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...