Anybody out there? It’s been a while, I know. Here’s some eye-candy from a local newspaper here in India to get back in the game:
Back in Jaipur, and it feels so good. Something I’m noticing: after a month of the Indian life, my little world is starting to feel very comfortable. I know the way to school and I can blurt enough Hindi phrases to get by (or least get chuckled at) in the bazaar. I’m finally at a level of familiarity with my host mama and papa that we can crack jokes and make chai and chapati together (I’m still pretty ineffective in the kitchen, but improving). Maybe most notably, I’m quite a pro at the bucket shower method now. Booyah. But at the same time, just a week of travel outside of my comfy home base has made it quite clear that I’ll always be a little bit too strange to ever call myself a local.
Brief update: over the past week, the SIT crew and I completed the first of two excursions to places and organizations outside of Jaipur that illustrate issues of sustainable development (the theme of the program). Here’s a brief travelogue of the adventure.
We began the adventure with a 12-hour train ride. “You will love the sleeper car, no? Gossip all night!” my host papa said to me before I left. True enough. What I didn’t know at the time was that the all-night gossip he was referring to is more out of necessity to keep oneself entertained when sleep isn’t really an option. Let me tell you something about Indian trains, reader. They jostle and they smell and they make loud noise. There is unidentifiable (or all-too-identifiable) schmutz on all the sheets and pillowcases. If you have to pee, you better do it while the train’s in motion or it’ll splash right through the eastern-style hole and onto the tracks at the station. One girl, luckily (?), didn’t follow this advice, and was able to retrieve her shoe after she slipped on the wet bathroom floor, got her leg stuck in the toilet hole, and in the process of trying to un-jam it dropped her shoe right under the train. There’s a story for the grandkids. This atmosphere ended up being great fun, especially when the chai man came blundering through the compartment every ten-ish minutes selling that sweet sweet nectar.
Tired and haggard, we found ourselves at an organic farm called Navdanya the very next day. Navdanya is a pretty cool place, and I’ll tell you why. It all started in the late 80s when this impressive lady named Vandana Shiva conceived of a workable and way better alternative to the erstwhile current state of Indian agriculture. The “Green Revolution” (the government’s attempt to eradicate hunger with new fangled high-yield monocultures and chemical fertilizers/pesticides) was wreaking havoc on the soil, the watertables, and small farmers’ pockets. Apparently there’s a bit of a correlation between cash-crop agriculture and farmer suicide. Yikes. Anyway, Ms. Shiva comes in with this genius idea of growing indigenous crops in conjunction with livestock, and doing it without chemicals. FUN FACT: did you know the leaves of an onion tree are a natural pesticide? OR that with just a delicious-looking slurry of cow poop and urine plus a few thousand worms you can turn old weeds and dirt into ultra-fertile soil?! How about that farming by organic methods is not only ridiculously cheaper than chemical methods, it also produces way more crop per hectare! This is the kind of thing Navdanya works to teach small farmers in 17 total Indian states in an effort to improve their livelihood, the environment and the viability of India as a nation of farmers (around 60% of the population still farms) all at the same time.
The weird thing about Navdanya: save a group that was staying there from Lahore, the crew of interns that were staying there were exclusively from the western world. Looking around in the mess hall during dinner, it could have been a spontaneous gathering of fresh Whitman grads. For being smack dab in the middle of the Indian sub-continent, I felt like I could pretend for a second that I wasn’t in India at all. But then I took a bite of a spicy pickled lemon and remembered again pretty fast.
Having accumulated an adequate amount of cow poop under our nails, we moved on from rural agriculture to rural empowerment. Rural Litigation and Empowerment Kendra (RLEK) is an NGO headquartered in Dehradun, Uttarkhand that specializes in getting adults from secluded villages, those from marginalized castes and women, up to a level of functional literacy. Even if the adult’s education isn’t stellar by the end, one woman (a RLEK employee) we spoke with said that oftentimes the adult students are so affected by the value of education that they are adamant about giving their children an even better one. And thus, a beautiful little chain effect emerges. RLEK took us to see a semi-nomadic, Muslim village where they had set up a school for grades 1-8. Before the RLEK school, it was a many mile trek (judging from the bus ride in, the village road is as close to uphill both ways as I’ve ever seen) into town for any kind of education.
Going for a little cross-cultural interaction, we crashed a classroom sesh of 6-7 year olds and watched them shout the English alphabet/other Hindi songs for a while. A cuter sight I don’t think I’ve seen. However, when we tried to teach them the hokey pokey, they just weren’t feeling it. By the time my whole self was in, I felt so ridiculous that it took all I had to shake it all about. Likewise, when we made an attempt at a game of duck duck goose (or “aloo aloo gobhi,” if you will), a lot seemed to be lost in translation. It seems it takes more than good-natured goofiness to break the ice sometimes.
An interesting part of that visit: after lunch, we got the chance for a little Q & A with some women from the village. After telling us via a translator that they have no electricity, listen to the radio sometimes, marry when they’re around 16 (always to an arranged spouse), and take naps for fun, I felt a tad bit like we’d never have anything in common. Then one woman said her favorite part about the village was the green fields all around. Those were all I could look at since we’d arrived. She nailed it.
On to the yoga capital of the world! Rishikesh was our final destination, and I would venture to extend that statement to include many blond-dreaded wayward souls I encountered there as well. Rishikesh is quite a holy city, as the Ganges (or Ganga, if you don’t want to be constantly corrected) flows right through it on its way down from its beginnings at a glacier somewhere in the Himalayas. Everyday at 5:30 pm, men, women, and children descend the windy streets to the riverbank to wash, splish splash, and drink the healing/slightly pungent water. It’s also the place where The Beatles stayed while they wrote many songs on the White Album. Recipe for instant spiritual enlightenment! That’s the thing I didn’t understand about Rishikesh, or rather, what I didn’t understand about the overwhelming presence of wayward western souls in Rishikesh. You can do all the yoga, feed all the monkeys*, and watch all the prayer ceremonies you want, but I have a hunch that no long-lasting revelations come from forcing upon yourself holy stereotypes or expectations. Usually, I think personal revelations are hiding right under your nose, wherever you are. Maybe in the green mustard fields of your village, for example.
All in all, the week went unbelievably quickly, and before I knew it the train was pulling into the Jaipur station at 4 am. As I was walking home in the crisp morning light, bags slung over my shoulder, I probably looked a little wayward myself. But it was the most at home in India I’ve felt thus far. I’ll never be a real cog in the machine of Indian agriculture, have a lasting influence on rural school kids after a day of failed hokey pokey attempts, or find ultimate truth in one of the holiest cities in the country. My foreignness is just too great. If anything, I just have a new appreciation for the undeniable comfort of a familiar place.
*But DON’T! Those little conniving assholes will get ya if you so much as make prolonged eye contact.
