seven days in bhopal..

okay, so i haven't written in almost a month... andrea is here. we are having lots of fun together, combined with lots of work. mel and her friend nava arrived almost a week ago, so there are lots of familiar faces around these days.

i'm spending most of my time these days frantically switching between trying to complete the million projects i have on the go here and trying to book flights over the internet (apparently an impossible feat). i won't bore you with the details of all of my projects, suffice to say that they are many, and time is running short.

i'm having seriously mixed feelings about leaving bhopal. despite all my moaning and groaning about everything here, somewhere along the way it has become home. i'm a little nervous to be going home after so long... i'll be one of those obnoxious people in the supermarket who complains to the pimply-faced teen-aged cashier that everything is too expensive; as if they can do anything about it.

also, there is a padiyatra starting only a few days after i leave bhopal, and i can't help but feel that i am missing out on an amazing experience by not going. the padiyatra (sp?) is a march that the bhopalis are doing, where they WALK to delhi from bhopal (some 900km if i'm not mistaken) and camp out in this pre-designated demonstration area (only in india) until their demands are met. they did it a couple of years ago, and apparently it took them a month to complete the walk. this time they're going for the bigger, better, louder, flashier version, and there are something like 150 people going. le sigh... unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) i've already booked my tickets out of here with andrea. if i hadn't i might have gotten sucked into the bhopal spiral of campaign-y-ness indefinitely.

in other news, you'll never guess what finally arrived: yeah, that would be the forty-odd rolls of film that was donated by kids with cameras (the org that was set up by the "born into brothels" filmmakers). the package arrived in montreal the day after i left for bhopal, and arrived in bhopal almost five months to the date that dan sent it here... can you believe that!?!? however, it inspired me to go ahead and start the photo project! hahaha! yeah, i know that i only had twn days left in bhopal when i did it, but whatever. mel and nava are interested in continuing it for a bit after i leave, and tarunima was enthusiastic about doing the translation. in short: it all fell together in a kind of divine way. rashida bee from chingari trust happened to be at sambhavna the day the film arrived, so we told her what we wanted to do, and asked if chingari had some kids that might be interested. we went over two days later, and they had already picked out some kids! all of the kids that are registered with them are disabled either physically or mentally or a combination of both, so i think that it is going to be a bit of a challenge just getting the kids to use the cameras. i kind of don't care whether the photos can be used in any sort of campaign way though, i think that at this point, its more just so that the kids get to do something fun and special that they may never have otherwise had the option to do... anyway, there was something kind of poetic about the timing of it all in the end... we've spent the past two afternoons going around to the kids houses to do individual lessons with the kids. its been intense and really awesome. i've never drank so much friggin' chai in my life.

so yeah, you can see why its getting harder and hrder for me to want to leave here, but my time is up and i have to go. if i don't do the travel that i've planned after this i think that i will regret it for the rest of my life. i may never have the chance to go see some of these places ever again. to placate my guilt over not staying in bhopal longer, i have decided to re-dedicate myself to hindi lessons when i get settled in toronto, and try to achieve some sort of fluency over the next couple of years. i want to save up enough money that i can come back for a few months around the 25th anniversary of the disaster in 2009.

anyway, i think that's about all the news that's fit to print for the time being... my apologies for not updating more often... there simply aren't enough hours in the day lately...

andrea arrives

Yay!! Andrea is finally here! It is so nice to see a familiar face after all of these months (aside from mom and dad’s trip of course!). Andrea arrived in Delhi on the 11th, and then braved the train to Bhopal overnight, arriving early in the morning on the 12th. She brought me really awesome Korean clothes and a bag, as well as a fairly large supply of delicious chocolate from Amsterdam… mmmmm. Its so weird that I haven’t seen Andrea in over a year, and here I am seeing her in Bhopal. Anyway, we spent the entire first morning that she was here planning our travels around India, which I was dying to do (surprise, surprise)! So, our route will be Bhopal – Varanasi – Agra – Delhi – McLeodganj – Delhi – Goa – Mumbai. And all within about two weeks!

From Mumbai Andrea has to go back to Delhi to catch her flight back to Korea. I think that I will stay another day or two in Mumbai before I go to Thailand. I haven’t quite decided where I’m going in Southeast Asia yet, but I think that I’m pretty definite about starting in Chiang Mai, then to Bangkok, and then somewhere in the south or a bit of beach time. Then Cambodia, the Vietnam. That’s all I know so far. But I am SO excited to start traveling.

I have almost exactly a month left in Bhopal, and I feel like the sands are quickly falling through the hourglass. I still have to finish about a million things here, and unfortunately most of what I have left to do relies on other people quite a bit. I need Shweta to finish typing the menopause booklets so that I can paste the text into the photoshoped version; I need Dr. Kaur to go over he information about cervical cancer with me in order to make the posters; I need Aziza and Masurat to go over my puzzles with me to make sure that I have all of the symptoms and everything right. Anyway, you get the picture. It’s hard to track people down and get them to do these things too. Everyone here at the clinic has such busy schedules that it makes it hard to keep things moving. Anyway, I only hope that when my time finishes here I will have something to show for it other than a bunch of half-finished projects! Ak!

Eurig and Susan left last week, and it seemed like the end of an era in a way. Eurig was always really good at getting everyone together to enjoy a few illicit beers and have a chat or watch a movie. He was here for three months, too, so it was a little strange not to have him here with us after so long. We did manage to make a wonderfully bland dinner of mashed potatoes, peas and carrots, and scrambled eggs the Sunday before they left though. Unfortunately that was also the night when two new volunteers showed up at the clinic. There was, as usual, some confusion as to where everyone was supposed to be sleeping etc. so in the middle of my mashed potatoes I had t go and move all of my many possessions from the girls dorm room into one of the small rooms again. Not that I’m complaining, but I’ll be glad when I don’t fell like I have to help every new volunteer settle themselves into the clinic. Because I have been here the longest people look to me to sort out things like sheets, blankets pillows, instructions on how to use the laundry and how the canteen functions. I know that it is only for another month, so that is good, but sometimes it feels like I’ve repeated the same information about four hundred times.

Ankeeta has officially been replaced in the canteen. A new group of women started cooking breakfast and lunch yesterday. I have to admit that I like their food a bit better. It’s a little strange though, because I’m so used to Ankeeta’s cooking that it seems like “home cooking,” while the new food is like going to a restaurant or something. Anyway, the new group seems nice, so I hope that it all works out okay. Prabjit went over to see how Ankeeta was doing yesterday, but she had gone away overnight – probably to visit her brother or something. So I guess we’ll see. I worry a bit about her being able to find another source of income, since she is essentially the sole breadwinner for her family.

On this past Sunday Andre and two new volunteers, Judith and Nicole, and I went to the Museum of Man by the lake. It was absolutely gigantic and pretty cool. It took us an hour just to get to the main museum building, since they had all of these traditional types of homes built outside the main grounds. We also passed this giant fenced in area where we heard these pretty intimidating growls coming from. Te guard said that there was a tiger in there, but we never did find the part of the fence that you could see through, so we never did see the tiger. The Museum itself took us another hour or two just to get pat of the way through. When they say that they are making a museum about the history of man, they really mean it. The museum literally started with DNA strands and Cro-Magnon man or whatever. There was kind of a big jump between Cro-Magnon man and traditional Indian culture and civilization, but I got the general picture. They had huge displays of different traditional societies and all of the stuff that they had in them which was pretty cool.

The museum went on forever though, and after a while we wanted to move on. They had these museum employees that would NOT let you move in the opposite direction of the pre-determined path though, and every time we made for an exit someone would yell at us to get back on the path. Judith eventually explained that we were going to the gift shop, thank-you-very-much, and we managed to escape. The gift shop was cool though, and extremely reasonably-priced compared to most of the other places that sell touristy things. I got a really cool silk-screened piece of tribal art that I absolutely love!

