-in-law started to place the sacks, each one about three feet in diameter, on his head and carry them towards his house about 15 feet away. I wanted to try and carry one, so he placed one on my head and helped me balance it until I let it fall on top of the other sacks. It was surprisingly heavy and very difficult to balance. He told me it was 30 kg, which is about 66 pounds. The cotton is so light and fluffy, it’s hard to imagine it being so heavy until you have a giant sack of it on your head. I took a closer look at it after I let it drop, and saw that it was crawling with tiny red and brown insects, some of which were no doubt now in my hair. I made a mental note to shampoo when I got back.

Dinner was at Suresh’s house, and was prepared by him, his wife, and his wife’s little sister. It was one of the best home-cooked meals I’ve had in India. I’m not going to be able to describe it well, because I don’t know the names of most of what I ate…but there was a sweet appetizer of chappati, ghee (purified butter) and some kind of sugary thing, fried vegetables in batter called bajiya, a chutney of cauliflower, onions and potato, more chappatis and a kind of whole-grain chappati made from a grain called bhajari, a rice and lentil mixture, milky curry, and butter milk. It was great.

We began to hear the Holi drums towards the end of the meal, so after we washed our hands we headed out towards the sound. Earlier in the day I’d noticed a large pile of wood and dung cakes, some of which were strung into garlands, sitting in an open area of the village, set to become the Holi fire. Yes, in case there is any confusion, I do mean that there were garlands of cow and buffalo dung decorating what would soon become a huge bonfire of flaming poop.

The fire was not yet lit when we arrived. A Brahmin priest sat in front of it, performing some kind of pooja ceremony for two young men from the Rajput community (dominant Kshatriya caste). All the while another young man, standing a bit apart from the rest of the crowd, banged on his drum. Tokrala has just one Valmiki family, and one of the caste duties of the Valmikis is to play drums on certain occasions. The making of drums is considered polluting, because of its association with the tanning on animal hides, which is why it is assigned to a Dalit sub-caste.

Eventually someone came and lit the fire, which quickly engulfed the entire pile of poop and wood. Dung cakes are highly flammable, and are often used as fuel in kitchens here. When the flames got big enough, some men began to approach it with small bundles of hay. They circled the fire, touching the hay to it so that it would catch, and then lifting it over their heads and smashing the flames out on the ground. Suresh and his wife explained that many villagers believe that the fate of the coming year is determined on Holi. Those with buffalos and cows perform the ritual to prevent their animals from getting sick over the next year.

Later, people started throwing coconuts into the fire, sending a geyser of sparks up each time a coconut hit. I didn’t quite understand the explanation for this act, but the sparks have some connection to the rain for the upcoming year. A group of village women had gathered, dressed in the red saris typical of the Koli Patel caste. They started singing wedding songs in honor of the young man who was now circling the fire, coconut and sword in hand. He eventually tossed his coconut into the fire as well.

The fire began to die down, and we headed back to the school around 9:30 at night. We passed another fire or two on the way. When we got back, I was telling some of the other teachers and a few students about the evening. One boy, Asvind, a very clever student in 7th grade, said that in his village only the Darbars (feudal landlord Kshatriya caste) are allowed to circle the fire. The right to dance around a pile of burning buffalo crap seems like such a silly little thing, but it represents social status and power. It's interesting to think about how caste dynamics extend into the minutia of village life here.

Finally at the primary schools

2009-03-09T23:23:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday I finally arrived at the first of the primary schools I plan to stay at. The schools were set up by my NGO as a response to the discimination that many Dalit children experience in rural government-run primary schools. I've been here for a week now, and it's been really nice. It’s a boarding school, and the students and most of the staff sleep in the school's classrooms. Thin, roll-up mattresses are piled up on one side of the rooms during the day, and then taken out at night. People sleep right on the floor just like that, with just the thin mattress as padding. There are a few cots, one of which I've been putting my mattress thing on top of and sleeping on. The first night I slept in one of the classrooms on the floor, along with a teacher and about 10 students. The bell is first rung at 6 AM, and then students start to study and do homework for an hour or so. The light got turned on, and I had a hard time staying asleep, and also being on the stone floor wasn't the most comfortable. So since then I've slept in the school's office on the cot. Unfortunately the bell is directly outside the office...but the privacy and cot are worth it. I always wear ear plugs when sleeping in India (it muffles the barking dogs, trucks with absurdly elaborate horns, firecrackers, singing, etc.), but they can only do so much.

Anyway, life here is nice. The school is for grades 5 through 7, and is coed. There are about 44 girls and 80 boys, which is a real success; it's very difficult to convince parents to invest in their daughters’ education, let alone send them to a boarding school. Everyone here is extremely enthusiastic about learning, and it shows. When they first enrolled, about half of the students had trouble reading and writing Gujarati, while more had trouble with Hindi and only a few could write the ABCs in English. Now all the students are reading and writing all three languages, a testament to the school's heavy schedule of classes and unstructured reading and study periods, along with the dedication of the teachers to provide extra tutoring in the evenings to students who need it.

Last year when I was in Gujarat I went with the Director of the NGO to a bookstore in Ahmedabad to choose some English children's books for the schools. I’ve been happy to see that many of those books are now well-worn. A few days ago some of the 6th grade girls asked me to read them the books in the "Benjamin Bunny" series, which are apparently a crowd favorite, so we spent about half an hour doing that. It was in the evening after dinner, and we were sitting on the lawn just outside one of the buildings. One of the girls, Mina, has really taken to English, so she read and tried to translate it into Gujarati while I held the book. We went through four or five of the books like that, with the kids sitting in a semi-circle around me as I helped Mina along. I don’t like everything about being here—I get a bit tired of people asking about the cost of my computer or plane ticket, or staring at me while I wash my clothes, or laughing about my use of toilet paper—but moments like that, outside reading on the grass with the students, a cool breeze coming in after an extremely hot day, far outweigh anything negative about being here.

I’ve been teaching some simple English songs to the students during the day as well. “Head, shoulders, knees and toes” is so popular that some of the boys whisper the words under their breath just walking around the campus. “Hello, my name is Joe” is also a good one, along with a few others. I think I’m going to introduce “Simon Says” today. We’ll see how that goes.

I interviewed two of the teachers yesterday, and will interview the rest today and tomorrow in order to write a report about them. They’re very interesting people, and their dedication is impressive. Most of them are happy to spend 6 or 7 days a week at the school. One of the teachers joined the school after she felt humiliated because of her status as a Dalit by the wife of the principal of the school she had worked at before. Another had been seated separately in the classroom and at lunchtime when he was a primary school student, which motivated him to become a teacher himself and teach children about equality. His father dropped out of school after grade 3 to start working, at age 10 earning 100 Rupees a month (about two dollars today, probably about ten dollars back then). His mother is illiterate. But he has a BA, and MA in Gujarati, and a B.Ed., and he also completed two out of three years of law school. Each one of them has their own story, and that’s what I’m trying to document in the report.

I’ll post some photos later on….I haven’t taken many yet.

Annie revisited...and I am asked my caste

2009-02-12T21:11:00.000-08:00

Last year at the vocational training center I shared an office with the woman in charge of the Digitization of Data program here. She was scanning forms for the untouchability survey, the analysis for which was actually just completed by a team from the US and UK. She's now working on a new survey, this one on the practice of manual scavenging in Gujarat. (Manual scavenging is the traditional caste duty of Valmikis, a Dalit sub-caste considered the lowest in the caste hierarchy.)

Anyway in October of 2007 I wrote a blog post about her experience with two local women from the nearby village of Nani Devti refusing to take water from her because she is a Dalit. In that post I called her Annie, which is short for Angela, her Christian name. Annie is Gujarati, and was born and raised in a town about a hundred kilometers away.

Annie just had a baby boy about 8 months ago. When I left India she was 9 months pregnant, so we've been joking about how her son is comfortable playing with me because he recognizes me from last year.

Annie started working a few months after giving birth, and somehow mangaged to take care of the baby and work in the office at the same time. She keeps the cradle just next to her desk, rocking it as she works. About two weeks ago she hired a local woman from Nani Devti to help her take care of the baby during the day so she could be more productive.

It went fine until yesterday, when Annie asked the woman if her son eats lunch at primary school. The woman said he doesn't, because "he's a clean boy". Annie asked what that had to do with anything, and the woman said that the cook at the school who makes the food is a Vankar, a member of a Dalit sub-caste. Annie said that she's also a Vankar, which surprised the woman. Then the woman said she doesn't eat anything prepared by Valmikis, the Dalit sub-caste associated with manual scavenging. Annie said that she's also a Valmiki, and wanted to know if the woman would continue to watch her son. The woman evaded the question. The next day the woman didn't show up to work, and Annie called her (nearly everyone in India, even the poor, have cell phones) to find out what was going on. The woman said she was sick, and couldn't work that day. Annie asked if she would come the next day, and the woman said no. So that was that; the woman has refused to work for a Dalit. Now Annie is working on finding a new person to take care of her son. There is a migrant laborer who has been working here that Annie is trying to get, and I think today is her first day.

Later on in the day yesterday, I was taking a bus back to the center from the nearby town of Sanand. The old man behind sitting behind me was excited to speak with a foreigner, and when I told him I was going to the Dalit vocational training center next to Nani Devti he got even happier.

Then he asked me something I didn't understand, and I had to ask him to repeat himself a few times. By the third or fourth time I realized he was asking me what my caste was, and if I was a Vankar like him. I told him I don't have any caste, and that in America we don't have castes.

The interaction struck me as an interesting one. Nani Devti is an isolated little village that functions largely on caste lines. The man looked to be about 60 years old, and was coming home from a small shopping trip to Sanand. I don't know if he can read or not, or what he knows about the world. To him, maybe, the way Nani Devti functions is the way the whole world functions, with every person belonging to a particular caste in the hierarchy -- even a white guy from the US who can only speak faltering Gujarati. Caste is not the exception to him, it's not something that's on its way out of society like the newspapers sometimes say. Caste is part of the foundation of his worldview, as it is for people across this country, especially in rural areas but in cities as well.

