More Adventures to Come!

This semester has been very busy for me with extracurriculars, so I didn't really get down to looking for a job until quite recently. It was a slightly worrisome situation, and the lady at the career center lectured me about not having enough focus, and I was freaking out a little bit about what I was going to do with my life after I graduated. It was a silly time. That was Monday afternoon. Then, on Tuesday, I went to check my mail between classes. I got rid of the pizza coupons and the junk mail, and noticed that I had a largeish and fairly fat envelope from somewhere called Institute for International Education. It looked kind of important, so I held onto it, but I didn't bother to open it until I had gone through the rest of my mail. I was outside of Wilson Commons, opening the envelope as I walked, and then I scanned over the letter inside and practically shrieked because it was a notice saying that I got accepted for a Fulbright grant to teach English in Taiwan! Needless to say, there were a lot of people I needed to call and tell, although I still had to get to class in 10 minutes. Although my original intention was to get some lunch in Wilson Commons and take it to class, I was so excited that I didn't even think I could really eat anymore. I got a little snack and literally skipped to my class, which incidentally was with a professor who wrote one of my Fulbright recommendations! I've been kind of keeping it on the down low with other students, because I don't know the status of my other friends who applied for Fulbrights and I don't want to make them feel awkward, but it's slowly getting out.

Silly Fulbright sent all of the important info to my home address instead of my campus one, but my mom is sending it to me ASAP, so I'm really excited to find out all the details. I know that the program starts on August 1st (I guess I still have to get a summer job...boo), and that my placement is in Kaohsiung city in the south end of Taiwan. I'll be there until the following June, so if you were just waiting for an excuse to go to Taiwan, this is it! More details shall be forthcoming...at the pace they come forth to me, I guess. Hooray!!!

The End of India

The long-anticipated follow-up...sorry it's taken so long:

The last night of my stay at the home was our talent show, and it was pretty excellent. We had two age categories, and a monetary prize of 100 rupees for each category (a little over two dollars, which is a pretty significant sum to the girls...the oldest girls get an allowance of 30 rupees/month), plus everyone who participated got a little chocolate bar. It was way fancy. There were an amazing amount of different talents displayed: singing, dancing, styling hair, cooking, acting, etc. Anjali and Sahina (7 and 6) sang "You Are My Sunshine" and thereby won first prize in the younger age bracket hands down with an immeasurable amount of cuteness. There were a few sore losers, but the aftermath was generally lighthearted, culminating in a huge spontaneous dance party, since we had gotten the speakers all set up for the show. Everybody danced, although the visiting Yale volunteers took a little persuasion. It was a marvelous way to spend my last night.

We left for Goa early the next morning. We had heard that there was a bus that went straight to the Nizamuddin railway station in Delhi, so we went to the bus stop and just asked every bus that stopped if they went there. It was way easier traveling into Delhi with my duffel bag than it had been the other day when I had taken my big rolling suitcase into the city to drop off at the Udayan Care office. Fun fact: there was a monkey in the railway station. It didn't belong to anyone, it was just a monkey. Welcome to India.

The train ride to Goa was 30 hours, which sounds awful but actually it was awesome and amazingly relaxing. I had a ticket for a middle bunk, but I traded it for an upper bunk, and promptly got into my bunk and passed out. We were so tired that we were happy to spend the entire trip horizontal. Eating sitting up was a little awkward, but we were sleeping almost the entire time so it was okay. The meals were complimentary and frequent, although I learned after the first one to always take the vegetarian option because the meat is a little bit sketchy.
I was bracing myself for some sketchy train bathrooms, but they were actually pretty nice (there was soap! it ran out halfway, but whatever, it was there in the first place) although they possessed the charming feature of Indian trains in that they were mainly holes emptying out onto the tracks. Nice.