Anyway, I don’t have much else to report at the moment. We watched Point Break (of Keanu Reeves fame) last night. I realized that I am much more desensitized to violence that everyone else. Most likely it’s the three-to-five day intensive periods of video-watching that happened at Grandma’s house a couple of times every year of my childhood. Annie had a knack for selecting the most brutally violent videos with minimal gore (because I couldn’t stomach the gore) which we would watch pretty much continuously for days at a time.

Oh yeah, and Photobucket seems to be allowing me to upload photos again (albeit at a snail’s pace), so you can check out photos from mom and dad’s vacation now…

new years maddness and walk-outs in the canteen

When I left off last time, I had just returned to Bhopal after the most miserable train ride of my life (or perhaps second-most miserable, next the nine-million-hour mountain climb train ride from hell in the Himalayas). Anyway, after Dharmesh and I made it back to the clinic, freezing cold and utterly exhausted. We all sat in the sunshine out on the big deck for a while, warming up. I spent most of the rest of the day getting unpacked and settled back into the dorm room.

Nothing much exciting happened over the next ay, until New Years Eve. Sathyu and Rachna had organized a bit of a New Year’s party, and had rented a house out in the country, about 12km from Bhopal. They rented two cars and drove all of the volunteers and a few of the clinic staff out there. We all sat around a big campfire (there was no furniture or electricity inside the house) and peeled mounds of garlic for dinner. Thai, the female panchkarma doctor came along with her two small kids and made us the most delicious curried chicken and veggies over the open fire for us. Then we all sat around the fire and sang songs and joked around. Then, for no reason at all, the electricity in the house turned on, at about ten minutes to midnight. Rachna had brought her laptop and a set of speakers, so we had some dancing in the living room right at midnight.

Now, the thing that struck me about the New Years’ celebration was the complete lack of restraint that all the men showed in drinking. I couldn’t help but think “no wonder drinking is considered socially inappropriate here!”. Most of the four 1L bottles of whiskey that they had brought with them within the first two hours of the evening, so by about 8pm, most of the men who had come were absolutely tanked, and by about 10pm there was no whiskey left. Anyway, I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg. Maybe men drink like that here because they have so little experience with social drinking, because it’s socially unacceptable. Or maybe it’s inappropriate because that’s the way men drink when they do drink. Either way, I couldn’t help but be shocked at the level of drunken-ness that ensued, and long before midnight too!

Anyway, the next day, New Year’s Day, I spent in the traditional manner – in bed. I talked to mom and dad and auntie Muntz and uncle Bri on Skype that evening. They sounded like they had had about the most boring New Year’s ever, since mom and dad were both quite sick with head colds and spent most of it in bed.

The past few days have been relatively uneventful. Although Prabjit did complain to me the other day that some of the guys at the New Year’s party had made videos of us girls dancing with their cell phones. Apparently Kamal, who works in the medicine dispensary, had shown the video to a whole bunch of people around the clinic, as if it was some sort of scandal. They had been giving Prabjit a hard time about it, and treating her as if she had committed some sort of social atrocity and had to be chastised for it. Anyway, it really pissed me off that she was getting such a hassle about it. For starters, it is absolutely none of anyone else’s business what she or I or any of the other volunteers do with our free time. And the fact that Prabjit’s parents are Indian makes her subject to a special kind of scrutiny, because people feel that she should be held to the same standards as any other Indian person, and that they can feel free to chastise her as much as they please because of that. Anyway, I guess that there really isn’t much that you can do about these things other than just behave how you want to and tell those who are judging you to get stuffed.

In other news, Ankeeta, the woman who runs the canteen here at Sambhavna walked off the job on Friday during the endlessly boring staff meeting. Apparently Kamal (yes, the same one!) made some comment to her about “don’t you have any shame? You let people criticize your food and you don’t say anything?”. Well, Ankeeta decided she wasn’t going to put up with all the crap anymore, and “Fine, then I won’t come back to work tomorrow!”. So, sure enough, Saturday morning the canteen was closed. All of the volunteers decided to go out for a late breakfast at Indian Coffee House, and we passed Ankeeta in her front yard doing some washing up. I have to admit that she looked pretty happy with her decision. I thought that it was good for her, since she was finally standing up to everyone for the way that she gets treated at work. No one ever gives her a break; people are constantly screaming at her because they don’t like the food, or they think the servings are to small or they think that they got overcharged by a rupee for the previous day’s lunch. Personally, I think the way that she gets treated is absolutely appalling, and completely inappropriate, and I’m glad that she made a stand for herself. I only hope that if Ankeeta decides to come back that she is treated with a bit more respect and dignity.

Not much else is new for the time being. I’ve scanned the menopause booklets that I have been working on (forever) and have been cleaning them up in Photoshop. This is the type of work that Dan had done for Drawn and Quarterly last year, and god, I sympathize with the extreme tediousness of it now that I have to do it. I’m getting better, and faster at it though, as I go along. I’ve also started designing the posters that are going to be used with my model vagina, which is slightly more interesting work. My lady (which mom named Lucy) is finished; I just have to spray on a layer of varnish this afternoon, and then she’ll be ready! Aziza, one of the health workers, suggested that I get her a pair of salwar pants, so that se isn’t exposed when she gets walked through the bastees!

Yesterday we took a trip to New Market, and stocked up on cheese spreads, mac and cheese and various other treats. My stomach is going through a rebellion against spicy food, yet again. So I have gotten as much non-spice food as I can to last me a few days. Tonight we are planning on making a most excellent bland dinner: mashed potatoes, boiled peas and onion and mushroom omelets! This is in honor of Eurig and Susan’s last Sunday in Bhopal. Sadly, they are leaving on Wednesday.

Anyway, I think that is all the news that is fit to print! I still can’t get photobucket to upload anything…

christmas fun and fond farewells

Well, I have returned from my two weeks of vacation with my mom and dad! We had a really wonderful time together, and I have to admit that I was more than a little sad as their taxi pulled away from our hotel in Delhi, whisking them back to snowy Canada. However, the time that we spent in India was, as always, a series of ups and downs, but overall we had a really good time.

Mom and dad arrived only a couple of days after the mayhem of the Anniversary activities had calmed down. Shree was leaving the next morning, and she Sathyu and I only just had enough time to meet about my work before I faced off to the airport to pick up the parental units. Although once I got to Bhopals tiny domestic airport, I quickly found out that my parents’ flight was delayed by about an hour and a half. I paid my Rs. 30/- in order to be able to go into the airport to wait for them (apparently a mechanism to prevent fifty members of a family from turning up to see off one departing relative). There isn’t much to do at the Bhopal terminal, so I spent my time drinking Sprite, chatting with Prabjit on my cell phone, and reading a god-awful local newspaper that had more celebrity gossip than actual news. Anyway, the better part of two hours later mom and dad came through the doors looking a little worse for wear from the delays. But they certainly were a sight for sore eyes though! We had a few big hugs through he railing that separates the new arrivals, and then set off to find a cab to take us to Jehan Numa – the fanciest hotel in Bhopal!

We ended up eating at Jehan Numa’s Italian restaurant, and I even got to have to glasses of wine! Unfortunately, Dad got some sort of food poisoning from the pasta there, so was out of commission for his first day in Bhopal. I went and picked mom up from the hotel and brought her back to Sambhavna for a little tour of the place. We also went over to Ankeeta’s house with Prabjit, so she could meet the kids and the family. Shivani took some very nice photos of all of us with my point-and-shoot digital, so I will post some of them. After that mom and I felt that we had to go and check on dad, who was still sick in bed. Luckily he was feeling better by Monday morning, so he was able to come into the clinic and do some work with Dr. Quaiser, the allopathic doctor here at the clinic.