Monkeys in the ashram!

2009-02-03T04:23:00.000-08:00

I was leading an orientation session outside today when a troop of about a dozen langur monkeys entered the ashram grounds and began feasting on the ample supply of foliage. We stopped the session for about 10 minutes so everyone could get cameras and watch the monkeys frolic on the grass, climb the trees, and do other things that monkeys like to do. If you know me at all you know that I think monkeys are awesome, so I was happy to break for them. Langurs are not aggressive towards people, but they can be aggressive towards each other, so anyway there is no harm in watching or taking pictures.

At first they just sat on some trees, bending branches and eating the leaves, and we got back to the session. Pretty soon, though, the monkeys became a bit more brazen. Branches started breaking, monkeys started chasing each other at full speed (and they can really move surprisingly fast) right next to our group, and fights (monkey on monkey only, of course) began to break out. The ashram groundskeepers, three or four friendly guys about my age, then came over with sticks and chased them away. Amazingly, the group was able to maintain its focus and the session actually went well.

Indians often seem surprised by Westerners' excitement at monkey encounters, and some are shocked to learn that there are no monkeys bounding around in American cities, and in fact no wild monkeys at all in the US. To many Indians, monkeys are just pests, since they are not eaten and can't be used for any kind of productive labor like cows or water buffalo. The relationship is probably analogous to the one people in the US have with deer, which have staked their claim to suburban America, eating garbage and shrubs. Though I suppose deer have yet to be responsible for the death of a the deputy mayor of our nation's capital...

Back in Gujarat!

2009-01-31T22:37:00.000-08:00

Well, for the past two weeks I've been back in Gujarat, working on the orientation for the next group of AJWS World Partner Fellows. Overall it's been great -- an interesting kind of homecoming, full of extremes, with most of what I loved and also some of what bothered me about living here.

My first autorickshaw ride through Ahmedabad was a great reminder of some shades of life in this city: the handpainted Gujarati script on storefronts, the huge buses made of welded sheet metal, trucks with people hanging out of every door and window, bicycle carts pulling loads of fruit, markets selling everything from cucumbers to cricket bats, an occasional camel decorated with black designs on its legs and torso, glass-paneled shopping malls, the dust, smoke and garbage of the street, all coming together to make this sprawling city what it is. Subsequent autorickshaw rides haven't been quite as exciting, though I did see an elephant -- the first I'd ever seen in India, actually.

My Gujarati is slowly coming back to me, but my vocabulary and grammar are still worse than they were when I left last June. I'm sure it will be back to where it was if I put in some work over the next few months, and maybe I can improve it by the time I leave.

The group and I have been staying at the Kochrab Ashram, which is in the city. Gandhi founded the Ashram in 1918 after returning to India from South Africa, and lived there with like-minded followers for about two years. There are some limited boarding facilities on the ashram grounds, so I've been sleeping in a simple room on a cot, using a sheet made of khadi, the handspun cotton Gandhi tried so hard to make the backbone of Indian manufacturing. I was a bit worried about how the group would take to the simple accomodations, which also include bucket showers and squat toilets, but everyone has been very positive about it. We've been having our orientation sessions in the ashram's library, and some of the fellows have led yoga or meditation sessions in Gandhi's former study.

The 26th of January was Republic Day, which commemorates the adoption of the Indian constitution. They had a small ceremony at the ashram with students and teachers from a local school, and actually the manager of the ashram made me the guest of honor. My duties entailed unfurling the Indian flag and saluting it, sitting on a chair on the stage, and then making a brief speech thanking everyone on behalf of my group. I said a few simple things in Gujarati, which made the people there very happy because they introduced me expecting to have to translate. I also was garlanded with a necklace made of khadi, which will be a great memento of the day. I was also wearing a "Gandhi topi", or khadi hat like the kind Nehru wore. The manager of the ashram had asked that I wear it.

A few days later, on the 30th, was the anniversary of Gandhi's death. Hundreds of students and staff marched to the ashram from Gujarat Vidyapith, a college Gandhi set up, carrying portable cotton spinning wheels along with them. They sat on the main lawn in front of the dais and spun while listening to a few speakers wax poetic on Gandhi's legacy. A few tv crews were there, and interviewed one of the fellows, and also filmed me trying to spin some khadi. It seemed pretty silly to me that we were getting attention from the camera crews, despite the fact that 500 devotees of Gandhian philosphy were sitting just a few feet away from us. I think that in some ways many Indians still want to have their society validated with the affirmation of Westerners.

Oh, and I took a trip to the vocational training center I worked at last year! It was great. I went along with the new volunteer who will be placed there for the next 9 months It was the last day of that batch of students, so they were having their graduation ceremony. It was so nice to see all of my former colleagues there, and I can't wait to see them again. The whole World Partners group is going to go to the center for a few days at the end of orientation to meet representatives of the NGOs they will be working with, and have some more sessions.

So all in all, things are going well, and I'm happy to be here. I would definitely like to start my work at the primary schools, and I should be able to do that in about two weeks, so that's good.

I'm going to try and post on this blog more often, but I don't have any consistent internet access yet, so we'll see how that goes. Later!

Gautam, married at 12 to a 5-year-old bride

2008-04-29T09:36:00.000-07:00

This afternoon around 5:30 I was sitting down for some tea with a few of the workers and teachers here at the vocational training center. Last night was the watchman's son's marriage party, and we were talking about it. I made some stupid joke about Gautam, one of the groundskeepers, and said something about him getting married.

"I had my marriage already," Gautam said.

"No you didn't," I said.

"Yes, I did," he said.

"Yes, he did," said Gamr, one of the drivers. "Eight years ago."

"What?" I said.

"It's true," said Gautam.

That's when my jaw dropped. I'd heard about child marriage still being practiced in some places around Gujarat, but I didn't realize anyone here had experienced it, or that it was being practiced in villages close to the center (Gautam lives just one or two villages away).

Gautam had been married at age 12, eight years ago. I asked how old his wife was now, expecting to hear that she was a year or two younger than him, but he said that she is 13, meaning she was married at age 5. They haven't seen each other since the wedding, and there are a few years left before the marriage is consummated. How many, I don't know, but I doubt it's more than 3.

Where is the line between inalienable cultural property and cultural deficiency? It must be somewhere. Is it here? Maybe.

Plastic chairs

2008-04-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

About four or five months ago, I went to go talk to Martin Macwan, the founder and mentor of many Dalit organizations, and the de-facto director of the vocational training center. He was dictating a document the NGO's secretary, and was sitting on two cheap plastic chairs, one stacked upon the other. I don’t remember what question I had for Martin, but halfway into my sentence he suddenly realized there were no chairs for me to sit on. “Sorry,” he said, “I was being a capitalist. Here,” now standing up, “Take one and have a seat.”

Recently I’ve begun to question the morality of living the “American lifestyle” I had been accustomed to. If I really believe in equality—and make it more than just a word, applying it to my own life—it becomes more difficult for me to justify, for example, spending a few hundred dollars on a snowboarding weekend, when people I have met and become friends with make less money in a year. Put another way, how many chairs am I sitting on? How many chairs do I have in the bank or in my wallet? How many chairs did I blow in Japan on food, drinks, and cover charges? A donation of a few hundred dollars to an organization that knows how to use it properly can make a huge difference, in all kinds of ways. The difference can even be quantified in dollar amount: books purchased, inoculations delivered, children sent to school, etc. Does the amount of fun I would have snowboarding outweigh that difference? A voice inside my head tries to argue away that problem, saying that I already give enough money away, that I spend enough of my time “helping people”, and I’m allowed to splurge. But these days, when that voice starts its familiar argument, a Lauryn Hill lyric from the song “Lost Ones” comes into my head: “Every man wants to act like he’s exempt.”

I don’t think I can keep acting like I’m exempt. I’ve seen so much injustice here that I don’t know what to do with it. On a train to Pune a few months ago, a ten-year-old boy, shirtless and barefoot, was crawling on his hands on knees down the isle, sweeping the floor—strewn with plastic wrappers, and sticky with tea and spit—with a short broom. After he swept by each person’s feet, he held out a dirty hand in the hope that a Rupee or two would be dropped into it. Sitting in the seat across from mine was another boy, also about ten years old. But this one was totally fluent in English because his parents had enough money to send him to an English-medium school; maybe they even spoke in English to him at home, because they had also been to English-medium schools. In fifteen years he will be an engineer or successful businessman. And where will that other boy—the one who is on his knees, now crawling down the isle with the broom in his hand—where will he be? It just feels different when you’ve seen the injustice in front of you, when injustice itself is at your feet and on the seat next to you, talking to you, when you can see the sweat on its back.

When we talk about solidarity, what do we mean? That boy on the floor was probably from the Valmiki community, whose caste-bound duty is to clean other people’s filth. Here in Gujarat and around India, many Valmiki children are made to sit in the back of the classroom, to sit separately at mealtime, and to clean the school’s toilets. What would I do if I were in that situation? Can I honestly say that I would stay in school and face the constant humiliation? When the script is written before a life even begins—when you can almost know how the child of illiterate Valmiki parents will grow up, just as you can almost know how the child of wealthier forward-caste parents will grow up—you want to do something to change that script.

Being a native English-speaker and having a college education made me qualified to be an English teacher in Japan, salary about $30,000, tax-free. My key skill, if you can call it that, was being able to speak my own language in my own accent. I know plenty of other people who can speak their own language in their own accent. Instead of being rewarded, they are punished, held back from decent jobs because they don’t know English well enough. Can I really still believe that I deserve all these chairs I’ve got stashed away?

When I can see in black and white the ways in which society can systematically include and reward—and also exclude, humiliate, and subjugate—it’s harder to keep living as if I’m exempt.

I wrote this for an AJWS assignment on Passover. The question was:

At the same time as we are instructed to experience liberation, we are also instructed to remember the suffering as our own. Because of our personal experience as slaves, we are commanded to recognize and rectify injustice. “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless; you shall not take a widow’s garments in pawn. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt…therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment (Deut. 24:17-18).” In what ways have you witnessed injustice in your experience this year? Does living this experience make you more obligated to address those injustices and in what ways? In seeing injustice on a day to day basis, do you feel more or less obligated to address those issues?

