bhopal and beyond

seven days in bhopal..

2008-02-05T23:20:00.000+05:30

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

2008-01-15T20:12:00.001+05:30

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

2008-01-07T13:30:00.000+05:30

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

2008-01-03T13:26:00.000+05:30

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

2007-12-07T22:22:00.000+05:30

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

2007-11-29T17:12:00.000+05:30

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

2007-11-18T19:14:00.000+05:30

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…

real cheese on pizza and adventures in model-building

2007-11-06T12:30:00.000+05:30

Well, now that the malaria fun appears to have died down things are getting back to normal around here. I have been testing out ways to make my model for cervical cancer detection, which has been pretty fun. At first I tried using this stuff that I guess is essentially just mud. Unfortunately it proved not to be sticky enough, so all of the newspaper strips just fell right off of the chicken wire frame that I made. The librarian, Shahnaz, recommended that I use plaster-of-Paris, since the mice and rats won’t eat that either (which is the main reason I didn’t use the traditional flour-and-water paper-mache mix). Anyway, I tested it our to make sure that it would work, and it certainly is a lot studier than the mud that I was using before. On Sunday I spent a long time tearing up strips of cloth to use on the model, and experimenting with the plaster-of-Paris. Things to keep in mind in the future: it hardens in about a minute if you are not constantly stirring it. I lost a half of a bag of the powder because I let it sit too long while I rinsed off the sink… anyway, Chantra Kanta saw what I was doing, and showed me a much better method, that looks wayyyy smoother and takes about half of the time than what I was doing! Eventually I’ll get around to posting some photos of her showing me what to do☺

The post-malaria blues seem to have pretty much dissipated for me. I’m left, instead, with a kind of a dull ache of longing to get home again. I keep telling myself that the hard part of the internship is over; my parents will be here in one month (almost to the day), and I have plenty of work to do before they get here. See, I have somehow become the resident “artistic person” even though my drawing skills are pretty sub-par (or at least they are next to Dan’s), so Prabjit and I have been recruited to make posters for the upcoming anniversary of the gas disaster. I can’t say that I mind this at all, because it means that I have something practical and fun to do for the next three weeks. It also means that we got to go to the stationary store and buy a bunch of paints and markers and stuff, and we all know that I am addicted to buying stationary supplies, so this is good. I also have my model to finish, which takes some time as I have to wait between layers and body parts so that things can dry. Not to mention that I fully intend to get started on looking for a translator to do my photo project in the next week or so. I really want to get started on that before I leave in December with mom and dad, especially since when I get back in January, I really only have about six weeks left here in Bhopal before I can start traveling! Woo hoo! Oh yes, and of course Andrea will be here as of January eleventh or so, and Mel is returning in February, so I suspect that the rest of my time here is going to be pretty busy. Which is good, provided I don’t get malaria again. If I get malaria again I’m going to the fuck home.

Speaking of illnesses, Aio has still been pretty under the weather, and actually got a second malaria test on Monday because he was feeling so sick on Sunday night. The test came back negative, which is good. However, this begs the question of what exactly he is sick with… I feel really bad for him, since he has only been here about three weeks, and he has been sick for at least two of them now. Although, we did go to Jehan Numa Palace Hotel for dinner last night, and I think that did us all a world of good in terms of morale. Jehan Numa is the most expensive hotel in Bhopal (or at least as far a s I can tell), although the bottom end of rooms are less than $100 per night, just to put that into perspective for you. They have the only restaurant that serves Western food that actually tastes like Western food though, at their Italian restaurant. I actually (decadence of decadence!) have been twice this week, since Eurig, Derek and I decided to go and check the place out on Friday night. Derek, Prabjit, Aio and I went back last night, since it was Derek’s last night in Bhopal, and therefore his choice of whre dinner was to be.

I had spinach and cheese ravioli (and no, the cheese was not paneer thank god), on the first visit, and then peanut chicken satay, a pizza and lasagna that I split with Prabjit last night. We couldn’t resist but get a bottle of wine on both of our trips, particularly because so far as I know there is no other restaurant that serves wine in the city. Considering that this place is really about one of the priciest places that you can eat, it is still pretty damn cheap by Canadian standards. The bottle of wine (there are only two red on the list) was about $30, and the main courses are each about $5.00. This restaurant is actually quite a bit cheaper than the “mixed cuisine” (read: Indian food) restaurant that we ate at before. I wasn’t overly impressed with the Indian food that we got at the other restaurant before, so I would say that I win all the way around: Western food is cheaper! Yay!

I have been shying away from the food in the canteen lately, as I am getting thoroughly sick of rice, daal, subjie and roti two meals a day, every day. I know that it is about the healthiest food that I could be eating, but I’ve been craving a bit of variety lately, and I the canteen just can’t give it! I know that I can’t afford to eat Jehan Numa style for next three solid months, but I think that just knowing that the option is available once in a while is uplifting. I am heading to Delhi this evening with Derek and Prabjit, on a much-needed break from the clinic, and Bhopal in general. Derek is going to continue up to Shimla and McCleod-Ganj after Delhi, and then he will be heading back to Chicago… for which I am very sad. As I said last night on our second toast to Derek: “I wasn’t sure about you at first…but now I’m sure!”. I’ll really miss him here, and I just don’t think that things will be the same at the clinic without him. Anyway, our trip to Delhi will be a nice farewell. I am also planning on raiding the city for certain Western items that I haven’t been able to find in Bhopal – granola bars, mosquito repellent, several particular brands of crackers, red wine, and hopefully a decent haircut. Is it sad that I am more excited about visiting the McDonald’s in Delhi than the Indira Ghandi museum? Hmmmm…

Anyway, I don’t think that there is much else to report before the trip. I’ll be sure to write about Delhi once I get back, as I’m sure that this time I won’t get lost with an evil cab driver at eleven o’clock at night. And if I do I will be armed with Prabjit, Derek and a cell phone.

more malaria and marriage madness

2007-10-29T20:57:00.000+05:30

This past week has been a series of ups and downs that is making me slowly lose my mind. I have been homesick a lot, I think mostly because I’ve been sick in bed, feeling weak and tired, so I’ve had nothing to do or think about but coming home again. On the other hand, I’ve been helping to reserve hotels and make some travel arrangements for mom and dad when they come, which is peaking my interest in traveling once again. I think that at this point that is what I am more interested in doing in terms of my time here. The frustration of feeling like I’m not actually doing much to help or to make a difference has really hit me hard the past week or so. Now that I am feeling better from my bout of malaria, I’m just looking forward to the part of my trip that involves the traveling. Too bad that is still another three months away…

I went to my first Indian wedding this weekend. It was a two-day affair of absolutely mayhem. I’m not entirely sure whether I actually enjoyed it or not, I’m still processing the insanity of it all. I’m not exactly sure whose wedding it was that we were at. We were invited by Ries, one of the rickshaw drivers who always waits at the edge of Qazi camp on Berasia Road, and I think that it was his brother-in-law that was getting married, but we’ll never know for sure. Anyway, we were told to meet Ries’s at his house, where we went to dinner last week for Eid, and that they would take us to the venue on Saturday nights. Well, Ries lives on the other side of Berasia Road, where I a not so familiar with the streets. We were headed in what I thought was the right direction, and rounded a bend to see somewhere in ballpark of two hundred men dancing in the street to music pumping out of loudspeakers on a truck. All at once, every face in the crowd turned and faced our little group, with me at the front. And then we were descended upon like vultures to a carcass. Every guy in the street surrounded us to ask us questions and say hello, but mostly just to stare with the most unabashed intensity.

At first I wasn’t entirely convinced that we were in the right place at all, since we seemed to have stumbled upon an enormous street party, and there wasn’t a familiar face in sight. After a few minutes though, there was a ruckus on the street behind us, and when I turned around I saw the groom approaching on a large white horse. At that point a semi-hysterical Ries jumped out from somewhere shoving us next to the horse so that our photo could be taken with the groom on his horse. Men were jumping around like Mexican jumping beans, shooting prays of party foam, and showering the crowd in sparkly confetti. After being sufficiently stared and photographed for about twenty minutes, all six of us were ushered into a Honda civic decorated with ribbons and marigolds. The car lined up behind the truck with the sound system, so we got to watch all of the men bump and grind with one another behind the speakers.

We were moving along at a snails pace, but I expected that we would speed up once we got out to Berasia Road again. However, we didn’t move much more once we got to Berasia as we inched along with the throng of pelvic thrusting dudes in front of us, setting off fireworks at regular intervals along the street. Our car stopped numerous times, and we were told to get out a couple of times so that we could watch the fireworks. As we stood about ten feet from where they were setting off long rows of cracking fireworks, I was a little nervous that a) I was going to go deaf from the blasts and b) either myself or one of the guys setting off the fireworks were going to get their face blown off. Eventually, Derek, Aio, Prabjit and I got into the car with Salman’s younger brother, Azmat, while Ruskin and Eurig were shuffled off into an open jeep of young men. We crawled along the street for about two and a half hours before we actually made it to the wedding reception. The whole procession was absolutely insane, since most of the guys who had been dancing had packed themselves three to a motorcycle, and were following the sound system with great reverie.

Once we arrived at the actually cite of the wedding, Prabjit and I were let to a separate area that was just for the women, where, once again, we were descended upon by everyone curious to know why there was a foreigner at the wedding. Although, after being stuck in a procession with a hundreds of gyrating men I was somewhat relieved to find out that there were also women at the wedding, the women were perhaps even more overwhelming than the men. Ries’ sister-in-law dragged me around by the arm, and up onto the stage where the bride-to-be was sitting with her eyes downcast, looking a lot like she was about to slit her wrists. I sat for a minute in silence, no sure whether I should say something to her or not, since no one else was talking to her, and then blurted out “congratulations?” with a confused smile. I saw her eyes flicker up at me as she tried to repress a smile, and I figured that my work here was done ☺ Melanie told me that the tradition in India is that the sadder the bride looks on her wedding day, the happier the marriage is supposed to be. I think it is also supposed to be symbolic of her being sad about leaving her parents’ home and family. Anyway, call me culturally insensitive, but I thought that it was the most insane thing ever. After that we were lead to a tent full of house wares and furniture, which I was told were “wedding gifts” (read: dowry according to Prabjit) to which I responded something along the lines of “Oh, isn’t that nice”.

Salman’s family was there, and his mother tried her best to protect us from the throng of women obsessed with introducing me to every member of their family and general fawning over the angreez. Very quickly after being introduced to the bride, we were lead to a tent over on the groom’s side, where all the men were hanging out, to eat dinner. We were pretty much the last people to arrive, and therefore the last people to eat, so I had some slightly cold rice and aloo curry with a puri, while being talked at by the extremely nervous brother of the groom. He was obviously wanted to impress everyone at the wedding, and felt particularly compelled to welcome us whities to the ceremony. About a minute into our conversation he told me that I was “doing good work here with the backwards people in India”… to which I responded “thank you,” and “I think” under my breath. He also insisted on telling us about fifty times that we were “lightening up the occasion” while deliberately turning his back to Prabjit while he said this.

At this point it was about one-thirty at night, so Ries told us that he would arrange for us to take a car home again. We milled around the outside of the venue (which was basically a large tent in a field) until a battered white Ambassador pulled up, and we all piled in. The drive home on the empty night streets took about five minutes in contrast to two-and-a-half hours that it took to get there. Also, I would point out that we spent less than an hour at the wedding itself. We missed the actual ceremony, which apparently took another two hours, since Salman’s mother told us that she was there until three-thirty in the morning. Prabjit told me afterwards that the first night of the wedding is about the bride’s departure from her family, while the second night is about celebrating the newlyweds joining, which might explain the whole procession thing about our arrival. At any rate, we arrived back at Sambhavna slightly after two in the morning, and, speaking for myself anyway, half insane from the evening’s events.

Now, the second night of the wedding Salman’s mom had invited us over to their house so that she could help us to put on our sari’s properly. We went over at seven o’clock, since the evening’s festivities were to start at eight instead of ten. It took the better part of an hour for Salman’s mom and younger sister to mummify both Prabjit and I in our saris, which made me realize why so many women wear salwar suits instead. I wasn’t entirely convinced I actually looked good at the end of it all, either, since I felt like I was about three times my actual width from all of the material wrapped around me. Salaman’s mom also put some large white costume jewelry on me as well, so that I looked like a proper lady for the wedding. We spent another hour waiting for the rickshaws to arrive to drive us there, and finally piled into three rickshaws and sped off to a different place that the previous night. Again, it was basically a huge open field fenced in by white cloth, with separate entrances for men and women.

Now, I had thought that there were a lot of people at the first evening’s celebration, but that was nothing compared to the number of people who were at the second night! I would have guestimated that there was somewhere in the ballpark of five hundred men women and children happily chowing down on mutton biryani, pani puri and a variety of other things. Being overly cautious of buffet food in general, I insisted on having veg food with Prabjit, so after a slight tug-of-war with Ries’ pushy sister-in-law about when I would have my photo taken with the bride and groom (they shared a stage this evening), Prabjit and I were lead over to an empty corner where the veg food was being served. It being a Muslim wedding I suppose that most of the guests were Muslim, so the veg buffet was pretty much deserted. We actually ate in relative peace, and were then lead over to the bride and groom to have our photos taken with them and the rest of the family.

After that we all piled into a rickshaw and made in home relatively early, or at least compared with the previous evening. Eurig, Prabjit and I had a few beers while discussing the evening’s events. Unfortunately, I think the residual malaria or possibly the med made the alcohol an unpleasant combination, and I have spent all of today feeling horribly depressed an sad. Note to self: no more alcohol for at least another week, and hopefully then my liver will have had a chance to recover from the malaria…

In other news, Aio also has malaria, although he seems to be coping with it pretty well. Salman, too, has malaria, and I found out about and hour ago that Dr. Quaiser, the allopathic doctor who prescribed my chloroquine, also has malaria. I guess that it is going around.

malaria fun!

2007-10-25T11:07:00.000+05:30

Well, I apparently have malaria. Humph. Lucky for me I seem to have either an extremely mild strain of it, or the anti-malarials that I was taking are helping to keep the full effects of it at bay. In fact, I would say that it is only by complete accident that I even found out that I have it. Vikas phoned on Sunday night to find out if we were interested in seeing a movie, but I told him that I was feeling a little under the weather, and that I had a bit of a fever, so I was going to pass. Vikas phoned Dr. Jai, they ayruvedic doctor here, and he insisted that I have a malaria test the next day, even though I felt quite a bit better. So go figure, I tested positive for vivax malaria, one of the less dangerous strains! Anyway, I’ve been feeling shitty on and off since Sunday, although not in any extreme way. From what I have heard from everyone else who has had malaria, you feel absolutely terrible, like you are dying, when you are sick with it, so I can’t help but wonder why I don’t feel too bad. Anyway, I phoned Dan last night, and apparently he is feeling far worse than I am with some sort of flu-y cold. Poor thing!

The past week has mostly consisted of eating giant meals at people’s homes and Indian Coffee house, which we are completely addicted to. Last Wednesday we went to Sareeta’s house for her fifteenth birthday party. It was very sweet, a lot of the neighbourhood boys were there dancing up a storm. It was pretty funny to watch these little guys do these totally over-sexualized dances, pelvic-thrusting dances with the utmost of sincerity. Thursday night we ended up going to Indian Coffee House for dinner yet again, so that was slightly less eventful. Friday, however, Rashida Bee, who runs Chingari Trust invited us over to her house for a belated Eid dinner. We ended up talking business a bit as well, which was just fine, since I have been eager to do some more work for them for a while. It turns out that they already have fourteen interviews with gas and water affected people translated into English, and they are really eager to get them up on the website. My idea is to read through the interviews and try to find some of the families that wouldn’t mind me taking their photos to put up on the website. I could also, with Prabjit, do some more interviews with other families if we have enough time and there is a need for it.

Rashida Bee’s family are extremely sweet. She lives with her husband, her brother-in-law and his seven children. Her four sisters all live in the neighbourhood though, and they all came over to join in the fun. When dinner was over, everyone just hung out in the living room together, laughing and talking. One of the brother’s seven kids was this extremely sweet, absolutely adorable little boy who had been born with some sort of problem with his feet as a result of the water contamination. His feet have grown so that they are curved, almost completely underneath his body, and his legs are just skin and bone, with no muscle. He can’t talk at all, but he seems to understand a lot of what is going on around him, and makes gestures and little cries to communicate. The best part of the night, though, was when he came into the room, the first thing he did was to crawl over to me, climb into my lap and give me a bone-crushing hug. I’m not sure exactly why, but he seemed to take a shine to me, and spent a good hour alternately hugging me, and showing me some of the simple things that he had learned how to do – like making a ball out of a scrap of paper. Anyway, I left feeling very good about life in general, and even more so about the project that I want to do for Chingari Trust. I find Rashida Bee a very inspiring person, as she always speaks about the importance of women in struggles for justice on a global level. She told us (through Prabjit’s translation) that she has been all over the world, Africa, Europe, Asia, America, and she sees that women are held down in different ways in all of these places. I think that it is absolutely incredible that a woman with barely any education and so few resources has done so much with herself, and becomes such a spokesperson on an international scale.

In terms of work, I also spoke to Sathyu about my project ideas for the Health Workers on Saturday, and he was enthusiastic about all of them. The Health Workers wanted to tools to show women in the bastees how to check for signs of cervical cancer using acetic acid, how to do BSE, ad to explain the different causes, symptoms and cures for abnormal vaginal discharge. Essentially what I had though was to make a model of a woman from the waist down out of paper mache, and with a piece of rubber in the crotch to simulate a vagina. Then, I would also build a cervix out of paper mache so that the women could practice using a speculum to open up the vagina, and looking at the cervix. The second idea was essentially to make a female torso and arms, with a space left for a breast made out of two balloons – one inside the other. The inner balloon would have sand in it, and the outer one water, which I think would somewhat accurately simulate the feeling of a breast. That way the Health Workers can show the women how to do BSE, and get them to practice. The third thing is the discharge, the idea for which I just got out of a book called Helping Health Workers Learn. Basically, I’m going to make a few puzzles with each of the different types of vaginal discharge, the symptoms and some easy cures. Each puzzle will be of a different cause of abnormal discharge, so that way the women will figure out which types of discharge require which treatment! So fun…

In other news, we have been invited to our first wedding on Saturday AND Sunday evenings! The rickshaw drivers who always stand at the edge of Qazi camp invited us to their younger brother’s wedding, which should be fun. I have been waiting for an excuse like this to buy myself a really fancy sari, so I am tickled that this gives me the excuse. I’ve already looked at a bunch of stores in both Chowk market and this other market that Mausam took us to on Monday afternoon. I haven’t found anything that I absolutely love yet, but I am going to go to New Market and look in the expensive store operated by the Madhya Pradesh government to see what they have. The other times I have been in there I have noticed some absolutely gorgeous saris in styles that I haven’t seen in the Chowk or other markets. So wish me luck, those of you have been shopping with me know that I can take about a millennium deciding on what I want, and I’ll refuse to buy anything that I’m not sure about☺

I don’t have too much else to report right now. It’s only six weeks until my mom and dad arrive! Yay! I’m really looking forward to seeing them and getting to do some traveling with them… and then after that its only another few weeks until Andrea gets here!! Woo hoo!

eiding and more eiding

2007-10-17T14:08:00.000+05:30

As of today, I have officially been in Bhopal for three months. It doesn’t really feel like it has been so long since I arrived here, but then, when I think back at all I have seen and done over the months, it feels like much longer.

The weather is finally starting to cool off to what I would consider an acceptable temperature. The heat of the day, in the afternoon, is still fairly warm, but nothing compared to the heat and humidity that I experienced when I first arrived. The monsoons are officially over, I suppose as of last month, and now it is dry and dusty here all of the time. I looked on the internet, and apparently Bhopal has only an average rainfall of a few days a month, except during the monsoon. I can’t say I mind, so long as the weather doesn’t get so hot again while I am here (which it is not supposed to).

We have another new volunteer, a Swiss-German guy named Aio. As per usual, Sathyu didn’t tell anyone that Aio was coming, most likely he completely forgot. However, just before dinner on Thursday night, Dr. Jai announced to Prabjit and I that there was a new volunteer in the boy’s dorm. We all crowded into the room and asked him a million questions, and just generally hassled him until we were ready to go and eat dinner. He was very patient with my hundred-miles-an-hour talking, so I think that he has passed the test, and we can be friends now. Just kidding Aio…

On Friday night we went to see a Bollywood movie with a huge troupe of people, which was actually really fun. I had been reluctant to go to an actual Bollywood film in the theater, mostly because they are never shorter that about three hours, and if it was as boring as some of them are, then I might have had to try to sleep through the entire thing. The whole night turned out to be quite fun though. We went out to Indian Coffee House for dinner, where I am quickly never tiring of eating, and then to the theater right next door. It turned out that the film we were planning on watching was sold out, so we all managed to pack ourselves onto Rachna’s, Vikas’ and Dr. Jai’s bikes, and drove a few blocks away to the other movie theater. The film was about a small-town girl trying to make it in Bombay, and who ends up becoming a high-class call-girl. According to Dr. Jai, this is a huge problem, since so many young women show up in Bombay every year trying to make money to send back to their families. Anyway, the film was really entertaining, and (Dan and G, are you ready for this?) everyone talks the entire way through the film!! It was great! People even boo and hiss at the screen when the villain came onscreen and cheer when the heroine prevails! It was like the Rocky Horror Picture Show with better songs. I love talking in movies, but am always reprimanded for doing it (except for when I watch movies with Lily and Sylvan, who may in fact talk more than I do), so this was like a dream come true for me! Also, it was somewhat necessary in order to follow some of the finer plot points, since it was all in Hindi and had no subtitles, Prabjit spent a lot of time translating for me. I was, however, surprised to see how much I could follow without her telling me… maybe it speaks to the expressiveness (or over-acting) of Bollywood cinema.

The Muslim holiday, Ramsan (or as we call it in North America, Ramadan) was over as of Sunday. Actually, when it was over was the source of great concern and confusion for us volunteers. Salman came by the day after Aio arrived (Salman always seems to have a sixth sense about these sorts of things, and shows up at exactly the right moment) and invited us all to his house for lunch on Eid, which follows the end of Ramsan. Unfortunately, no one was able to really explain to us what the last day of Ramsan was. We kept getting these vague answers about the moon, and it either being Saturday or Sunday. Eventually someone explained to us ignorant angrezies that if the moon is not seen on Friday night, then it means that Ramsan continues for another day, and Eid is then on Sunday instead of Saturday. It turns out that there was no moon on Friday night, so lunch at Salman’s was on Sunday.

I suppose that after a solid month of fasting I would be starving too, but lunch at Salman’s was like no other. There must have been ten or twelve different dishes; mutton kabobs, chicken biryani, chickpeas, roti, and so on. I stuffed myself silly, and thought that this will make up for the fact that I missed out on Thanksgiving dinner this year. Especially because there was this dessert thing made out of what I can only describe as noodles made out of sugar, that are then boiled or fried and served swimming in milk and topped with dried fruit. I can’t, of course, remember what it was called, but I have been assured that it is not a special Eid thing, and that I will be able to find it when Eid is over.