The rest of the week was spent with my dad doing work in the mornings with Dr. Quaiser, while my mom helped me to assemble the remainder of my model vagina (who was in need of another layer of plaster of paris, and, of course, the actual construction of the vagina itself. In the afternoons we went on various sigh-seeing expeditions, taking in all of the fabulous Bhopal sights; the Chowk and New Market, the mosque, and, newly discovered to me, the old Bagum’s palace. We went on a little day trip to Bhojpur, which was fun aside from the gaggle of men in their early twenties harassing us to take their photo. My dad also took a day trip to Sanchi, although I opted out of that one, having already been there twice before. He was quite impressed by the architecture though! The only interruption in our happy wee here was when my mom also got food poisoning from eating the pasta at Jehan Numa’s Italian restaurant a couple of days into their stay here. However, it was nothing too lasting, if nothing else.

We left on Saturday the eighth on a flight into Delhi, and found our driver, Ram, straight away. After quickly dropping he bag of crap that I has asked my parents to bring home for me at the left-luggage in the international airport, we headed off to the first hotel in Rajasthan that we were staying at. It was a place about three hours outside of Delhi called the Hill Fort at Kesroli. It was absolutely beautiful, this old fort on top of a hill that had been converted into a hotel. Each of the rooms are full of these little nooks and crannies to hide in, and there were little rooftop terraces all over the place. We got chatting with a few different people at the hotel, and got some suggestions from them about where to shop in Delhi – which proved to be good advice later on! There wasn’t much to see in the village surrounding the fort. We took a walk one afternoon in the field surrounding the fort. It was nice, but most of the kids from the area eventually followed us and asked incessantly for pens (which we eventually did buy at the local store).

After that we drove to another hotel another few hours away called the Piramal Haveli (a haveli is a mansion in Hindi I believe). The mansion was beautiful, as it was covered in the original frescoes from the 1920’s. Unfortunately we were the only people staying at the hotel, and the waiter who was serving us was a bit of a creep. During every meal he would hover uncomfortably around the table, interrupting us every few minutes to ask prying questions, and insist that we eat more. However, the real kicker was that after every meal he would insist on giving my mother and I each a kiss (which he kept attempting to plant on my mouth, but I quickly learned to avoid) and a hug. Euch! It was totally sleazy. When we checked out of the hotel he hovered around the front door, possibly in an attempt for some sort or romantic parting moment.

However, despite the lingering waiter, we did have fun, particularly in a town about 50km away called Malawar or something like that. The entire town was made up of old painted Havelis. I’m not entirely sure how old they were, but some of them were really quite spectacular. One of them looked very art deco, which was pretty neat. We ended up getting an hour-long camel ride (which was quite long enough since they are really quite lurch-y). Although it was more through some rubbish heaps than the desert, it was still quite fun! Mom and I did a bit of shopping in the town, and bought some fabric things that are somewhat like carpets, only not really.

Anyway, the next day after that we headed out to our final destination in Rajastan, called Neemrana Hotel about two hours outside of Delhi. Neemrna is really quite spectacular. It is a huge fort palace built on the side of an incredibly steep hill. They have done a magnificent job of converting it into a hotel, and like at Kesroli, each of the rooms are different and full of little nooks and crannies. We stayed in one room for the first two nights, and then had to move to a different (and much larger one) for the third night. Like Kesroli and the Piramal Haveli, there wasn’t exactly much to do in the surrounding countryside. The town of Neemrana was pretty lacking in anything exciting whatsoever, although I did buy a touristy camel t-shirt for Dan. The hotel kept us fairly occupied though, as there were plenty of places to curl up with a good book and read in the bright sunshine for hours at a time. The buffet food was really quite good (although the Indian dishes were a bit on the spicy side when compared to the food as Kesroli). So we basically spent three days reading in the sunshine and eating good food! I can’t say that I minded that sort of vacation whatsoever! We also spent quite a bit of time just exploring the hotel, which was and adventure in and of itself. We realized that the original structure had been added to, and the current structure was probably almost twice the original building. It had been so well-made, though, that you could hardly tell the difference between the new and the old parts (although the fact that there was a swimming pool and a spa should have alerted me that perhaps this was not a fourteenth-century Mogul invention).

After our time at Neemrana we drove back to Delhi, and stayed at a very shwanky hotel called The Claridges. It was really top-end, and, in order for the three of us to stay in the same room we had to take an “executive suite” which had no less than two giant flat-screened TVs and a luxury bathroom. I took mom and dad for a bit of a tour of Pahar Ganj on our first afternoon there, since it was the only area I really knew where to go. We ate at one of the guesthouses that I had eaten at with Derek and Prabjit a couple of months ago. Then we wandered around Pahar Ganj fr a while, soaking up the sights. That night I was rather sick to my stomach, presumably the result of eating too many greasy french fries for lunch! The next day dad went to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. I was glad that I didn’t book myself on that particular trip, since I wasn’t feeling all that great. Instead mom and I made some attempts to go on The Great Shopping Expedition in Delhi. I wasn’t able to do the all-out shop-mania that I had been planning on, but we did manage to go to a few stores and get some things in the afternoon. Our shopping was also limited by the fact that quite a few of the stores were closed (although not nearly as many as our tout of a rickshaw driver attempted to lead us to believe).

The next day we went to the New Delhi train station at the crack of dawn in order to catch our train up to Shimla. Shimla was the town up in the Himalayas that the British used to move the government up to during the hot summer months back in ye olden times… or at least until a couple of years after Independence, when the Nehru government realized how ridiculously expensive it was to do that. Anyway, the first half of our train ride was lovely, since we were on a Shitabdi train, which are like first class trains in Nroth America: spacious seating, lots of leg room, a full meal and a snack. We had to get off of that train at Kalka though, since in the mountains the train changes to a narrow-gauge track with a “toy train”. The toy train was indeed narrow. There was barely enough space for two adults to sit next to one another on the tiny blue plastic bench seats. Also, the train was clearly not intended for tourists with vast luggage, and mom and dad each had huge suitcases that wouldn’t fit (by a long shot) either under the seats or in the overhead luggage racks. So mom was stuck sitting with her suitcase wedged next to her seat and getting an ass in the face every time someone wanted to get by. Which was approximately every twenty to thirty seconds. Dad’s suitcase was pressed in the only available corner of the train, where a family used it a picnic bench.

We got in slightly late, but the other train was waiting for our train and one other one that was even later, so we ended up waiting on the cramped toy train for about an hour and a half in the station. Fortunately for us we were sharing a tiny car with no less that four families, each with extremely ill-behaved children under the age of five, so there wasn’t a possible moment of peace for the entire wait at the station, especially since the kids kept trying to run up and down the aisle to follow their fathers out onto the platform to whine for chips and biscuits. We finally set off at about 1:45pm and began the spectacular ascent up the steep hills. Everyone was taken in by the vast and beautiful scenery, and was sticking their heads out the windows to get a better look and the steep mountainside that we were slowly chugging up. The children started this truly adorable game where they screamed every time we went through a tunnel (there are 93 tunnels on this particular stretch of 103km track), which almost prompted me to chuck them all out of the windows… however, I managed to restrain myself, although just barely.

Then, about half and hour after we had started out, we stopped. And waited. And waited. And waited. It turned out that the track is a single track, and we had to let another train coming downhill pass us, since we had left so late from the station. So we waited about another hour there, at which point all of the screaming brats completely lost control and their idiotic parents did bugger all to try to make them shut up and just continued their conversations by yelling even louder over the din of what sounded like a million spoiled brats screaming. Dad and I got out and took some photos of the train in an attempt to get away from the mutinous children. Eventually the train started again and we continued the five and a half hour ride up the mountains.