We could tell we were arriving in Goa because when we looked out the door between cars, it was all palm trees and other green leafy things. We arrived in Margaon, which is in central Goa, so we had to take another bus to get to the beach. Before we left, Elysia and I had formulated the following game plan for our arrival in Goa: bum around on the beach and see if there was anywhere that looked like a good place to stay, then stay there. The only downside was that since we went straight to the beach upon our arrival, we were still carrying our bags
in the most obviously touristy fashion possible, so we were set upon mercilessly by people trying to sell us things. This eased up after we had found a guest house and weren't looking quite so newly-arrived. The guest house was a little damp and mildewy because of the monsoon, but they brought us a coconut with a straw stuck in it! Who can complain about that? One other really nice thing about the guest house where we stayed in Calangute is that there was a little restaurant place on the beach in front of it which had chaise lounges. We were super wary at first, and asked several times to make sure that they wouldn't charge us for lying on the chaise lounges, but not only was it free, the restaurant guys also shooed off any sketchy men who looked like they might be loitering to stare at the white girls in bathing suits. It was marvelous. So for two days we lay on lounge chairs on the beach reading our books while being waited on by nice little Indian men who chased off creeps and brought us cold beverages and dried off our chairs with towels after any spurt of monsoon rain. If that doesn't sound fabulous already, keep in mind that since it is the off-season, we got our room for about a third of the peak season price, something along the lines of two American dollars per night.
Although our personal beach featured our friends who ran off the sketchy men, the rest of the beaches did not. At one point we were being tailed by some guys, at which point Elysia and I pretended to stop for a while so they would be forced to walk past us to keep up their act. They stopped soon after, and waited for us to keep walking so they could keep following us. At this point, we suddenly acquired a friend: a random beach dog (these are not so uncommon) decided to walk along with us. At first I was not entirely comfortable with this; what if the dog had rabies or tried to bite us or something? But then the dog proved its friendly intentions by getting between us and the sketchy guys and keeping them away. They kept following us until I finally broke down and told them off in a loud and angry fashion, but the dog stayed. We walked several miles, all the way up to the end of the beach, and the dog stayed with us. The next morning we went back to that area of beach to get breakfast at a certain restaurant, and once again the dog showed up to walk with us. We were leaving Calangute right after breakfast, and we saved our canine friend some bacon for a parting gift, but by the time we were finished with breakfast, he was gone. It was a little bit sad, but Elysia and I reasoned that he had been called off to go guard some other foreigners.
We spent the better part of the afternoon riding buses, but finally we arrived in Palolem, a little fishing village in the southern tip of Goa which Elysia had deemed from comments on the Internet to be the best vacation spot in Goa. Important fact about Palolem: it is full of hippies. While Calangute is more of a tourist spot (according to our travel guide), it is more popular with Indian tourists in the peak season. Palolem was populated with hippie Westerners, even in the off season. It was strange, after spending so long in India, to see so many white faces in one place. It sounds racist to say that I was glad to see so many white people. However, really it was just relaxing to feel for once like I could blend in after enduring so much stress during my stay due to my nationality and the color of my skin.
In retrospect, both Elysia and I agreed that we wouldn't have minded just going to Palolem for an entire week, even if it meant seeing less of Goa. The beach there was insanely beautiful, and not just that, either. Unlike any beach you've been to, this one featured cows!