There was one particular kind of funny, and eye-opening incident at Salman’s house, that I couldn’t help but laugh at when Derek, Prabjit and I were talking about it later. Salman’s family appear to be fairly devout Muslims, and I’m not sure if his attitudes are the result of religious upbringing, or simply a cultural attitude that he holds more than most of the other people I have met here. In any case, the only women eating the Eid lunch were myself, Prabjit and Rachna. This was fine, but when lunch was over and Rachna took off, we were left in a room full of white courta-clad men. So Salman, dear boy, says to us “Emily, Prabjit, I’m thinking that you should go and help my mother in the kitchen”. Derek said that he was watching my face when Salman said this to me, and the look I gave Salman could have broken mirrors, but I managed to compose myself again fairly quickly. I realized that he was trying to be hospitable, and felt that we would be more comfortable hanging out with the other women, rather than in a room full of men, and to a degree he was right. I did not, however, have any interest whatsoever in doing the dishes unless all the other (male) guests were also about to help. I felt bad for his mom and sisters when we went into the kitchen, since there were enough dishes to rival one of Whitney and my Yanksgiving dinners, and as far as I could tell, no running water to wash them in. Yikes! Anyway, as soon as we came in, one of Salman’s sisters sat on the floor and chatted with us, and soon his mom and aunt came in and made paan. Essentially, there was no work being done, or at least not immediately, which I was glad to see. Oh man, I still shake my head when I think of Salman telling me to go to the kitchen to do the dishes….

We have since been invited to more people’s homes than I can count for Eid, despite the fact that the three day festival has now ended. In fact, we have dinner arrangements this entire week, from Monday through Friday, because of Eid. We’ve even had to turn a few people’s invitations down! I was talking to my mom and dad about it on the phone last night, and we couldn’t help but comment that if we had to spend an entire week entertaining people we would go completely nuts. I suppose that the Christmas season is somewhat like that, but it seems much more intense here for some reason. Anyway, I’m a little concerned that I am going to gain back the twenty or so pounds that I lost since I got here with all of this Eid food! Last night we went to the home of one of the rickshaw drivers who are always hanging around on Berasia Road outside of Qazi Camp. It was the guy that I really like, Ries, with the hat (although he has stopped wearing the hat). He had a really nice family, and about a million of his own kids and nieces and nephews running around the house while we ate. We also got our first wedding invitation!! Hurrah! An excuse to finally buy a sari! The wedding is next week, on Saturday and Sunday (we have been invited to the reception and the party, whatever that means…its two days anyway), so I had better get cracking and go sari shopping!!

This evening we are off to the birthday party of Sareeta, who is turning fifteen today! Prabjit and I actually took quite a bit of care to pick out a shirt that we thought that she would like in the Chowk yesterday. I also found some beautiful embroidered fabric for a churidad suit, so I of course had to buy that as well. I had only intended to get a nice black duppta to wear with some of my outfits, but couldn’t find one at the store I like. I ended up getting a white one, since I was told that it could be dyed black. The tailor, however, told me that its hard to dye anything black since it fades after just a few washes, so now I’m not too sure what to do with this white duppta. I suppose exchange it for a different colour…

tikrit and new friends

2007-10-11T17:32:00.000+05:30

I left off pontificating yesterday, so I thought that I should change pace a little bit and write more about how I have been spending my time the past week or so. We have gotten into the habit of doing little day trips with Mausam on our Sunday’s, since that is the only day that the clinic is closed and we can go exploring. This past Sunday Mausam took Prabjit and I up to Tikrit (sp?), which is a temple on the top of this really high hill just at the outskirts of the city. There is a little cable-car ride up to the top, although we took Mausam’s bike because it is wayyy more fun. …and also I’m not entirely sure if I trust cable-cars in general, and more so in India. It was neat, because you could see almost the entire city from up at the top. We went up the stairs to this gorgeous temple (which I believe Prabjit said was to Hanuman, but what do I know about these things?). You weren’t allowed to take photos inside so I don’t have any photos, but it was a lot nicer than most of the other temples I have seen; the floors were all gleaming marble, and everything was completely immaculate. It had these really neat chandeliers made out of these glass orb-type things. I bet that had they been all lit up it would have been even more beautiful, because the orbs were each different coloured glass.

Mausam took us to the side of the hill that faced the sun so that we could watch it set. I have to admit that sunsets in India are a lot more intense than in Canada. Every night it seems like there is a spectacular sunset, even the ones that I just see here at the clinic. The sun is just so huge and deep orange. Also, they are a lot faster than Canadian sunsets, which suits me just fine, since I am too impatient to wait three hours for the stupid thing just to get under the horizon. Anyway, we ate ice cream and joked around and giggled at all of the romantic couples who had come to also watch the sunset. It was fun.

While we were up there watching the sunset, Mausam got very very serious all of a sudden and said he had to ask us something important. For a minute I was actually worried that he was going to ask us both to marry him. Luckily that was not the case. However, you remember how I talked about a different understanding about sentimentality here? The attitude is somewhat akin to being filtered through a cheesy, poorly translated Japanese greeting card. So keep that in mind when I say that Mausam officially requested that Prabjit and I become his friends. I was a little taken aback by it, since I of course had assumed that we were, in fact, already friends. But I guess Mausam was making some sort of distinction between the kind of friends that you see and hang out with once in a while, and the kind of friends that you pour your heart out to. I suppose I make that distinction as well, but usually I don’t offer the second kind to people so openly; I just decide after the third pint that sure, were good enough friends that I can tell them my deepest, darkest secrets. Anyway, after my initial shock, I decided that it was a really sweet gesture on his part. I of course gallantly accepted. Now when Dan proposes, I’ll be ready to look appropriately shocked without seeming silly, since I’ve gotten it all out of my system in this practice run!

After our special moment at the top of the hill, Mausam took us to his friend Monty’s house for dinner. Monty lives on the opposite side of the city from Qazi camp, actually much closer to Tikrit. His family’s house was very neat, since the living room was all open concept, and opened up onto this large deck. There was also a swing in the house, how cool is that? Anyway, Monty’s family was very nice, and we got to hang out with several of his little nieces and nephews and one of his sisters. We also got tomato soup, which I thought was absolutely delicious. There isn’t enough soup here I don’t think. Anyway, we also had really great chicken for dinner, but I, once again, was the source of great embarrassment by not being able to finish all of the food that was served to me. This happens pretty much no matter whose house we are at for dinner. I have tried to cheat the India stuff-you-till-you-vomit system by only taking excessively tiny portions, but watchful hosts, like Monty, always catch me in the act and put ten times as much food on my plate, which I, of course, then can not finish. Anyway, I have decided that I like being twenty pounds thinner, and I’m not stretching out my stomach to its previous girth for any reason if I can help it, so I’m not eating what I can’t finish… I just hope that it isn’t too rude…

When we got back to the clinic we realized that Derek had still not returned from a walk to New Market that he had left on at about noon. Since it was now 9:30pm, we were a little alarmed that we hadn’t heard anything from him. I went to inform Sathyu that we were starting to become concerned, to which Sathyu immediately replied “why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”. I grit my teeth and explained that we had only just returned ourselves. Anyway, Sathyu was about to leave for town for a meeting for two days, and he instructed us to contact the US Embassy if Derek wasn’t back by about midnight. In the meantime, we started calling every number we could think of to see if perhaps he had run into a friend on his way back; Rachna called shortly afterwards and said that she was calling the police; Biju and Vikas both went to New Market on their bikes to see if they could track him down: in short, we panicked. After Prabjit and I returned from rapping on Ankeeta’s door across the street and waking up the entire family to see if anyone had seen him, Derek came strolling down the street. It turned out that he had gone to Bharat Bhavan, the cultural centre, and had taken in a Hindi play. He had just forgotten to call. Anyway, we are all happy that Derek is safe and sound and back here at the clinic with us. Although his little disappearance reminds me of the time I went for a walk at Bill and Faye’s house, down by the beach, and everyone thought I had drowned.

We went out for dinner at the infamous Jehan Numa Palace on Thursday of last week. We had decided that we were going to take Derek out for his triumphant return to Bhopal after his terrible experience in Delhi. It also happened to be the same night that the new group of students came from Delhi, and previously the dinners for the large group had consisted mostly of rice, so we were eager to avoid dinner at the clinic. Anyway, Jehan Numa is certainly outrageously priced, or at least it is far more expensive than any other place in India that I have seen so far. That said, for four people to eat, I believe it cost about $47.00 CND (about Rs. 1800). I was upset because I had wanted a glass of wine if we were going to eat there, but my head was so stuffed up that I knew I would regret it if I did, so I didn’t get my wine. The food was good, but not out-of-this-world, and I think that if I was to go back (which I am sure that we will at some point), I would order off of the Thai menu or the Italian menu instead of the Indian now. In fact, I’m not sure why I didn’t this time around. After dinner we took a little stroll around the hotel grounds, which are really beautiful; everything is immaculately neat, fresh painted, decorated etc. I’m looking forward to mom and dad staying there when they come to visit. Maybe it’ll be warm enough that I can go swimming in the pool…

I won’t go into the details of the work I have been doing, since they aren’t that interesting. Suffice to say I have been looking up the causes of white vaginal discharge. Although I did have a good meeting with Masurat and Aziza late last week, and they showed me some of the teaching aids that they currently use, and explained what other ones they thought they needed. If anyone has any brilliant ideas of how I could make a life-sized torso that opens up and has the female reproductive organ in there, please do let me know. Oh yes, and you have to be able to take the organs out of the body and open them up and look inside of them, too. My best idea so far has been papier-mâché, so, as you can see, I am in need of some inspiration.

I’ve spent the past hour re-arranging the furniture in the volunteer’s room with Prabjit. I quite like the new setup, since now Prabjit and I are facing each other and can spend all of our time making faces at one another. Joking aside, I do think that the set up is far superior to the previous one. We also rearranged the furniture in our bedroom yesterday, and Prabjit finally unpacked the last of her suitcase. I joked that she had finally decided that she was going to stay.

Mausam came by after his coaching lessons (or as we call them, tutoring) last night. We sat in the empty canteen and got eaten alive by mosquitoes and chatted about various things. Mausam is interested in going to the US, either to finish university or afterwards, so I got one of the world maps from upstairs and showed him where Prabjit and I lived. I think that for anyone from pretty much anywhere else in the world it is impossible to grasp just how huge North America is. Just looking at how tiny India is by comparison really kind of shocked me. But I did promise Mausam that if he was ever to go and live in California (that’s where he wants to go) I would certainly come and visit him. I think that that is about all the news that is fit to print for now… so adios.

englightening thoughts and goodbye to an old friend

2007-10-10T22:52:00.000+05:30

I’m over my head-cold, and back in full force! Whatever that means… I say that mostly because I spent one hour working in the garden this morning, between 9:30 and 10:30, and by the time I was calling it quits I was so tired and thirsty that I had to go and get a bottle of Limca and some mango-cream-filled cookies, which I of course ate all of and thoroughly spoiled my lunch. After my enormous sugar-rush I decided that I had to go and lie down for a while. Unfortunately there was still too much sugar sludge in my veins and I couldn’t fall asleep either, so I spent the best part of two hours writing in my journal (which, for those of you wondering, is where I write down all of my private and nasty thoughts that I can’t publish on here…yes, you Derek). Besides this being sad commentary on both my physical form and my work ethic, I came to some rather interesting conclusions about myself, or at least I hope that I did after two full hours of fracking self-reflection.

Last night I drank my third beer while in India (I would like to note here that I am now averaging one beer per month…not bad if I do say so myself!). We had decided to go out for dinner at a place Derek was curious about, in a hotel down by the lakeshore. We called Mausam to see if he wanted to come and hang out with us, but we hungry soon and decided to go to dinner after about an hour. As we were walking to the hotel/restaurant Mausam asked me why we were going to dinner. An excellent question: why were we going to dinner when there was a perfectly good free dinner waiting for us at Sambhavna if we should so choose. I have, of course, thought of several other good reasons to go for dinner since then, namely: we get the same four meals six nights a week at the clinic; that we have precious few other excuses to ever leave the clinic grounds…etc. At the time however, all I could come up was that we were bored and wanted to get out of the clinic, and this was what we decided to do. When I said it though, it just sounded kind of spoiled and decadent. I felt worse when the restaurant turned out to be fancy-ish (by Indian standards anyway, meaning linens on the table and no florescent lights), but cheap by North American standards (the main courses were about Rs. 120, or $3.00 CND).

I hadn’t really thought much of it before, mostly because I hadn’t been going out to eat very much, but Rs. 120 for most people here is a fair bit of money to throw away on a single dinner, even if it wasn’t for us. I also started to feel uncomfortable about my beautiful beer, which I even split with Ruskin because even I knew that I couldn’t (or rather shouldn’t) finish all 700mL to myself. As we sat there discussing the flavour of the beer and comparing it to British and North American beers respectively, I couldn’t help but see myself through the eyes of the Bhopalis sitting in the restaurant. And then I suddenly realized why Westerners are such celebrities here: we are totally fucking weird. How many places in the world is it considered appropriate for an unmarried woman, who *gasp* LIVED with her boyfriend in the West, to sit at a table with three other unmarried men, drink a beer and compare it to the millions, okay, thousands, of other beers that she had drank in her young life? Parents millions of miles away, and still trusted to be marriageable and respectable the next morning? I’m not saying that I agree with the mentality, I still believe that women have just as much of a right as men to get drunk, sleep with whoever they want etc. It was just the first time that I had ever really thought about how crazy I must look to the average Indian man. No wonder white women have the reputation of floozies here.

However, this did make me think, a lot actually, about the changes I was willing to make in myself for the time that I am here. Considering I have been here for almost three months, this may seem a bit delayed, but I don’t think that it is at all. I think that it takes a long time to figure out exactly what is expected of you for a variety of reasons, and which rules you can ignore, and which ones you can’t. Its certainly taken me quite some time to figure it out anyway. Three months in Bhopal hasn’t changed my attitude about certain things; I don’t really give a rat’s ass what people think if I drink a beer, I still like to wear my Western clothes on occasion (within reason of course -- no mini skirts); and part of me is absolutely desperate to take my nose ring out so that people can see it (I mean not have it flipped inside my nose). I know that that is a weird thing by which to define oneself, but I have good reason, or at least intellectually. Having a hole and a piece of metal through my nose interrupts the viewing pleasure of men staring at me, for one thing. It also contradicts everything else about my short, sweet appearance. I honestly think that in Canada anyway, people give me less shit if they see my nose ring, because without it I am far from intimidating. Besides, it looks cool, right? Hahaha. One of these days I’m going to walk down Berasia Road with my nose ring in plain sight and see if I still suffer the same harassment from all the hooligan men out there… little shits that they are. Humph.

The flipside of all of these thoughts swirling around my head, however, is that there are things about myself that I am flexible on, or even want to change. The main thing that I have noticed so much since I got here was my consumerism. I’ve even noticed this in Canada, in comparison to other people, but I buy a lot of stuff that I don’t actually need. I buy clothes that I never wear, food that I never eat, junk that I never use, and all of this becomes even more glaringly apparent when some of that crap costs more than most people in this neighbourhood make in a month. I won’t say that it makes me feel guilty, because change shouldn’t be motivated by guilt, but it does make me think twice about buying shit I don’t need when I have to walk by dozens of homes who could never afford those things. Even when I bought my Limca today, I was also buying one for Prabjit, and as I walked back to the clinic, I couldn’t help but wonder if a lot of the people in this area have ever even had a Limca before, let alone could buy two at a time.

Anyway, I remember during my pre-departure training from CIDA, the instructor was talking a lot about the re-entry shock that people experience when they come back home, and find that not only have things changed in their absence, but they have changed as well. Until I had my long contemplation today, I had been thinking that very little about me had changed since I left, and that I wouldn’t have any problem fitting right back in when I got home. Now, to put this in perspective, I was also very flippant about the culture shock I would experience when I got here, and simply assumed that it wouldn’t be so bad because I was expecting it… I of course, spent two weeks with my mouth catching flies in shock at every sight, sound and smell here, and could barely venture outside of the clinic without taking a small arsenal of hand sanitizers, Kleenex, water bottles, cameras etc. So, I am beginning to realize that maybe, as I once suspected it might in a glimmer of premonition, I might not be changing India so much as India is changing me... despite my intentions to spread my morally loose Western-woman ways of drinking and sleeping around among the women here (just kidding… sort of). I’ll admit that I have even thought about wearing a burkha so that the men can’t tell I’m white and will stop hassling me… however I later decided that that is another thing that I am not willing to budge on, and if it means poking out the eyes of every uncooperative man in Bhopal, then so be it.

Anyway, I just got off of the phone with Dan, who has had some very bad news: his cat, and best friend, Winnie, had to be put to sleep yesterday. His mom has been looking after Winnie since Dan moved to Montreal a few years ago, so Dan is very upset that he wasn’t there to say goodbye to his old pal. I was going to write more about my own lingering thoughts, but instead if you are reading this, I think that you should pick up the phone and give Dan a call or send him an email, since I can’t be there with him. Thank you.

dinner out and again...

2007-10-04T17:21:00.000+05:30

Derek has returned to Sambhavna, after his passport and wallet were stolen as he slept on the train the other night on his way to Delhi. He was supposed to be on his way to Thailand for a month-long trip, but since he had his knapsack stolen, he wasn’t able to catch his flight. It certainly made me nervous about traveling around India once my internship is done. I’ve already had my wallet stolen while I was in the market here, and I like to think that that made me more aware of the dangers that I face, but I think that it is still hard to be on your guard absolutely all of the time. It should help that I’ll be in a group with Andrea and Louis, but you never really know, especially when it is so clear that white people are the target of theft so often.

I’ve got a nasty head-cold now, which is really annoying. Mostly my head is just stuffed up, but its hard to stay hydrate in the heat, especially because its still too hot to sleep without the fan on at night. I hate getting sick when it is hot out, somehow it feels worse than having a cold when its cold outside.

Another group of students came from Delhi this morning. This time they are from different disciplines, instead of all being psyche students, so Shalini was discussing what to do with them once they got here. She came up with a really interesting idea for how to get them involved and engage with people here in Bhopal. One group is going to do a sting-type operation at the gas relief hospitals here in Bhopal, by pretending to be patients needing treatment. Another group is going to spend some time with some of the kids with disabilities, and the third group is going to do some work with the women who do work at the trade union. Anyway, I think that it sounds like a really interesting way to get people involved in the campaign.

Tuesday was Gandhi’s birthday, so the clinic was closed, and most things were closed for the day. Mausam came and took Prabjit and I to Bhojpur, a little town about forty-five minutes outside of Bhopal. There is a thousand-year old temple there, which was very pretty. Although the Pundit was washing this giant phallus in the middle of the temple, which I have to say, made me mildly uncomfortable. Anyway, after the phallus-washing, we went to the edge of this huge rock formation, and hung around there watching the sunset. At the bottom of the rock cliffs is this river, so it was nice and cool as well. I took some very pretty photos of the sunset…so enjoy☺

We went to another pooja last night at Ankeeta’s house. Ankeeta is one of four daughters-in-law across the street, so there was quite a large group of people there. It was held outside, which was nice, since there is a lot of burning of things that goes on during poojas, and last time it got pretty smoky in the room that we were in. Anyway, the pooja was shorter than last time, which was fine, since the kids each wanted about four million photos of themselves taken with the other family members. Some of them actually turned out pretty well.

We ended up going out for dinner again last night, which we have been doing a lot lately. We branched out and went to a placed called Indian Coffee House, not to far from Manohaur, where we usually go. It was absolutely delicious, and incredibly cheap: Prabjit, Shalini and I ate for Rs. 150/- (about $4 CND). Tonight, in honor of Derek’s return to the clinic, we are thinking about heading to Jehan Numa Palace for dinner, to experience the wonder of vaguely North American food! Too bad I have a cold, otherwise I might even try to have a glass of wine or something… maybe I still will.

lice and fresh blood

2007-10-02T00:09:00.000+05:30

Last time I had just had my first encounter with one of those furry caterpillars, which has left a rough path of skin on my ankle, and continues to be ever so slightly itchy all of the time. This time I am utterly paranoid that I have somehow managed to contract lice from somewhere. However, it could also be the serious sunburn that I got last Sunday on my forehead and scalp. Either way, my head has been incredibly itchy all week, so last night I finally blurted out to Dr. Jai that I think that I might have lice, and could he please take a look at it for me. Fortunately Dr. Jai was very professional about it, and didn’t laugh at me once, for which I am grateful. Of course, I couldn’t pass up this golden photo opportunity, so I have a photo of me having my head checked, as well as a short video clip! So you all can laugh to your hearts content at me.

Last Sunday Mausam and Dr. Jai drove Prabjit, Derek and I to Bhimbetika, which is about an hour outside of Bhopal. Bhimbetika are these huge rocks jutting out of the landscape. We found out that about 5 million years ago the area was under the ocean, so the ocean formed the rock caves. The rock caves themselves are pretty spectacular, but they are made more so by the fact that about five thousand years ago whoever lived here then (sorry I’m not more historically inclined) made paintings in these caves, which are still there! The paintings are in amazingly good shape, and are actually pretty good artwork, too. Anyway, we spent a while wandering through the pre-designated paths, trying to avoid a large group of male tourists that were there mainly to stare at us I’m pretty sure. Eventually we got off the beaten track a bit, naturally to get to the short cut back to where we were parked. This, however, lead to a rather arduous trek through the Madhya Pradesh jungle. I should interject two things here: 1) just to give you an idea of what sort of jungle we’re talking about, that the Jungle Book is set in the jungles of MP and 2) that I, once again, was wearing my crappy flip flops, which are not terribly great trekking shoes.

Anyway, I successfully managed to dodge the cobras and pythons lurking in the underbrush as we scrambled around and tried to figure out where the hell we were and how to get back to some semblance of a path. Naturally, with my innate sense of direction, I was of no help. Spurred on by the visions I was having of the headlines (“Canadian development workers bodies found after two-month search”) I kept saying “There’s no way through there. We should just go back the way we came!”. However, just as I said this for the umpteenth time, we emerged at exactly the place where we had started (god bless Mausam)… although I did have a mild allergic reaction to something in the jungle and had itchy arms for an hour afterwards. After this there was some debate about whether or not we should stop in Bhojpur on the way back, where, apparently, there is a very large, beautiful temple. In the end we decided not to, which I’m glad about, because by the time we got back to the clinic I realized that despite my efforts with my duppta and sunscreen my forehead was the colour of a lobster.