The rest of the trip would have been fine except for three things:
1) The annoying children wouldn’t shut the fuck up. I realized that one particularly annoying child was threatened with a slap every time she started crying, which of course, only intensified her screaming.
2) We were so cramped by our too-big suitcases that I thought my back was going to break after a couple of hours (I can only imagine how sore mom and dad’s backs were). 3) A thirteen-year-old girl switched seats with her brother so that she could more conveniently scrutinize me by sitting right next to me. After about an hour of staring at me she finally worked up the courage to ask my name and where I was from, which I politely answered. I should have pretended not to speak English, because she continued to grill me about my home in Canada, my work in Bhopal, my religion (or lack thereof) and a variety of other banal topics, barely waiting for me to finish my answer before firing off the next round. In between rounds of twenty questions she would nip back to her parents and report my answers to them in Hindi. After a couple of hours I slipped my headphones in while she was off relaying info and pretended to be asleep when she came back. For the rest of the trip I was afraid to open my eyes lest she attack me with a fresh round of questions. Oh, and by the way, this was on Christmas eve.

When we finally made it to Shimla train station we managed to get a cab and then two sherpa-like porters to carry the suitcases up the steep set of stairs to our hotel. Dad and I split a beer from the mini-bar, and then we all collapsed into our beds. The next day we ventured out into Shimla proper, which dad very accurately described as reminding him a lot of Niagara Falls, minus the wax museums. There were such vast numbers of tourists roaming about my about 11am that it was hard to walk along the Mall (the main shopping street) despite the fact that there are no cars allowed there. I was shocked (and not completely happy about) the number of roving groups of young single men, most of who tried to take my photo with their cell phones as I walked by. The rest of the tourists appeared to be families with toddling children, all screaming. The only children I saw smiling (aside from the beggar kids) were two boys stuffing their faces with ice cream cones.

We did some shopping along the Mall for most of the first day, and then went back to our hotel to arrange for a driver to take us to the Wildflower Hotel. The hotel is about 12km outside of Shimla, and used to be the home of Lord Kitchener (or someone like that). It is absolutely spectacular, sitting at the very top of one of the mountains. It was absolutely silent up there, save the very distant hum of cars. There was even some snow on the ground (that’s where the photo of me with the snow-ball came from) as we “trekked” thorough the forested grounds. We only lasted about fifteen minutes since there was some ice too, and we were afraid that we were going to slide off the side of the mountain. Anyway, we had high tea in the hotel lobby, which was pretty fun too.

The next day we had the same driver take us to the monkey temple, which both mom and I had read about in “White Cargo”. The description of the author being attacked by a monkey for her food had only egged me on in wanting to see it, while it had suitably terrified mom away from the idea. The monkeys were actually fairly tame, and were being fed huge sacks of corn kernels by the people looking after the temple. They were really quite cute, although you do have to watch out for you glasses because apparently they can be quite mischievous. After that we drove to another building, which I unfortunately can’t remember the name of. It was some British person’s summer lodge back in the day… I think maybe Lord Dufferin. It had been turned into a study center for PhD students of something, so you couldn’t see very much of the inside of the building. But we did get to see the room where they had the discussions about Partition, and the grounds were pretty nice too. After that we went to another fancy hotel called the Cecil and had a nice quiet lunch there.

The next day we hired a car to drive us back down to the Kalka train station. Unfortunately the road was so wind-y and curvy that I was quite car sick the entire two-hour ride down. I still prefer the nausea to the screaming kids. Then we headed back to Delhi on the Shitabdi, and into our final hotel: the Hyatt Regency! Mom and I spent our final day in Delhi shopping (what else?) while dad toured around and saw a few more of the sights in Delhi. Mom and I managed to get a fair umber of places on that final day, including Dilli Haart, which I really liked. It was really interesting little stalls set up from people all over the country, so you get to see a wide variety of different crafts and things. We also went to the Khadi shop in Connaught Cirlce, and went through the Janpath Tibetian Market more thoroughly.

That night I said a tearful goodbye to mom and dad in front of the Hyatt. They headed to the Delhi airport (where they apparently had to pay Rs. 500/- in backsheesh to get in) to wait for their flight. I spent the rest of the night watching bad cable TV in the largest, plushest bed I have ever slept in, trying not to feel lonely in the big city all by myself. The next morning I lounged in bed, and spent most of the morning trying to pack everything into my bag (which proved impossible), and taking an extra-long, hot bath (presumably my last until I get back to Canada). I left my bag at the hotel for the day, and set off to wander around the city. I did a few bits of shopping that I had been meaning to do, including stocking up on gummy bears (which are impossible to find here), buying some brie cheese for Prabjit and an extra supply of granola bars to take back to Bhopal. Dharmesh happened to be in Delhi with some family from Chennai, so I met up with him in Connaught at about 6:30pm, giant bag in tow (note to self: no extra shoes when traveling, are a waste of space and cause severe back ache). We went down into the underground shopping area under Connaught where Dharmesh bought some nice new sweaters, and I examined fancy Ipod headphone knockoffs, but decided against it.

We headed out to Nizamuddin station and just managed to get some samosas as water bottles before getting settled into our seats. Unfortunately we were in separate cars, but I was sitting with a nice family with two well-behaved children. All was going well, and I thought that it was going to be a pleasant trip until it came time to pull down the beds for bed. As everyone else unpacked large woolly blankets, I realized that there was a strong cold wind coming through the windows of the train, blowing directly onto my lower bunk. “No matter!” I thought to myself, and simply put on a pair of jeans over my sweatpants, and an extra sweatshirt under my fleece jacket. Unfortunately, I spent the entire night wide awake and absolutely freezing, bone-chillingly cold. At one point I went to the filthy train bathroom and put on as many layers as I could manage: three pairs of pants, five shirts and a rain jacket, three pairs of socks, and a duppta wrapped around my head as a hat and over my face. Around 7am I managed to fall asleep for about an hour. Luckily the nice family woke me up when we arrived at Bhopal, since I was now too tired to stay awake.

I arrived back at Sambhavna to find things more or less how I had left them: Robyn (a volunteer who was only here for a short time amidst some controversy) had left, Eurig’s partner, Susan, had arrived. The hot water still doesn’t work properly, and the lunch sabzie is still inedibly spicy, but the internet is working and Andrea arrives in nine days! I will have to write more about our New Years Eve celebrations, which were an enlightening cultural experience and explained much of the cultural attitude towards alcohol here. But more on that next time…

In the meantime, I’m sorry but Photobucket is being stupid and I can’t seem to upload any photos. Hopefully I will be able to sort that out before too long…

anniversary and awards

I have to admit that I breathed a giant sigh of relief once the anniversary of the gas disaster was over. Not to complain, because overall the entire experience was good, but it’s hard to sustain yourself on that level of high intensity for too many days. There were actually several different things going on in commemoration of the people who died, and actions against Dow and the Indian government, condemning them for their inaction on the issue twenty-three years later. I have photos of everything, so I’m sorry but you’ll have to read through all of the explanations…

The actual gas leak occurred shortly after midnight on the evening on December 2nd, so there are things going on both the 2nd and the 3rd. On the 2nd Sambhavna had its action, which was attempting to make demands on the government concerning the treatment of gas-affected people – namely to have yoga taught and used medicinally in the gas-victims government sponsored hospitals. Anyway, the plan was to get as many Sambhavna patients as possible together outside of Kamla Park, near the lake, and form a human chain. I think that maybe about three or four hundred people turned out, which was pretty good. It was nice to see that the posters I had done such hard work on were going to use! The human chain didn’t last for too long before people got kind of bored and started wandering off, but there did seem to be a fair bit of media attention, which is good.