Transportation in Gujarat

2008-04-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

Getting around in India is hard to describe, and even harder to experience.

In auto-rickshaws—basically three-wheeled go-carts—I’ve had strangers practically sitting on my lap, because the rickshaw is moving 11 people instead of the 4 for whom seats are actually available. I’ve hitched rides in trucks, the front cabs of which are so crowded with travelers that the manual gear shift is between my legs, substantially too close for comfort when in 2nd gear. And I’ve ridden in buses that seem to have been welded together from scrap metal, with no shocks, seats missing, the diesel engine roaring so loud that it actually comes close to drowning out the passengers yelling on cell phones, the crying babies, and the angry conductor.

At the same time, though, traveling the way my friends and colleagues do has given me a lot to think about.

Once I was heading out on a long bus ride over to one of the NGO’s primary schools. It was supposed to have been an easy journey, because the bus would pick me up just a minute outside of the vocational training center where I live and work, at the local village’s bus stand, and take me directly to the town by which the school is located.

That direct bus comes once a day, at 2 pm. I waited there from 1:45 to 3, and the only vehicles driving by were massive trucks hauling timber or cotton, the local buses, and the local auto-rickshaws, which function as shared taxis with people hanging out of every opening.

I had just about cancelled my plans when the bus finally came a little after 3. I told the conductor where I was going, and bought a ticket for around 100 Rupees, or about 3 dollars—not bad for a four hour journey of a couple hundred kilometers.

Throughout the trip, different people got on and off the bus, and on and off the seat next to mine. For a while, a rather fat woman with flesh rolling out of her sari parked herself against my shoulder, her young son playing on the bus floor. Later, when she left, a man of about 25 took the seat next to mine. His hair was slicked back, and he wore scratched sunglasses, blue jeans, and a faded, stained collared shirt. He took out his cell phone and immediately began cycling through every ringtone stored in the phone from start to finish, as if the syncopated beeped muzak were anything resembling music. His phone was the same model I use now, a Nokia of the kind that was common in America about six or seven years ago. It sells for about forty dollars new, or twenty used.

After getting tired of the ringtones, he turned to me. “Iscon Mall,” he said, bringing up one of the huge malls that have sprung up out of the dust in Ahmedabad over the past three years. “Best mall.” He stressed the word “best” as if to imply that he had been to all kinds of malls, and Iscon had topped them all.

“I’ve never been there,” I said.

“Oh yes, yes,” he answered, feigning understanding. “Shopping is best.”

I had no ipod with me, and no cellphone or camera visible, but the man had seen my white skin and associated me with a kind of lifestyle that he did not have, but clearly was trying to emulate. The mega-mall and chain-store era has begun here, and people want to prove their success by establishing a connection with both.

I continued one of my favorite bus-ride pastimes—people watching—when the man got off. Many of the women on the bus wore so much gold on their ears that the top of the ear literally sagged from the weight. Each ear had at least five or six rings and ornaments in it. Maybe the permanent ear-sag is a mark of prosperity, showing everyone that you possess enough gold to accomplish the sag. Like almost all of the other women on the bus, they wore bright, sparkling saris with part of the cloth pulled just over part of the head. They could adjust the amount that they pulled the cloth over their head, so that the extremely thin cloth could function as a veil, a way to block the sun, to wipe away sweat, or any one of a number of other uses.

Though the rule has exceptions, unmarried girls and women more often wear the salwar kameez, a knee-length cut dress with matching slacks and long, flowing scarf. Schoolgirls like the ones who got on the bus on their way home from school typically wear a salwar kameez, adding the scarf once they reach about 12 years old. Girls and women constantly adjust the scarf to a position that seems appropriate; often, it is used to preserve modesty, and is pulled down over the chest.

Most middle-aged or old men on the bus wore all white, usually a long cotton kurta with white cotton pants. Many were proudly mustachioed; mustaches are a symbol of strength and manhood in India, and nearly all police officers have huge, curled and oiled mustaches. Some wore turbans, the style of which depends on the caste to which they belong. If the turban is brightly colored and the man is wearing big gold earrings, he is probably a Bharvad, or shepherd. In that case, he is probably also wearing a bright blue or green skirt-like lower body wrap, has a big mustache, and holds his head high. If the man has a white turban, no gold earnings, but the same kind of bright lower-body wrap, he is likely a Rabari, another caste.

Another time, I was on my way back from the visiting my friend Prakash’s village. Prakash is one of the tailoring instructors here, and he was with me at the time. We didn’t get to Sanand, the nearby town eight kilometers from the vocational training center, until just about midnight. After about seven or eight o’clock, the only way to get to Nani Devti, the village next to the center, is by hitching a ride in a truck. I’ve done this a bunch of times, but never as late as midnight.

As trucks pulled by, we flagged them and shouted, “Devti? Nani Devti?” But none slowed down to listen. Two trucks pulled over and stopped, but that was because the drivers were resting for the night. Apparently, drivers are worried about picking people up after a certain time. The hitchhikers always give the driver 5 or 10 Rupees for the ride, but at night it may not be enough.

Finally, after one o’clock, we got a ride in the front cab of a truck with one more hitchhiker. When we were about one or two kilometers outside of Nani Devti, we took a right onto a sandy path, and the driver turned off the engine. Construction was being done, and his dump truck had to change places with a full dump truck. We would get into the full dump truck, which would take us the additional kilometer.

We watched as a big caterpillar construction shoveling machine (I know there’s a better name for it, but I don’t know it) finished filling up the dump truck that we needed. Once full, however, it wasn’t able to drive up the sandy hill to the level path. The construction machine took out some of the sand from the truck, but that still didn’t help. So the machine got behind the dump truck, and used its shovel to push the back of the dump truck all the way up the hill. It seemed like a very India Moment.

Our new truck stopped and picked us up. “Who are these guys?” the new driver asked the old one.

“These guys are going to Nani Devti,” our original driver answered, “and the other one’s going to Bavla.”

“Fine, but who are they? Are they all right?” The new driver seemed worried that we might injure or rob him, but our original driver reassured him that we were safe, and we finally got back to the center a little before two in the morning.

Usually when I want to get to Sanand, I take one of the shared rickshaw-taxis. The twenty-minute ride costs 5 Rupees, and is really the only way of getting into town. If I’m lucky I get a middle seat. Sometimes I have to squish myself onto three inches of seat, next to the driver and three or four other men in the front, holding onto part of the rickshaw frame to make sure I don’t fall out. If it’s really crowded, I have to stand on the back rack, holding on to a different part of the frame. That’s the only way that seems really dangerous, and I try to avoid it when I can.

The trip to Sanand goes by two or three other villages, and the scenes are very much typical of rural India: women and girls carrying head-loads of water, bundles of sticks (for use as fuel), or weeds and plants (for fodder for cows and buffalos), young men tending to a herd of water buffalos and cows, a few wandering goats, and, if it is harvest time, women in the fields cutting the rice or wheat with a sickle.

Most of the houses that we pass by are small, one-story, made of brick with either a clay-tile roof, corrugated tin roof, or plastic tarp roof. As the rickshaw moves closer to Sanand, though, the Darbar houses appear on the left. Darbars are a dominant land-owning caste. Hundreds of years ago, they were local lords and nobles. They are mostly still very wealthy because of their land inheritance, and their huge, two or three-story houses testify to that fact.

I’m about typed out for now, but I hope you can get a kind of idea of what traveling has been like for me here.

Fish on Bakari Eid

2008-03-02T01:34:00.000-08:00

I wrote this a few months ago, and just noticed it again, so I thought I’d post it. I should warn you, though: it contains graphic depictions of slaughtered goats and stinking fish.

Because of the Muslim holiday of Bakari Eid, the director of my NGO decided that fish should be bought for dinner. Bakari means goat, and on this holiday it is traditional for Muslims to have a feast of goat. Goat meat, however, is more expensive than fish, and there are few Muslims here anyway. I had to go to Ahmedabad to pick up some English textbooks, so I went into the city with the vocational training center manager and one of the drivers.

After picking up the textbooks, we went to a Muslim market to find some fish. The market was a street on one side of which were shops and on the other side of which were some stalls. Wherever I looked there were parts of recently slaughtered goat: skinned goat torsos hanging from iron hooks, legs resting on shop floors, a few heads resting on the dusty ground outside. Some people were busy hacking at chunks of meat, and others were roasting legs. By one stall I saw a family—all barefoot, dressed in rather dirty-looking clothes—of a mother and her children roasting some nearly meatless legs. All around their stall were scattered hooves; there must have been about 15 or 20 of them. A few goats who had managed to live another day wandered around sniffing at trash as usual, seemingly nonplussed by their newly deceased brethren.

It was already 4 or 5 in the afternoon, and all the fish shops on that street had closed because of the holiday, so we couldn’t buy any fish at that market. We left for another market which had less goat and a few more fish stalls. The stalls stank, and the fish were kept on the stone counter or on the shop floor. There was no ice to cool them, of course. Dozens of flies buzzed all around. A woman weighed the 15 kilos of fish that the manager of the vocational training center ordered, and threw them to her sons to skin and chop. The process was agonizingly slow, as the fish were whole, and none had been gutted, skinned, or filleted. They worked like this: first the mother cut off the tail, fins and head. Then her sons skinned it, chopped it, gutted it, and threw the product in black plastic bags. Altogether, we must have waited more than half an hour, though it took a few minutes of waiting before we were able to place our order. Once the bags were ready, they were put in a large, blue plastic barrel that the manager had brought with us in the truck for that purpose. The fish didn’t stink quite so badly once the fish was in with the top on.

Once the cooks at the center got the fish, the finished product was only thirty minutes away. Knowing where the fish came from made me a bit intimidated, but I ate it anyway. It wasn’t bad, but picking out the bones was annoying since it hadn’t been filleted.