The rest of the week was pretty uneventful by comparison (to the jungle adventure anyway). I ended up doing some data entry work for Jyoti, the yoga instructor, who wanted to compile some data for a new volunteer that was coming. It turned out to be a very mutually beneficial relationship, because I made up a few charts on Excel for her, and she translated the remaining premature menopause booklet and the BSE pamphlet that I had been working on, and unable to find anyone to translate for me. Word has gotten around the clinic about my “fantastic” artistry as well, so some of the cleaning staff asked me to make them some posters to hang up in the bathrooms, showing how to flush the toilets, and reminding people not to throw garbage in the floors but in the dustbins. These seem like rather basic things, but attitudes towards garbage are very different, since the government by no means comes and carts it away to dumps. People just throw their trash in the open spaces outside of their homes. Also, most of the people that come to the clinic don’t have flush toilets in their homes, so they aren’t sure what to do when they encounter flush toilets here. Anyway, I was happy to have something to do that made me feel at least marginally useful, even if it was in that fifth-grader sense.

Prabjit and I picked up yet more clothes from the tailor this week. I had some proper Indian salwar suits made, instead of the outfits that I have been putting together myself, which are mostly comprised of baggy sweat-pants-type things and a few shirts. Every time I wear one of the actual suits, I get innumerable compliments from all of the women who work at the clinic, and I can almost hear them thinking “thank god she’s finally stopped wearing those weird pants”. Anyway, on the way back from the tailors we randomly ran into Mausam riding his bike back from his coaching lessons. (All the older students I’ve met in India do tutoring for younger students, which they call “coaching”. I believe Mausam has four younger students who he coaches on a daily basis). We decided to take a spur-of-the-moment trip to the lake, which turned out to be really fun. We all had Top’n’Town ice cream, which is way better than North American ice cream, and a plate of french fries. I also bought a treat for Derek, since he didn’t have the opportunity to come with us, and a veggie burger to bring back, which I had seen there before and had been very curious about.

A couple of days later Prabjit and I decided to sample the veggie burger that we had brought home with us for lunch. It tasted pretty good, although it did have this strange mayonnaise-y type substance on the bottom layer that I was somewhat suspicious of. A few hours later was the weekly staff meeting, so I dutifully went down to sit through several hours of discussions in Hindi about the general operations of the clinic. I had great intentions of trying to further ingratiate myself with the clinic’s staff, but these were cut short by the vague need to possibly vomit up the veggie burger that I had eaten for lunch. So half an hour into the meeting (which turned out to be about two hours) I decided to spare myself the agony of sitting through the meeting in waves of nausea and went upstairs to lie down. Fortunately (yet again) I didn’t actually throw anything up, although I will use the polite euphemism to say that my stomach was a bit “upset”. Prabjit, despite also feeling mildly uncomfortable, stayed through the meeting, where apparently I was the topic of conversation. In essence, Sathyu told the health workers not to avoid me and try to help me out, which I appreciate immensely. Additionally, the staff at the clinic has decided that they want to know what we spend our time doing up here in the volunteer room, clacking away on our laptops all of the time. I can’t help but feel that all of the hours of the day that I spend reading the CBC and BBC’s headlines, watching podcasts of the Hour and uploading my hundreds of photos have been found out. Just kidding.

Anyway, Sathyu’s appeal seems to have worked, since the very next day, as I was preparing to track down one of the health workers for yet another of the infinite number of revisions on the BSE pamphlet, she, too, was looking for me!! I felt so grateful I thought that perhaps, as a token, I should offer her my first-born. Instead we had a nice chat about what else needed to be changed, and planned to have a focus group on Thursday with some of the women in the bastees to find out what some of the biggest health problems are that they would like more information on. I of course, happily took this information to Sathyu, who immediately asked my why I hadn’t looked up videos of BSE on the internet. Sigh. I felt like saying “because I was told to make a pamphlet, not a video you nitwit,” but kept my opinions to myself. As it turns out, that was probably a good idea, since as I chatted with Aziza today it slowly dawned on me that the health workers were planning on creating an entire workshop about BSE (information that I think that the language barrier had previously prevented me from understanding). Fortunately Shalini, the co-ordinator of Students for Bhopal in India, was there and able to translate some of the more complicated things that Aziza wanted to tell me. Now I feel that we re finally on the same page (although I’m sure a five minute conversation with Sathyu will change all of that again). Anyway, the plan right now is for me to develop the workshop that the health workers will give to women in the bastees about breast cancer and BSE, and, my favourite part, we’re going to make our own BSE video! How fun is that?! Well, for me, anyway…

Shalini arrived on Friday morning form Delhi along with twelve psych students from a school in Delhi. They were to spend three days in Bhopal doing a bit of fieldwork and interviewing survivors of the gas disaster. On Saturday they went to Chingari Trust to meet some of the kids born with disabilities. I, of course, decided to tag along to see the kids, of who many more showed up than when I went to the school about a month ago. I took some more photos of the kids, some of which turned out very well. It was nice talking to Shalini about the photo project idea that I had for Chingari though. I was saying that I had so much to do at Sambhavna that moved so slowly that I didn’t feel like I could really leave during the day and devote my time to doing something for Chingari, especially since my internship is supposed to at Sambhavna. She made it seem so simple when she said, “just start going to one family every Sunday, since then it doesn’t impede on your time at Sambhavna since the clinic is closed. Chingari will make the time for you since they want people to volunteer for them”. Now why didn’t I think of that? So Prabjit and I have decided that we are going to do that starting this Sunday. Maybe after some time we’ll be able to go on other days of the week as well, but for now I think that this is a good arrangement. So, Rashida Bee is supposed to phone us with our first assignment later this week,

The group of psych students has already gone back to Delhi, since they were only here for three days. I had kind of forgotten what it was like to be here with so many other people, and I have to say that I don’t really miss the company. The girls were all very nice and friendly, but by the time the evening rolls around, I mostly want to chat on Skype or read or something, and its hard to have privacy when there are so many other people around. I also don’t like to have my morning routine interrupted (those of you who have lived with me know that I am not a morning person by any means). The first morning the girls were here there was an accident in the girls bathroom, and the shower fixture was pulled out of the wall, so I awoke to no shower, which of course mean that I didn’t have my requisite ten-fifteen minutes of de-grouching before heading down for breakfast. Other than that everything went smoothly though… there is another group of twelve students coming on the fourth, so hopefully that goes well.

This past Sunday Mausam took Prabjit and I on a little walk up to the “solar evaporation ponds” north of the factory. Essentially, Union Carbide decided to dump a bunch of toxic waste in the ground, where it would evaporate into the atmosphere and be dispersed around the world so that the toxic waste is so diluted that it is harmless! What a wonderful way to get rid of it! Pretend that its not there! And to prevent it from leeching into the ground they put plastic down, which is now rotted through… This is not to mention that the government is trying to sell the land to build houses on. Currently it’s just an empty site with giant pools of toxic water where all of the kids play. Its really terrible… Derek and Prabjit also finally got their permission to go to the Union Carbide factory, which for whatever reason proved to be much more difficult than when I did it. Anyway, I tagged along, since the weather was marginally better than when I went. It turned out to be a good idea, especially since the guards actually took us up top of some of the old buildings and machinery stuff, so check out the new photos!

By the way, I forgot to mention that there is some fresh blood in the volunteer room. A new volunteer named Ruskin that has come from the UK. He arrived on Sunday amidst the chaos of the fifteen girls from Delhi, but seems to be settling in nicely. In other news, Derek has left for a month to go to Thailand, and then will return to do more work at Sambhavna afterwards.

ganesh day and an holding hands

2007-09-22T17:19:00.000+05:30

Its official: it is possible to be bored even when you are in a completely foreign country, surrounded by unfamiliar things. I have spent much of the morning looking at the classified ads in Toronto to see if there are any jobs that a) I am qualified for and b) I actually have a remote speck of interest in doing. It turns out that there aren’t, so I switched to the real estate ads to see if I would be able to afford an apartment on my measly salary of zero dollars. As it turns out, either the housing situation in Toronto is worse than I thought, or the Star has lousy listings, because everything cost well over a thousand dollars, even for shitty basement apartments.

I was prompted to do all of this searching when I have started to wonder a bit about what I will be doing once I get back to Canada. Dan’s father recently offered to pay for him to finish up his degree at Concordia, although Dan has decided that he wants to switch programs, so he may still have another couple of years to go. For me, I’m not entirely sure what this means: either I am going to have to get yet another crap-tastic job in Montreal, and suffer through one last frigid, depressing Montreal winter, or I will go back to Toronto and find a job that actually appeals to me in some minute way… or that is the hope anyway. I find the options somewhat less than appealing, since the former means being miserable on a daily basis at work at the latter means being miserable on a daily basis at home. However, as Dan says, there really isn’t any point in worrying about it now, since what will happen will happen and there isn’t a whole lot to be done about it.

Things are quiet here at the clinic. As I mentioned, Ramadan has started, so there are much fewer patients coming in during the day. The health workers have been out supervising a study that the Government of India is funding to determine whether or not the water-affected people should get free health care. Unfortunately the study is being conducted by some group that has absolutely no interest in seeing justice for the water-affected people, and so they are doing a terrible job of it. One of the health workers from Sambhavna who has been sent to observe them doing the survey has been secretly recording footage of them on her cell phone, and it is absolutely appalling how little care they are taking in the study. The questionnaire is seven pages long, and the surveyors sometimes only take a few minutes to fill out the whole thing; they guess people’s ages, they skip entire sections and sometimes pages, they don’t bother to weigh or measure people properly. At one point a woman complained that she has cancer, and the doctor just ignored her and took her blood pressure and said she was healthy. Anyway, I’ve been slowly finishing the pamphlets on breast self-exam and menopause. I had a good meeting with the two gynecologists earlier this week, who were very helpful in telling me which changes should be made for the BSE pamphlet. Now I have to track down the health care workers to get them to take a look at, and translate the menopause pamphlet. At any rate, most of my days have been spent trying to colour in the pamphlets, or attempt to draw things that look like people, which is becoming less than stimulating. So when I complain of boredom, that is why.

I think that I would much prefer to be out and about, trying to do things within the community and interacting with people, but the whole Hindi thing makes that somewhat impossible. I have started up in my Teach Yourself Hindi book again, in a vain attempt to understand verbs and their conjugations. It turns out that my Hindi has actually improved since I got here, and I have added a number of words and phrases to my vocabulary that I hadn’t even noticed, so that is promising. Although I am still a far cry from actually understanding more than about 3% of what people say to me.

Apparently this week has been a festival for the Hindu god Ganesh (that’s the one that looks like and elephant, and therefore the only one I recognize). There are these little makeshift temples set up all around the city for him, particularly in the Chowk, but also in people’s homes and front yards. In fact, Vikki and little Vishal’s family has one in their front yard! You know how I know that? Because there is also a set of loudspeakers attached to the temple thingie, which blare music until about twelve o’clock every night. All I can say is thank god it has cooled off enough that we can sleep with the windows closed, because it noisier than living next to a bunch of frat boys for about two hours every night! Anyway, the festivities are supposed to be over in a couple of days, so that will be the end of that… until next week when there is a similar celebration for another god and people will set up statues of him.

Sareeta wanted us to come and visit her house on Wednesday, in particular to see her family’s own little Ganesh temple. I couldn’t help but have visions of myself sinking waist-deep into the mud outside of her house after the heavy rains the night before. So, in an effort not to be led around by the hand and treated like a particularly incompetent two-year-old, I wore my trusty Chuck Taylor’s for the walk there. I haven’t worn anything but flip-flops in so long I forgot how much easier it is to walk in actual shoes! Anyway, I succeeded in not sinking this time, and anyhow most of the mud had dried up since the previous night. It turned out that, as usual, Sareeta had plans for us that she had not bothered to divulge before the trip to her house, so we were lead to the Chowk on something of a hunt for the dozens of Ganesh temples set up all throughout. I have decided that I do not like having my hand held, and am becoming increasingly annoyed at the various people who try to impose this on me, particularly when I feel as though I am being led around like a dog on a leash, which despite the fact that she is eight years younger than me, Sareeta manages to make me feel like. Luckily Prabjit was there to take over the hand-holding duty, so I was off the hook this time. I’ve noticed that it is a form of affection between friends of the same sex here in India (although heaven forbid that a couple of the opposite sex hold hands. They’d probably be stoned to death). But when I first arrived here I couldn’t figure out how there were so many openly gay men walking around everywhere holding each other’s hands until I realized that all of these guys were just friends. Or I guess that’s the official line anyway. I wonder if there is a word for “gay” in Hindi. There isn’t in Mandarin/Cantonese. Anyway, I don’t like having my hand held, it annoys the crap out of me, especially when I’m keeping watch for motorbikes and rickshaws flying towards me from every direction, and have to be able to jump out of the way at a seconds notice.

After the first five or six Ganesh temples Prabjit, Derek and I had seen enough Ganeshes, but Sareeta and her friend Pinkie were ready to Ganesh-spot all night long if need be. When it started raining around eight o’clock we insisted that we had to go back to the clinic for a late night meeting with Rachna. It turned out that the guard had thought that we weren’t coming back to the clinic for dinner, so he had sent Shanti Bhai on her way. We went directly back to Manohaur (which is right next to where we had just left) to eat. Dinner on the whole was very good, as usual. I had my first plate of french fries since I got here, and they weren’t half bad. Unfortunately, as I was snacking on a few final pieces of vegetable kote to finish up, I didn’t notice as I “snacked” on an entire chunk of a chili that had been fried up with the kote. As soon as it hit my poor, weak, British stomach, I was quite sure that it was going to be rejected and spewed back onto my plate, so I looked ill and made for the bathroom. Fortunately I didn’t vomit up my perfectly good dinner, but I’ll think twice before I eat the kote again.

Earlier this week I put on a pair of pants that had one of those furry caterpillars lodged in the hem. I didn’t notice it until I was downstairs eating breakfast and my ankle had this rather urgent burning feeling and I looked down to see that the stupid thing had embedded about a zillion little spores into my ankle. I tried washing them off, but to no avail, so my ankle continued to have this unpleasant burning/itching sensation all day. At about three o’clock I asked Dr. Jay what the hell was wrong with it, quite convinced that it was only a matter of time before my foot feel off. He laughed at me and told me to go and get an anti-histamine from the medicine counter, which I forgot to take anyway, and I still have the full use of my foot, so don’t worry. However, I now check the inside of my pants every morning, because it could have been much worse if had been somewhere else inside my pants…

Holy shit, we interrupt this broadcast to announce that I have lost almost 20 lbs. since I got here. That is insane. I guess that is what happens when you don’t like what is served to you three meals a day, and you spend the rest of your time sweating and dreaming of real pizza and maybe, just maybe, a little bit of nice, sharp cheddar cheese.

salman's house

2007-09-17T10:48:00.000+05:30

Yesterday on our walk we ventured as far as the Chowk, which we had previously always taken a rickshaw to. It turns out that it is about a half hour walk, which really isn’t far at all! I wanted to buy some cloth for a couple of long courtas, as the tailor had been confused by my directions the last time I came in and had made me short courtas instead of long ones. I can’t wear the short ones with my churidad pants, because they look absolutely ridiculous, so there you have it, I am not buying excessive amounts of clothes at all! Okay, maybe a bit more than I need… anyway, I picked out a couple of things, as well as some green fabric to make an entire salwar suit out of, so then I will have three or four “appropriate” outfits that I can wear out and about without the local women asking me “why aren’t you wearing…?”.

I can’t help but notice that everyone absolutely hates it when I wear my hair in little, tiny pigtails, which I find kind of funny. There really is only one acceptable way to wear your hair if you have hit puberty: long, long and longer. My short hair, especially in its pigtail form, is the great amusement to many of the women and children here. The other day Shushma teased me and asked if I had had lice, and that was why I had to cut it all off! Yesterday Shivani’s grandmother came up behind me and pulled the elastics right out of my hair, telling me (in Hindi of course, so I only think this is what she said) that I needed to wear my hair out and long.

I should mention here that yesterday afternoon a guy named Salman showed up at Sambhavna, looking for Derek. Salman is somewhat like Mausam, in the sense that he serves as a sort of welcome-wagon for many of the new volunteers. He was close friends with a few different ones who have been here over the years, and has since decided that all of the volunteers should want to be his very best friend. On my second or third night in Bhopal I went to his house with a number of the other volunteers, since Mel had been hanging out with him a fair bit during her time here. However, Mel also warned me that Salman was extremely jealous and perhaps a little on the creepy side, so I had been avoiding him when he came for visits with Anisha afterwards. This wasn’t hard, since he didn’t seem terribly interested in hanging out with me, so I hadn’t seen him since my first few days here. (Ah yes, with the exception of when he came and brought Anisha an enormous pair of earrings for friendship day). Anyway, it turns out that a past volunteer that Derek knows had sent Salman a letter saying that Derek was here at Sambhavna, and that they should get in touch, so Salman came by yesterday to invite us to dinner.

Salman has a huge, very welcoming and sweet family. He is the eldest of five sisters and four other brothers, as well as some of the kids of his oldest sister, or at least that’s who I think they were. Yesterday was also the first day or Ramadan, so the entire family had been fasting since sunrise that morning. So before dinner was served, we ate a huge snack of fresh fruits (luckily all had been peeled or were peel-able) and sweets. It was pretty interesting to see the traditions. At the beginning of the snack we each ate a date, which is apparently the first thing that you are supposed to eat after a day of fasting. So that was interesting… Anyway, Salman showed us all of the photos of the other volunteers he had befriended, and it quickly became clear to me that he is generally only friends with the male volunteers, which is why he was more interested in Derek. Although he did say “Emily I am very, very sad. Do you know why?”. In my head: “No, but I can guess that it has something to do with the guilt-trip you’re about to lay on me.” “Emily, I am sad because you did not come to visit me all this time you have been at Sambhavna.” Ten points for Emily’s guess. Anyway, I’ve decided that this isn’t going to be something I lose sleep over. Derek can be friends with him, and I’ll try to quietly and politely bow out of that one…

I’ve spent most of the morning reading The Namesake, which is a novel about a Bengali family moving to America, and their eldest son trying to adjust to being the middle ground of the old Bengali ways and the new American ways. It’s strange how well I feel like I can relate to some parts of the book since coming here. One of the things that really struck a chord with me is the feeling of being temporary in a new place, because that’s how I feel here a lot of the time. I just can’t quite imagine moving to a new place forever and always feeling like that. At least my feeling of impermanence will end when I get back to Canada, whereas when you immigrate somewhere permanently you feel temporary for the rest of your life. I think that it makes me understand why Grandma and Grandpa Gibson kept wanting to move back to England, but never really could.

Anyway, we are supposed to be going to Sanchi later this afternoon on Mausam’s bike. I’ve been to Sanchi before, my first weekend here; it’s the ancient Buddhist stupas about an hour outside of Bhopal. Originally Derek and Prabjit were supposed to go with him, but Derek ate some street-vendor food that has made him horribly ill (thereby finally vindicating my strict no-street-food policy), and so I get to go instead!

By the way, I forgot to mention that there are the most adorable little kitten living somewhere in the clinic!! I came across them on Saturday night when I was going back to room for bed, a little later than usual since I had watched a movie. And what did I find in the hallway, but a mother cat and two sweet little kittens. The kittens got scared and ran into the bathroom, so naturally I had to take a photo of one of them... the other one ran out, so thats the picture of the one scrambling down the stairs!! They are soooo cute!

birthday blues and the supermarket

2007-09-17T09:59:00.000+05:30

I just finished reading the book “Five Past Midnight in Bhopal” and have decided that it should be on the reading list of every high school and university class. The book recounts the story of the Bhopal tragedy from many perspectives: the survivors, like Ganga Ram who were (and still are) living in the bastees around the Union Carbide plant, the plant’s engineers and designers, the politicians in Bhopal, and the UC executives who decided that cost cutting was more important that human life. I went up to the crow’s nest at Sambhavna to read the final pages of the epilogue, and I couldn’t help but wonder that I was so close to such an immense catastrophe: from the crow’s nest you can see the flare tower that, should there be a leak, was supposed to burn off the MIC. The flare tower had been turned off for maintenance, while all of the other safety measures of the plant had been turned off to save, quite literally, a couple of bucks. You can also see the top of the decaying structure of the plant, left to fester and rot, leaking more poison into the ground water of people too poor to do anything about it.

It is amazing to think that the people written about in the book are real, living, breathing people, some of whom I have met. I couldn’t help but cry when I reached the part of the novel that depicted the horror that people faces when the MIC started to escape the plant. I could feel my own lungs and eyes burning, and I pictured myself running down Berasia road in an attempt to flee the poisonous gases. It makes me wonder how, knowing the injustices of the world, we can sleep at night. Although, as a side note, I slept terribly last night. I woke up a few times to itch my hands, which felt like they had been bitten by a dozen mosquitoes. This morning I had not bites though… maybe it was my own subconscious bubbling through my dreams. Either that or I have malaria.

Work is going very slowly here still, and perhaps that is contributing to my general feeling of malaise. I had sent an email to Diana, the much-loved CIDA intern who was here last year, and she recommended that I set up a volunteer meeting with Rachna to try to get things moving, which has proven to be very effective. To tell the truth though, when the meeting was over I couldn’t help but feel like it had simply been an opportunity for Sathyu to reprimand me for not being productive enough, and then cease to dispense with any advice that might actually enable me to do more work. However, Rachna has had me write up a detailed proposal of what I would like to do with the photography project, which I am optimistic might get things moving a bit on that front.

For the meantime I have been working on a pamphlet about breast self-exam to distribute to women in the bastees. Many of the women are illiterate, so it is important that the pamphlet describe everything using pictures. Unfortunately my drawing skills leave something to be desired, so I hope they can tell what the hell I am drawing. Ritesh, one of the health workers, told me that the pamphlet could be about eight pages long, so I had almost completed that particular task. However, Sathyu took one look at it and said “its only supposed to be on one page”. Sigh. So I started all over again. The health workers seem satisfied with what I have come up with, but they want actual photographs of some of the thing to look for when doing BSE, so that it is clear to the women what the warning signs are. I spent a good chunk of yesterday looking up pictures of breasts on the internet…

Part of my frustration with the work has lead to me being a bit despondent of late I think. Some days I love it here, and feel like I might actually be doing good work, other days, like today, I’m ready to jump on the next flight home, where I can bury my head in the sand and have a hot bath and eat some chicken wings with my beer and/or Diet Coke. Maybe my lack of youthful optimism is part of getting older. For those of you who don’t know, I turned twenty-four on Wednesday. I didn’t really tell too many people around the clinic, because I didn’t want a big fuss made of it by anyone, particularly Ankeeta’s family. When it was Anisha’s birthday they wanted to buy her a cake and have a celebration, but couldn’t afford it, so I though I would try to avoid any repeat scenarios. Instead, Mausam Derek, Prabjit and myself went out to dinner at the illustrious Wind’n’Waves restaurant by the lake.