After that we all trekked up to New Market, about a half-hour walk away. There was a candlelight vigil for the people who dies, which the media went absolutely insane over. A local Bhopal rock band had written a song about the gas disaster, and they were to perform their first-ever show. Unfortunately things were a bit on the disorganized side; they couldn’t get certain equipment to work, and the lead singer kept starting the song, and then stopping because he decided it didn’t sound any good. The result was that it felt like I was at a practice for a high school band. The sound was pretty terrible, so when they finally did get the whole way through the song, I wasn’t terribly impressed.

After that we were all starving so we went to the Indian Coffee House in New Market, where we were ushered upstairs where “Ladies and Families” are seated. Weird. Anyway, we had a quick dinner since Rachna phone halfway through and said that the torch lit march to the factory had already started. It was only from a few blocks away from the factory itself, so by the time we got there we had actually missed the torch lit march. People had already gathered in a square around candles that spelled out “No More Bhopals” with large black banners. It was really beautiful, and very moving if it hadn’t been for the vast quantity of misogynist twelve-year old buys behind me. I was allowed to crouch inside the banners because I was taking photos, but the kids behind me kept poking, pushing and hollering at me. I couldn’t help but notice that there weren’t very many women around at all. Most of the vigil’s attendees were young men and boys out late at night in large groups, and spending most of their time hassling the white people from Sambhavna. I was pretty disgusted with their behaviour, especially because this was a memorial of sorts for many people who had died that night. It really pissed me off that these guys could have so little respect for their friends and neighbours.

We finally went back to the clinic around 9:30pm, completely exhausted from the day’s activities. However, before we could start relaxing, Rachna told us that we had to finish off some other signs for the protest the next day. We started a production line, and so we were lucky enough to finish up fairly quickly, or at least within the next couple of hours. The next day I slept in a bit, and by the time I was making my breakfast in my pj’s a small horde of children – Sareeta and people she had rangled together – had trailed into the clinic dressed in suits. They were supposed to be the CEOs and whatnot of corporations that are screwing India over. Unfortunately they looked more like a bunch of school children, so Rachna told us to hurry up and get dressed so that we could make them cardboard hats and briefcases with corporate names on them. The march to the Union Carbide factory was supposed to start at 11:30, so with little time to spare, Prabjit, about ten eager eight to ten year old kids and myself managed to churn out hats and briefcases for each of them. For young-ish kids, I have to admit that they were remarkably efficient, especially since they cleaned up absolutely everything without me having to tell them to do so.

We managed to get together two rickshaws, and all of the little boys piled, squealing with glee, into one, while Prabjit, the three other girls and myself got into the other one. I felt kind of like a schoolteacher as we herded everyone into the rickshaws and then piled out again at the meeting spot for the protest. There was a fair bit of waiting around before the protest actually started, but eventually we got under way. The turnout was really good for the march, maybe five hundred or more people, mostly women marched for about three and a half hours from just off of Hamidia Road to the Union Carbide factory. Admittedly I had not exactly been prepared for quite that long a walk, especially in the blazing sun and with more frequent that necessary stops to chant slogans against Dow and Union Carbide in Hindi. By the time we got there I was completely exhausted, and about ready to collapse. Luckly some chairs had been set up, so I nabbed one of those while the twenty-foot tall effigy of Warren Anderson (CEO of Union Carbide) was burned to the ground and his ashes stomped on. Then I realized that the terrible band was going to play yet again, although this time they were a little more together, so it wasn’t so bad.

After the band played and people started dispersing, every child in a fifty-foot radius around me moved closer so that they could stare at me. When an older woman came and sat next to me to get a better look and started asking me questions in Hindi, I decided I’d had enough of this, so I got up to look for some of the other volunteers. I ran into Eurig not far off, but he hissed under his breath “the creepy guy from the wedding is over there! Keep walking!!”, so we walked down Chola Road until we got to the gap in the wall and hid behind it… The creepy guy from the wedding, you may recall, was the one who told us that we were “enhancing the beauty of the evening” and that I was “helping the backwards people of India”. Euch…

When everyone reconvened at Sambhavna shortly afterwards, we discovered that no one had remembered to take the fifty-odd posters that we (mainly Prabjit) had spent the previous three days making. Arg… talk about wasted work. We all took showers and relaxed as much as possible for the next few hours, since the next day everyone was going to start getting ready for the Chingari Awards. I had offered my services to write up a short presentation of what Chingari had been doing since its beginning, and make a slideshow of photos to go along with it, so I had been working on this for the past few days pretty continuously, but hadn’t yet finished, so I spent a few hours that evening finishing a rough version.

Most of Wednesday was spent pretty lazily, since the Board of Trustees for Chingari had all shown up at this point and started taking command of the situation. They decided that instead of the ten-minute long presentation I had been told to make, they wanted something only three minutes, and that they would get Suresh to write the dialog. So I handed what I had over the Suresh, and he commenced work. At about 10pm, however, Suresh asked me if I wouldn’t mind copying all of the photos I had collected from Chingari (about 2 gigs worth), onto his memory stick so that he could start making the slideshow. I pointed out that I had already pulled out most of the really good ones, so why not take a look at what I had done already, but he insisted not. I spent until about 1:30am with Suresh and Biju trying to find the best photos out of what we already had, to go with about three minutes of text that Suresh had written out. I gave up at 1:30 because one or all of the four memory stick we were using had viruses on them and crashed both the computer we were using, and Suresh’s laptop crashed with the viruses, and lost all of the work we had done.

The next morning Shalini told me that Biju was starting all over again from scratch, since they hadn’t been able to recover what we had already done, so I spent the better part of the day in Biju’s office making the slideshow all over again (please note here that they had decided to trash having text all together, and were just making a collage of about ten minutes worth of photos). It went a lot more smoothly this time though, sine Biju and I seemed to have a fairly similar idea of what we wanted to show in the slides. Although we did have a scare when we stopped for lunch, and his computer crashed, but the show was recovered, so all was well.

The show was actually pretty good in the end, if I do say so myself. The one criticism I would have is that Biju wanted to put it to music, which was fine, but I thought that the music should only be instrumental since Rashida Bee would be speaking overtop of it. Our compromise ended up being that Biju took the first few bars of some classical song (I don’t know what it was called, but its really famous) and looped it over and over again. The effect, especially on an extra-loud style India speaker system, was a little jarring.

Nonetheless, the awards went extremely well. The auditorium was absolutely jam packed with women and children that Chingari has helped, which was really touching to see. I had misty eyes when Rashida and Champa were making speeches, even though I have no idea what they were saying. It just made me so happy to think about the work that they do, and how much the community supports them. I mean, they are trying to help the people who have been screwed over the most by the disaster; who have no money; who work long hours; who are trying to take care of severely disabled kids with the most meager of resources; who are blamed by their families and neighbours for their children’s birth defects. I think that they are possibly the most inspiring women I have ever met, or ever will meet. The entire awards ceremony just made me so proud of what they have accomplished in their lifetime.

Once again, having a vast number of people here from Delhi and other more cosmopolitan Indian cities made me realize the awesome fashion that exists outside of colloquial old Bhopal. After spending an hour trying on everything I own before the Chingari Awards, Prabjit and I both finally raided Tarunima’s closet, and that sealed the deal – I need at least one or two nice warm kourtas before I make it Shimla or Rajasthan!
Tarunima has absolutely beautiful, heavier kourtas from the Khadi Shops in Delhi, which I am absolutely set on finding when we go back. It has gotten cold enough here that all of the salwar suits I’ve had made are too cold on their own, so that is the perfect excuse to buy a couple of other things, even though I had already put the kaibosh (sp?) on buying more clothes.