When it comes to food in India, there are a lot of “pretend you didn’t just see that” moments. Last week I ordered an omelet at a little stand in the nearby town of Sanand. The omelet was fine, but after I returned my used plate to the shopkeeper, he wiped it with a rag, and then put it on top of the stack of supposedly “clean” plates.

So far in my life, I’ve only had food poisoning once, in Israel. Let’s hope it stays that way.

A Gujarati Wedding

2008-02-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

Sorry it’s been so long since I last posted anything. I’ve been teaching four classes a day, conducting a study on why the students here at the vocational training center dropped out of their schools, and editing a book all at the same time, six days a week. But the last batch of students just ended, so I’ve had some free time. I spent two days at one of the three primary schools (the last one I hadn’t visited) run by my NGO, teaching English songs and having fun with the kids. Then I went around Gujarat for two days to see some historical sites. Civilization has existed in Gujarat for around 5,000 years, so there are lots of old temples and ruins. It was a nice chance for me to relax and be a tourist for a little while, and gave me an opportunity to see some of India’s history.

What might be more interesting for you, though, is if I write a bit about the marriage I attended last week. The groom, Raju, is a coworker, and works as the furniture course instructor here. For the occasion, all of the vocational training center staff crammed into two or three cars, and drove two hours to Raju’s village, somewhere in the middle of rural Gujarat.

The sun was already going down by the time we pulled onto a narrow dirt road off of a main highway, and parked the cars next to a wedding tent set up outside Raju’s home. A couple dozen relatives were lulling around, the women in their finest saris, the young men in slacks and shirts, and the old men in kurtas (a loose, long shirt) and lungis (a white wrap thing, part pants, part skirt, and part loin cloth). It didn’t take long for anyone who could speak 10 words of English to find me, shake my hand and ask me “where you coming from?”

Raju soon came out of his house (one-story, concrete, maybe three rooms), bedecked in a turban, a sparkly wedding kurta, pointy shoes, and carrying a faux-golden dagger. His skin looked a sickly yellow-green because his female relatives had been bathing him in turmeric, which is apparently considered auspicious. Raju, who typically leaves his shirts un-tucked and is pretty laid-back, looked somewhat uncomfortable covered from head to toe in formality and wedding tradition. I exchanged a few words with him, but soon the procession started.

This was not a wedding procession in any way that you might imagine. It was led by a pushcart on which rested a cheap electric keyboard and the car battery used to power it, along with three megaphones set on the top. A few teenagers pushed the cart while the local “talent” yelled into a microphone and pounded on the keyboard. It might have seemed more musical if it hadn’t been forced through the megaphones, which distorted whatever chance the sound had of coming through cleanly; imagine it all coming through the loudspeakers of any train station. Leading the cart were two or three men with drums, banging away and keeping the beat to which everyone danced their way through the village. At one point, the cart and drummers stopped and played in once place, allowing a garba dance circle to form. To the delight of all, I joined in, my garba skills coming back to me from the Navratri celebration a few months earlier.

Raju marched alongside some older male relatives, a coconut in one hand and the fake gold dagger in another. The coconut, I’ve learned, is a symbol of purity. The procession marched on. At a few houses, some old ladies gave Raju a coin, threw some rice on his hair, put a dot of red powder on his forehead, and then moved their hands from his head to theirs, as if forcing something from his mind into their own. I learned later that this symbolizes their desire to take all the bad luck away from the groom and to bring it on them instead.

After the music, everyone returned to Raju’s house for dinner. There were vegetables, rice, lentils, and about five different varieties of sweets. As is typical with all Indian sweets, they were basically pure sugar, thinly disguised with food coloring. After dinner and a short break, the garba dancing continued anew, this time under the tent outside Raju’s home. I danced with everyone until about 1 in the morning, and then went to bed at a neighbor’s house.

The next morning was when the real action started. I was surprised that the bride or her family hadn’t even made an appearance at Raju’s house, but this is all part of the tradition. After one last march through the village, everyone boarded a bus to the bride’s village, about 30 kilometers away. Once there, everyone seemed kind of lost. I drank tea at a random person’s home and sat around until someone started playing a drum. I got up, and saw that it was a kid of about 11 or 12 years old playing drums with his father. Some relative of either Raju’s or the bride’s told me that they were “doing their traditional duty” as Valmikis. Valmikis are considered the lowest caste in India’s caste system, and are usually relegated to the most menial and degrading of tasks, like dragging away dead animals or cleaning excreta. Strangely, they are also assigned the duty of playing drums, apparently because drums are usually made of animal skin, and making them is/was considered an unclean task. This boy and his dad, though, were playing store-bought drums that were not made of animal skin; regardless, the “traditional duty” remained.

In any case, to the beat of the drums, the bride’s sister came out of her house, surrounded by female relatives, and carrying a coconut covered in beads on her head. Team Bride confronted Team Groom, and the bride’s sister put some red powder on Raju’s forehead. Raju was now wearing a different turban and carrying a fake gold sword in place of the fake gold dagger, all of which stood in contrast to his 1970’s style suit and loafers. The priest, dressed all in white, said some prayers. All the while, the bride’s female relatives sang songs ridiculing the groom, which is my favorite of the Gujarati wedding traditions. The random relative who spoke English translated some of them for me. In one line of the song, the women said Raju was short and ugly. In another, they asked if all the people standing around him were blind. And then in my favorite, they called everyone who came with him monkeys.

Despite the ridicule, Raju and his entourage were granted permission to approach the bride’s house. At the doorstep, the bride’s mother gave Raju some more red powder on the forehead, and then Raju sat down on one of two purple plush chairs waiting on the porch. Because of my status as an outsider with much-revered white skin (I really hate that Indian people value white skin so much, and it bothers me that if an American with darker skin were in my place they probably would not be treated as well), I was able to get up on the porch and watch the whole ceremony, and take lots of photos. For the first half an hour or so, Raju just sat on the plush chair looking bored while the priest drew designs on the floor with white and orange powder. Eventually, the bride came out, wearing a beautiful red and gold sari, her hands and arms covered in henna, her face and hair elaborately made up. No words or even glances were exchanged between her and Raju, despite the fact that she sat down on the second purple plush chair directly next to him.

The priest continued his chanting, setting out some copper pots around his powder design, and then putting a coconut in the middle of it. Then Raju and the bride stood up and marched around the coconut a few times. Someone guided her hand onto his, and some money was placed on it. Her sari was then tied to his scarf, the coconut was dipped in oil and lit, and once again they marched around the coconut, now flaming.

When the ceremony was over, the old men got together over a pot of crumpled bills, apparently collecting donations from the community to cover the cost of the ceremony and the forthcoming meal. Lunch was good, and was similar to dinner the previous night.

So that was the first Indian wedding I’ve seen. I’m thinking of introducing a flaming coconut into my own wedding, whenever that happens, but I haven’t yet decided about the turban or dagger.

From village to village...

2008-01-12T19:42:00.000-08:00

Last month I had a very interesting trip to about six different villages around Gujarat, and I didn’t have time to write about it, so I'll try now. I should say this this particular day really blew my mind wide open. If you feel like this entry jumps all over the place and covers more than one blog entry really should, that's because this particular day was that full.

Thursday, December 8th is the anniversary of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar’s death. (Dr. Ambedkar was the most significant Dalit leader in India’s history, and was the primary framer of the Indian constitution, a document which provides numerous legal safeguards and a job reservation system for Dalits.) As a result, my organization—which is at root a grassroots network of fieldworkers—organized a variety of programs in the villages. The organization has set up hundreds of “Bhimshalas”—Bhim from Bhimrao Ambedkar, and Shala for the Gujarati word for school—which are basically extra-curricular education centers run out of a volunteer’s home. The volunteer is trained by the organization in strategies to combat discrimination at school, and also gives the kids academic support. The organization also provides the volunteer with a library for the children to use.

Anyway, the programs on December 8th were coordinated through the Bhimshalas. When we drove into the first village, we had to spend a bit of time looking for the Dalit locality. We stopped and the director of the organization asked a villager where the Dalit locality was. The villager looked puzzled; Dalit is a relatively new word, and is preferred by the Dalits themselves, while non-Dalits still just use the traditional sub-caste terminology. So the director asked where the weavers and leather-workers lived (these two communities form the biggest part of the Dalit community). The villager waved us on, and said “all the way down”.

The road was narrow and unpaved, and our van was bouncing quite a bit in the potholes, but me made it eventually. When we arrived, we were introduced to the Bhimshala volunteer, a Christian man from the Vankar (weaver) community in his 20’s. He knew a bit of English, and told us about the classes he runs. I also saw the library in his home, which was composed of a small bookshelf and a few dozen books. We got a brief tour of the Dalit locality. A two-minute walk from the volunteer’s home, we met a young man now in the local high school whose protest had resulted in the de-segregation of Dalit and non-Dalit children during the mid-day meal at school. Mid-day meal segregation of Dalits from non-Dalits is typical, because non-Dalits traditionally believe Dalits “pollute” food by their touch or presence, and would not want to even eat while looking at a Dalit. Of course, no child is born with this idea, but the notion is reinforced by their parents and by the school itself, which often enforces the segregation.

We continued walking around the village a bit, and met some local women, about 40 years old. They told my organization’s director that they work as day laborers in fields owned by village Patels (a relatively wealthy non-Dalit caste) for Rs. 40 (one dollar) per day, despite the fact that the minimum daily wage is Rs. 53. They themselves own no land, and are therefore economically dependant on the Patels, and feel powerless to protest their meager wages. The Patels are under no obligation to hire them, so if the women strike or protest, they could lose their only source of income. This type of situation is one reason why my organization has led numerous campaigns on Dalit land rights.