You may remember Wind’n’Waves from my first few nights here, as it was where we went for Mel’s goodbye dinner. Mausam stopped on his way there and bought me a birthday cake and some flowers, which was extremely sweet. He also sent me a text message the night before my birthday that was extremely sentimental about friendship, which I have learned bears the same sentimentality as in, say, Japan or China: a little over-the-top by Western standards, but very wholesome and sincere. Prabjit got me material to make a proper salwar suit (which I have been avoiding by buying various different fabrics separately instead of buying stuff that matches… people will have to stop asking me where my duppta is!). Derek got me an enormous bottle of Limca (which I have finished), and some cookies that are like Oreos, only better. We had a good time at the restaurant, especially because I got to have a beer! They come in 650ml bottles here, so I split one with Prabjit, but I still felt a little light-headed on the ride home! I must be loosing my tolerance…

Last night we were invited to a pooja by Shushma, who has been working in the canteen with Ankeeta since Paupoo’s recent relapse into drug abuse and idiocy. I’m still not entirely sure which gods were being prayed to and for what reason, but I did glean the following: the girls had been fasting all day in an effort to ensure getting a good husband. The pooja itself was very interesting to watch. There were only women in the room, with the exception of five-year-old Sumit, and another young boy I didn’t recognize (oh yes, and Derek of course!). First the older women painted their feet and the feet of the younger girls with yellow stuff, bordering them with a bright purple paint. Eventually it was decided that Prabjit and I should also partake in this particular practice, so my toenails are still tinted a purply-pink colour. Then about a million little plastic bags were produced, full of incense, flowers, various foods and powders. The woman whose home it was being held in (I didn’t catch her name) decorated and set up a little alter to put a little statue of the gods. Before the Pundit (priest) arrived to perform the actual ceremony, the women got out a drum, and did some rituals with it, which included some chanting and singing. This part peaked my interest, because I thought “how cool would it be if they just did their own pooja and didn’t have a priest?”. Eventually he arrived though, and read some stuff from a book while the women took turns placing various things on the alter (presumably as offerings). There was everything from marigold petals to bangles to milk up there by the time he was done! The incense in the room was overwhelming, and part of the ritual involved several other things burning as well. I caught myself wondering if all this burning of things had any effect on keeping mosquitoes away… Mosquitoes aside, however, the pooja was very interesting to watch. It seemed like it was a real bonding experience for mothers and their marriageable-aged daughters. It was the daughters who were dressed up in their best saris and salwar suits, and who participated in the pooja. Apparently they stay up all night together, and perform the same pooja again four more times throughout the night. And they have to take a shower between each pooja. Anyway, I thought “hey maybe Hinduism is the way to go… n opportunity to pray to whoever you want for whatever you want”. Not that I’m converting, it just seemed like a good way of mother-daughter bonding during those “difficult teenaged years”. I bet Annie would have hated it ☺.

My back pain from lack of exercise in combination with my desperate need to get out of the clinic for a few hours every day has prompted me to go for little walks with Derek and Prabjit every day around dusk. The weather is still pretty hot here, especially in the heat of the day, but since going out after dark can be a bit on the sketchy side, our walks have been late in the afternoon, as the sun starts to set. So far we haven’t made it very far down Berasia Road, but yesterday we came across a SUPERMARKET!! Now, keep in mind that the only North American style stores I have been into here (ie. meaning that they aren’t stalls that you can’t even walk into) are the Sony store, and a clothing store in New Market that is four stories high. So when I say “supermarket” you must grasp the full extent to which this place is a fully North American style market: air conditioning (!), aisles, plastic baskets to load your food into, a produce aisle, prices clearly marked, the whole nine yards. They didn’t really have anything that you can’t get at the markets and protein shops, but it was just such an amazing and incongruous find in the middle of crumbling old Bhopal. I bought a few chocolate bars and a couple of bags of Lay’s chips, one of which is “American Style Cream and Onion,” and tastes shockingly like the real thing!

the (in)famous emily

2007-09-10T22:28:00.001+05:30

After the disappointment of not being able to beat open a piñata full of butter on Tuesday, I have other exciting news! I was in a newspaper called the Raj Express on Sunday! There is a picture of me taking a photo of two women looking at the display that we set up In Sambhavna to celebrate the 11th anniversary. I’ll back up a bit and say that on Saturday Sambhavna had organized a bit of a celebration, which they call a “program” here, hence the photographers from the newspaper. They showed a movie about Sambhavna at the beginning, and then there was a somewhat didactic-sounding lecture from one of the doctors in Hindi about malaria. I didn’t understand word of it, but there was a lot of finger-pointing and gesticulating to drive the point home. Afterwards we moved out to the front of the clinic where a tent had been set up, and a group of school children performed some little skits about Sambhavna. It was actually the same group of school children that I had taken photos of in the garden a few weeks ago, if you recall the photos of the little kids in white that I posted a few weeks ago. At any rate, I also didn’t understand any of the skits because they were in Hindi, but fortunately I had been designated the “official photographer” of the day’s events, so I got a front-row seat for the entire show. But I digress, at the end of the day’s activities, I was chatting with the two school-teachers when a couple of guys with cameras asked me to be in some photos. I thought that they were the same photographers who had come with the school on their previous gardening trip, so I obliged in pretending to take some photos. It wasn’t until the next day when Mausam showed me the photo of myself in the paper that I realized that the photographers hadn’t been from the school!

So that was fun… although I was perhaps roped into giving someone English-with-a-North-American-accent lessons. One of the school teachers spoke English and the other didn’t, so the one that spoke English was translating for the other one. Eventually the non-English one, who had been asking all sorts of questions about whether I had made any friends yet, phoned her fiancé and I was told that he wanted to practice speaking English with a North American accent. It was very awkward. I was hoping that they would just forget about it if I seemed vague, but the cell phone numbers were exchanged. Anyway, he has called a couple of times and I just haven’t answered. Euch, awkward. The kids are coming back to do their skits again on Wednesday, so I’ll have to think up a pleasant excuse for not wanting to spend my time giving ESL lessons.

We had dinner at Mausam’s house on Sunday night, which was really good. I had his mom and his sister the last time that we were there, but this time we got to meet his grandma and his dad as well. Mausam is this little skinny guy, and his dad is about three times his size. Its kind of funny because his father is this big man ho works as a guard at the jail, but he was so shy with us in his living room! He made Mausam come out first and ask if it was okay that his dad came out to meet us. Anyway, I just thought that it was very sweet and funny.

We had a fun time getting back from Mausam’s house as well. As I mentioned before, he lives on the outskirts of the city, so we took a city bus there and back. So on the ride back I decided to take some photos of the bus ride. We had to change buses at one point, and the second bus full of people were highly amused that there was this crazy white lady photographing them in the bus… I think that I thoroughly embarrassed Prabjit, Derek and Mausam, but what the hell, I had a good time! Unfortunately we all felt uncomfortable saying no to the drinking water at Mausam’s house. I don’t know why, because I haven’t accepted water that I don’t know for sure isn’t filtered from anywhere else, it just seemed extra-rude for some reason. So both Prabjit and I had mildly upset stomachs last night and this morning. It wasn’t too bad though… Derek wasn’t sick at all though, which made me think that perhaps it wasn’t the water at all, just the extra-spicy subjie (vegetable dish).

Today we ended up going back to Orya bastee so that Prabjit could meet Gangaram and check things out. When we arrived he took Prabjit and Derek on a tour of the garden, which I had already had on a previous visit, so I just hung out in the schoolyard and took photos of some of the little girls that were following us around. It actually turned out really well, since there was just a small group of them, and the older one and I were able to communicate through my broken-down Hindi. It was pretty fun. Then we asked Gangaram to see some of the rest of the bastee, so we went on a little walk up the street. We got to see Gangaram’s house, too, which was fun except for his wife was there and she scares me. She was the one that kept yelling at me in Hindi because I wasn’t doing the traditional dance properly. This time I got the sense that she was thoroughly annoyed at me because I’m not serious enough and I’m always joking around. I imagine that in her head she is thinking something along the lines of “this white kid has no pride”. It’s hard to have pride when you don’t speak the language or understand the customs and you spend your days being the butt of jokes though… Anyway, we had a good visit, that was only about an hour and a half, so that was nice.

Tomorrow there isn’t much going on. I’m thinking about taking Jeannie’s advice about making photo booklets instead of drawing booklets about breast cancer and self-exam. I’ll have to talk the idea over with the health workers, but I think that that is a good way of combining my talents in a useful and productive way!! So thank you to Jeannie for the idea!

In other news, Mom and Dad have been scrambling around trying to make arrangements for the visit in December. It turns out that they are coming the peak of peak season, so the travel agent had warned them that things are really booked up a lot of places already!! Ak! Anyway, there are a million places to visit, so I’m sure that we can find some second choices if need be… and I think that is about it for now.

a note about photos...

2007-09-08T21:32:00.000+05:30

a quick note about photos: much to the disappointment of my dear sister, i have had to convert to photobucket.com for photo storage. the webpicassa program just didn't allow enough storage space, and i have filled up my account yet again! i know that photobucket.com's interface isn't as nice, but it has the biggest storage space! anyway, the biggest annoyance of it is that it doesn't seem to show the photo album that is linked to the blog entry, instead all you see is a narrow box underneath the title of the posting... so if you click on that it will take you to the appropriate album within photobucket. if you are confused, email me.

lakeside photos and krishna's birthday

2007-09-07T19:06:00.000+05:30

On Monday morning I got up bright and early to help finish decorating the clinic for the anniversary. Devaker had bought some marigold strings, so Biju broke them apart and made them into one long string up around the entrance of the clinic. It looked very pretty… In the afternoon I ended up going to Arushi to take more photos. At first I took some photos of the kids in the school room, which was really fun. This one little guy with downs syndrome started to sing and act out these Bollywood songs every time I took a photo of him. It was so incredibly cute! It turned out that they wanted to go to the lake to take photos of some of the kids! So we drove back down to the lake in their van, with one little guy in a wheelchair and four blind kids. We took photos of each of the kids feeding the geese, riding horses, in a boat, and looking out over the lake. Some of them turned out really, really well, so I’ll be sure to post them. It’s really amazing how much the little blind kids are able to move around on their own, though. This one little guy learned English by listening to the BBC radio, and can walk around places that he’s never even been without a stick or anything. He’s really pretty amazing! The lake trip was fun though, and I think that it was a fun for them to get to go on an outing as well.

The next day was a festival for Krishna’s (a Hindu god) birthday. We had been invited to Meera’s house for the celebrations, but Mausam also wanted us to come with him to his house. It turns out that the prison that Mausam’s dad works for opens its doors to the public once a year, on Krishna’s birthday. Everyone is allowed in to see a film and some speeches and stuff, so Mausam wanted us to come to see that, too. Unfortunately the prison guards stopped us at the door, suspicious white people that we are. Mausam had to talk to them and tell them that we were with him before they would let us in. They wouldn’t let us bring our cameras unfortunately, which is really too bad. The prison was really dressed up and decorated. People were only allowed into one big hall of a room, where the superintendent of the prison was making a short speech. The superintendent actually decided that he wanted to know why there were two white people in his audience, so we were asked to go and sit next to him. He asked us where we were from, and asked us if we wanted to say something to the audience; we politely declined. Anyway, we weren’t allowed to see any of the other parts of the prison, so we left to go to Meera’s house at that point.

Meera’s house wasn’t terribly exciting. We quicky realized that we had been invited so that Meera could use my camera to take photos of her sisters tying Rakhi bracelets on her brothers. Apparently Rakhi actually lasts eight days, and Sunday happened to be the last night of the festival as well. We each got a Rakhi bracelet and some red holy powder put on our foreheads as well, so that was fun. It turned out that the festivities for Krishna’s birthday didn’t start until 11pm. Considering I am usually falling asleep at about that time, and Prabit was still jetlagged, we decided to bow out at about ten. Apparently the Krishna festivities involve a giant piñata-style thing filled with butter that the kids bash down with sticks, and then everyone eats the butter from inside it. I’m sure there is some perfectly logical reason for this particular ritual, but I’m not sure what exactly the reason is. At any rate, Mausam told us that the bus out there didn’t run that late, and we would have a hard time getting and auto, so he drove us back to the clinic is two batches Derek first and then Prabjit and I.

When we got back we realized that the internt hadn’t been working for a while, and it continued to malfuntion into the next day. Having gone to the Chowk to get Prabjit material for new salwar suits and to the photo store in New Market for me the previous day, we were a bit bored sitting around the clinic all day without the internet. We decided that we would go and check out Jehan Numa Palace, the ritziest hotel in Bhopal, since they have free wireless internet. Since Mom and Dad were interested in staying there I got to check out one of the rooms as well. The whole place was pretty shwanky, and it certainly was nice considering how much it cost, by Canadian standards anyway. It was weird to be in such luxury after spending so much time in the poor areas and the bastes here in Bhopal. It almost makes you forget what a lot of the luxuries are… but I sure am looking forward to having a meal there eventually! Apparently they make Western-style food there that tastes almost like the real thing! I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but as you can tell, I’m more than a little excited about it☺

Yesterday we started watching a Bollywood movie that we bought in New Market earlier in the week Even though the plot was pretty easy to figure out, I was definitely glad that there were subtitles (badly done as they were), because after the first hour and a half, I was getting a bit bored. Bollywood movies are always about a million years long, so even though we watched about two hours of it, there is at least an hour that we were too tired to watch last night. We also registered Prabjit with the local authorities, which turned into a bit more of an adventure than we would have liked. Derek cam with us, and I made the idiotic mistake of introducing him as “another Sambhavna volunteer”. They immediately wanted to know where he was staying, etc., etc. There are all sorts of restrictions about different sorts of visas when you are coming into the country, and on a tourist one you aren’t supposed to be doing volunteer work… thus I shouldn’t have mentioned to the official that Derek, with his tourist Visa, was doing work at Sambhavna. Anyway, the don’t appear to be following up about it, so I’m not too worried.

Today has been pretty eventful so far. I have been working on a pamphlet for breast self-exam for women in the bastes to use. We were trying to get it printed up for tomorrow, but the gynecologist had a look at it and wanted the text changed, so they won’t be done for another while. Tomorrow they are having a “program” as they say here for the anniversary of the clinic. I’ve been officially been put in charge of taking photos of the festivities here tomorrow, so I’m glad that I can be of some practical use. After spending the day trying to get things translated into Hindi and feeling rather useless, its good to know that I’ll be able to do something myself tomorrow!

For now, Prabjit and I are thinking that maybe we should go and take a walk for some exercise, but not much else going on. Its already dark, which makes it hard to walk around here…

By the way only five days left until my birthday!!

boat rides and autorickshaws

2007-09-07T18:00:00.000+05:30

Wednesday I ventured back to the Chowk to have mehindi done by Sareeta’s “big mother’s” sister. By the way, I discovered that her name is Sunita, and her son’s name is PJ, which is helpful, because I was finding it embarrassing to refer to her as a “big mother”. Derek was quite bored after about the third hour of mehendi time, and was ready to go. She did an amazingly detailed job though. I wish that I had taken some pictures of it to post, alas, I didn’t, and most of it has washed off now. Sunita’s daughter, Perna, did take a couple of photos of it though, so maybe sometime I’ll be able to get them from her via email. I’m still hoping that I’ll be able to see some of her designs for clothing as well.

So on Thursday, I went to Chingari Trust’s school to take photos of some of the kids born with disabilities. The mothers were all pretty welcoming to me and Mausam, who came with me to translate. He asked the mothers the kids ages and names, and wrote everything down, which I think helped people to think that we were “official” in some capacity. Anyway, the power was off in the building, which was a bit of a pain, because a lot of the photos turned out a little bit burry or whatever. Anyway, I’ll try to post some of them as soon as I can get the Photobucket account up and running again. My Web Picassa is, yet again, full, and I can’t seem to get any of the other photo-sharing programs to upload with any efficiency.

I picked Prabjit, the other CIDA intern, up at the airport later on Thursday night. Masaum took me on his bike, which was fun. Prabjit looked a little frazzled and tired when we got there, so I think that it was good that we picked her up… I know that I felt relieved when I finally made it to Sambhavna after all of my many misadventures in Delhi. Anyway, she is really nice, and we get along very well. I even discovered that she shares m love of George Stromboulopolous (sp?)!! How exciting is that?

On Friday Sathyu asked us to come to the weekly staff meeting that happens every Friday. He said that now that we had Prabjit to translate for us, we should start coming to them (they’re in Hindi by the way). The meeting was a little (ok, a lot) on the long side, especially since I couldn’t really understand much of what was going on. Prabjit isn’t fluent in Hindi, her family is Punjabi, which I guess is similar, but not exactly the same. So she was having a hard time translating every detail of the meeting for me.

Eventually we extricated ourselves from the endless meeting, and went to Arushi to take some more photos of the kids. It turned out that they had quite the adventures planned out for us. Thy took us to a place called Bhopal Heart, which has booths set up from most (if not all) of the states in India, selling things that are traditional to their states. They wanted photos taken there because Arushi had had he plans of the building changed so that there are wheelchair ramps throughout. Anyway, one of the women who works at Arushi (whos name I don’t know) insisted that she buy me this necklace that I had been eyeing. I felt bad accepting anything from them, but she was insistent to the point that it was embarrassing to say no. The photos turned out really well, so I’ll be sure to get them posted, too!

The clinic had its eleventh anniversary on Sunday, although it is closed, so on Saturday we decorated for Monday. There are about a million posters stored up in the library, so Prabjit and I helped Biju and Jothi (the yoga instructor) to patch up the various holes, dust them off and hang them up around the clinic. I think it looks very colourful downstairs now, even if the posters are hung up on privacy curtains taken from disused examination rooms… in the afternoon a former doctor from the clinic came to talk to the staff about early detection of cancer. He spoke fluent English, but since his talk was mostly in Hindi, I didn’t get everything that was going on. Luckily the PowerPoint presentation was in English, so I was at least able to follow that. I asked him about the HPV vaccine, ad whether or not it has been approved here. He said that it hadn’t been, and that people weren’t really all that excited by its prospect, since it was so costly. I hadn’t really thought about it before in the context of a developing country, but even in North America it’s ridiculously expensive, so I can’t imagine even a fraction of the population here being able to afford it.

After that we trekked up to New Market to get a cell phone sorted out for Prabjit (she says thank you for the phone by the way Casey). I was quite proud of myself; despite getting slightly lost in the market trying to find the cell phone shop, I felt that I was very efficient in sorting things out, and getting all of the paperwork together. When we came back to Qazi camp we went next door to pay Ankeeta a visit. The power was off in the houses, so it was hard to make it through the muddy back yard. It was fun to sit in the dark house though… although it did make me notice how difficult it is to communicate when no one can see you. Generally I rely a lot of hand gestures and exaggerated expressions for people to understand me. Not being able to do that meant that our conversation was a little more limited than usual…

Sunday was quiet for most of the morning, but I had promised Sareeta that I would go to the Chowk with her again in the afternoon. I wasn’t entirely sure what we were doing in the Chowk, and because of our limited communications I wasn’t able to figure out very easily, so we just had to wait and see what we were doing there! It turned out that she was taking us to her Auntie’s house once more. It was nice to see them again, although I think that we may have interrupted them by arriving unexpectedly. PJ was in the middle of a shower, and it looked like Sunita was cleaning or cooking or something. So we didn’t stay too long in the house. Sareeta still wanted yet more Rakhi bracelets on her way out of the Chowk, so we made a bunch of stops for that as well.

In the evening, Mausam came to take us to the lake for a bit. We ended up renting a paddleboat for half an hour and putting around the corner of the lake, which was nice. It reminded me a lot of the Toronto harbour, with a big cruise ship with music and dancing in the distance. The lakefront is really pretty, too, with some of the nicer restaurants and kind of touristy stuff. It’s almost North American… almost. Anyway, we had to rush back to the Clinic because Vishal had been reminding us daily about our promise to come and eat chicken and drink beer at their house. So, at about nine o’clock we showed up at their house. I quickly realized, however, that we were definitely not being made dinner. Derek and I ended up having a conversation in French to discuss what we should do. We ended up staying for chai, ad then excused ourselves, discussing our learned lesson about dinner invitations on the way home. We ended up going to Manohar for diner instead, which was delicious and wonderful, so all was not lost!

On a side note about Sundays activities, we were twice embroiled in the disputes with rickshaw drivers. The first time was on the way back from the Chowk. We were stopped at Sambhavna, and Prabjit paid the driver with a Rs. 50/-. She was asking how much more we needed to give in order to send Sareeta to her house as well, and then he started to insist that she hadn’t given him anything! Anyway, half the neighbourhood came to watch the dispute, and in the end there was nothing we could do. We walked out to the rickshaw stand at the entrance to Qazi camp. All of our usual drivers wanted an outrageous price to drive the few blocks, so Sareeta ended up flagging down another guy and getting a reasonable price from him. However, it doesn’t end there! When we went to get a rickshaw to go to the lake a while later, we got into an auto before we reached the auto stand at the entrance, and then the fat mean driver (I don’t know his name) flagged down our driver, looking rather annoyed. When our driver slowed down, the other driver jumped into the rickshaw and jammed his foot onto the brake. He started yelling in Hindi at our driver, and he screamed back! Then, to break up the fight, I started yelling at them to cut it out! It was mayhem! It turned out that the fat, mean driver was claiming that we were his rightful fare, because he had been waiting for us all afternoon long! The other driver eventually conceded and we had to take the fat, mean driver’s auto to the lake. Anyway, we were thoroughly annoyed, because the fat, mean driver always charges us too much, and now he’s scaring away the other auto drivers and treating us like we’re his property! I wanted to tell him that we aren’t taking his auto anymore because he’s mean to everyone and he over-charges us way too much, but I didn’t know enough Hindi… so we’re still stuck with him…

anyway, there is more to report, but i'm not finished writing it all up yet, so... perhaps later this evening....

no internet

2007-09-05T18:56:00.000+05:30

alas, the internet at sambhavna appears to have crapped out in major way. no one has been able to connect in a few days, even when plugged in, so i'm sorry but no blog for now. i am currently sitting at the fanciest hotel in bhopal, jehan numa palace. its fancy even by western standards!! anyway, they have free wireless internet out on the patio, so i braving the barrage of malarial mosquitoes to write this!! at any rate, keep sending me emails, because i love opening my inbox after a few days and finding lots of new messages... it makes me feel popular:)

next time i come here i'll be sure to write out an entry beforehand so that i can post it!

pinched pockets and fresh fish

2007-08-28T22:28:00.000+05:30

Tuesday August 28, 2007

So my wallet got nicked in the Chowk the other day… it was my own stupid fault though. I had one of those tourist fanny pack thingies that you are supposed to keep around your waist. I just had it in my sidebag though, and someone unzipped the picket it was in and walked away with it! I certainly didn’t even notice… but I should rewind a little bit, because the rest of the days adventures are interesting, too!