The woman who won the award this year is a woman from Orissa who has been rallying people in her community to fight against a mining company for about fourteen years. Someone pointed her out to me at the march on the 3rd, and I have to admit that the first thing I noticed was he she and all of the women who had come with her from Orissa all had their septum’s pierced!! (I’m talking about a nose ring through the middle of their noses). I was totally dying to go up to them and pull out my hidden node ring and be like “hey!! I have one of those too!”. I did manage to contain myself though, so I narrowly escaped that particular embarrassment. Anyway, during the awards she was really nervous-looking on stage, until she got up to the podium in her traditional sari and started shouting slogans! Then you could totally see the fire in her eyes, and man, did she look pissed. I guess I would be pissed to if some corporation was mining my land and exploiting my family…

While I was off making the slideshow with Biju, you’ll never guess who arrived at the clinic!?! SHREE! I was so happy to see her, when I finally did several hours later. I didn’t really get a chance to sit down and talk to her until we all sat down together for dinner at Hotel Ranjit on Hamidia Road. We were a crowd of about twenty-five, so Sathyu forbade us from drinking alcohol (which is the point of going to Ranjeet, since the food isn’t great there), as he was concerned with the image that it would give of both Chingari and Sambhavna. I was a little miffed that I wasn’t allowed to have the beer I had been looking forward to, but I understand his sentiment: Bhopal is ridiculously conservative, and word travels fast about things like this. Unfortunately, this sparked a lengthy debate about drinking alcohol in the clinic at all, and why there was no official ban on it blah blah blah… Christ the politics of this place get to me sometimes. Everyone is into everyone else’s business and gossiping about everyone else behind their backs. Not that I’m not guilty of my fair share of these indulgences, but considering that the weekly staff meetings are supposed to air out the dirty laundry, so to speak, there sure is a lot going on under the surface that no one talks about up front. Anyway, I won’t dwell on it any longer, suffice to say that there are certain standards for some people, and other standards for everyone else. Ppppbbbtt…

Eurig left Bhopal for ten days yesterday evening, so Tony and I escorted him to the train station. It turned out that his train was almost two hours late, so we went to Ranjeet again and had the beer that had been forbidden to us the previous night. I had spent most of the day drawing up yet another project proposal to get the kids taking photos to show Shree, since I know that once she has a say in it, the ball will get rolling with great momentum. She has already helped Prabjit out tremendously with the study that she has been trying to start for the past three months, and I know that she will do the same for me as well.

I spent all day today finally wrapping up the rest of my cervical cancer inspection model in plaster of Paris-soaked cloth. I have to admit that I think it is starting to look pretty good. I need to go over it tomorrow with a thick layer of plaster to smooth it out as much as possible (right now it still has a slightly mummified look). But I managed to buy some varnish this afternoon, so as soon as I am finished with that I can seal it up so that it won’t continue to crumble away. Oh yes, and my mom is bringing an old thera-band to use as the vagina, so everything is falling into place. This afternoon the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB) opened their offices on the second floor of Chingari Trust. They invited everyone from Sambhavna over, as well as a fair number of other people, to eat a quite delicious meal on their rooftop, which was pretty fun.

I think that about sums up the past week, although I haven’t commented on the vast number of people here right now. Sara, the Italian girl left earlier in the week. But gained what feels like about a million people in the meantime. Tarunima, who is doing the field work with Eurig and Dharmesh, arrived on the first; Shree and one of Sambhavna/Chingari’s trusteed, Mira, arrived on the fifth; two of Dharmesh’s friends from Chennai were here for a few days; two other Chingari Trustees were here; there was another couple from Chennai here for a few days; Shalini from SfB is here now; Dharmesh’s girlfriend Shweta is here; and a new volunteer named Robyn from Seattle came a coupe of days ago.

Anyway, the dorm rooms and everyone’s houses have been jam-packed with people, and the upstairs kitchen has never seen so much action – people making chai and French toast and coffee pretty much constantly. The bustle is nice, I certainly like having lots of other people around. It’s intense though, and there isn’t a whole lot of time for reflection or “alone time,” which can be a bit trying at times. To be honest though, I think I prefer the insanity of all the action around here. There is no time to be bored, or homesick or to feel as though you are being useless and unproductive. I think that the craziness actually motivates me to do more work…

My parents arrive tomorrow night! I don’t think I have ever been so excited to see them (with perhaps the exception of when I came back from my two weeks at overnight camp when I was eight years old). The hot water hasn’t been working here, since some asshole threw a rock at the solar panels that power the water heater, so I am fully planning on showering at their shwanky hotel! Okay, I’ll update again once they are here are we are driving each other nuts☺

p.s. i have more photos to post, but i haven't yet uploaded them on my computer... soon... sooooooon...

the poster-master and nothing exciting

My apologies for not writing as frequently as I used to – especially you Mel, since I know that you have been itching for more updates on the kids in particular! Things have been pretty busy for the past couple of weeks with the upcoming anniversary, and I have had trouble finding the time to spend an hour or two typing up the goings on here. That said, here are the goings on…

The goings on are not actually that interesting, now that I am thinking about it. The clinic has been making a poster display for the anniversary, which is going to be ferried around various hospitals and whatnot in Bhopal to try to raise some awareness about Sambhavna and the demands that the gas survivors have on the government and their hospitals. At any rate, Prabjit and I were elected to make some additional posters on water contamination and its effects, since that is an important aspect of the demands. After we started working on those posters, however, Jyoti, the yoga instructor quickly co-opted us to make some more posters with her. Prabjit soon managed to fall out of the running with the poster-making (mostly because I think that she despised doing it), but also because she was quite sick for a few days, and had meetings about her study going on. Sooooo… I ended up getting roped into doing quite a few posters about water contamination, yoga, etc. It was kind of nice to have something that actually kept me busy for a few days, but I think that I could have done about three fewer posters quite happily, since they quickly took up my entire week. I ended up spending several days listening to movies on my laptop while I outlined people displaying various symptoms of water contamination (think diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, abdominal pain, etc.). Apparently my drawing of “constipation” is a favourite among the staff.

During this time, I have also volunteered to help out at Chingari Trust on December 5th, since they are having their first awards ceremony! Every year they pick out a woman in India who is fighting against corporate crime, so I guess they need some extra hands for the event. I am also attempting to make a slideshow for them to use on the night of the awards that introduces Chingari Trust and explains a bit about the work that they are doing. I’ve been trying to work on it all week, but every time I thought I was finally finished the posters, another one cropped up. However, after two trips to Chingari to download all of their photos, and a couple of hours of organizing, I have finally put all of the photos of Chingari into some discernable order. I still have yet to actually make the slideshow, but I am two steps closer now!