I really wasn't kidding when I said that cows are everywhere in India. The beach is no exception.
Besides the gorgeous beach and the cows, Palolem also had a number of nice little restaurants and guest house where, since it was the off season, we bargained down our nightly rate to 125 rupees, which is a little more than a dollar per person per night. There is no way I could have afforded this kind of vacation anywhere else, but India, although flawed in many other areas, has prices that pretty much can't be beat. We spent the rest of our week there, strolling on the beach and reading during the day, in the evening relaxing at some restaurant with good food and drink. Goa is famous for seafood - what you saw the fishermen catch in the morning was your dinner at night. So good! We developed a habit of ordering drinks to fill the space before our dinner came, which resulted in a couple nights of slightly tipsy girl-bonding. (important lesson: alcohol+sunburn=double dehydration. watch out) We had made friends with some cute boys who we met at the bus station after arriving in Goa and then ran into again in Palolem, and we were staying in the same guest house as them, but we never ended up looking for them to hang out in the evenings because we were having too much fun ourselves to be bothered!
Although there were many Westerners in Palolem, it seems that the locals were still not quite adjusted to them. The tourists on the beach were all white, and all wearing Western-style bathing suits, so we felt pretty comfortable in our bikinis. However, one day towards the end of our stay, one of my sandals broke, so we hustled back to the guest house without bothering to put anything over our bathing suits. The guest house was just steps away from the beach, so it didn't seem like a big deal; however, we had only gotten maybe 25 feet before some local men started hassling us, yelling out "how much?" and then when we didn't answer, "twenty dollars?" Fortunately I didn't hear their words at the time (Elysia informed me a few seconds later), because at this point in my stay in India I was completely fed up with the disrespect that Indian men showed to Western women, and if I had heard it at that exact time, I was ready to physically attack the men and kick them where they'd regret their words the most. But we were too far away when I realized what had happened, so instead I just thought angry thoughts back in our room and plotted the deeds of violence I would do to the next man who so insulted me. It's funny to think that I was so riled up, but the constant disrespect I felt towards white women had just accumulated to the point where I couldn't take it anymore. I was so ready to leave and get back to a country where I wouldn't be judged so much by my race.
On the day that I left Goa, I tried to call my airline to check if my flight was on time so I could let my boss back in Delhi know when I was going to be arriving to pick up the rest of my luggage from the office. I found a pay phone at a travel agency, but every number I called was incredibly unhelpful. I called the airline, but then they tried to tell me that I should call some other number. When I called the other number, nobody picked up. I realized that the first number was the person I was actually looking for, but when I called them back, they just pretended not to hear what I was saying and then hung up on me. At this point, I had had enough adventures abroad. All I wanted was to go home, and the person on the line who could give me the information to send me on my way was being actively unhelpful. I felt so frustrated and defeated that I just sat next to the pay phone and started to cry. While I sat there in the travel agency feeling miserable, the man behind the desk noticed my unhappiness and asked what was the matter. I showed him the printout of the receipt for my plane ticket, and using his magical travel agent powers, he just went online and found out that the plane was on time. Although I had countless negative encounters with sketchy and disrespectful Indian men, the kindness of the travel agent redeemed my faith in humanity a little and reminded me that I couldn't make a complete generalization.
From the time I left Palolem, it took me about 40 hours to get back home. First I took a bus to Canacona, a slightly larger town in Goa with more buses running to Margaon, where I had to catch the shuttle to the Goa airport. On the third bus, I saw the airport out of the window, but the bus didn't stop. I thought that maybe it would drop us off somewhere else near the airport, but after it kept going for a while I realized that perhaps I had been misled to believe that it was just a shuttle to the airport. The next time anybody called for a stop, I grabbed my suitcase, got off the bus, and started trekking back in the direction of the airport. I must have walked a couple of miles with my suitcase, ignoring the stream of whistles and catcalls from passing cars at the strange sight of a white girl walking down the road with a suitcase. I made it to the airport in plenty of time, however, and waited wearily for my flight. After getting into Delhi, I took a prepaid cab from the airport to the Udayan Care office where my luggage awaited. The airport cabs are supposed to be outbound only, but I bribed my cabbie to take me back to the airport, and to the international terminal this time. I had left Palolem around 1 pm, and it was now the middle of the night. I changed my clothes in the Delhi airport and packed up my stuff for the flight. My flight left after 3 in the morning, so I waited several hours in Indira Gandhi airport, which I must say is the most awful airport I have ever experienced. It was hot and crowded and I never quite felt safe. I was glad to get on the plane, and even more incredibly relieved to arrive in Helsinki for my 5-hour layover. Although I wasn't home yet, getting to Finland was almost as good as being back in the U.S. Everybody was so friendly, nobody stared at me for being white, and there was very delicious chocolate for sale. I spent the remainder of the euros I had changed on the way over on chocolate, and curled up on a couple of airport chairs to sleep. My plan was to only sleep while it was nighttime in New Jersey in order to fight jet lag in advance. It didn't work very much, but it was worth a shot. Anyway, my experience in Helsinki was extremely positive, and I would definitely consider going back to Finland simply based on my experience in the Helsinki airport.
Another 7 hours or so, and I was coming in to JFK. I looked out the window at Long Island as we came in, concentrating to see streets and houses and cars as the plane got lower and lower. I waved to Pu Danni, even though I don't really know precisely where on Long Island he lives. Close enough. There was a long line to get back through customs in New York, and then more time spent waiting for my parents to come pick me up. I was worried that I was waiting in the wrong place, because they weren't there when I arrived, like I had expected. After some time waiting in the airport, I went outside to where the cars pull up, and soon enough a familiar van came along. I was surprised to see that even Josh was there to pick me up from the airport instead of back at his house in Baltimore! The westbound traffic out of JFK was kind of gross (it was rush hour, so what do you expect), but after 2 hours or so we finally got back home. It was a long, 40-hour trip from Palolem to my house, but it was so, so good to be home.