Saturday night I ended up going to a rally-type thing with about 150 of the kids from the water contaminated communities. The intention was to show them a movie about Bhopal, but Rachna wasn’t able to get the video projector to work, so Sareeta just got on the megaphone and got them chanting anti-Union Carbide/Dow slogans. Sareeta is the main kid for the photo project, who I have high hopes for. She is something of a political activist here, even at the age of fourteen! Unfortunately, because there was no video to distract them, all hundred and fifty kids became very interested in the white lady taking photos (me). Throughout the evening, various people played bodyguard on my behalf, including Rachna, Meera, Sareeta and a group of her girlfriends, and Rashida Bee. After a while it became rather embarrassing, and I felt like I was being more trouble than I was worth. It was a bit frustrating to feel so powerless, but in a crowd like that what can you do? Part of me wanted just to tell the others not to worry about it and let the kids harass me; I’m used to the constant abuse at this point anyway. But I know if I had said that I would have been told that the kids would only get worse if they weren’t told to get lost (which is probably true). Anyway, after a bumpy motorbike ride with Sathyu through the field that the gathering was in, I went back to the clinic and did some reading before bed.

Sunday was a fairly eventful day, even without the added fun of having my wallet stolen! Mausam was back from Delhi, so I asked him to come and translate for the photo project. I had the kids’ photos back, as and was sure that they would be eager to discuss them. Unfortunately it rained in crazy monsoon-fashion on Sunday afternoon (to the point that I was actually worried that it might flood the clinic like last year!). So in the end, only the three die-hard kids came for the photo project: Sureeta, her younger brother and her friend Pinkie (who is very shy but very sweet). They were excited to look over the photos, but it was hard to have a discussion with them. I think that Mausam is a bit shy about translating things directly, because when I would ask him to tell the kids something he would just say “okay” and then not say anything to them. Anyway, I hope that in the end everything was fine, because I went upstairs to get something and Masaum told me that he would tell them everything while I was up there…

I had seen Sareeta the night before at the rally thing for the kids and had promised that I would go to her house with her and say hi to her mother (translation: have chai), as well as go to the Chowk with her to visit a woman she described as her “Big Mother”. I could only imagine that she meant her grandmother, and agreed to both trips. I should mention here that Sareeta lives north of the old UC factory, across the railway tracks by a few hundred yards. The last time I was there, with Emily and Aanya when they interviewed Sareeta’s mother, it was a bumpy ride down a street made of broken up chunks of brick, and then just a hop across the railway tracks. This time, however, because of the heavy rain, things were a bit different. I had decided that she lived close enough that we didn’t need to take an auto, which is true. So instead we walked the twenty minute walk through approximately three inches of mud pretty much the entire way there. At the railroad tracks, I couldn’t help but notice the overwhelming presence of runny human crap all over the tracks (I think my train ride to Delhi alerted me as to how many people use the tracks as an open-air toilet). On the other side of the tracks there was about si inches of mud the few hundred yards leading to Sareetas house. Just as we reached the outdoor water tank my flip flop became so sunken into the mud that the thong in the middle ripped out when I pulled my foot free from the suction. Fortunately Sareeta was able to fix it without much trouble, and then rinsed my feet off with the water from the tank.

We sat and had chai with her mom, grandfather and several other miscellaneous people (one of whom was one of the women Emily and Aanya interviewed, the woman with the little boy there are all of the photos of). I felt that we were interrupting, since everyone was clearly partaking in some extra work at home, sewing these little plastic things onto heavy strips of canvass. However, it wasn’t long before Mausam had to get going back home, and we were off through the mud again. This time I decided that it would be much easier if I just took my shoes off entirely, since they were providing me with no protection as it was. This plan worked well, until I had to put them back on at the tracks. Because my feet were still covered in mud, as I tried to climb up the steep hill to the tracks my feet slid backwards out of my flip flops! Anyway, thankfully I managed to get up the hill and down the other side without loosing my shoes… there was no way I was going to cross the tracks without my shoes on.

We then got into an auto and went to the Chowk to visit Sareeta’s “Big Mother”. We wandered around the Chowk for a while, where I succumbed to guilt and purchased a Rs. 30/- stuffed dog for Anjolie’s maybe-birthday. Then Sareeta lead me down a quieter street, and up a tidy set of stairs. She knocked at the second floor door, and a fifty-ish woman answered. A few words were exchanged, and we were invited inside. I was rather embarrassed by the state of my feet, which were caked completely in still-fresh mud. The apartment itself was quite lavish, particularly in comparison to the bastee houses that I have become accustomed to. There was Western-style furniture (ie. couches, beds, dining room set, etc.) in all of the rooms, and the whole place was decorated with wood paneling type-stuff on the walls. I was lead by the smiling woman to a bathroom (! - most of the bastee houses just have little outhouses) to rinse my feet off. I was then seated in the living room on an enormous black l-couch. Eventually two young people came into the room, who clearly spoke more English than either Sareeta or this mystery-woman. I was still trying to figure out why Sareeta’s grandmother had two kids the same age as Sareeta, and why their house was so fancy as we exchanged pleasantries and I explained how I knew Sareeta. Eventually I asked what their realtionship to Sareeta was, since clearly this was not Sareeta’s grandmother. It was revealed that Sareeta’s father worked for the family as some sort or servant... a-ha! That would account for the discrepancy in salaries…

The family was really friendly, and it was much easier to carry on a conversation since both of the kids spoke fluent English. The son was still in highschool, but the daughter was my age exactly, as was visiting home from Mumbai, where she works as a fashion designer, for Rakhi. The mother insisted that I come back and have one of the numerous aunts (who were all actually sitting in one of the bedrooms drinking chai and looking at photos) would do some mehindi on my arm. I eventually had to excuse myself to go get back to Sambhavna to clean myself up before the fish dinner we were to have at Vishal and Pooja’s house.

Sareeta took me back home through the Chowk, and we made several stops at the numerous vendors selling Rakhi bracelets. Rakhi is a holiday where sisters tie a bracelet around the wrist of their brothers, and the brother then promises to protect the sister (and, moreover, has to buy her whichever present she wants). We had stopped at a bangle vendor who Sareeta seemed to know, and I was about to buy us matching bangles, when I realized that my wallet was gone! I must have pulled it out three of four times in the past few blocks, so it would have been easy for someone to see which pocket I was keeping it in in my bag. I was more mad at myself for keeping it in my bag rather than around my waist where it should have been (it was one of those tourist fanny pack thingies). Luckily I was smart enough not to keep my Visa in there, but I did loose my ATM card and about Rs. 300 ($7.50 CND). Hopefully my parents will be able to send me a new ATM card before too long, but until then I’ll have to keep taking money out on my visa. Oh well… live and learn.

We took an auto back to Sambhavna and then Sareeta home it in, which Derek was fortunately able to pay for. I phone mom and dad to tell them to cancel my bank card, and then took a quick shower to get the mud off the back of my legs and feet before heading out to dinner across the street. At first we were lead into Ankeeta and Paupoo’s house (btw Mel, that’s a nickname that everyone uses, Baupoo means dad). I took out the camera, and we took about four hundred photos of each of the kids. Ankeeta got Shilvani all dressed up in an outfit that Diana had bought her, and then tried to dress Sumit up as well (he, however, was overwhelmed and started to cry). Eventually we went next door and were served dinner. I have to admit, I normally don’t eat fish (as we all know), and about the only person I will let cook it for me is Dan, but this fish was actually delicious! There were still little bones in it, which suited me fine, because it gave me an excuse to eat super slowly, but even then I couldn’t finish everything that was given to me. I always feel guilty for not being able to finish my food here, but the servings you get in people’s homes are usually about five times what I can eat. At any rate, two men came home as Derek and I were finishing our meals. I don’t know for sure, but I think that it was the dad… he thought that we were hilarious though, and kept trying to ask us things in Hindi. I just nodded and smiled a lot. Eventually it was decided that we would come back this Sunday for chicken and beer! I can’t say that I think that it’s a good idea that I become known as the beer-swilling, meat-devouring Canadian, but what the hell, you only live once.

So that was Sunday… Monday was less eventful. I spent the morning trying to finish typing the report for Rachna (almost done, finally). In the afternoon I went over to Arushi and started taking photos for them. I got quite a bit done, but I made arrangements to go back on Thursday to do some portraits and shots of the exterior of the building. They gave me this cute little model of one of the stupas at Sanchi to say thank you, which was really sweet. I went to New Market on the way home to try to exchange my still-malfunctioning headphones, but the store was closed.

As I mentioned, today was Rakhi, so the clinic was actually closed. I spent the morning farting around on the computer, and then decided that we needed to get out for a while. We went to New Market first to get my headphones first. I was given another pair of crap ones, so I decided to forget it and went to the Sony store and got a pair that work fine at an only slightly higher price than I would have paid in Canada (they were about the equivalent of $15 CND), but they do actually work. Then we went to the Chowk so that I could get some material to make long courtas (shirts) out of, since the pants I had made are presently sitting unused for a lack of long shirts. We got quite happily lost in the market today, which was nice. We just wandered around until we were able to get our bearings, but because it was a holiday there were fewer people there than usual to wade through. I kept my ziplock bag of money tucked safely in the inside pocket of my bag.

Later this evening Derek said that he was going to go for a walk along Berasia road. How revolutionary! Previously none of the volunteers have dared venture out there after dark, because it is full of single, sleazy dudes. I decided that as long as I had some male company I would be okay though, and I was. We were actually quite successful in buying several fruits and veggies (including carrots!!), and discovered a new little area off the beaten track that we hadn’t known about. All in all it was quite fun! Anyway, now I’m getting tired because we actually walked somewhere today instead of just taking autos, so I’m going to read more of A Fine Balance.

Thanks everyone who responded to my Facebook thingie saying that my wallet got stolen!

pinches and family politics

2007-08-25T16:53:00.000+05:30

arushi part one and kids in the garden">arushi part one and kids in the garden" border="0" alt="" />
In case you didn’t notice, I have finally sorted out the photo problems and have uploaded them into the appropriate posts. So please check out the past few posts, which were without photos before!

I’ve managed to keep myself quite busy the past few days, despite the fact that I was worried that I was going t be horribly bored and lonely without the other girls here. It is certainly harder to communicate with people without Anisha around to translate the stuff that I can’t communicate, but I think that I’m slowly getting the hang of it. Mostly I am referring to Ankeeta and the kids across the street when I say that, because they speak almost no English, but I spend a significant amount of time with them. I realy enjoy their company, I suppose partly because they are a family, so it seems very familiar and homey to me. Although, the longer I’m here, the more I start to realize that they’re family has their dysfunctions as well!

After moving into the two-person room on Thursday, and spending most of the day cleaning, I was glad to get out of the clinic on Friday. Derek and I made arrangements to go to Arushi for Friday afternoon and sort some things out, and take some photos. I had also promised Ankeeta that I would get her photos of Risen developed by Friday, so I decided to stop by New Market to pick up the films that the kids had left and drop off the CD of photos for Ankeeta. Things were going smoothly until then, but unfortunately the address we had for Arushi was wrong. It turned out that the address that was on the back of pamphlet that we had was old, and they had moved. So after a long and bumpy auto ride, we arrived in the complete wrong part of town. Luckily I had my trusty cell phone, so we called Arushi and got straightened out. Anil, one of the people we had been in contact with there got straight to work orchestrating photo ops for me… until my camera battery died!!! Ack!! I think I must have left it on over night, because it has never died so quickly before; it usually lasts for over a thousand photos. Anyway, we made arrangements to come back on Monday afternoon, so I’ll have to make sure to recharge it properly this time.

Rachna phoned and asked if I could get enlargements of a couple of the photos that the kids had taken. There is a meeting in one of the Basti’s nearby tonight (about what I’m not entirely sure, but I plan to find out when we get there), and they wanted photos of the solar evaporation ponds to display. In case you don’t know, Union Carbide decided that the best way to get rid of the chemicals was to dump them into these large pools of water so that they would evaporate with the water and get dispersed so thinly that they are no longer hazardous. Ahem, except for it doesn’t work like that, and now there are these giant pools of poisonous water leeching into the groundwater supply. Euch… apparently the kids play in them, too, because they have nowhere else to play.

So after Arushi we went back to New Market to get those developed. We had to wait a bit, and I decided that I wanted a scrub brush for my filthy feet and fingernails, as well as to return the headphones I had bought that didn’t work. All was well until I went into the electronics store to exchange the headphones. I was in there for quite some time arguing with the guy because he kept trying to sell me different pairs of faulty headphones, and Derek had decided to wait outside. When I was finally finished arguing, Derek had moved inside, and told me that there was a group of beggar kids outside who were seriously harassing him and pinching him. They had moved on when we came out again, but caught up with us in front of the photo lab. At first they seemed innocent enough, but then one of them body-checked me into the oncoming traffic and I lost it on them. I was about to pinch one of them back, but caught myself. Luckily Derek found and auto quickly and we were able to drive off, unscathed other than my wounded pride at being beat up by a bunch of kids, and the red marks all up my arms where they had pinched me so many times. It was another one of those times I wished that I spoke Hindi, because I later decided that they were really just looking for attention, and that if I had been able to answer them then the whole scenario could have been avoided… at any rate, since it is always the same kids there, I’m not looking forward to going back to get my (yet another pair of) replacement headphones. I’ll have to figure out some why of dealing with those (pardon my French, but) little fuckers.

I went over to Ankeeta’s house last night and dropped off the photos, which I think that she appreciated. Although there never seems to be a moment without family politics involved. Derek and I were invited over by Ankeeta’s sister-in-law, Sunita (well, actually, her kids, Vishal and Pooja) for a fish dinner. It seemed innocent enough, but I got the sense that it was to show up Ankeeta and Paupoo, who are always short of cash for reasons I won’t go into. After the mayhem of the photos had died down a bit, Pooja started telling me (albeit in very broken English) that it was both Anjolie (her younger sister) and her mother’s birthdays on Sunday! So what a coincidence that we would be coming over for dinner! Then she said that we had better bring presents of else Anjolie would cry… hmmmm. I asked Ankeeta when we had a moment alone, and, as I suspected, it is no ones birthday on Sunday. Pooja had been taken out for her birthday a month or two ago by some of the other volunteers here, so I think she was fishing for more goodies, but it really infuriated me that she would lie so greedily and selfishly. Afterwards she kept telling me over and over again that Ankeeta had such-and-such a photos, and she wanted that one too. The first time I agreed to print her a double, but after I lost it and said firmly (and perhaps a little too loudly) “Pooja! Bas!” (meaning “enough” or “stop”). I should mention here that Pooja is thirteen years old, so I felt a little stupid yelling something like that at her, but her behaviour seriously merited it. Anyway, now I’m not sure if I should bring something small for Anjolie to keep up the charade that it actually is her birthday… sigh.

I spent most of today running around doing little things. I worked on the premature menopause booklet a bit, and discovered that I’m a far worse artist than I thought. Some kids from a convent school were here learning about the garden, so I went and took some photos of them. At one point while hanging around the gazeebo the kids surrounded me and demanded autographs once again. Fortunately the teacher was there, and she kept yelling "One turn at a time" at them, which seemed to quell the crush a bit. One little girl was albino, and I almost went up to her and asked her if people mistake her for a foreigner and yell “Didi! Hi!” when she walks down the street. Either way, I feel her pain at being different looking from everyone else.

I spent most of the afternoon stuffing the kids photos into the free little booklets that they came with and writing out little comments on stickies so I can remember what I wanted to tell them tomorrow. I don’t know which photos belong to who, but a couple of the rolls are really good. I can’t wait to talk to the kids about them tomorrow. Masaum has agreed to come and translate for me in the afternoon…

Anyway, I think that’s about enough for now… its super-hot out and I’ve been sweating like a pig all day. I think another shower is in order. By the way, they have ketchup chips here! I don’t even like them in Canada, I’m just so desperate for food that’s familiar that I’m eating them anyway! Haha…

the snake catcher and a room change

2007-08-23T18:56:00.000+05:30

New Market and the Snake Catcher">New Market and the Snake Catcher" border="0" alt="" />
It has been a few days since I last wrote, so my apologies for the absence. It hasn’t been the most interesting few days, but I do feel that I am finding more things to do in a productive capacity (rather than a “filling the days” ort of way). Anisha left on Monday morning, so we lost our Hindi-English translator, and a good friend as well. It has been interesting getting around without someone who speaks the language to rely on. Even though I had done a few little excursions on my own, Anisha was usually present for the big things. It certainly has forced me to focus on my Hindi much more though. I was at Ankeeta’s house last night, and her sister-in-law was trying to invite us over for dinner, ask us our ages and other things, and I was able, with the help of Ankeeta’s few words of English, to actually answer most of the questions! Yay! It was sad to see Anisha off at the train station though…

Anyway, after Anisha left, Casey got us organized to do a couple of things that she had been wanting to do during her time here. Casey had spent several weeks in Bhopal a couple of summers ago, and had been to a centre for the disabled called Arushi, in New Bhopal. So on Tuesday afternoon we went to Arushi to check out the facilities and see if there was anything that we could do. I was struck immediately by how much the facilities could benefit the kids with disabilities that Chingari Trust is trying to get for their kids. I’m hoping that I can get the two organizations to connect and help each other out (or rather Arushi to help Chingari at any rate). Anyway, Arushi has all sorts of things going on, from a recording studio for books on tape, to a physical therapy room for some of the kids with physical disabilities. They were interested in us working on a booklet for them, and asked me if I would like to do a photo project to make posters. It sounds like it would be pretty interesting work, and it would get me out of the clinic for at least a little while, so I’m all for it!

After we went to Arushi, we came back to the clinic for a little while, but ended up going out again shortly to the snake catcher! This guy catches snakes by profession, and Sambhavna has used his services on a couple of occasions when they have found poisonous snakes, like cobras, in the garden. Anyway, we went back to New Bhopal to his “office” where he keeps the snakes that he catches. It was pretty amazing; he had two full-grown cobras, which he let us take amble photos of, and three baby cobras which were no less vicious. He also took out this one giant snake, which he conveyed was quite harmless by putting his face up against the snakes’! Casey and Derek both had a turn holding the snake, but I chickened out and wouldn’t do it. It was just too slimy and gross looking…. Although there was a small part of me that wanted to pet the snake!

Aside from that particular adventure, I haven’t done anything too exciting this week. We went to the Chowk market again yesterday, as it was Casey’s last time and she wanted to get more scarves and some material. I ended up buying some very nice silk scarves that one of our usual vendors had just gotten into stock to give to people back home. We also went to pick up our clothes at the tailors. I had gotten these pants called churidad made, which are a funny shape. They are baggy like clown pants at the top, but are skin tight round the calves and ankles. It turns out that you need to wear at least knee-length courtas (shirts) with these, or else they look quite ridiculous… so that means that I’m going to have to get a couple more shirts made! Although the shirts that she made for me turned out quite well... I’ll have to take some photos.

This morning Casey left for the airport. I decided to go with her and send her off, so it was yet another sad goodbye! I can’t help but be a little bit jealous of the people who are all leaving to go back home. I’m enjoying my time here, but I still miss Dan, as I expect that I will until I’m with him and he’s driving me insane again. I miss a lot of the comforts of home, too. Food that I really want and enjoy, endless Diet Coke, walking the streets at night without worry, wearing clothes that I like and not worrying about them attracting the wrong kind of attention. You know, the little things. However, I’ve already been here for longer than a month, and I feel like I am really just getting settled. I wish so much that I could speak Hindi better so that I could talk to people more. I feel that I’m getting better at communicating with people on a simple level, but the more complex things I still can’t do.

After I came back from dropping Casey off I decided to clean out the girls’ dorm room, which has a plethora of things that past volunteers have left behind. Everything from old shoes, to half-finished bottles of vodka, to expired pills were in the cupboards, so I decided to throw out all the junk. I then thought that this was a good opportunity to move into the two-person dorm room that I am to share with Prabjit when she gets here. So I okayed it with Sathyu, and then spent the rest of the morning washing the thick layer of dust off of the cupboards and re-arranging the furniture. It took me the better part of the day, but I eventually managed to get all of my many belongings into the one cupboard and squirreled away various other places. It’s certainly nice to have a room to myself after sharing with so many other people for all this time. On the other hand, it feels a little bit lonely not to have other people around all the time…

Derek and I ventured to New Market yet again this afternoon so that I could drop off the first rolls of film that the kids took!! The kids came and dropped it off while I was out on Tuesday, and I had to laugh: Sareeta had told me that they would need two weeks to take the photos, and they had only needed three days! Anyway, they’re supposed to come back on Sunday afternoon, so I’ll have to get someone to tell them that I can only develop one roll of film each every week! I’m excited to see how the films turned out though! The computer in the conference room has a scanner, so eventually I’ll have to figure out how to use it properly so that I can put the kids photos up for you to see! By the way, I have received just over $1000 in donations! So thank you to everyone who has sent money!!

Casey and Anisha weren’t able to complete all of the work from their study before they left, so I have been passed on their project. They were working on a study to see if the gas had caused premature menopause. The community heath workers at the clinic are still conducting the study on the control group of people. I’m supposed to help with data entry (or at least as much as I can considering the surveys are written in Hindi, but there is some numeric data I can enter), and also work on the booklet about menopause that the clinic is going to release. Anyway, I’m glad that I am finally getting to do something related to my actual internship. I think that this will be a good opportunity for me to get to talk to the community health workers about future projects as well, so I’m really glad about it.

By the way, I have almost got the photo problem worked out on my computer, although it involves a lot of tedious re-organizing, so you’ll have to excuse the lack of photos on the blog; I know that it’s the best part.

goat dinner and the photo project begins!

2007-08-19T17:20:00.002+05:30

First Day of Photos!">First Day of Photos!" border="0" alt="" />
Goat Dinner!">Goat Dinner!" border="0" alt="" />
The past few days have been fairly uneventful. I haven’t been taking a lot of photos, especially since I can’t seem to figure out what is wrong with the stupid iPhoto on the computer. I can’t seem to get it to upload the photos properly, and it keeps telling me that it can’t find the originals on the hard drive. Arg! Anyway, I’ve been trying to remedy that particular problem, but have been so far unsuccessful. I did back them all up on my iPod though, all ten gigs worth, so at least they are safe and sound. Anisha, Casey and I went to a place called Shoba Studio on the main road the other day and had a bunch of photos printed up. They only charge Rs. 4/- per photo (about ten cents CND). Unfortunately the quality wasn’t great, and they were all a little washed out and greenish-tinted b my standards. Anyway, those ones were to give away to some of the kids and families in the neighbourhood, so next time I’ll have to try another place.

I ended up not being able to go to Chingari Trust on Thursday to do the photos of the kids, since Anisha wasn’t available to translate for me. I was a little disappointed not to be able to get started on that right away, but it did give me a chance to buy a tripod for the low, low price of Rs. 800/- (about $20 CND). I’m hoping that Masaum or someone can help me do a little translating at some point next week.

We went to dinner at Reshma’s house on Friday night, which is the daughter of the corner store owner. You may remember we went and had mehendi done by her a while ago. She asked us to come over for her birthday dinner though, which was really good. Reshma had literally spent the entire day cooking for us beforehand, and it was absolutely fantastic. Her family is Muslim, so they had made goat, which was really, really good. It was also pretty much the first time I had eaten meat since I got here, apart from the odd bite or two of chicken from Joe. It was funny though, she insisted that she would eat after we had left and she had cleaned up the massive pile of dinner dishes! Anyway, it was a great meal, and I have decided that I want to try to find a good Muslim restaurant. The flavours are very different from Hindu cooking, so it was interesting to try the difference.