The photo project is still not moving forward at all, especially because everyone is so wrapped up in anniversary plans. I spoke to Mel about it on the phone the other day, and I think that she had some good suggestions for which directions to move it in. My hope now is that in the next couple of weeks I will be able to find a good translator, and talk to Rashida Bi, Sathyu and Rachna about my plans so that I can, at the very least, get started as soon as I get back from my trip with mom and dad. I was a bit disappointed to realize that Micha, the French photographer who was here for a week, had already taken a lot of really beautiful photos of the kids with disabilities at Chingari. I know that Rashida Bi was enthusiastic for me to do whatever work I wanted to, but I think that I would simply be repeating work that has already been done if I was to do this again. It would be more useful for me to do work on their website, and to record the kids stories in some more detail. I’m hoping that once I find a translator for the kids taking photos project that I will be able to do this work fairly easily, but who knows. Part of me has given up entirely on actually completing anything of use while I am here. Le sigh…

This blog entry is becoming very boring very quickly… my apologies. I haven’t done anything that interesting this past week. I bought a 2gb usb key for the equivalent of $22, which I thought was a pretty good deal. The weather is slowly getting fractionally colder which I don’t mind except for the fact that there isn’t much hot water in the mornings, so showers are a bit unpleasant. I’m glad I bought that fleece thing…

Oh yeah! We went to see a Bollywood movie called Om Shanti Om a week or so ago, which was a lot of fun. Prabjit and I had been seeing ads for it absolutely everywhere in Delhi, and it looked really fun, so we were itching to go see it when we got back (we had to wait until both of us were clear of the diarrhea before we could sit through the feature-length 3 hours that is Bollywood though). Anyway, all of the volunteers went, along with Vikas and Satish. Luckily I was next to Prabjit, and she translated for me what I didn’t catch – although, as before, I was surprised at how much I could understand! Anyway, the basic premise of the film is that a guy who is obsessed with a Bollywood actress in the 70’s watches her gruesome murder and then dies himself. He is re-incarnated as a spoiled, famous Bollywood actor in present-day, eventually remembers what happened in his previous life and wants to avenge her death. Sounds pretty cheesy, no? Okay, but the amazing thing about this movie was the fact that the first half was a total satire of the entire film industry here, including all of the over-the-top acting, song-and-dance routines, and pointlessly-scantily-clad women! It was absolutely hilarious! Unfortunately not long after the intermission (yes, of course it had an intermission), the plot got a bit on the boring side, since they had to devise a scheme to get the murderous producer arrested. Anyway, thanks to the booming bootlegging industry here I have already managed to find a DVD-quality copy of the movie so we can re-watch all of our favourite songs every night… My favourite is the one called “Darde Disco” where Sharu Kahn dances sound shirtless and glistening with oil surrounded by a team of nearly nude women. Its frigging hilarious! Is it sad that the most exciting thing I have done in the past ten days has been to buy a usb key and watch a Bollywood movie?

Other exciting news… none, really. We had another dinner at Jehan Numa last week, which was nice. Mmmmm… pizza. Mom and Dad are coming very soon! That is exciting. They arrive on Dec. 8th, so it is only about ten days or so now! Yay! Fun times ahead! Okay, I’m going until I have something more exciting to write. Sorry for the lack of photos… I don’t have none.

delhi belly and other adventures

I started this entry when I had just got back from Delhi, thinking that I would write all about the fun and adventures we had while it was still fresh in my mind. I got distracted, and now it is a week later, so there you have it.

Derek, Prabjit and I all went to Delhi together on Tuesday night, catching one of the trains that makes the run from Bhopal overnight. Because it was a few days before Divali, about half the country is traveling somewhere to visit family, and the trains were really booked up by the time we got our tickets. We got ourselves two-tier A/C tickets, which is the highest tier that you can get on the trains here, and it was pretty luxurious, especially when you compare it to the train service between Montreal and Toronto. You get an entire little bed to yourself, complete with your own curtains, so that when you are ready to sleep all you have to do is pull them shut, and doze off. I do have to admit though, that I found it a bit hard to sleep very soundly through my vague paranoia that all of my stuff was going to get stolen while I slept… but I did manage to sleep for a while. Our train got into Nizamuddin station in Delhi at about 6:30am, so needless to say I was still pretty groggy when we got there. We took an auto-rickshaw to Pahar Ganj, which is the neighbourhood in Delhi (actually right opposite the other, New Delhi train station) where a lot of the backpackers and tourists stay.

Almost nothing was open because it was so early in the morning, so we went into the first guest house that we saw on the main street. It wasn’t very expensive - Rs. 496/night, which is about $12 for both Prabjit and I – and I was so tired that I didn’t really care where we went so long as it was big enough that I could lie down. Prabjit and Derek were wide awake though, and decided that they would go to the airport and drop off Derek’s extra baggage for storage there, so while they did that, I got caught up on my sleep. It turned that it took them about three hours to get there and back on a combination of public transportation and by rickshaw, so it wasn’t until almost noon that Prabjit got back to the room. We decided that for our first meal in the “big city” we would have no other than McDonald’s, more out of curiosity and than craving. There are no shortages of fast food chains in Connaught Circle, which is only a short walk away from Pahar Ganj, so Prabjit went over their for our McDonald’s fix, and then went on a little shopping trip.

Connaught Circle has a plethora of American chain stores, which aren’t terribly appealing, especially since the prices are about the same. I did, however, manage to find myself a newer version of the Lonely Planet’s Southeast Asia guide, and a pair of Converse All-Stars for $20, so the shopping wasn’t entirely wasted. I also looked extensively at a store called FabIndia that sells some nice stuff, but I couldn’t find any pants that I wanted, and since I’m all courta-ed out, I decided not to get anything there. The real shopping fun actually happened in Pahar Ganj, since most of the stores in the main bazaar cater to the massive numbers of tourists. I ended up buying more scarves thatn I know what to do with (so if you are reading this then you probably have a scarf coming your way), as well as a couple of pairs of what I would call “hippie pants,” since all of the dirty hippies in Pahar Ganj wear them. We also found this extremely cute little store in the lobby of one of the guest houses that sold adorable skirts, dresses and so on at pretty good prices. I actually ended up going back a second time I liked it so much and chatted with the Israeli girl that owned the place. She expained that she buys the clothes from the manufacturers in India, but that they are all brand names back in the States. Anyway, I bought a sweatshirt, a tank top and a skirt (none of which I can wear in Bhopal), and have promised myself a dress when I go back to Delhi with my parents next month.

I really liked Delhi, despite my previous misgivings on my previous trip (I’m referring here to the cab ride from hell). It was extremely easy to navigate by comparison to Bhopal – especially Pahar Ganj because of all the tourists. That was actually the weirdest thing about Delhi – all the white people!! There must be hundreds of them in Pahar Ganj alone! No one even looked twice at me, and only one kid called me “Angreezi!” during the entire trip. It was pretty awesome to go almost entirely unnoticed for four whole days☺ It was a nice break…

Not that Delhi was the perfect place by any means. On our last day there we went to South Delhi to explore a market that Rachna had suggested to us for buying granola bars and the like. While we were there four little beggar kids approached us, one of whose hand and arm had obviously been held over a fire so that her skin was crusted in huge black scabs almost up to the elbow. You could tell that someone had done this to her in order for her to be able to make more money while she begged, which is totally fucking sick. But I think that the thing that made it more disturbing was the fact that when we left the market to explore another store that the Lonely Planet recommended we ended up in a neighbourhood not all that dissimilar to Yorkville in Toronto. It was so ritzy and expensive, with shiny new cars and million dollar homes everywhere that the disparity between the rich and poor was really just a bit too much. After that we went to a restaurant in another area called Punjabi by Nature (which we were interested in mostly because of Naughty by Nature, but anyway), which turned out to be even fancier. It reminded me of the restaurants that you see in suburban malls - $25 cheeseburgers and ridiculously over-the-top décor. I paid the equivalent of $10 for a Corona (admittedly a splurge on a mediocre beer), and our meals all came in American-sized portions (ie. I ordered a chicken dish and got four leg and thighs of meat!). Anyway, it was all a bit much, but nothing quite beats the strip of stores that this restaurant was located in. Pretty much all of the stores were expensive American chains, and it was bustling with middle-class families and teenagers. I went to get my haircut (it only cost Rs. 500, or $12 but I’d say that it wasn’t even worth that) while Derek and Prabjit walked around the stores in a bit of disbelief. There was even this little gang of white teenaged boys wearing baggy jeans and Slipknot t-shirts that looked like they had been transplanted right out of an American suburb… so weird. Anyway, we went back to Pahar Ganj feeling a little disturbed by the extreme of rich and poor living quite literally side by side.