We also went into the Valmiki community. I hadn’t realized that even Dalit localities are divided into clusters of houses based on sub-caste, but this is clearly the case. The Valmikis are the manual scavenger and sweeper caste, and are considered to be the absolute lowest in the caste hierarchy. Even today, tens of thousands of them in Gujarat alone are employed to manually remove and transport human excreta from dry latrines, which are often nothing more than an open area surrounded by four walls. Anyway, a family sat us down on some plastic chairs and gave us some tea, and we talked to some members of the community. They actually seemed to be doing fairly well. One woman we met there was a college graduate now working as a social worker with a different organization, and her daughter is now in college studying English. Her daughter was a bit shy, but when we called her over was able to use the opportunity to practice speaking English a bit. The houses were decent, and made of concrete. They said the government had given some money for their construction.

We then went back to the Bhimshala. Students were sitting in rows, and a fieldworker of the organization was leading them in call-and-response chants related to Ambedkar and equality. My favorite chant was the Hindi, “Hum sub ek hai”, which means “We are all one”. After about 10 minutes of organized chanting, they marched to the village primary school. The kids had been given little signs to hold, which had messages of gender and caste equality printed on them. This little march took us through the non-Dalit part of the village. The villagers looked at us a bit oddly, but I tried to smile at them. Many smiled back. It was a conscious decision on my part to smile; the chants the kids were saying went against the village status quo of caste segregation and gender discrimination, and the villagers probably felt somewhat threatened and surprised that several foreigners were a part of it. A smile can go a long way towards reducing any tension, and also help a cause more than any chants can.

When we got to the school, I was surprised to see that all of the school’s students were sitting in rows, apparently waiting for us. The school’s staff was sitting in front of the main school building, on the school’s open hallway that provided a kind of makeshift stage. The students who had marched from the Dalit locality (mostly Dalits, but apparently a few non-Dalits as well) joined the other students in rows. We sat on the school floor “stage” facing the students. Some speeches were made, including by my organization’s director. The organization’s fieldworkers helped as well, and all the students joined in chanting “Jay Bhim”, a chant of support for Dr. Ambedkar, which really surprised me. Even some of the school’s staff said “Jay Bhim”, though the principal was more stoic. He had been against the boy who protested the segregated seating at mealtime in school. I made a short speech in Gujarati, in which I said my name, where I’m from, and told the students to read the children’s books brought by the organization for the school; those books deal with gender and caste equality in a way children can relate to. As the event ended, I told the principal that he had a very good school, and shook his hand. I wanted to be overly friendly in order to try to assure the success of the organization’s message.

After the event at the school, we went to another village where we had lunch at someone’s home. There are no dinner tables in the villages, so people sit on the floor, always Indian style, with legs folded. After lunch, four girls who had gotten dressed up for the occasion performed two song and dance numbers for us. They were really impressive, and very well choreographed and rehearsed. One involved throwing flowers, and the other was about how life today differs from life “in the old days”. For example, they said “In the old days women wore saris, but we wear jean pants”, and “In the old days people drank water, but we drink Pepsi”. I recorded the first one, but unfortunately I didn’t get the second. I should say that I didn’t understand much of the song, but it was translated for me after they finished.

Then we went to another village and sat in on their Bhimshala program. Some kids gave us flowers to welcome us, and we put a garland of flowers on Ambedkar’s picture. A volunteer read the children’s books protesting gender and caste inequality. It was interesting to see the women’s and men’s reactions to the points about gender equality. The men weren’t too keen on it, but they perked up during the book about untouchability practices. One man in particular—the peon at the town hall—stood up and started passionately explaining how separate water is kept for him because he’s a Dalit. He said it had been that way all the 28 years he’d been working there. I've added his photo just to the right of this text.

We had another interesting experience at yet another village. We were shown a cremation ground about which there had been a protest a year or two back. The ground was built with public funds, but had been used only for upper castes. After a story was published in the newspapers about the discrimination, they were forced to serve Dalits as well. But when we got there, we saw that a new sign proclaiming that the ground was only for Patels had been put up. Also, in a sign explaining the rules for using the grounds, the words “without caste discrimination” had been painted over. You could still see them under the fresh coat of beige paint. We took some photos, and then walked to the area where “lower” castes are forced to cremate their dead. You have to hike through a path into the bushes for a few dozen yards. We saw one place where a cremation had taken place. It was simply a hole in the ground. Some bones were still visible in the ash. The bamboo poles used to carry the body were lying next to the hole. Below, I've posted a photo of the discriminatory sign, with the words "without caste discrimination" painted over in a dull yellow. Unless you can read Gujarati, you'll have to take my word for it. I've also posted a photo of a cremation pit for Dalits, since they cannot use the new facility.

Then, in that village, we joined an event in the Dalit locality. A table was set up under a tent, and we were invited to sit on chairs behind the table, while everyone else sat on pillows in front. The occasion for the meeting was the establishment of an Amebedkar youth club in the village. A bunch of different people spoke. One woman wearing all white—the sign of a widow—worked as a member in the village council through the reservation system that is maintained for Dalits, part of Ambedkar’s constitutional legacy. I misjudged her because she looked so meek, and kept pulling her veil over her face. Also, when a fieldworker asked her if she wanted to make a speech like many others at the gathering, she said no, and the director had to insist that she speak. So I thought, “Wow, this woman is so weak…look at her hiding behind her veil. I’m sure the non-Dalits in the village council walk all over her, and she never speaks up.” But when she spoke she became very passionate, even starting to cry, and the director said she spoke very well. I was angry at myself for judging her before knowing anything, and without even thinking about what might have happened in her life to make her so afraid.

After the event, we had a snack of rice, sauce, and sweets in someone’s house. Then we left for yet another village. This Bhimshala was also holding an event, similar to the other ones. One little girl MC’d the program, others did a dance, the director spoke, and the children’s books were read. The village women were totally engaged in the books, and really connected to it. They nodded, finished sentences, and made sure their kids listened. The men were not enthusiastic about the messages of gender equality, but they became engaged when the book about untouchability was read. One moment that has stuck in my mind happened when the woman reading the book on untouchability asked the kids if they, as Dalits, were allowed to sit in the village square. It's very hard to describe a look in someone's face, so I won't try. But I will say that I have not forgotten the expression on the face of one little girl, maybe 9 years old, when she shook her head no.

Finally, around 11:30 PM, we had dinner in someone’s house. The food was good; potatoes, eggplant, lentils, chappati (Indian bread), and rice. The director had to fight with the woman of the house to be able to wash her own plate. I understood it; it would be hypocritical to push a message of gender equality and then leave plates to be washed by a woman. We all washed our own plates. As I washed mine, a small crowd of boys crowded around, and some practiced their English with me. It was a very positive atmosphere, and everyone wanted to shake my hand or hear me speak some Gujarati. After seeing me wash my own plate, the grandmother of the house suggested to the director that a marriage could be arranged between me and a Dalit girl. I laughed, but the director said she was serious.

Then we left, and I was exhausted. I got back to the vocational training center a few minutes before 2 AM, and went to bed.

So, that was my day. There was plenty to think about, but I was so exhausted that I don't think I was in bed for 10 minutes before I was snoring. It's taken me some time to digest some of the things I saw and learned, but I think it's been sinking in. I've read all kinds of different accounts of discrimination practiced against Dalits in Gujarat and India, but it of course resonates in a different way when it's written on the face of a little girl.

A gecko on my shirt, a monkey in the dining hall, and a lizard in my toilet

2007-12-05T08:41:00.000-08:00

A pair of pigeons keeps trying to make a nest on my windowsill. They’ve actually succeeded several times, and I have to knock it down, eggs and all. Knocking down the eggs makes me feel guilty, so I try to get rid of the nest before any are laid. Yesterday morning I opened the window to do just that. As I was pushing off the last few twigs, a gecko leapt onto my shirt. I’m not afraid of geckos, which are everywhere in India, but the surprise of it made me start writhing and shaking to try to knock it off. After a couple seconds it fell down onto the floor. It was about six or seven inches long from head to tail, and was a typical gecko like any of the others that come in my room to eat moths or bugs, and leave roughly one capsule-sized black turd on my floor per day. I smiled when I saw that it was nothing to be afraid of.

“Listen, gecko,” I said, “I don’t care if you want to come into my room, but don’t jump on my shirt!” It scampered away under my desk.

I then left for breakfast in the campus dining hall. I was enjoying my tea when I looked up to see a large langour monkey enter the building from the stairs leading to the roof. He must have gotten onto the roof from a nearby tree. “Oh my god,” I said, “a freaking monkey!” Languors are not dangerous, and are actually used in some cities (such as Delhi) to repel the smaller, more malicious macaques. I’ve seen many langours around India before, but this was the first time one had come into the dining hall.

Someone made a noise to scare the monkey back onto the roof, but it didn’t budge. I got up and yelled at it, but that didn’t help either. One of the guys who works in the kitchen ran up the stairs and chased it away with a stick, and then closed the door so it wouldn’t be able to get back in.

I left the dining hall smiling. I’ve always been partial to monkeys.

In the evening, I went to my room to use the toilet. Upon opening the lid, I saw that a lizard—several inches longer than the gecko, with a spiny back, a long, thin tail, and a small piece of toilet paper crowning his head—had somehow gotten inside. How he’d managed to get in I don’t know, because the lid had been on since morning. He was finding it difficult to get out, because the bowl was too slippery for his little feet to grasp.

I closed the lid, left my room, and used a communal toilet instead. I then went to the library, checked the dictionary for the Gujarati word for lizard, and told the librarian and the man in charge of discipline about the kanchindo in my toilet. The librarian laughed, but the disciplinarian was stern.

“Who is better,” he asked me in Gujarati, “David or kanchindo?”

I saw his point. I went back to my room, and used my toilet brush to shift the lizard from the bowl onto a flat piece of wood. The lizard was very antsy, but it wasn’t able to climb off because of the way it had grasped the wood. I dumped it onto the ground outside.

Then I went back to the library to find the disciplinarian. “Kanchindo toilet out,” I told him in awful Gujarati. “Kanchindo better not. David better!” He nodded in approval.

Haircuts

2007-11-17T22:52:00.000-08:00

So far I've had three haircuts in India. I was a bit nervous about getting a haircut at first, for two reasons. First, most Indians do not have curly hair, and barbers might therefore panic when seeing my head. Second, I didn't want to get lice or something from a comb that is used on everyone's head without being sterilized.