Rachna was talking to Sareeta the other day in her office, so I decided just to set up a time and place with Sareeta for the photo project then. We decided that Sunday was the best day because the kids don’t have school that day, and the clinic is closed so its quiet. I asked Biju where the best place to get camera and film supplies was, and he told me about this place in New Market, so I went yesterday with Derek. The prices were a bit better than the place that I had gone to nearby, and the guy said that we might be able to work out a deal for the developing. At any rate, I ended up buying film and batteries for five cameras, since Rachna told me to start the kids off by having them share the cameras. Biju also told me about a place that sold bootleg DVDs across the street from the photolab in New Market, so we went there afterwards. It turns out that they had a way better selection than the place that Joe had been going, so I went a little DVD crazy and bought a while bunch. A lot of the bootleg DVDs here are packed into “8-in-1” sets, where you get eight movies on a single DVD. The quality isn’t great, but it isn’t bad either. So now I have lots of Hollywood drivel to keep me company at night…☺

Anisha, Casey and I went to this fabric fair thing with Rachna last night. It was a bit disappointing though, because it turned out to be run by the MP government, so the prices were all really high. There were some beautiful silk saris though… We ended up going to the Chowk instead, since Anisha is leaving on Monday. I bought a really beautiful dupta and some material to make a summer dress. I know that I don’t be able to wear it here, since anything knee-length is more than just frowned on. Casey, Derek and Masaum took an overnight train to Pachmari. Apparently it is one of the most beautiful places in the province. I decided to stay here though, which was a good thing, because the arrangements with the kids were for them to come on Sunday (today).

That has been the highlight of the day so far, the kids coming to start the photo project. Sareeta brought nine other kids, although some of them are too young to really do the project. Her community is gas-affected, so these kids are the perfect group. They were all really calm and well-behaved and happy just to sit and learn about the cameras and stuff. It was so fun when they all opened up their cameras and put the films in. They were so excited!! Anyway, they said that they wanted two weeks before they wanted more film, but they’re coming back next Sunday to ask questions and to make sure that there aren’t any problems. I’m really looking forward to getting their first rolls of film back. I think that they’ll do a really good job. Especially Sareeta, she seemed to know a lot about cameras and how to take photos, so I think that she’ll be good at it.

Anyway, now I’m sitting and watching movies and being very lazy, which is really nice. I don’t think that I have had a single Sunday where I just farted around and did nothing. I’m supposed to go over to Ankeeta’s house for dinner tonight with Anisha, which I’m looking forward to.

there are some photos of a couple of random things in here being:

1) the care package that my mom sent me about a week into my trip here. i was desperate for some food from home when my stomach was still getting acclimatized, so my dear, sweet mother xpress-posted a parcel of food to me. it was supposed to take 10-14 days, and instead took about a month. you can tell from the photos that the parcel wasn't exactly treated well, either. the toilet paper she used as padding looked like it may, at one time, have been soaked with water!! she paid $120 for this lousy service, so i would suggest that if you are going to mail me something, bubble wrap it to death and don't bother paying for it to get here fast, because it won't!!

2) the mouse that we caught in the humane mousetrap. it was in there for about 24 hours because we weren't sure what to do with it... eventually derek and i released in the heap of garbage across the street from the clinic. i think it will be happy there...

independance day

2007-08-19T17:20:00.001+05:30

Meera's House">Meera's House" border="0" alt="" />
Independance Day">Independance Day" border="0" alt="" />
Independence Day was Wednesday, August 15th so it was time to do our dance at Orya Basti. It was a pretty intense day of activities, because apparently Independence Day festivities start at 7:30am here. School kids get up extra early in the morning and they go sing songs and march around with their schools in uniform. I took some pictures of one school all dressed up in their uniforms so you can see what I’m talking about. We were asked to be at the school by 7:30am, in order to get dressed up in our costumes and whatnot. It turned out that they didn’t start to get us dressed until much later, so we got to watch the beginning of the ceremonies. It started with a flag-raising and singing the Indian national anthem, then some of the kids recited poetry and sang little songs. After that some older guys came and did some traditional warrior-style moves with spears and stuff. It was really neat. At that point Anisha and I were told that we needed to go get suited up.

They had a costume that was big enough for Anisha, but they decided that I was small enough to fit into one of the costumes made for the little girls!! The elastic waist couldn’t have been more than about six inches across, but somehow I managed to squeeze myself into it, fat spilling out from every angle! The costume itself was a somewhat garish pink, with silver shiny polka dots all over that made me look about the same age as the rest of the kids that we were dancing with. They eventually found a sari big enough for Casey, that actually made her look quite stately. You can see in the photos… anyway, the dance itself was pretty hilarious. The little girls didn’t remember the moves any better than we did, so the whole thing looked a little garbled. Masaum took lots of photos with my camera, so when I can get things working again on the photo end of my blog I’ll put them all up. Biju. Dr. Jay, Ritesh and Devaker all came to watch the performance, and Biju video taped it, so hopefully I’ll get a copy that I can bring back with me.

After the performances were over, we went back to the clinic for a little while and rested. Then Masaum came and got us, and we went to Meera’s house. She lives out pretty far from the city centre. I wa glad that I got to go with Masaum on his bike, because everyone else was on the bus, which took quite some time longer. Masaum’s family actually lives quite close down the street. His dad is a guard at the Bhopal prison, which is apparently one of the biggest prisons in India. He pointed out where the perimeter starts and ends, and the prison seriously goes on forever! Meera’s house is nestled in a little community of houses at the foot of a large Mont Royal-sized hill. She decided almost immediately after we got there that we should go for a hike up the giant hill!! It looked okay from the bottom, but I quickly realized that the only way to the top was to do some actual climbing on the rocks, which proved difficult in my flip-flops.

We walked around on the top of the mountain for a while, since it was really beautiful up there. It was strange that we were so close to the city, but it was so quiet and peaceful up there. There were so few other houses around, you can see it in my photos, there’s so much green around. Anyway, I almost killed Meera on the way back down, because she decided that I needed help o the way down and kept holding my hand, making it infinitely more difficult to get down. After that we were brought around to a bunch of different people’s homes (who I think were all of Meera’s sisters, but I’m not really sure). After that we decided that the day had been long enough and we headed back to Sambhavna. Anisha and I were decided that we wanted to go and pick up the shirts that we had had made though. I had also bought some really cool material from the Chowk, so I brought that and had myself measured for three pairs of pants and another shirt. The shirts that we picked up were really nice. The material is nice and light, and she had made them a bit loose fitting, so they’ll be perfect for hotter days (which we still are having sometimes).

Phew, I can’t say that I’m not glad that Canada doesn’t celebrate Canada Day with so much enthusiasm… as just the one time was exhausting enough. Apparently everyone does it all over again on the day that the constitution was signed, but I think next time I’ll refrain from doing any dancing….

actual dancing and chengari

2007-08-14T14:43:00.001+05:30

Chingari and Dancing">Chingari and Dancing" border="0" alt="" />
Tuesday August 14, 2007

That about brings us up to speed, I think. Today, as you may have noticed, is a quiet day. The internet has been in the fritz and I haven’t been able to get on all morning. Anyway, it has proven useful to write out the entries for my blog. Posting them will be a problem without the internet though….

Monday morning we went to the Chowk market, because Anisha and Casey are both leaving soon, and wanted one last trip. I ended up buying some metal bangles so that they won’t break when I put them on and cut up my hands. They’re much more my style anyway… so you can all expect massive numbers of bangles upon my return, because they are all super-cheap and they look pretty. We went back to some of the places that Rachna took us to get some material. I bought some really cool stuff to make a shirt and pants out of, as well as some plain black to make pants out of. The store still hadn’t gotten the nice scarves that we all wanted more of in yet, but we reminded him that we were still interested. I’ve decided that I am getting lots more clothes made before I leave, but I’ll just make the waist a bit big so that I can still wear them in Canada when I gain back all the weight I lost!

We didn’t stay as long as we had though we would at the Chowk, but had missed lunch, so we went to Manohar on our way back. I have found a few things that I absolutely love on the menu, and I’m even finding that the spice isn’t getting to me so badly anymore. Anyway, Manohar is great… you know those mushroom things that you get at Chu Chai? They taste like chicken wings, but they’re veg? Well, you can get those everywhere in India!! They’re called kote, and I’ve become obsessed with them. Manohar does them really well…

After that we went back to Ory Basti for our dance lessons. I find it kind of hilarious that we go out there for hours at a time, but we actually only went through our dance three times. They’re doing about six other dances, so they practice all of them, too. Derek decided to come with us. I think he was bored out of his head after a while though… poor guy. His first day in Bhopal he gets the family vacation from hell, and then he’s subject to hours of Bollywood dance!

It was the first day they I had actually gotten to dance, though, and the kids thought that I was absolutely hilarious. Anisha and Casey had already gone through the dance a few times on Saturday when I was in Delhi, but I was utterly lost the whole time. This was not helped by the fact that both the kids and the dance instructor would occasionally forget a move, or be doing it on the wrong side, so I was forever trying to figure out which was the right way to be doing it. Anyway, I apparently had a confused look on my face the whole time, and the kids kept making fun of me… Sigh. At least I can be the source of some amusement for them.

Gangaram sent our auto guy away when he came to get us at 6:30pm, and told him to come back at 7:30pm. By the time we left it was 8pm, and we got stuck at the train tracks in the biggest traffic jam I have yet to see in India. When a train goes through, cars, trucks, motorcycles and people line up along the whole width of the road on both sides. When the wigwags go up (yes, amazingly, there are wigwags), there is no space for anyone to get through on the opposite side. I think that matters were made worse because that particular road is a thoroughfare for gigantic Tata truacks, which really clog up the traffic. At any rate, it took us about an hour to get back to Sambhavna, whereas it usually only takes about fifteen or twenty minutes.

Masaum was waiting for us when we got back, as we were supposed to go to this activist girl, Meera’s, house for dinner. Since it was about 8:45pm, we decided to leave it for tonight instead though.

I think that that’s about it for now… I’ve been doing laundry all day, and have done up all the sheets and blankets from the other beds so that they’ll be nice and clean for new volunteers. I’ve also been in touch with the other CIDA volunteer coming to Bhopal. Her name is Prabjit, and she seems really nice. She’ll get here in early to mid-September sometime, so not long now.

By the way, it has already been a month since I got here!!! Can you believe it??

family vacation and mischevious monkeys

2007-08-14T14:42:00.001+05:30

Risen">Risen" border="0" alt="" />
Sunday August 12, 2007

When I got back to Sambhavna at about 8am on Sunday there was a new volunteer sitting at the kitchen table reading!! Yay! Fresh blood! He new guy’s name is Derek, and he’ll be here until December, so I’ll never be completely alone at the clinic! And better still, you may have noticed that he’s a guy, so I can make him take me places after dark (athough I think he’s too skinny to be really intimidating)! Anisha, Casey, Masaum and I had planned to go to a small town about an hour outside of Bhopal called Risen that day. It turned out that Anisha had invited Ankeeta (who runs the canteen) and her family to come with us, which was great because she has really sweet little kids. However, Ankeeta’s neice, (who lives in the same housing complex across from Sambhavna along with Ankeet’s three other in-law families), had overheard the conversation and decided that it was an open invitation for EVERYONE! We left about two hours after we had planned to with the following troops in tow:

Ankeeta and Papoo, their three kids: Hersheeta (2), Shilvani (8), and Sumit (5). Ankeeta’s sister in law and her tiny baby (maybe about 6 months old, if that), another sister in law and her kids, Pooja (13), Vishal (11 or 12), Nancie (7), Anjolie (5), as well as myself, Anisha, Casey, Derek and Masaum. In all, there were seventeen of us and we had to take three autos to the bus stand. We actually filled the seats on one of the tiny buses (although by Indian standards it wasn’t even half full, because they crammed another twenty or so people on there). The kids were all excited and full of beans, but of course fell asleep within moments of being on the bus, so they were all the more hyper when we reached Risen an hour later. First we visited a temple that was quite crowded with other visitors. The kids wanted me to take pictures of the dozens of monkeys all over the place, and the moms all wanted their photo pretending to do various religious things. So you will excuse the rather excessive amount of photos of these things. However, once every other child in the place saw that I was taking photos of that family I was followed around by a group no smaller than about twenty-fie kids all begging to have their photo taken. I decided that this would quickly get out of control and said no to all of them, not that that prevented them from all following me anyway. At one point I had Derek pull out his camera and take a few group photos of the crowd to distract them so that I could take photos of other things. The whole “Didi! Photo!” thing has reached the point of extreme annoyance rather than “aww, that’s so cute”.

Anyway, we didn’t stay long because it wasn’t that pretty and there wasn’t that much to do. Instead we started the (what seemed like) twenty-mile hike to and up a hill about the same size as Mont Royal. Keep in mind that we had in tow six kids under the age of ten. Needless to say that it was a slow walk… especially because every time I took out my camera to take a photo of something Pooja would say ‘oh! Didi! One photo! Me!” and look pleadingly at me. So you will notice the vast number of photos of a girl in an orange shirt. About half way up the mountain I was ready to have an Annie-Dad moment and throw her in a snow bank. She was whining worse than any of the little kids and kept pulling this sucky face at me. I think she wanted me to trade shoes with her, but there was NO WAY I was going to wear the frikken’ heels she had worn. Anyway, it made me realize how annoying teenagers are, and dread the day I have any. Annie can take them when they hit twelve, and I’ll keep them when they’re little. But I digress… about half way up the hill I sped ahead and walked with Casey, who carried the two0year old the entire way up the hill without breaking a sweat, making me feel horribly out of shape as I huffed and puffed my way. I was reminded vaguely of my recent trip up Mt. St. Hilaire, although I think I would have died had I been that hung over on this trip. Only myself, Caey and Derek had brought any water, so it was quickly gone, because the kids kept asking for it. Paupoo re-filed our bottles at the top, but we didn’t know where the water was from, so that was it for us.

Anyway, once we got to the top it was quite pretty and breezy. Paupoo and Ankeeta had made a really yummy picnic lunch for everyone, so we sat and had puri (thicker versions of roti), potato subgie (which thank heavens wasn’t too spicy because we were out of water), and pekoras (my favourite). All was going well until two things happened: 1) a group of sleazy-looking guys that had been hanging around started taking photos of Casey and I with their camera phone (which apparently happened to Mel when she was there as well) and 2) we were surrounded by monkeys who wanted our lunch.

Masaum (our ever-brave protector), grabbed the guy’s cell phone and smashed it on the rocks, and told him off. A few smacks were exchanged but nothing serious, and the guys moved off. Then the monkeys moved in, so Vishal and Paupoo took turns chasing them off with sticks while we quickly finished lunch. Paupoo threw all of the leftovers their way once we were done. It was pretty amazing how aggressive they were, so we decided we had better head down. However, at precisely that moment, the group of guys returned with the “registration” guy who was supposed to be keeping order over the whole mountain. Ahem. Yeah right, the guy was like a hundread, but anyway. They had told him that Masaum had broken their phone, so he asked us to leave!!! Can you believe that? He asked the group with all the small kids to leave instead of the pack of wild dogs, er, boys!! I was fuming of course, but a few more smacks were thrown around (this time Paupoo got involved, too), so I moved away. Then the mother of Pooja and co. stepped in and told the whole lot of them off, and broke up the fight. I’ve never seen anyone quiet a crowd so fast. I don’t know what she said, but she kept telling the registration guy off the whole way down the mountain, so it seemed to be effective.

Anyway, it didn’t dampen our spirits too much, as we were leaving anyway. So we made it back down the hill and caught a slightly less crowded bus back to Bhopal. Although Masaum did comment to me that he hated Risen and he was never going back…. Poor Masaum. This time everyone fell asleep except for the kids who ran up and down the aisle screaming and dancing to the Hindi music barring from the speakers. I was relieved to get back to Sambhavna and have a break, and very thankful that Anisha had begged our excuses from Dance lessons that night, because I think I might have actually died of exhaustion if I had to endure two more hours of screaming kids. All I have to say is that Mom, Dad I now know why you decided against long family vacations. I have already vetoed them for when I have kids.

delhi and an awards show

2007-08-14T14:41:00.000+05:30

Delhi and the Dalal Awards">Delhi and the Dalal Awards" border="0" alt="" />
Saturday August 11, 2007
Obviously I’m not posting all of this on the day I wrote it, but I thought that it would be easier to read if I posted a day or two’s events under one date.

Friday at 4:30pm an auto showed up to take us to Orya Basti for our first two-hour dance lesson. Which, of course, everyone for three miles had showed up to watch. The stereo system had yet to be set up when we got there, so we spent the first hour and forty-five minutes watching the kids recite various poems and songs in Hindi. Then, when the system had been set up, the kids showed up about six different dances, one of which we were supposed to emulate, although I wasn’t sure which one exactly. Gangaram of course, served us chai and pekoras, and insisted that we stay, pretty much indefinitely. He was about to send the auto driver (who we had told to come back at 6:30pm) away, but we caught him in time, and I insisted that we leave (mostly because I had a terrible headache from the persistent screams of sixty-odd children and the blasting speaker system, but also because I had to get ready for my trip to Delhi in a couple of hours). It has since become apparent to me that Gangaram would like us to live in Orya Basti, and, without somewhat forceful removal, will never let us leave. Anyway, more on that later…

I went to Delhi on Friday night, for an event on Saturday afternoon that Sathyu, Rachna and a lot of Bhopal supporters were organizing, particularly student groups in Delhi. The idea was to have a mock awards ceremony for all of the people who have sold India out to corporate American interests, which happens a lot here from what I can tell. This was the first year that they’ve done the awards, and naturally the focus was on Bhopal, since a lot of government officials, bureaucrats and other corporate people have been doing just that on the Bhopal issue. Apparently India is trying to enter a nuclear deal with the US, and is basically selling out any and everything else so that this deal will go through, and one of the things that the US has asked (in response to corporate lobbying) is for Dow to be deemed free from liability in Bhopal. Anyway, the even went really well and was well attended. There was a fair bit of media coverage, too. Here are some links to the media outlets that covered it:

NDTV: http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20070022324
Asian Age: http://www.asianage.com/presentation/leftnavigation/news/india/'mir-jafar'-awards-for-bhopal-'84.aspx
Kerela Next: http://www.keralanext.com/India/read.asp?id=1067923

The trip to Delhi was, er, “exciting”. I went on an over-night train on Friday night, which Rachna booed for me. She got me non-AC sleeper class, which is exactly like 3-tier AC sleeper, but the windows open. I was a little bit nervous about going back to Delhi after my god-awful experience with the fracking cab driver there when I arrived in India. I decided that, armed with a cell phone and the numbers of at least ten different people from the clinic to call in case I got into trouble (or, more likely, lost), I would be okay. So Friday at about 8pm, I left the clinic on my own. I should mention a few things here: 1) I have been warned that women traveling alone in India are subject to sexual harassment (as are pretty much any women at any time) 2) it had just gotten dark out, so there were still lots of people out and about in Qazi camp 3) Casey had offered to walk me to Berasia road, where the auto guys wait, and I had said “oh no, its still early! There are lots of people out and about still!”.

Ahem. So as soon as I walked out of the gates at Sambhavna, there were these two young guys sitting on the ledge of the dried-up well. They were like “excuse me, miss!” as soon as I walked out of the gate, and I saw them start to follow me when I ignored them. Its only, maybe, a hundred meters along that street, and then you get to the corner store, where we know the family, so I wasn’t worried. Except for one of them ran up behind me and tried to grab my ass!!!! (He kind of missed though and kind of flicked it instead… but anyway). I whirled around and yelled at him to fuck off, and they both ran off down the street. I was absolutely furious! I mean, talk about the nerve!! They were probably waiting outside of Sambhavna for some volunteer to be walking to the corner store or something!! In retrospect I should have tried to chase them down and beat the living crap out of them… either that or call the guard at Sambhavna and get him to do it for me. Anyway, as it was I just continued on and got an auto to the train station (luckily it was my favourite auto guy, who always wears the Che Guvera hat, and who always drives us places, otherwise I think I would have taken my anger out on him).

So needless to say I was feeling a little on the vulnerable side when I reached the train station… especially because there were like NO other women there. Indian women don’t go out alone at night (probably because of experiences like when I just described), so there were a few women traveling with men, but none on their own, which didn’t exactly make me feel too safe. Anyway, I made it on to the train to discover, of course, that I was about the only woman on the entire car. There were three or four other young women traveling together, who were carrying large amounts of sports equipment, but that was it. I found my seat (which in the sleeper cars are the bottom of three bunks, the middle of which is flipped up), and sat down with the fife other guys sharing my compartment. Most of them just politely averted their eyes, but this one young guy in a pink shirt kept grinning at me. He was probably just trying to be friendly, but I glared at him and gave him a dirty look to be o the safe side.

I ended up having to ask the guy next to me which of the bunks was mine, because it wasn’t exactly clear. He was helpful and just not friendly enough not to be intimidating (I find it a bit on the creepy side when guys are too interested), so that was good. I was on the bottom bunk, but he left me have the middle one, which I felt safer in, because its not so close to the ground. The train ride was actually on the uneventful side, so I have learned not to be afraid of the train, although I would certainly think twice about traveling around India all by myself. I’m glad that Andrea is planning on coming with her boyfriend, because guys will leave you along for the most part if you are with another guy. Although I can’t say that any of this makes me happy. I think that is totally fucking ridiculous that women are intimidated into having a male escort every time they leave the house after dark on their own (and to a degree, even during the day its better to be with another woman). The whole thing reminds me just a bit too much of The Handmaid’s Tale. Sickening. I’ve decided that the women in the communities around here should have a Take Back the Night-style march. I have also though that perhaps I will start carrying pepper spray… hahahaha, that’s probably a bad idea. Although Rachna did say that if men are leering at you or try to grab you it is perfectly socially acceptable to kick the crap out of them. Maybe I’ll invest in a punching bag for practice…

Anyway, Delhi was really fun. I got to meet lots of Bhopal-supporters, and hang around the Other Media office (a big NGO that houses the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal). It was fun because everyone stayed in one room with the AC and drank chai and talked. Rashida Bee from Changari Trust was there, and I had one of the students express my interest in starting the photo project that she had suggested with her, so I am going over this afternoon to commence. She wants me to take artsy photos of all the kids with serious birth deformities as a result of the contaminated water or gas exposure. They have already started compiling medical-type photos, but she wants to tell the stories of these kids and what their daily lives are, too. She’s planning on getting someone to come and record fuller and more complete stories from them too. I’m hoping that these photos will turn into something that we can turn into a photo exhibit so that Changari can get more money and volunteers. They need surgeons to do free surgeries on these kids, fixing cleft palates and lips, leg problems and other things. Anyway, I’m super excited about it!!