Hangry

Raphaelle occasionally mixes words up a little when she speaks English, particularly "angry" and "hungry." However, this is really rather appropriate, as we find that the two feelings often occur in conjunction with one another. For instance, yesterday we had 6 students from Yale visiting the home, and at dinner they had their own table with a plate of fresh tomatoes and onions. Neither the children, the caregivers, or the other volunteers were given fresh vegetables. Ironically, the visitors didn't even want to eat the tomatoes, as most of them had only been in India for a few days and they still had the traveler's fear of raw fruit and vegetables instilled in them. We normal volunteers, on the other hand, have enough experience to know that it's probably not as bad for you to risk sickness from eating raw vegetables as it is to not have them at all, and when we saw that the Yale students had tomatoes and weren't even appreciating them, we felt a little bit hangry. Elysia and Raphaelle sat at the table and stewed for a bit about the unfairness of the situation, but I took some action about it in the form of going over and asking "hey, aren't you gonna eat those tomatoes?" Upon receiving their permission, I took a few tomato slices, after which Elysia, realizing that the tomatoes were remaining completely unclaimed by the Yale volunteers, went over and politely absconded with the whole plate. We who had felt so deprived reveled in our newly won fresh vegetables. My improvised wrap of chappati and beans was dramatically enhanced by a few tomatoes. Elysia ate whole slices with reckless abandon, caveman style, like she would never have another chance to eat tomatoes again. We felt slighly foolish and still rather annoyed but at least temporarily triumphant, and the hanger dissipated, at least until the next inevitable slight in our continuing line of kitchen-related conflicts of stinginess...

Other things you should know

I've decided to take a trip to Goa for a couple days with Elysia at the end of my trip, so my time in Delhi is rapidly coming to a close. The weeks go by soooo fast here. I figured I should add any other pertinent information about India now in case I don't get another chance to post while I'm here. For one thing, you may have known this, but they don't use toilet paper in India. Instead they use water and the left hand. This is one of those things that I try not to dwell on, especially in conjunction with the thought of all the small children I encounter on a daily basis, whose washing abilities sometimes leave a bit to be desired. Also, Indians don't nod when they mean yes; instead they waggle their heads to the side. At first this is confusing, because the same gesture would indicate ambivalence in the West, but you catch onto it slowly. Also, people tug on their ears when they are saying sorry, which is a reference to the way that people are physically reprimanded by being pulled by the ear. By pulling your own ears, you are demonstrating penitence by enacting the punishment on yourself.
One of the things that really strikes me about India is that it's actually pretty close to how I would imagine it in my mental stereotype. The women really do wear saris on a daily basis, many men wear the traditional skirt-like dhoti, and there genuinely are cows and wild dogs and monkeys and elephants roaming around in the street (the elephants less so, but still). Rickshaws are a common mode of transportation, although there are a lot more motorcycles than one might think. The one thing that's different is that I don't go around eating chicken tikka masala and naan every day...that kind of stuff is more of restaurant food. Probably I can eat some in Goa. Eating meat, what's that about?
My big project for the end of my stay is the talent show that we're organizing for the girls. They've submitted so many different kinds of talents to perform; it ought to be a good time. Raphaelle, Elysia and I plan to open the show with a combination act where Raphaelle twirls juggling balls, Elysia drums on her stomach, and I play the nose flute. Yeahhhhh. I'll see if I can get in a few more workshops/activities with the girls in the mean time. Curiously, there is actually a group from Yale at the home at the moment. They are only in India for 9 days, and they are also taking trips to Jaipur and Agra, so they're only actually at our home for like 2 and a half days. We incumbent volunteers have been questioning the point of coming to volunteer for such a brief time, and it's a little annoying that the organization is bending over backwards to do special things for the Yale group while trying to make us change our plans around it. Whatever, the Yale kids themselves are very nice, so I bear no grudge. I'm just happy to spend my last week of time with the girls and get lots of good things done and then have some sweet times in Goa with Elysia, living in huts on the beach and drinking fruity things out of coconuts and whatnot. It should be some super relaxing time, although any potential relaxation will probably be canceled out by the fact that I'm flying back from Goa to Delhi, then chilling in the airport for 6 hours until my 3 am flight from Delhi to Helsinki, where I have another 6 hour layover before my flight home...33 hours straight of travel, in total. I might be a little crabby coming out of that, so be prepared. Also be forewarned that I am probably not bringing anybody presents because goodness knows I already spent too much money in China. Whatevs, it will be nice for me just to be home.