Contrary to my earlier statement that my plan was to shop and only shop, I did conceded to some sightseeing. On our second day we took a trip to the Red Fort, which was pretty neat (there are some nice photos). We also visited the biggest mosque (possibly in India although I always get my facts wrong about these things), and of course I can’t remember its name now either. I think its Jama Masjit, but I could be wrong about that. Anyway, there were these two guys outside the mosque who insisted we pay Rs. 200/- to bring our cameras in, which I was not terribly enthusiastic about. Derek waited outside with our cameras and shoes, while Prajit and I took a look around inside. I know that im supposed to be all impressed with stuff like that, but it just looked like a really big mosque, and there wasn’t much else to say about it than that. The more exciting thing was while Prabjit and I were looking after Derek’s shoes outside this adorable little black cat came up to us and was soooo friendly! Against my mother’s wishes I gave the little cat a few scratches (she forbids me to pet any of the stray animals here and I don’t blame her because you can see the festering open wounds on a lot of them). As we were leaving we saw these boys trying to catch the cat, which really pissed me off because I’m sure that they were only going to torture the poor thing. I think it ran off in the end, but who knows… We also saw a Sikh Gurdwara nearby which was pretty cool. We were lucky that Prabjit was there to tell us what to do because they were doing a prayer service type thing, and there were several rules I wouldn’t have been able to figure out myself. For example, instead of just leaving your shoes in a giant pile in front of the door, you give them to these women who store them in a little cubby-hole and they give you a ticket. Men and women both have to cover their heads when they go into the Gurdwara, so there is this bucket of headscarves that you can borrow at the door as well, which was kind of neat.

After our day of sightseeing we took the newly-build subway back to Pahar Ganj. We had taken it in the morning, and it has been pretty quiet, and therefore significantly easier to manage. Firstly, because of terrorist threats, they have decided that they need to send everyone through metal detectors before they are allowed on the subway… so you can imagine the lineup of two hundred-odd men (and about five women in a separate line, surprise, surprise) waiting to go through. Of course absolutely everyone sets off the metal detectors, but they just glance into your bag and send you on your way anyway, making the entire routine completely pointless. Once you actually get on the subway, no one moves into the cars at all, but when you get to another stop, more people just push you mosh-pit style so that they can crowd on. I have to admit that after having my ass grabbed so many times here in Bhopal I was pretty uncomfortable with having that many men in such close proximity, especially without being able to see whose hands were where, but fortunately no one did any groping... maybe the illusion of security prevents men from being perverts on the tube here.


On Divali proper (which is the biggest Hindu holidy) we randomly met a guy from the UK who was lost in Connaught Circle and trying to get back to Pahar Ganj, so we walked with him. We ended up getting dinner with him at a rooftop restaurant in Pahar Ganj. The food wasn’t great, but it was definitely the best place to be sitting, since we could see all of the fireworks shooting up from every one of the narrow streets in and around Pahar Ganj. In addition to this, the restaurant owners were also setting off fireworks, or rather, they were allowing their five year old son to do so. When he was (to the great relief of the patrons) unsuccessful at lighting, one of the older employees/family members took over. My pictures of the fireworks really don’t do it justice, but the guy set off a number of those fireworks that just shoot a large shower of sparks straight up into the air. I don’t know what they are called, but from twenty feet away they are pretty impressive to watch. I should mention that Divali is the festival of lights, and, as far as I can tell, just an excuse for every man d child between the ages of five and five and forty-five to set off as many explosive devices as he can afford. The fireworks started at about 6pm, and they were still going strong when we left the restaurant almost two hours later. It was a rather nerve-racking walk from the restaurant to a bar that we thought would be open (oh my god, yes, Delhi does have bars and god I forgot how much I love them), since we had to dodge groups of rowdy men and excited children setting off more fireworks about three feet from each other. I was pretty sure that before the evening we were going to witness someone lose a limb or be blinded, if it didn’t happen to one of us. The bar we were going to was long since closed when we got there, and a walk in the other direction proved that pretty much the only thing open were the numerous guest houses in Pahar Ganj. We settled on another rooftop patio to continue to watch the numerous fireworks and drink a hot chai. We stayed up there for another hour or two, sitting in pretty much stunned silence as the fireworks just kept on going. I swear, whoever manufactures fireworks in India must be a fucking millionaire, since this went on long after we had gone to bed at about 11pm.

Delhi was quite a bit colder than Bhopal, particularly at night. Although I noticed it more during the day, because Bhopal still goes up to at least 25 degrees during the day because the sun is so strong, but what can only be described as the thickest smog I have ever seen in my life blocks out most of the direct sunlight in Delhi, making the days far less scorching than Bhopal. It should be noted here that although the smog in Delhi actually blocks the sunlight (you can actually see it as you descend into the city in the plane), I have heard from numerous people that Delhi has significantly lessened its pollution in the fast five or ten years since now the autorickshaws and public busses run on some kind of fuel. I also noticed that there is some sort of recycling system in place, since there are two separate dumpsters for biodegradable and non-biodegradable items… a far cry from the burning heaps of trash in Qazi camp. (Although I have seen a garbage truck twice in Qazi camp now, collecting garbage from one particularly overloaded garbage heap).

Anyway, I am now back in sunny Bhopal, which is hard to do after you have been having fun in tourist-ville for a few days, drinking beer and not getting harassed. Prabjit and I have had to move out of our private room since there is an older woman coming to do some work who takes precedence over us. It took me a lot longer to move out of there than it did to move in, since I have accumulated a large amount of stuff. I took the bed that I had originally had when I got here and just dumped everything into the two drawers at the bottom… until they were full, and then I dumped all of the clothes that I was actually wearing into one of the cupboards. I finally went through the drawers today (I couldn’t find my mosquito repellent anywhere) and packed all of the stuff that I’m sending home with mom and dad into my big suitcase…. And its full. Uo-oh. I’m lucky that they are coming or else there is no way that I would be able to get all of the stuff that I have bought home with me. Mostly it is clothes that I brought that I shouldn’t have, but there are quite a few books and a LOT of scarves for gifts.

Prabjit and I have both been feeling pretty sick the past couple of days. Late on Monday evening I had terrible diarrhea and fever and muscle aches. It went away overnight, and the next morning I felt better, but it keeps re-appearing in the evening every couple of days, which is kind of awful. I felt pretty shitty all day today, and spent most of the day sleeping and watching Superman movies in bed. Prabjit didn’t start feeling crappy at all until a couple of days ago, but has felt more consistently bad than I have… so who knows what is going on. I’m a little worried that I have malaria a second time, since my flu-like symptoms keep going away and then coming back, but I guess I will go get yet another malaria test tomorrow morning and find out.

There really isn’t anything exciting going on here other than that. There was an action against the gas minister on Wednesday, so we spent several afternoons cutting out people-shapes from cardboard and painting them. The anniversary of the gas disaster is coming up an a couple of weeks (Dec. 2nd) and I have been designated as resident poster-maker, so I am busy drawing pictures on poster board these days. There is also a new volunteer named Sara here from Italy for a month. She is living in the north of India (I forget the name of the town) doing work in a farm of some sort up there. A guy from Derek’s hometown, near Chicago, named Tony also arrived a couple of days ago. Tony was here for eight months, and had only left Bhopal a month or two before I got here in July, so it is kind of nice to have someone around who already knows the ropes so the speak. Eurig has hired two people to conduct interviews for his project here, and one of them has already arrived. His name is Darmesh, and he has been involved in the Bhopal campaign for quite some time. He’s not living at the clinic with us, but is around quite a bit, and has an apartment close by.

Anyway, I’m finally going to post this since it is now a week since I started writing it…