The train ride back from Delhi was uneventful. Although there was a young guy sitting next to me who did everything in his power to get me to notice him and ended up thoroughly annoying the shit out of me. He kept talking to his girlfriend or someone on his cell phone really loud in English, and when she asking him why he was talking in English he was like “I have to talk in English right now”. Yes, so the white girl sitting next to you will notice you and sleep with you because we’re all like the sluts you see on MTV. Sigh. I’m quickly beginning to understand Mel’s frustration with men in this country…

more mehendi and a night out on the town

2007-08-13T16:12:00.000+05:30

hmmm, the photos on this post turn out kind of weird. click on the title of the post to see the photos, or the long, thin, rectangular box under the title. it'll take you to photobucket.com, and you can see my photos there...

i know that i still have to explain the last series of photos from orya basti, but i wanted to try out photobucket.com for my new photos. my stupid webpicassa is already saying that i have maxed out the number of photos that i'm allowed to put up on the site, so i've had to change to another photo thingie. it seems better anyway...

these photos are from friday night. anisha, casey and i decided to go out to this restaurant in a hotel, called hotel ranjeet. a lot of restaurants here are called "hotel something-or-other" and are just restaurants, but hotel ranjeet really is a hotel. at any rate, the food was pretty good but we couldn't help but notice that aside from a british couple who retired soon after we got there, we were the only women there. as the night wore on we realized that because the restaurant serves alcohol it was a bit of a drinking establishment in the evenings. i, of course, took up this rare opportunity to have a beer. the beer here is pretty light, and has a very distinct aftertaste that i wasn't all that crazy about. on the upside, it cost about $2 canadian for a 600ml bottle. it might even be cheaper than idee fixe.... the waiter did think, however, that we were all splitting the beer, which sadly, no, was all for myself:)

after diner we stopped at the corner store, and anisha and i had , you guessed it, more mehendi done! the daughter of the store owner did a really good job on both anisha's arms and my right arm! you can see the photos... the whole family was really sweet and nice though. they have an eight-year-old son who was really cute. i actually taught him how to use my nikon camera, so some of the photos attached are ones that he took. anyway, we ended up staying there until midnight getting the mehendi and hanging out. it was nice to spend some time with a very happy family. they thought i was hilarious because i kept miming everything i wanted to try to say... we also got a tour of the actual store, which is jam-packed with about a million different things. the space is tiny, but you can get everything from fresh eggs, to race-car shaped toothbrushes, to indian sweets there! the photo only show a fraction of what is actually available.

anyway, i'll write about my trip to delhi later. there are some good photos from sunday in particular:)

orya basti and dance lessons

2007-08-09T17:05:00.000+05:30

Orya Basti">Orya Basti" border="0" alt="" />

i don't have time to write right now, but i wanted to put up these photos. they are from a community near the union carbide factory that is made up of people mostly from a rural area (i think its called orissa). sambhavna sponsors a school there, where the kids learn traditional languages, as well as english and hindi. anyway, i'll tell you all about it later, but enjoy the photos!

here's the day's post:

It has been a few days since I wrote anything properly, so I’ll try to fill in what is missing from the photos!

First off, these ones of Orya Basti are of a school that Sambhavna helped to start up, and I think is even able to provide some funding for. The headmaster at the school is this very authoritative little guy named Gangaram. He is a gas survivor, and features largely in the book Five Past Midnight in Bhopal from what I have heard (I haven’t read the book yet). At any rate, Anisha, Casey and I originally went to the school to see the kids there do some dances, because Anisha is in her university’s Bollywood dance troop. Ganagaram immediately decided that we should partake in the Independence Day celebrations on the 15th.. which means that we are to learn one of the dances and perform it for the community on for the celebrations. Ahem… the last choreographed dance I did was to Baby Got Back in the twelfth grade, so needless to say, it’s been a while.

The kids at the school were really sweet though, and they loved having their photos taken and whatnot. I wrote my name in Hindi in one of their books and damn near started a riot, because afterwards they ALL wanted me to write my name in their books afterwards. You can see it in the photos a little bit…

Ganagaram showed us around the community garden that surrounds the school. It’s a pretty impressive garden, and the whole community just works together and takes what they need from the garden. It’s a really nice example of how group efforts can work really well actually. Gangaram seems to be the kind of leader of the community. Everyone just kind of does what he tells them too, which I found impressive. The kids will even sit down and listen when he tells them too (this is opposed to most of the kids in the other neighbourhoods we’ve visited. The presence of a camera makes the children absolutely insane and vying for the attentions of the photographer, and there’s absolutely no calming them down afterwards).

So we were told that we would come back at 4:30pm everyday to learn the dance. I was going to Delhi the next day, so I missed the next lesson, but you can read about that later… Gangaram also asked us if we could bring some school supplies (which I suspect might be the reason behind some of the rather excessive hospitality), so we agreed to bring some notebooks and pencils and whatnot. The notebooks are only Rs. 5, so it’s not exactly a huge financial commitment. The school itself runs off of nothing as far as I can tell. For fifty students they have two teachers who both look like they are about fourteen years old (although Sathyu informed us that they are in fact older), as Gangaram to maintain order. There is just one actual room of the schoolhouse, and another little patio-like area, where they sit when it is hot outside. There is no electricity, and they just use chalkboards, and the students all share a few textbooks. Its pretty impressive how much they have accomplished though, especially considering the school is free. A lot of the schools here require that the students pay for their own uniforms and supplies, which means that a lot of families can not afford to send their kids. So not having uniforms and providing the supplies means that almost all the kids can go… especially the younger girls, which I like!

Anyway Gangaram insisted on serving us chai, and we stayed until after lunch being shown around the garden and making arrangements for the coming to learn the dance. At the end of the day he insisted that Anisha get up in front of the older students (who come back after lunch) and pretend to teach them some English so that Casey and I could take photos. I had to laugh, because she wasn’t actually teaching them anything, so god only knows what he wanted the photos for.

after this, we went out for dinner at hotel ranjeet, which i wrote about in the next post, so enjoy!

focus group and fabrics

2007-08-08T20:26:00.000+05:30

Focus Group & Chok">Focus Group & Chok" border="0" alt="" />
I was worried that I would be bored without all the other volunteers here to keep me busy and entertained, but that hasn’t been the case the past few days! After everyone left on Monday, I had a quiet morning mostly by myself just hanging around. Later in the afternoon, however, I decided that today was the day I was going to get my metal, mouse-proof bins from the Chowk market, and Casey and Anisha decided that they were going to come with me. Well, it turned out that Rachna, who works here at Sambhavna, needed to pick up a dupta that she had sent for dying, so we ended up meeting her in the market as well. We wanted to explore some of the areas that we had never seen before, and Rachna proved to be a perfect guide around the twisted and confusing streets of the market. She knew where all of the good deals and best shops were, and which materials were good for what sort of clothing and whatnot. I ended up buying two really beautiful scarves from this one store (which had some of the most fantastic fabrics and the shopkeeper spoke English!) for Rs. 50 each (about $1.25 CND). I had seen the exact same ones on St. Laurent in Montreal for $35 each!!! So you’re all getting one, whether or not you want it. I also bought a Gujarati-styled embroidered bed sheet for $10, and two pieces of really nice Madhya Pradesh-dyed fabric for about $3 to make shirts out of! However, in all the excitement over buying all of this fantastic material, I completely forgot about my mouse-proof bins! I finally had the courage to take photos in the Chowk though, so there are a few up here. I hope they’ll give you the sense of how completely tiny and small the streets and stores are. There are a million things packed into one little area!

Rachna had invited us over to her house afterwards, so I had a slightly hair-raising ride on the back of her scooter to her apartment. Rachna lived in the US for thirteen years, and actually worked at Dow for a year or two when she graduated from college. She is amazingly spirited and passionate about her work in Bhopal, and told us all the exciting stories from the fast that happened earlier this year in order to make the government concede to the Bhopalis demands. You could tell that she was very much in her element with all of the action and excitement, with the police chasing them down, and how they outwitted the officers! Rachna told us about a satirical awards show that they (some of the Sambhavna people) were going to in Delhi this weekend. The idea is to give awards to all of the people who have sold India out to corporate American interest, a la Yes Men style. So I decided that I would like to go as well, and Rachna has booked me a train ticket! So I’ll be in Delhi for a day on the 10th and 11th!

The next day, Tuesday, I ended up not doing too much during the day as well. Mostly I just typed up a chunk of the report for Rachna, and tried to do laundry, and farted around. I cleaned out the cupboard with all of the food in it, and much to my dismay, the mice had managed to get into a lot of things that we had thought was tightly sealed up!! They bit through the Styrofoam cups that Genvieve had bought with Cup-O-Noodles in them, and two bags of sealed pasta that I had bought! Anyway, this prompted me to throw out anything that I thought they might be able to get into, much to the shock and dismay of the cleaning lady, Chandra Kanta. Anam, Maya and Shaziya (the girls responsible for my makeover) stopped by early in the afternoon to bid me a happy friendship day, and Anam gave me a little gold bracelet with two little faux diamonds in it. It was really sweet, and I felt terrible for not having something noce to give them in return, so I went and got some bangles that I had bought a few days earlier from the Chowk and gave those to Shaziya and Maya, but I had nothing for Anam. I’m still racking my brain about what to get a nine or ten year old girl. She’s too old for kids toys, but I think she’s still a bit young for some of the beauty projects that her sisters are into…

Anyway, in the afternoon I decided that I would go back to the Chowk on my own in order to get those metal bins. Casey decided that she wanted more fabric and ended up coming with me. We got completely lost for a little while, but eventually found out way back to the shops that Rachna had shown us. I found some fabric that is very much perfect for Whitney and Richard, so if you are reading this, then be prepared to get something little in the mail from me! I also found three huge storage containers for flour and rice and whatnot, and got those for the mouse-proofing project! They only cost about $12 too!

Anyway, as soon as we got back to Sambhavna, we rushed out again to meet the translator that Anisha had used when she came here last summer, Aditi. We went all the way to Bittle Market, in New Bhopal to meet her, because she lives on that side of the lake. We had ridiculously sweet and decadent chocolate cakes and brownies at Café Coffee Day (also known as CCD by the locals), where we were joined by her cousin, Krishna. She invited us back to her parents house afterwards, where we were fed dried Poha (the non-dried thing that we are served for breakfast every morning), those cheese-looking sweets that I had at the other girls’ home, samosas and eventually chow mein that her mother prepared for her. I spent most of the time trying to talk as much as I possibly could in order to slow down the flow of food coming from the kitchen (although her mother’s chow mein was delicious and had no spice whatsoever so I had two servings). I was really nice to go to someone’s home and be able to communicate so easily. Her parents only spoke a bit on English, but seemed content to just hang out and listen to us. Aditi has an amazing amount of energy, and was totally full of life, chattering away the whole time we were there. Its too bad that she was leaving to go to a Master’s degree in another city the next day, because I have the feeling that she and I could have become fast friends.

We didn’t leave until after eleven, and her father insisted on driving us back to Sambhavna, convinced that we wouldn’t get an auto at that late hour. It was raining pretty hard, and Aditi told us about how the previous summer the bridge across the lake had been flooded (as was Sambhavna I was later reminded) and they were stuck there for a couple of days. Her father drove very quickly in the most ancient and bet up jeep I have ever seen. It actually looked like it might have been used in a war. Like a lot of the jeeps here, the front seat faces forward, but the back seats are just benches along the sides of the car, so it felt much more harrowing that it actually was. Anyway, we didn’t get back to Samnbhavna until after midnight (late by everyone’s standards here). The guard even told us we should be back by ten in the future because we worries about us! I collapsed into bed instantly and fell asleep with Harry Potter in my hand.

This afternoon was really fun. I went with Anisha and Casey to the community that they’ve been doing their surveys in so that I could see the focus group they were conducting about menopause. The women that came to the focus group were really animated and interested in the topic, and had a lot to say about it. I got to take photos, so make sure you take a look at them!

After that we came back to Sambhavna and Rachna told Anisha and I where we could go to get our shirts made, so we did that. Then two of the girls from across the street came over and did mehendi on my feet. Its still drying as we speak, but it already looks fantastic. As a side note, as Anisha and I were going to the corner store to get the mehendi we saw a goat that was practically decapitated lying dead in the street. A man in an auto stopped and picked it up, put it on the floor of the auto and drive off with it. It was most upsetting to see this little creature just lying in the street like that, after such a brutal death. I have become rather fond of goats, because they are everywhere here, and are do all sorts of strange and funny things. The other day when we were at the corner store, two goats butted their way under the awning with us to get away from the rain. The baby was kind of nuzzling up against my pant legs, and after a few minutes decided that it was going to try to eat them! It didn’t get very far, but I thought that it was pretty hilarious.

On that note, I think that I’m going to try giving Dan a wake-up call. Enjoy the photos!

friendhsip day and visiting the neighbours

2007-08-05T18:37:00.000+05:30

Ankeeta's House">Ankeeta's House" border="0" alt="" />
The past few days here have been pretty quiet. It has been raining pretty much non-stop until today, which makes I hard to go out and do things. I have spent my time trying to type up the never-ending report that Rachna gave me, and cleaning up parts of the volunteer areas. There has been a small problem with the dinner dishes, which the volunteers are supposed to do on a rotating basis. Shanti Bai comes every evening around 7pm to make dinner for the volunteers and, inevitably Sathyu because he is always sill here at 9pm, when dinner is finished. The volunteers are supposed to take turns doing the dishes, but the system seems to have fallen apart, and often the dishes and leftover food are left out over night. Normally this wouldn’t be such a problem, but because the kitchen is fairly open concept, the food attracts massive numbers of flies, ants and those Indian chipmunks. I generally get up early in the morning to discover the mess in the kitchen, and frequently end up doing the dishes. It annoys me to no end, but it’s hard to be the one to try to instill order, so I haven’t made any complaints so far.

The current group of volunteers are slowly moving on to other travels and back to the States. The other Emily and Aaya left early this morning, Genevieve and Juliet leave late tonight, and Joe leaves first thing tomorrow morning. So then it will be myself, Casey and Anisha. I think that the dishes will be easier to monitor with a smaller group, so that is a perk. It has certainly been nice to have such a large group of other volunteers here for my first few weeks though. It has meant that there is always someone else around to do things with and to show me around.

I spent the morning trying to clean out some of the communal spaces, and managed to rope some of the other volunteers into my efforts. First we attacked the volunteer room, where the internet works, which had gotten pretty sloppy. We wiped down all of the tables, took all of the books off the shelf, wiped it down and rearranged the books in an orderly fashion. Anisha organized some of the papers from a survey that she conducted last summer, and put back a lot of the material that had been taken from the library. I think that we may have even curbed some of the ant problem in this room (which I am especially happy about because I was getting worried that the really little ones were infesting my keyboard and slowly eating my new computer!).

Next Joe, Casey and I moved al of the stuff that wasn’t being used from the room behind the gazebo, where Mel had the kids come and do activities. A lot of it just got thrown out, but we salvaged some of the paper, crayons and whatnot that was in better shape for future use. Then I did a brief tidy of the two-person room that Aanya and Emily had been staying in. I’m hoping that I will be allowed to stay in that room once the other CIDA volunteer gets here, so I thought that it wasn’t a bad idea to get rid of some of the garbage so that the cleaning lady could give it a sweep. I know that its boring to hear about all of the cleaning activities but the neat freak in me just can’t stop organizing and cleaning once I get started.

In other news, there is a mouse (or rather mice) living in the girls dorm room. There isn’t really anywhere to put food in the kitchen where the chipmunks and ants won’t get at it, so we have all been storing our non-perishables in the bedroom. This of course has attracted our friendly neighbourhood mice. Anisha, as it turns out, it utterly terrified of the furry little rodents, so when Casey found one in her bed the other night Anisha freaked out a little bit. Mice don’t really bother me, aside from the initial startle that you get when they creep out from somewhere, but I am concerned about sharing food with them because of all the diseases that they can carry. Since the initial sighting of the mouse in the bed, Genevieve has seen them a few other places, so I have resolved to buy some of the big metal storage containers that they use for rice and flour in the kitchen so that I can put all of my food in them.

On a side note, the other day the staff had some sort of meeting in the afternoon during one of the biggest monsoon storms I’ve seen yet. Ankeeta and her husband Paupoo, who run the canteen, made these delicious fried-potato things as a treat for the staff. There was some left over, so they invited the volunteers down to the kitchen to have some. It was really nice hanging out in there with the whole family. They have three adorable little kids, who were all in there with us. Hersheeta, the youngest who is about two, was sleeping on the kitchen floor. We were making so much noise laughing and horsing around that she woke up though. In a few moments of quiet we could hear this squeaking and rustling around under the cupboards. I assumed that it was the chipmunks, which invade everywhere and are impossible to keep out, but Ankeeta told Anisha that it was rats!!! Anisha freaked out again, which the kids thought was hilarious, and the middle one, Sumit (who is a holy terror), made a game out of opening up the cupboards to scare her. At one point we even saw a big black rat run by!! Anyway, it was after that that I decided that constant vigilance was in order to keep the rats at bay!

Rita came by today and explained to us that it was “Friendship Day” in India (which explains all those text message ads I keep getting on my cell phone saying that you can get special rates for “Friendship Day”). From what I can figure out, this is kind of like Valentine’s Day in North America, but an even better marketing scheme because you have to buy everyone little presents. Anyway, big Vishal (there are two of them) came by and gave Anisha and Joe little presents), and when I went to buy some mango juice Nancie gave me a little white flower, and asked if I could come over later. I was happy to have something to do, so I told her after lunch would come by. She lives in this kind of compound right in front of Sambhavna, where Ankeeta and her family and about a million other people also live. So I went over and brought some cookies for “Friendship Day”. I was immediately accosted by Nikita and her many “Didis” (older sisters), who I quickly realized were not all actually sisters. They wanted to know who had done my mehendi and insisted on painting my nails (again), so I let them do that. They were asking where all the other volunteers were, and I explained that Joe, Juliet and Genevieve were leaving soon, so then of course they wanted me to go and get them so that they could say goodbye.

So I went back to Samnbhavna to retrieve Joe and my camera, and went back to the compound. The kids always get a huge kick out of the camera, so I have about a million photos of each and every kid, mostly with Joe (who is a human jungle gym for some of the little kids). Juliet and Genevieve showed up then, and started taking photos and horsing around with the kids. It was madness, Genevieve started a dance party in one room, Juliet and I were taking photos, kids were yelling and screaming and running all over the place, a cow kept stampeding through the courtyard. It was a bit of a relief when Ankeeta and Paupoo invited us into their little room in the house and made us coffee, which lucky for me is sweetened like nobody’s business and has more milk than coffee. Ankeeta is so sweet. Make sure that you check out the photos of her with Hersheeta and Sumit in the house. So cute!!

Anyway, tonight we are going out to dinner at Manohar (sp?) for Joe, Juliet and Genevieve’s last night in town. The other volunteers all love Manohar, so I’m looking forward to that. Apparently they have pizza that almost tastes like North American pizza…

Dan's birthday is tomorrow, so I will be thinking of him. Email him and wish him a happy birthday!!

mehendi and water contamination

2007-08-03T19:59:00.000+05:30

Sareeta's House">Sareeta's House" border="0" alt="" />
Yesterday I had a really fun and interesting day. I spent part of the morning trying to do some of the typing work that Rachna gave me. It was pretty slow going, because the report has been badly photocopied from somewhere, so parts of the text are almost completely blanked-out. However, after doing that for a couple of hours I was informed that the cleaning staff was doing a thorough scrub of the bathroom! Apparently the cleaning staff that had been responsible for the upstairs was moved downstairs, where an eye could be kept on him… all of the dirty areas that I had assumed were the responsibility of the volunteers to keep clean, are, in fact, his job, has just wasn’t doing it. So the woman who had been cleaning downstairs has been moved upstairs, and has been scrubbing the entire floor!! Oh cleanliness, how I love thee…

Anyway, after I found out that I didn’t need to spend my day cleaning the bathroom I went back to my typing, only to be interrupted by Joe telling me that there were some girls downstairs asking for me. I thought that it might be a mother and daughter who had invited me over the day before, but had never shown up back at the clinic, so I went to investigate. At first I didn’t recognize any of the girls, and was rather confused at how they knew to ask for me by name. After a minute I recognized the little girl, who has been coming to the gazebo sometimes to play. We sat in awkward silence for a few minutes before I decided to go and get Aanya to translate what they were asking me to do. She came downstairs and said that they were inviting me over to their house. I decided why the hell not, got my camera and headed out. They lived just around the corner from Sambhavna, in a clean but extremely stuffy little house. The power was off in the neighbourhood (which seems to happen in brief but frequent intervals), so the cooler couldn’t be turned on, which meant that it was absolutely sweltering. For those of you who don’t know, coolers are these kind of budget versions on air conditioners. There is one in the girls’ dorm here at Sambhavna, as well as in several of the offices. Essentially they are these metal boxes with mesh sides about two by three feet long and high. You open the tops of them and then pour in a bucket or two of water and then this giant fan blows the cool water around. I’m not entirely sure how they work, but they are pretty effective because I’ve been into a lot of stores that have them. At any rate, the cooler was off, and I was absolutely sweating to death in the house.

I had brought my camera with me for some photo ops, which of course attracted a crowd (it seems to no matter where I go in India). Many of the other women on the street hovered around outside the door, and one woman kept asking me to take picture of her and the pants-less baby boy she had on her hip. She thought it was hilarious that she was having her picture taken when he didn’t have any pants on, and kept yelling something in Hindi and pointing at his naked butt and laughing hysterically. It was pretty funny.

The girls gave me a glass of Fanta to cool me off, and almost immediately set to work beautifying me. First up, it was decided that I needed some bangles. Unfortunately my hands are too fat, and they weren’t able to fit any of the bangles they had past my thumb. In the process of trying to squeeze my hand into one, it snapped and actually cut into my hand a little bit. The girls took some cream out of the fridge and put it on the cut… I have no idea what the cream was, so hopefully it was some sort of disinfectant. Eventually they found a fat-hand bangle and managed to squeeze it on with the help of some soapy water, but I have the feeling its never going to come off unless I smash it. After that they painted all of my finger- and toenails a bright, rather garish, red. I’m not a fan of having polish on my fingers, so I have since managed to chip it all off, but I left it on my feet. It makes them look cleaner, or at least relatively. Then, the little one, Anam, went out and returned a minute later with a tube if mehendi (henna), which one of the older girls used to make a fantastic design on my arm and hand with. It looks really cool, and I’ve decided to get it done on my feet too. I’ve been told that the tubes only cost about Rs. 3 here, so if anyone wants me to bring some back, let me know! Finally, a bindi was stuck on my head, and I was deemed beautiful. I couldn’t help but feel like I full-grown Barbie-doll with all of this stuff, especially since the mehendi has to take a few hours to dry, so I was stuck not being able to use that arm for quite some time.