I got over both of these worries, though, for the same reason I've gotten over a lot of other similar worries: I have no choice.

My first haircut was during the orientation for the fellowship, at a town called Mussourie up near the Himalayas. The barbershop was tiny, but well-lit and in possession of some big mirrors and decent-looking scissors. The barber was pretty young, probably in his early 20's, but he was a real pro. After giving me a better haircut than many American barbers have given me, he even gave me a head massage. All told, it set me back 35 Rupees, including 5 Rs. as tip. That's about 90 cents.

My second haircut was a bit less of a positive experience. I live now just outside of a tiny village, so normal barbershop facilities aren't available. What is available, though, is a guy in a shack who has a pair of scissors, a straightedge razor, and a mirror. I went to see him about three weeks ago in the evening, around six, but since the sun was low in the sky and he didn't have electricity, and my curly hair would require more concentration than usual, he asked me to come back the next morning. I did, but the haircut wasn't nearly as good as the one I got in Mussourie. This barber was clearly intimidated by the curls, and kept trying to straighten my hair, which doesn't work very well. As a result, some parts were too short, others too long, and I wasn't particularly satisfied. It cost 15 Rupees, or about 37 cents.

Yesterday I went into the town of Sanand, about 8 km away, to a barbershop recommended by a co-worker. This one had electricity and a fan, which was nice. The smock they put on me had Japanese writing on it, and the barber was amused when I translated it for him. The haircut was decent, so I think this is the place I'm going to use from now on. It cost 20 Rupees, about 50 cents.

I haven't worked up the courage to get a shave from these guys, because it's all with a straightedge razor and something about letting a stranger hold a blade right on my jugular doesn't sit well with me. But I'll get a shave there at some point.

In other news, I'm going to try to embed some pictures into the blog entries. We'll see if it works. OK, it worked. The photo above is of the second haircut.

One night in a village

2007-11-13T00:54:00.001-08:00

This past week was Diwali, the Indian New Year. It’s probably the biggest festival of the year, and most people go back to their native village to celebrate with their families. I went to the home of one of the accountants here, whom I’ll call Suresh, though that’s not his real name. Suresh speaks English quite well, and lives in a village called Ranoda about 25 kilometers away with his parents and sisters.

I left for Ranoda on Friday, and took a series of three shared auto rickshaw taxis, each one packed with about eight people, though they should sit only three. The journey cost me less than fifty cents. I called Suresh when I arrived, and he came out to meet me. We walked together down the main road of the village—unpaved, though level and covered with gravel—and then took a left.

“The road to the right is for non-Dalits,” he said. In nearly every Indian village, the Dalits live in a separate locality some distance from the rest of the village. The road we were now on was in significantly worse condition than the main one; it was probably too narrow for a car or truck, and was fairly muddy.

Nearly everyone we passed was excited to see me. They all asked Suresh where I was from, and nodded in awe when they heard the word “America”. Suresh was clearly enjoying showing me off, but I didn’t mind. I’m sure I was the first foreigner to come into the Dalit locality (probably the overall village, too), and maybe even the first person from outside Gujarat. Soon a trail of people had formed behind us as we walked to Suresh’s house, winding between the houses and alleys. His house was two stories, and made of concrete and wood with an earthen floor. Suresh told me his grandfather built it fifty years ago.

Suresh’s sisters and mother smiled when they saw me. They sat me on a cot, and gave me some water and then tea. When I finished, I went on a short walk with Suresh. It was late in the day, around five-thirty, and it was really just beautiful, very much the picture of Indian village life that you might imagine. Balanced on their heads, women were carrying jugs of water or fodder for the buffalos. Old men, whose smiles displayed only half the number of teeth there should have been, were coming back home from the fields.

In a clearing surrounded by houses, some kids were playing cricket. The houses there were fairly large (by village standards), concrete, and together formed a “U”, with the interior left open for hay, buffalos, and a tractor or two. The boys playing cricket invited me to join them, so I picked up the bat. I hit a few good balls, but they were pitching (or “bowling” in cricket terms) slowly for me. Everyone cheered when I had a good hit.

Suresh’s mother cooked dinner on a small wood fire just outside the house. Suresh and I were served first, so we ate sitting on a rug on the floor. The food was really good; there were several dishes, including a vegetable stew, lentils, rice, and Indian flatbread (roti). The rest of the family didn’t start to eat until Suresh and I had finished.

After dinner, the Diwali celebrations continued. People carried torches (crowned with buffalo dung, and soaked in coconut oil) to the banks of the pond, and stuck them in the ground there. It’s supposed to symbolize something, though I’m not sure what. Kids were lighting firecrackers and fireworks the whole time, and actually they didn’t stop until well into the next day.

When it was time to sleep, Suresh’s sisters lined up some wooden cots outside the house, and everyone slept in a row. I was too tall for the cot, and my legs stuck out, so it wasn’t the best night of sleep in my life. But that could also have been because of the nonstop firecrackers. At one point, I woke up to see a boy lighting a firecracker fifteen feet from my cot. I checked my watch; it was 4:30.

People were up and moving well before sunrise, and soon we had tea and crackers for breakfast. Suresh and I took another walk around the Dalit locality. I was offered tea by probably a dozen different households, and I accepted from a few. Oddly, the custom here is to pour the tea from the cup onto the saucer, and then sip directly from the saucer. I think the point is that it cools down more quickly that way. As is typical in Gujarat, the tea was made from boiled buffalo milk and black tea leaves. It’s a bit sweet for my taste, but still very good.

Suresh wanted to take a bath, so I continued my walk by the houses where I had played cricket the day before. I learned that the reason those houses were so big was that they had been built under a government plan implemented by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, India’s foremost Dalit leader, now deceased and revered by many Dalits as something of a god. Ambedkar dedicated his life to the breaking of caste barriers, and was the main author of India’s constitution. As a result, Dalits receive legal protection and are given reserved spots for government jobs, called “positive discrimination”, the Indian version of affirmative action. The caste system is deeply ingrained in Indian society, however, and laws are often not enforced. Sadly, the condition of the Dalits in many places is not so different today than it was a hundred years ago; many are landless, uneducated, and relegated to the most menial, laborious work.

Anyway, I walked from house to house, and had tea with a few different people. Most had framed portraits of Dr. Ambedkar on their walls, usually next to a picture of a Hindu deity. Some homes had handlooms on the front porch; these probably belonged to Vankars—the Dalit sub-caste dedicated to weaving.

I spent the rest of the morning lounging around Suresh’s house with his extended family. They served us lunch, and afterwards we headed outside the village to see some other of his family members.

Near the village entrance was a temple compound, with one larger building and one smaller. It looked harmless to me, but Suresh pointed out that Dalits are forbidden from entering the larger temple, and have to be content with the smaller one. This is typical in India, as untouchability—the practice of treating Dalits as polluting by their very presence—is common in rural areas. Suresh also told me that though relations were good between the “upper” castes of the village and the Dalits, and the “upper” castes sometimes came into the Dalit locality, they wouldn’t drink tea or water from Dalit homes. Doing so would, in their minds, cause them to become “polluted”. “They come to my home, sit on the cots and talk to my family,” Suresh said, “but they don’t drink our tea. Never.” Some elderly Dalits are used to this discrimination and rarely complain, but the youth seem to assert themselves more actively.

So we spent the afternoon at the houses of some of Suresh’s relatives, drinking tea, eating sweets, and chatting. I spent the next night in a town called Dholka at the home of the manager of the vocational training school here. It was very pleasant, but lacked Ranoda’s charm. I’m planning on developing the pictures I took at Ranoda and giving them to Suresh’s family as a thank-you gift for treating me so well. Everyone loved my camera, and basically lined up to have a picture taken. Despite my poor Gujarati, I understood when one man told a neighbor, “Come on! Have him take your photo. Then people in America will see you!”

I have open invitations to come to many different villages here, but I’m going to make sure I go back to Ranoda at least once before I leave.

Untouched

2007-10-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

For the last few weeks, I've been working in an office with two other people. AJWS says we shouldn't use the names of our coworkers in our blogs, so I asked one of them what name I could use for her. She chose Annie, which is short for Angela, her baptismal name (she's a Christian). Her real name is much more Indian-sounding, though. You'll have to take my word on that.

I can’t think of a day since I’ve been here when she didn’t announce her arrival in the morning by bursting through the door singing and dancing. She constantly has a smile on her face, even though she is busy doing work everyday for which she is terribly overqualified. For the past several months, she’s been scanning surveys on untouchability [the practice of treating Dalits--"untouchables"--as pariahs]. The work is basically mindless, but requires careful attention to minute details on the forms. Annie is a college graduate in mechanical engineering, speaks fluent English, has been in charge of a bunch of machines in a factory, has taught Computer Assisted Design and Videography/Photography, and could no doubt be making much more money working somewhere else.

She’s always joking with me, teaching me things about Gujarati culture or about this organization, and spends time helping me with something or other nearly every day.

Yesterday, she told me that she’d been the victim of an act of untouchability the day before. Annie lives in a building on the edge of campus with her husband, the organization’s chief engineer. Some of the married staff live in this building. Anyway, I’ll tell the story in her voice.

“Yesterday I was outside doing some laundry, hanging it up on the lines. The weather was cool and I was feeling good. Three women from the village were walking by and went to take some water from the faucet. I had a jug of water already out, and I told them to just take the water from the jug, so they could use cups. But they didn’t want it. I asked them why, and they said, ‘If you drink out of the well of a Valmiki [a sewage worker], then we will take water from your jug.’ I couldn’t believe it, these three women who were too good to drink from my cups but still wanted my water, talking to me like they were so much better than me! Oh, it made me so angry. So I told them, ‘If you don’t want to drink from my jug, then you can’t have water from my tap!’ They said, ‘Did you put the water in the ground? It’s not your water!’ But it was my tap, right by the building! I told them they had no right to talk to me like that, I’ve a BA, they can’t act like they’re such goddesses. They spent their whole lives in this little village, but because of their caste they’re too good for my water. They said, ‘If you have so much money, why are you living in this building, not even in your own house or apartment!’ They were Patels [a higher caste], these three. These Patels are always practicing untouchability. They’re the worst. I told them to leave and never come back, and never take water from the tap ever again.”