Monsoons and Meetings

So the monsoon, after taking its sweet time getting here, has finally arrived, and its a little bit messy. It's nice because the rain cools things down, but there are problems with flooding in a lot of areas, and we got positively soaked coming in to Delhi today for the Mentor Mothers meeting. The Mentor Mothers work with the children in all the homes, and we get together to discuss all sorts of things, but today the big issue that was weighing on the minds of the three of us didis was the behavior of the permanent authority figures in our home. We try to encourage good health and hygiene, but the head Aunty refused to acknowledge or deal with the dead rat in the kitchen when we pointed it out. We try to work with the girls to solve their problems in a peaceful and constructive fashion, but Uncle advocates slapping the girls when they are disrespectful, and worse, the Aunties beat the girls for wetting the bed (which is a problem for some of the older girls as well). It's not like they're wetting the bed on purpose; surely it's a result of all of the emotional trauma they've been through, and beating them is only going to traumatize them more, in addition to the original humiliation of wetting the bed. We can't communicate much with the Aunties, who speak next to no English, and they ignore our input anyway. I think that since they are in the home all day, they can get very controlling over their small domestic domain, and view us as intruders. Uncle is easier to communicate with, but he is still a firm believer in corporal punishment. Fortunately, today at our meeting we were able to communicate our concerns to Dr. Modi, who is the head of the organization, and she is totally receptive to our input and really awesome, and she got right on the phone and gave Uncle the what-for. She is planning to have more workshops to train the caregivers and everyone who works in the homes in proper conduct (although they already had some where they were all taught not to beat the children, and look how much that helped). It's kind of frustrating to be a only a short-term volunteer in this kind of situation, but hopefully the organization can derive some permanent benefits from the concerns that we've raised. Next on the list: attempting to organize a talent show for the girls! Should be a good time.

The Girls

I don't have much time to write because I'm just biding my time in the Internet cafe waiting for Raphaelle and Elysia to come back from the railroad ticket office, but I haven't even gotten to the most important and most interesting part of my experience here, which is the girls in the home. We've been reading some of their files lately, and their backgrounds are really unbelievable. One girl's father poisoned her mother so he could marry another woman, then abandoned the child, who was taken in by a woman in her village who basically kept her as a little household slave and wouldn't let her go to school. On a trip to Delhi, the woman abandoned the child in a railway station, where she was picked up by the police and transferred to the guardianship of Udayan Care. That was a year ago. Now, she is 10 and in the first grade at school (having no previous education), and is a bold and charismatic girl who reminds me of nobody more than Sophie Mitchell, for you Pattenburgers. It's amazing for us to see how resilient some of these girls are, considering all that they've gone through. Many of them are not technically orphans, but have parents who are incapable of taking care of them, like the three small sisters whose mother is terminally ill and whose father is serving a life sentence in jail. Others ran away or were taken by the police from abusive homes. With all of the traumas they have been through, most of the girls have turned out to be absolutely lovely people. One one hand, they are terribly unfortunate in that they lack the love and care of a mother and father, but on the other hand they are amazingly lucky to have landed in Udayan Care, which provides them with education, counseling, and health care superior to that which probably 99.9% of other Indian children receive. The amazing second chance that Udayan Care provides for these children only makes it more painful when we see some of them fall through the cracks, wasting second and third and fourth and tenth chances, the opportunities of a lifetime, by rebelling against the discipline of the home, refusing to go to school, skipping class to meet boys, etc. It's frustrating because, as short-term volunteers, we don't have enough time to really get to know the girls, understand them, and gain their trust so we can hope to nudge them back on the right track