I was surprised that right by the campus of the organization, the village women still practiced untouchability. Annie told me about another experience she had in Sanand, the closest town. She’d gone with her husband to find a house to rent so they could have their own place and still live near the organization. They were having an interview with a landlord, and it was going fine until the landlord asked their caste. They said they were Dalits, and the landlord told them that, sorry, he only rents to Darbars [a dominant caste] and Patels. They tried a few other places, and it was the same. That is why they’re currently living in the building at the edge of campus.

In many ways, this vocational training center is a kind of oasis. Everyone treats each other equally, regardless of subcaste or gender. Annie’s stories served to remind me of the reality outside.

Garba till you can't Garba no more

2007-10-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

"David-brother! You play Garba with me! You know Garba? You dance with me! Garba, Garba, hahaha!"

We're currently in the midst of Navaratri, a very popular festival that literally translates to "nine nights". There is some confusing religious significance to it, but it seems like what most people like about it is the Garba dancing. People have been talking about it for weeks. Two weeks ago after dinner, five or six guys were practicing, sans music, out behind the furniture workshop. They stepped in unison and clapped their hands, and eventually the night watchman, a skinny sixty-something man with a mustache and a scrunched up face, joined and started moving around too.

Three nights ago was the first night of Navaratri, and all the students here were excited. After dinner a stereo system was set up, and everyone began to gather around. Then the music started, and for one and a half hours, it was Garba and only Garba.

The dance is pretty simple, and only four steps. I eventually got it, but I'm sure I looked like a goofball compared to everyone who's been doing it since they were four years old. Everyone made a huge circle--probably more than a hundred people all in one circle--and did the dance in unison with the drum beat. The music sounded like all the other Indian music I've been hearing, but I'm sure my untrained ear was missing something.

Everyone got a kick out of me dancing, and the Videography and Photography students took enough pictures and movies of me to fill a hard drive.

It's pretty fun, but doing the same dance for an hour and a half gets a bit tedious. They're at it again tonight, but I'm taking some time off from Garba for now. Nine days of Garba is more Garba than I can handle.

Who are Dalits?

2007-10-13T19:51:00.000-07:00

I'm working at a vocational training center for Dalits. But who are Dalits, and why do they need vocational training?

India's caste system has been around for 3,000 years and is closely linked to Hindu religion and culture. Though many believe it disappeared when India gained freedom and became a democracy in 1947, anything that has 3,000 years of history behind it cannot disappear so easily. The basic idea of the caste system, rooted in certain Hindu religious texts, is that one is obligated to fulfill one's dharma (role, or responsibility) by practicing the customs of the caste into which one is born. It is sinful to strive to be more than what your caste mandates.

The highest caste is called Brahmin, comprising about three or four percent of the population and traditionally society's priests. They continue to be the most educated and wealthy caste, occupying, for example, about 75% of judicial positions. There are all kinds of intermediate castes of merchants, landowners and farmers, maintaining different degrees of status, and these castes compose the vast majority of India's population.

And then there are Dalits. Commonly called "untouchables" in the West, Dalits are considered the lowest rung on the ladder of India's caste system. Surveys put them at around 16% of India's total population, which would make them about 175,000,000 strong. India's Dalit population is larger than the total population of Japan, roughly half as large as America's population, and about five times as large as Canada's. My point is that there are many, many Dalits, and the conception of a "minority" has to be shifted into larger terms than are usually used.

The dharma of the Dalits is to perform occupations considered ritually impure, including leatherwork, weaving, dealing with dead animals, and human waste disposal. They are sometimes called "untouchables", because of the idea that they are unclean, unholy pariahs. These ideas give rise to the practice of untouchability, avoiding the presence of Dalits as if they had the plague, refusing, for example, to allow them to use a water glass also used by non-Dalits.

At one point or another in India's history, Dalits have been victims of probably every crime imaginable. Many of these crimes continue to be practiced. Even today, a Dalit risks being beaten or murdered for: drinking from the well of a non-Dalit and "polluting" the water with his or her presence, entering a Hindu temple, questioning the authority of higher-caste power figures, trying to change his or her occupation, and so on. Dalit children are often ridiculed at school, and therefore have a higher dropout rate. But Dalit women have it the worst. In some rural areas, they are expected to have sex with members of higher castes whenever the latter desire, or risk injury to themselves or their families. Dalit girls are sometimes sold into sexual slavery for use as prostitutes at a particular temple, "married" to that temple's god but forced to have sex with any temple visitors who so desire. Though technically illegal, these crimes are often tolerated with a shrug or a wink from higher-caste officials and police. This is all well-documented in India, but for some reason it hasn't gained much notice abroad.

Today, Dalits generally fare better in cities than in villages. Cities offer a degree of anonymity, and occupational opportunites are much greater. One teacher here told me that about 20% of Dalits are fairly comfortable financially, and probably nearly all of them live in cities. In villages, however, untouchability is still frequently practiced. In the past, even the shadow of a Dalit was considered impure. Today a major issue is water access. For example, if a village has only one well, Dalits have to rely on a "touchable" to get it for them. Another untouchability issue is temple access. Another big issue is if a Dalit and a "touchable" wish to get married. Even today, this can lead to the murder of the Dalit.

The organization I work with fights for Dalit rights in several ways. One is by registering and legally challenging Dalit human rights abuses and crimes. Another is by training young Dalits at this vocational training center. The idea is to get them a marketable skill, enabling them to escape their caste-mandated occupation and become self-sufficient. Many Dalits (perhaps up to 40 million) serve as bonded laborers constantly in debt, so self-sufficiency is crucial. The courses offered here are geared towards maximum marketability, and include tailoring, mobile phone repair, metal fabrication, furniture construction, videography and photography, and about 12 or 13 others. This center also serves to build the character and self-confidence of the students, allowing them to grow in an atmosphere totally free of discrimination.

One of the things emphasized here is Dalit unity. There are many Dalit subcastes, separating the weavers from the leather-workers from those who deal with sanitation. But the philosophy here is that the only way to overcome discrimination is to not discriminate against others. If a Dalit weaver complains of upper-caste discrimination but discriminates against other Dalits considered lower than he is, his complaints don't have much value.

I didn't know any of this stuff before coming to India, and I may have gotten a few points wrong, but I think the general ideas are all correct. Anyway, that's Dalit 101!

Yom Kippur in an Unlikely Place...

2007-10-03T07:48:00.001-07:00

...is the title of this piece that I wrote for Temple Beth El in Stamford, and for the Buffalo Jewish Review, and for anything else that will publish it I guess (so bear that in mind--it's written for a particular kind of audience) Also, it's long. And when I pasted it in this box from MSWord, all the tabs for new paragraphs disappeared, and for some reason they won't re-tab now. Sorry.

“Khamasa Gate, Yehudi church,” I told the auto rickshaw driver. “Yehudi chuch.” He hadn’t responded when I said “Jewish temple,” or “Yehudi temple,” or even “Yehudi mandayr,” which means “Jewish temple” in Hindi.
“Ahh,” he said as recognition finally showed on his face. “Yehudi church! Khamasa, Khamasa. OK.”
I was trying to get to the only synagogue within several hundred miles, a place called Magen Avraham located in Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat state, India.
It was Saturday, September 22nd, Yom Kippur. A week or so previous, I had found the congregation’s website, and scribbled down the name and address. The two other American Jewish World Service (AJWS) volunteers placed in Gujarat—though not near me—said they would meet me at the shul.
I was excited to participate in a Yom Kippur service—something familiar in such an unfamiliar place—but I didn’t know quite what to expect. Would the congregation be primarily foreign ex-pats, or a local community? I hadn’t had time to explore the website, so I had no idea.
The auto rickshaw pulled onto a bustling commercial street, full of Hindus and Muslims doing their normal daily business, and there—two buildings down on the left, between an apartment building and a snack stall, around the corner from a mosque—was Magen Avraham. I paid the driver 20 rupees (about fifty cents), stepped onto the street, and put on my kippah.
The synagogue had no watchman or greeter, so I just walked up the steps and looked through the sanctuary’s wide-open doors. A few dozen men were standing barefoot on white sheets covering the marble floor, their sandals piled haphazardly outside. They were dressed entirely in white, some in western-style shirts and pants, others wearing the Indian kurta—a long top that comes down close to the knees—but all of whom looked to be Indian.
After slipping off my sandals, I walked inside. It was a Sephardic-style shul; the bimah was towards the middle of the sanctuary, and there was a mechitzah separation, with the women’s section on a kind of balcony on the second floor. The women above also wore only white, though most of them either wore the elegant, flowing salwar kameez—a loose blouse and slacks set with matching scarf—or the more formal sari, midriff exposed as is standard with nearly all saris.
A few other things distinguished the synagogue. Two plaques engraved with the 10 Commandments were set above the arc, Hebrew on the right plaque and Hindi on the left. The sound of passing traffic and the market outside came through the open doors and windows, and—though initially off-putting—eventually seemed to blend in with it all. And, oddly, blinking Christmas lights were set along the bimah, completing the sometimes bizarre contrast between old and new that exists all over India.
Seeing me struggle to find my place in the relatively new Sephardic siddur, a man of about fifty came over to help. In decent but heavily accented English, he introduced himself as the vice-president of the synagogue, asked me where I was from, and then smiled and returned to where he’d been standing.
The melodies were unfamiliar to me, but I followed along in the Hebrew. After twenty minutes or so, another man walked over, introducing himself in perfect, American-accented English. I thought I’d found another foreigner, and shook his hand happily.
He said his name was Jacob, and asked me where I was from. I told him Buffalo, New York. “Oh,” he said, “the States! Great. And what are you doing in Ahmedabad? Traveling?”
I told him I was a volunteer through the American Jewish World Service’s World Partners Fellowship program, and that I would be working for about nine months at a vocational training center for Dalits (a low caste that suffers terrible discrimination), about 30 kilometers south of Ahmedabad.
I asked him where he was from. “Well, I’m from Ahmedabad,” he said, smiling. “I’m Indian, of course! As is everyone else in this synagogue.”
The quality of his accent surprised me, and I told him so.
“It’s my job,” he said, shrugging. “I teach American English to call center workers in Ahmedabad. The accent is just a gift I have.” He told me that Ahmedabad opened its first call center in 2000, and now employed some 15,000 people in the field. This kind of work brings in crucial white-collar jobs and capital to a very poor, developing area that desperately needs it.
“So,” Jacob said, shifting the conversation back to the service, “Do you have a white handkerchief?”
I told him I didn’t, but that I’d happened to bring a blue one. Jacob told me that everyone would soon spread out a white handkerchief onto the floor, and—fully prostrate—bow several times.
“Just follow what everyone else does,” he told me. “I’m not too religious myself, but it’s nice to do the ritual.”
So, about five minute later, I spread out my handkerchief and—mimicking those around me—got on my knees and bowed towards the arc. I’m sure I stood out as the only person using a non-white handkerchief, but no one else commented on it.
I was glad when the other AJWS volunteers, Adam and Anna, arrived during a break in the service. Before the next batch of prayers started, we took a short walk around the neighborhood. Both Hindus and Muslims seeing us come out of the synagogue were very friendly, shaking our hands, asking us where we were from and becoming excited when they heard the word “America”.
A parade honoring Ganesha—the Hindu god with the head of an elephant—passed on a nearby street. Aaron remarked that India is probably the only place in the world where you can go to a synagogue around the corner from a mosque and watch as a parade to Ganesha tramps past.
Back in the shul, I spent a few minutes talking with two of the older members of the synagogue. One told me that there are only about 65 Jewish families left in Gujarat, down from a population of some thousands only fifty years ago. Nearly everyone, he informed me, has emigrated to Israel or America, including his daughter.
“Matchmaking is a problem,” he said. “We get girls from Bombay, where there are more Jews.” Young Jews in this part of the world apparently do as the locals do, and rely on their parents to arrange suitable marriages.
After sundown the shofar was blown, though the 90-degree heat had apparently taken its toll on the blower, and he had some trouble getting a clear sound. As per local tradition, fresh-squeezed grape juice was then given out to everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed mine, though the heat had forced me to break my fast earlier in the afternoon.
Magen Avraham is surely different in many ways from my own synagogue back home, but despite these differences—or maybe because of them—I’ll definitely be heading back to Ahmedabad’s “Yehudi church” sometime soon.