A Day in the Life of a Didi

This is what it is like: I wake up before 8 basically every day because the sun shines in my window. I go downstairs and catch the tail end of breakfast while the girls go off to school (the last ones leave at 8ish). Breakfast is some random starch...often chole (a fried flat bread thing), but we've also had vaguely toasted white bread and some kind of chopped up thin noodle thing on occasion. Once there was egg; that was exciting. The girls pack a snack to take to school, maybe another piece of chole and some potatoes. While the girls are at school, we three volunteers (me, Elysia, and Raphaelle, who I am going to refer to henceforth as "the didis") have some tea, take showers, run errands, wash our clothes, and plan things to do with the girls. A few girls won't go to school, but they are not allowed to leave the premises, and we honestly have no idea what they do with themselves all day. The rest of the girls get home around 2 or 3, change out of their school uniforms, and have lunch. Lunch is rice, chappati (a toasted flatbread), dal (lentil stuff), and something else, maybe a vegetable or some yogurt-based soupy thing. After lunch, we help the girls with their homework for a couple hours, then play with them or hang out with them or whatever. Sometimes we take the younger girls to a nearby park, but often it is too hot to play outside much. At maybe 6 or so we have a snack, probably milk and this hard sweetish bread thing that the girls dip in the milk to make it soft, although I think there were mangoes once, but I didn't pay much attention because that was the time when Asmani had gotten hit above the eye with a cricket bat and we had to send her to the hospital to get stitches. There is a little more down time until dinner, which is at 8 something, and generally consists of chappati and maybe a little something left over from lunch. Ponder for a moment the starch-overload of a dinner we had the other night: a mushy mixture of rice and potatoes, eaten with an aloo paratha (flat potato pancake-thing). We don't have meat, as most of the girls are Hindu and many are vegetarian; and some of them don't even eat eggs, so we don't have those much. Yesterday at lunch we had a thing that looked excitingly like chicken, but it turned out to be made of cornmeal or something. Oh well.
After dinner the girls gather their school uniforms off the clothesline and iron them for the next day. Even the littlest girls do their own ironing, as well as washing their own dishes. The girls also are in charge of cleaning their own rooms, cooking dinner, and cleaning up in the kitchen. On one hand, they are remarkably responsible, although on the other hand, I'm a little dubious as to how clean the dishes get when a 4-year-old is washing them, especially because we don't have hot water. It's a wonder the girls are in such good health, considering the potential for disease spreading in a 42-girl home, as well as their rather unbalanced diet.
The girls are all responsible for putting themselves to bed, and although they don't have any enforced bedtime that I'm aware of, they go to sleep at pretty reasonable times anyway because they get tired. The really little ones can barely manage to stay awake for dinner. Last night the littlest one was outside the kitchen crying, so I brought her in and sat her on my lap to have dinner, and she conked out completely before I could get her to eat anything. I had a short adventure trying to eat completely one-handedly while my other arm held a sleeping 4-year-old, and then I put her to bed. It's good that the girls are trained to be so independent in taking care of themselves, but the little ones aren't completely up to it sometimes, and the "aunties" who are the permanent caregivers in the home honestly aren't motherly at all, they just discipline and oversee operations. The other night the little one wet her bed, and while Raphaelle was trying to talk to her about it, an Aunty came in and slapped the little girl in the head and then didn't wash her sheets that day either. Discipline is one thing, but being so harsh with such small children really can't be particularly good for them or even particularly effective, I shouldn't think. The little girl has enough trouble in her life as it is.