First substantial post...ever

2007-10-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

Well, first I should apologize for not doing a better job of writing in this blog or writing emails. My days here are very busy, but I could probably have made some time for it. So, sorry.

Where do I start? This is going to be hard, because over the past month and a half, I've experienced so much that deserves to be shared. Do I move chronologically, or start at the present and work backwards?

Well, I guess I'll start by detailing my day today, and from that you can probably get a sense of what my life is like here. I'll try to fill in the blanks of the past six or six and a half weeks sometime later. (Incidentally, it is AJWS's policy that fellows should not put the name of the organization they are working for in their blogs, so I'm not going to. If you want to know, email me!)

My alarm went off at 6:45, but it didn't pull me out of too deep a sleep; the pigeons that call my windowsills home had already been cooing their stupid heads off since some time soon after sunrise. Indians apparantly don't distinguish between pigeons and doves, so when I complain about it I'm just told that they're symbols of peace, and that the cooing is nice. People don't seem to understand my opinion that pigeons are filthy, worthless animals unfit to be called birds.

I lifted the mosquito net up and climbed out of bed, and moved over to my desk, which, besides my bed, is the sole piece of furniture in my room. I turned on the computer, and connected to the internet by way of my absurdly expensive wireless modem, purchased almost exactly a week ago. Being able to check the New York Times in the morning is calming for me, since I've been doing it almost every morning for the past 6 years or so. It was a bit odd not being able to do it for the first 5 weeks here; since I'm somewhat addicted to the news, I was going through a mild withdrawal.

After washing my face, brushing my teeth (with water from a small cooler I keep in my room, not from the tap) and putting on some clothes, I headed out of the dorm in which I'm staying and into the dining hall, about a two minute walk away. I brought my plate, bowl and spoon (all made of stainless steel) with me; everyone is responsible for their own dishes here. I sat at the teachers table, and said good morning to a few of the friends I've made. The lines for food were long, since there are about 170 students here, plus staff, so I waited until they'd shortened to go get my food. This morning's breakfast was some kind of yellow rice that I don't really know how to describe, and chai. When I finished eating, I went over to the washing area to clean my plate. First, I used my spoon to push some ash (leftover from the fire that cooked last night's meal) onto my plate and bowl, and then moved the ash around with my hand until it had wiped away the oil residue. Then, I washed my plate in the communal sinks. There are five sinks. The first is to rinse off the ash or dirt, and that is the only one with running water. The second is also for cleaning off the dirt, and you just kind of dip your dish into the sitting water. The third is soapy, and the fourth and fifth are for cleaning off the soap. All the "grey water" from the sinks is later used to water the plants on the campus here. It's part of the "eco-san" system that I'll describe later.

I brought my plate into the staff room, where I've been teaching English classes. It's a small room with a round table and a blackboard made of plywood painted black. I basically make my own teaching schedule, and I leave the first period free so I don't have to rush breakfast and can plan my lessons. So, from 8 till 9:30, I made some notes for the day's lessons, studied a bit of Gujarati, and zoned out a little. There was a 15 minute break at 9:30, and at 9:45 I started the advanced English class for the 5 best students from the computer course and the photography/videography course. I enjoy that class, because the students are enthusiastic and have a relatively high English ability. I taught for the full 90 minutes until the next break at 11:15. The staff then came in (it is the staff room, remember) and had tea. Everyone is always curious to see what's on the board.

From just before noon until 1, I had my first class with the police traning course students. That course is made up of 8 boys and 1 girl, all of whom are about 20 years old, give or take a few years. The instructor is a great guy who speaks English pretty well, had a graduate degree in something or other, and generally impresses me. The students are friendly, and remind me a bit of the sports course students I taught at one of my high schools in Japan, though of course they're older and more mature. But they are similar in that they are not shy at all, and have good senses of humor. One of them makes me call him Rocky, another goes by John Cena (who apparantly is a WWF star), and another goes out of his way to talk to me around campus.

Anyway, I did my self-introduction lesson (well-honed from two years in Japan), and had the students write introductions for themselves. The lunch bell rang just as we were finishing going over "classroom English" (with sentences like "Could you say that again please?" and "Please wait just a minute").

I grabbed my plate, and went over to the dining hall, again waiting until the lines had shortened before getting up. Lunch today was some kind of vegetable sauce thing and rotli, which is the Gujarati word for chapati, which is the Hindi word for what is basically a tortilla. It was a little spicy, and not the best meal I've had here. At the table, a few teachers asked me about the staff English class I was to teach in the afternoon, and I reminded them that today was for advanced English, Tuesday for medium, and Wednesday for basic. They seemed excited to come, and practiced by saying things like, "You want onion? Take onion! Food tasty, na? I am English!"

After lunch I taught the lower level students--about 12 of them--from the computer course. It actually went really poorly, despite the fact that previous classes had gone well. I think I was pushing them a bit too hard. It's hard to make classes when all the resources you have are a blackboard, some chalk, and a dictionary, but I should have made a greater effort to keep the lessons fun instead of overly focused on grammar. After the class finished (I ended it after only 45 minutes, because everyone looked out of it), I scribbled some ideas for English games to keep things interesting for them.

I used the next period to study Gujarati and make some additional notes for the staff class. At 5 (the end of classes for the students) I joined the students and staff in a snack of tea and little fried dough nuggets, and then went back to the staff room. Some of the teachers with the highest level of English didn't show up, so I ended up doing a class at a slightly lower level than I had planned, but it still went fine. I introduced myself for a while, and then had the teachers and staff write their own introductions. It went pretty well, and I felt good about it. Class ended at 6:30 (only an hour).

7 pm is "prayer" time. They use the word loosely, and what happens from 7 to 7:30 is not what I think of when somebody says the word prayer, but in any case it's pretty cool. Usually, it is lead by the guy who runs the organization, a really charismatic, intelligent man of about fifty who is basically awesome personified. But today he had to leave early for some other engagement (his presence is in high demand for all kinds of events, both within India and abroad...a few weeks ago he was in Switzerland for some human rights conference), so prayer was lead by a much younger staff member. Regardless, it followed the same structure of all the sessions. Everyone sat down on the floor of the prayer hall--the girls on the left, the boys in the right, lined up in neat rows. It began with a 5 minute silent meditation, following which one boy and one girl read something illustrating the theme of the day, and then the staff member leading the prayer lectured about the topic for about 15 minutes. At the end, as per usual, there was a song, this time lead beautifully by a female student and sung in the traditional Gujarati folk style. How can I describe it? I can't. Sorry.

After prayer was dinner at 7:30 (a rice-thing with spicy sauce), and now here I am in my room, typing away. The students have diary/reflection time in the prayer hall from 9 to 9:30, and I'm supposed to be there too, but I thought it was more important to finally write something in this blog.

I will definitely post more stuff and fill in some of the many holes I've left here. I'll try to write in this thing at least once a week, at least for the next few weeks. There's been so much that's been worth writing that I sometimes feel at a loss of where to even start, because if I want to get it all down I'd have to just summarize, which wouldn't do it justice. Feel free to email me any time you want. Take care!

My first blog post...ever

2007-09-09T20:27:00.000-07:00

This is just a test. I'm sitting in an internet cafe/convenience store about a fifteen minute walk from our hostel in Mussoorie (sp?), India. I have to head back up soon to study a bit before Hindi class begins at 11:20. More posts to come!