After that the father came home with a little baby boy and some sweets from the street vendors. I had been warned countless times not to eat anything from the street vendors because the quality of the food is highly questionable. However, they were quite insistent that I have some of this little white square that looked like cheese and tasted like pure sugar. Luckily they didn’t insist that I have the other thing he brought, which looked like tiny red intestines curled into a little ball (which Anisha says are delicious sweets as well). After eating a bit of the sweet, I decided that I needed to get back to the clinic and do some work, so I begged my excuses which I’m sure they didn’t understand) and they returned me to Sambhavna.

Joe, Aanya and the other Emily had a good laugh at me when I came back, because I was so covered, but they also took some photos of me in the wet mehendi, so make sure you take a look. Soon after that, Aanya told me that she and he other Emily were going to the community just North of the Union Carbide factory to do some interviews with gas-affected women. They invited me to tag along and take photos, so I was off again (with my Mehendi still wet). We took an auto down the bumpiest road I had ever experienced in my life; it was literally made out of chunks of brick and rock that jutted out of the road in such a way that it was almost impossible to drive on. Sareeta, a fifteen year old girl who was guiding us around and taking us to her house, kept arguing with the auto driver that the road wasn’t that bad so that she could get us a cheaper rate, which I thought was kind of hilarious. As soon as we got out of the auto we were surrounded by en enormous group of kids all wanting their photo taken. Sareeta kept telling me not to take any photos, because each photo seemed to provoke the desperate cry of “DIDI!! PHOTO!!” from about twenty more kids.

We crossed a set of train tracks and maneuvered around huge piles of mud until we were at Sareeta’s house. Her house was a bit off the beaten track, so it was a bit quieter there. Her mother had just finished re-mudding the floor of the house, so the outside was still sticky with cow-dung and hay. We made ourselves comfortable inside the little house though (of which there are lots of photos, so please check them out!). I couldn’t help but notice that even though there was only one bed for four or five people, there was still a TV and DVD player. Anyway, Sareeta’s mother was really nice and friendly. She made us the best chai I’ve had since getting to India and we sat and chatted for a while. It turns out that Sareeta knew Jennifer and Diana, last years CIDA interns. She seems to be really active in all the political stuff surrounding Bhopal, and from what I know she is essentially the leader of the group of kids that Rachna has been working with to create awareness among the youth here.

Anyway, Sareeta brought over the mother of one of her friends for Emily and Aanya to interview. This woman had a four-year old son who could neither talk nor walk. He seemed to be in some sort of chronic pain, because every time she touched his legs or feet he would start to whimper and cry. It was absolutely heart-breaking to look at his little face, he was obviously so unhappy, you just wanted to give him the world to try to help him. They think that he was affected by the contaminated water in utero, but they really don’t know. They’ve been going to the government hospital for gas survivors, but she said that the help that they got was entirely symptomatic relief and did nothing to help the root of the problem. All over the neighbourhood there were these huge black drums with safe, uncontaminated water in them. But from what I’ve heard, there’s only about half enough water shipped into the neighbourhood as they need. We even saw one woman using a hand pump that obviously brought up contaminated water. You just wanted to scream at her not to touch the stuff, but without it they’d have no water.

Anyway, after that they did a couple of other short, impromptu interviews with women as e passed through the community. We had a group of about fifty kids fallowing us around begging me to take their photos. Sareeta forbid me from taking any more photos because of the crowd that we had attracted. Then we took an auto to the Chok, but since Sareeta was our guide we got to see an entirely new area of the market that I’d never seen before. I ended up buying more bangles (and broke yet another one in the process of trying to try them on), four dupptas (scarves) and two more shirts that are much nicer than the other ones I bought. I still haven’t found the kind of scarves that I really wanted to buy while I was here, which are silk ones with fancy gold embroidery on them. Maybe in my travels I’ll find the places that sell them, but until then I haven’t bought anyone any gifts yet! Sorry!

Anyway, as usual I’ve been writing this on and off all day. Today has been fairly uneventful though. I did do my first errand on my own today, which was entirely successful (I’m happy to report!). I took an auto to the local police station to have some stupid form signed by literally three different people, and then all the way back to Sambhavna. I also stopped by the tailor to have the sleeves put on my two new shirts (when you buy shirts here the sleeves are often not attached, they come sewn onto the back or something so that you can add them if you want to). So yes, I am finally becoming independent enough to do some things on my own! I think that it is about time, too, because, five of the seven other volunteers are leaving on Sunday and Monday, so its about to get pretty quiet around here!

I think that that’s about it for now… the internet hasn’t been working on and off again all day, so hopefully it won’t be too long before I’m online again!

hindi harry potter and the neat-freak

2007-08-01T21:44:00.000+05:30

Well, I have officially been here for two weeks, at the clinic. Those of you who said that things would get easier, you were right, they have. I still miss Dan a lot, but I don’t think that that is going to change. I got used to having him around, so it’s still hard to not have him here with me. But in terms of going out and doing things around town, that has certainly made me feel a lot more at home here, and a lot more at ease.

My work here still has yet to really pick up, but I have gotten some office work from Rachna, and that helps to pass the days. I have also been trying to take initiative to do things around the clinic, even if they aren’t exactly putting to use my bachelor’s degree. For instance, the fridge in the kitchen has been absolutely filthy, and the freezer part at the top of the unit has gotten so badly iced over that one of my water bottles actually got frozen into it yesterday. So this afternoon I roped Joe into helping me defrost and clean out the fridge. We found some interesting and rather disgusting things growing in there, but we also got the satisfaction of using a screw driver to chip off some of the more stubborn chunks of ice. I then decided that I would was the rags that we use in the kitchen which proved to be a bit of a mistake, because they continue to turn the water black in the machine, despite the fact that I have put it through the wash cycle four times now… ewwwww.

My disgust with the state of the communal areas that the volunteers use has of course prompted a full-scale cleaning attack. I have managed to find a source of sponges and scouring pads to use in the kitchen and the bathroom today in a different market. Aanya and the other Emily took us to a place called Bittle (sp?) market, in the new section of Bhopal. There are full-fledged stores there, with doors and air-conditioning and everything. It’s most exciting. I was going to buy a big thing of vinegar and baking soda so that I could clean the bathroom out properly tomorrow, but apparently Indians don’t use vinegar because I couldn’t find it anywhere. I asked Dr. Jai where I could find some when we got back, and he had no idea what vinegar even was, so I’ve given up on that idea for the time being.

We have to use biodegradable things in the clinic because they recycle the water here in the herbal garden, so no chemical cleaners allowed! Technically we aren’t supposed to use regular shampoo and soap and stuff but no one seems to be terribly strict about those things. Laundry and kitchen soaps are closely monitored though. We use this gross soap called Sanchi soap that I think might actually be made of lard, because when I boiled the kitchen scrubbers to clean them there was this separated layer that looked like fat at the top of the pot. At any rate, its about the only biodegradable soap that India has to offer, so unless you bring laundry detergent from Canada you have to use a cheese grater to flake the Sanchi stuff into your laundry. Luckily I knew about that in advance, and came prepared with Dr. Bronner’s nice-smelling laundry soap...Anyway, I have been promised that I can use some rubber gloves from downstairs tomorrow, and that Devaker (the guy who does all the technical facilitating for the clinic) will be able to find me some vinegar. I have my doubts about this, but whatever, the sponges will have to do.

The other thing that I feel I must mention about the market that we went to today is that we went to a café that was the closest thing I have seen to anything Western since I got to India! Everything was clean, air-conditioned and polished-looking. The tables and chairs actually matched, and the décor was fairly modern looking, even my North American standards. But the real piece de resistance was the bathroom! Oh the bathroom!! There was a Western toilet (not a squatter) for starters, with actual toilet paper AND soap!! In addition to which, the toilet flushed! It was like paradise. I wished that I had my camera so that I could take a picture of it, it was so beautiful!! I had a mango smoothie and a paneer tikka sandwich (in the café, not the bathroom), which was of course too spicy, but still good.

We then went to the Rs. 99 store, which is like a dollar store, except that Rs. 99 is actually $1.50 CND, however, you take what you can get. But they had things like canned beans (I have yet to see any other form of canned food in this county, to the extent that the clinic doesn’t have a can opener and I had to buy one of those too). After that we went to another super market where I bought the new sponges for the kitchen and to clean the bathroom. I also got some glass cleaner for my brand-new white computer, which is quickly turning gray, but I am resisting! Anyway, as you can tell, the neat freak in me has become obsessed with getting things here into what I consider a livable state… its like moving into a new apartment: the dirt that’s already there is totally gross because its not your dirt!

Other news, not so much, it’s been a slow couple of days. We went to see Harry Potter in Hindi last night, which was really fun. I remembered a lot of the book after we got into the movie, so the lack of subtitles didn’t bother me too much. I made sure to sit next to Anisha so that she could translate the wordier scenes. The theater has AC which was a real treat, and the movie had an intermission! Go figure… Anisha said that all movies in India have one. Maybe that’s because all the Bollywood movies I’ve ever seen are like three hours long, no matter how thin the plot.

Also, Rachna also told me that she has the perfect group of kids for the photo project (!!), which I am really happy about. She has a group of kids in their early teens that she has been working with to try and get them a little more politically conscious about the gas disaster, which is great. Initially she had wanted there to be a photography unit for the project, but hadn’t had the funds for it, so I think that this should work out really well ☺ I have also been talking with some of the other volunteers about Chegari trust, that Rashida Bee started up, and they were thinking that the trust needs help with a lot of things, so hopefully I’ll be able to work more with them as time goes on.

Anyway, no exciting photos this time. Maybe I’ll take some pictures of the furry caterpillars that are dropping from everywhere here… or maybe one of the beautifully clean fridge….

orcha and the train

2007-07-30T20:41:00.000+05:30

Orcha">Orcha" border="0" alt="" />
Well, today has been a bit of a slow day, if you can’t tell from the fact that I’m now writing my second lengthy entry of the day. I spent most of the morning waiting for Rachna to get in so that I could ask her about what I should be doing. Unfortunately at around the same time that she came in, I had already decided to call Masaum and see if he couldn’t take me to go register with the government. So at 2pm he came and we commenced that particularly thrilling journey.

Indian bureaucracy is an interesting thing. It involved making the most number of photocopies known to human existence, and I’m quite sure that each of said copies are never actually filed away, but are indeed documented as being received and then thrown on top of the old documents. I have a theory that if India was to recycle all the duplicate copies of documents it has we could continue to reuse that paper and save the rainforest. I guess that it’s the lack of computerized systems, but dear god, I had to photocopy one form five times and another form twice before handing them all in, each with a passport photo attached to them. The whole process took about forty-five minutes, during which time I had to leave to make more copies because, guess who didn’t bring enough?! (That would be me). Anyway, at the end of all of this, just I was thinking how glad I was to be rid of this particular branch of the government, when I was handed a letter, told to have it signed by the local police and then bring it back for the completion of my file. And guess what? There is more paperwork to follow. Totally and completely absurd, the whole thing.

Anyway, when I came back to the clinic we made plans to go and see the new Harry Potter movie, which Masaum had seen the night before. He confirmed that no, it didn’t have any English subtitles, so we would be watching in Hindi, but I figured that getting it on the big screen in a different language was better than not at all… besides, the movies here will be an adventure, like everything else.

But I digress into the days goings on. Where I should really begin is Saturday, because we went to Orcha, a small town a few hours away from Bhopal. We left Saturday afternoon, right after I came back from the gas/water affected communities, so we were a bit rushed. Masaum, who I sometimes feel has the unfortunate job of babysitting us, took us to the train station to make sure that we were on the right train. As many of you know, I always set my watch a few minutes ahead of the real time, in order to be on time for appointments. Although I know that there is absolutely no point in doing this here in India, old habits die hard, and I was convinced that we were cutting it far too close for the train and that we were certain to get left behind. Casey had also set her watch ahead, so the two of us were tearing ahead of everyone else and dashing to the right car of the train with Masaum. The others caught up a few minutes later wondering why the hell we had been running… at any rate, we made it there just fine. We had to take a train to Jonsi (that is an entirely phonetic spelling), and then a rickshaw to Orcha, because it doesn’t have its own train station. The train station in Jonsi was totally packed with people, and it is obviously some sort of junction because there are a million tracks, but the town is smaller than Bhopal by far (or at least I think it is). But we made it to the rickshaws, and proceeded to have the bumpiest ride of all time down a dirt road before ending up at our hotel in Orcha.

I should mention that we stayed at a place called the Sheesh Mahal, which is an ancient palace that has been partially restored into a fairly shwank (especially by Indian standards) hotel. It actually reminded me a bit of the place we stayed in Havana over Christmas last year, but not quite to that shwank factor yet. It has a bit of faded glory that I think comes with the territory of being a hotel in a developing country. But check out the photos, and you’ll see what I mean, because it is really nice – especially the spectacular view over the whole town. From one direction you look out over miles of forest, and from the other, you can see the entire town of Orcha and all of the other ancient ruins of temples, burial grounds and whatnot. It also had hot water, which we do not have here at the clinic. So you can see why I was impressed. The food was so-so, but we were entertained by live music and dance (who we later decided was a man in drag, but she had a duppta over her face so we couldn’t really tell).

We had an early night of it, and slept in air-conditioned bliss. Although both Casey, who I was sharing a room with, and myself found that we kept waking up in the middle of the night. My theory is that we were just too comfortable on our soft beds and in the cool, non-humid air, to sleep. Hahaha! At any rate, we both woke up early in order to meet two other girls downstairs for breakfast. Completely by coincidence, we had run into two girls traveling around India at our hotel the evening before. It turns out that they both go to Stanford, where Anisha, Joe and Casey all go to school, and Casey actually know both of them by sight if not name! So we had breakfast with them and the rest of our group, and then headed out to check out the rest or the palace. It turned out that only a small portion had been converted into a hotel, and that the vast majority of the palace was still in a state of total disrepair. It seemed that the MP tourist board (who owns the hotel) had gotten as far as repairing things like stairs, so that you could climb around to the different levels of the palace, but that was about it. A lot of it seemed to be gradually crumbling away, despite some rather abandoned looking efforts to preserve it. Joe noted that the entire of India appears to be constantly undergoing some sort or repair at all times, which I think is certainly true.

After that we went into the town and found the gigantic temple, which was equally as high as the palace/hotel. The funny thing about the temple was that once you climbed about a million stairs up to the top and you were inside this absolutely massive dome thing, the actually part where you go to pray was about a ten by ten space carved out of the wall! I almost couldn’t believe it! This huge building, and then the spot to worship was so tiny. Anyway, the inside of the temple was a little underwhelming, so after watching a bunch of swallows swoop in and out chasing each other for a while, we went back outside. It was already starting to get really hot out, and it was only about 11am. We went back to the hotel to check out, and then I decided that I needed to just hang out for a little while. So I found a cool spot in one of the old palace buildings and waited with Genevieve and Juliet for the others to finish exploring. While we waiting we attracted the attention of the friendliest street mutt I have yet to encounter (which despite my protestations, Juliet let lick her hand), a small Indian girl who may or may not have been begging, and a group of three or four leering young men who stared so hard at us that you would think that their eyes might pop out of their heads. I wished that I could remember the phrase that Mel used that means "Do you stare at your mother like that?"...

When we finally left I gave the men a nasty look, which was completely ignored on their part, and then walked along the river to another temple thingie. In the photos, this is the one with the vultures living in it. I’ll have to get Dan so send me Photoshop though, because you can barely see them with my weak zoom lens, but they were huge birds and they kept swooping around all over the place, and at first we thought that they were some sort of hawk.

After that the heat of the day really got to me and I just went into a shop for about half an hour and looked at a bunch of different things. I ended up getting this little wall covering thing with two elephants embroidered onto it. After that everyone who had split up regrouped for dinner at a local place, which was better than the hotel for food, but not spectacular. After that we decided to wait in the hotel lobby until it was time for our ten o’clock train. It was really hot out the entire day, so the hotel was about the coolest place we could find to sit, even thought it wasn’t AC, but at least they had a bunch of fans.

We made the bumpy ride back to the train station with time to spare, because we were worried about how long the drive would take after dark (the answer to that is actually less time, not more because there’s no traffic on the roads). So we were stuck waiting at the train station for about an hour. That hour got me more than comfortably acquainted with India’s rail system. It became obvious why there are so many different classes of tickets that you can buy, because there are noticeable differences in the way the cars are set up. The cheapest ticket you can buy does not guarantee you a seat. There are some wooden benches on the inside of the cars, and the windows are just metal slats, which, at stations, people stick their arms out of so that they can have their water bottles filled by these huge hoses that are set up next to the track. Some of the more crowded cars just had people hanging off of the doors to stay on. To be quite honest, a childhood of holocaust books made the whole scene uncomfortable in an acute way, since these cars looked just a bit too much like cattle cars. The station itself brought a whole new meaning to the word "dirt". There were people, entire families, everywhere just sleeping on the platform, who set up cam outside the station and were cooking and snoring away. Rats fought over the piles of garbage that people throw out of the windows of the train, and stray dogs and cows rummaged around on the tracks for things to eat. The entire station absolutely reeked of urine.

When our own train finally did arrive, it was about half an hour late and about thirty cars long. We had to run past all of the other cars to get to ours, which was three-tier sleeper AC. I was worried that the train was going to take off while we were running down the platform, but we finally found the right car and hopped on…only to discover that there were no free bunks, save a few which we were told were taken by the two men sitting up in them. We found someone who worked on the train, who promptly told us that we were on the waiting list, and that we didn’t have seats. Ack! Panic!! There was NO WAY I was going to spend the night in the hot, crowded, filthy train station in Jansi, so I decided that no matter what, we would just refuse to get off the train, and pay whatever bribes were necessary… We were told by the rail employee to go and sit in two-tier sleeper AC (actually a step up in price and comfort), to wait for the ticket collector to sort us out. We were worried that they were going to throw us all off the train despite the fact that we had all paid in full for our seats. When the conductor came by, he told us that two of us were not on the waiting list, and had seats in three-tier, and that the other three were on the waiting list. So the three on the waiting list would have to pay and extra Rs. 200 in order t stay in the nicer car. Whether this was a bribe or not, I can’t say, I’m just glad that we didn’t get stuck in Jansi!!! Casey and I went back to the empty bunks that the men had claimed were theirs (and were actually ours) and had a fairly restful trip. It’s actually quite nice to be able to lie down on the train and sleep on and off.

We arrived back in Bhopal at about 3am, and took rickshaws down the deserted streets back to Sambhavna. I’ve never (and probably never will again) seen the streets in Bhopal so deserted. The shops are open ‘till about ten here, so there are always people out and about, long after things are quiet in North America (with the exception of bars that is, because there are none here). It was a funny feeling of relief at being back at Sambhavna though, because it really did feel like getting back home after a long day. So I think that is good… at any rate, its now 8:30pm, and I’d like to post this before dinner.

rashida bee and a following

2007-07-30T11:43:00.000+05:30

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Monday July 30, 2007

Well, this morning was a tired morning. We didn’t get back from Orcha until after three last night, and I woke up at seven-thirty like clockwork anyway. I wonder if that it part of getting older. Anyway, I will tell you all about Orcha soon enough, but first I wanted to mention meeting Rashida Bee, and going out into the communities with the other volunteers to do a survey.

Friday afternoon Masaum had caught a cold from wandering around in wet clothes through the factory all the evening before, so he wans’t up to driving me around and getting my registration taken care of for me. Instead some of the other volunteers were going to New Market to do some shopping, so I decided to do that as well. We went back to the store that I got my pants from and also to the bookstore to get Harry Potter (for yours truly of course!). I was surprised at how well I knew my way around, even though I had only been there a couple of times before. It felt good to actually have a sense of where things are… I think that it added a little order to my world ☺.

When we came back from our little shopping excursion, some of the other volunteers were going to the old Sambhavna building that was used before this one was built to interview this woman activist Rashida Bee. Rashida Bee has started the Chenghari (sp?) trust up with the money that she got for an international award. The trust deals with people that have been severely affected by the gas disaster and water contamination, and then mostly children and women. There have been a lot of kids born with birth defects because their mothers were drinking contaminated water while they were pregnant. The trust tries to find specialists that will do surgeries for them for free, and tries to find special schools that will take the kids with mental disabilities.

Anyway, two of the girls were doing a radio piece about the disaster, so they were interviewing her about that. The other two girls were interviewing here about international activism because she has become such an international figure in the movement. I of course was just there to tag along and take photos. As soon as Aanya introduced me though, Rashida Bee said that it would be great if I could come and do a creative photography project about the kids that Chenghari trust, so that made me feel good. Not having much to do around here is still driving me a little crazy, so it made me feel a lot more useful. Rashida Bee, who I had heard about back in Canada, was really wonderful and warm and open. She just seemed so genuine and welcoming that it seemed like that might be a place that I could really do some work, even though she doesn’t speak any English! You can check out more about her at http://www.goldmanprize.org/node/83.

On Saturday morning I decided that I would go with Anisha and Casey out to the “basties” (I’m not sure of the spelling, but it means communities) that were affected by the gas and water contamination. They are helping with a study that the clinic is doing about whether these women are experiencing premature menopause as a result of the gas/water. I didn’t really do anything but watch, because the community workers are going through the actual surveys with the women in Hindi. But it was really interesting to see all of the different homes that people live in. At one point we went into a part of the neighbourhood that Casey and Anisha hadn’t been to yet, and all of the kids started following us around hardcore! At one point there must have been thirty of them just walking with us where ever we went. When we went into one of the houses to watch an interview, all these kids came in with us!!! The father kept shooing everyone out, but they’d just wander back in five minutes later! It was insane. Luckily Casey and I had to leave to catch our train at that point, so we left the interviewers in peace! I couldn’t help but be a little shocked at the lack of privacy though… I guess curiosity over the white people was just too overwhelming!

Next: Orcha!

union carbide and a motorcycle

2007-07-30T10:12:00.000+05:30

Union Carbide">Union Carbide" border="0" alt="" />
Well, today is the first day that I can officially say that I had a really good day. I woke up this morning without the joint and muscle aches of the flu that I felt yesterday, and my stomach was only a little bit upset too! Joe had gone to the corner store, which sells fresh egg, so I got to have a breakfast of scrambled eggs, and no spice. Then I did a load of laundry and went downstairs to play with the kids for a little while, which was fun. We were playing musical chairs with my Ipod, which each of the kids wanted to have control over. Mac doesn’t seem to have a very big presence here in India, but they knew how to start and stop the songs, so each of the kids wanted to be in charge of doing that. I decided that this was a recipe for my expensive device to get broken, so we compromised by me holding onto the Ipod and letting one kid at a time push the button.

Masaum came at noon to start running some of the plethora of errands that I had to run. Mainly I have to register with the collectorate because I am here for longer than six months at a time. I’m not sure if that is a safeguard against me staying here past my welcome or against me getting abducted into India society, but it does seem slightly strange to me. Some of the other volunteers also wanted to go and see the abandoned Union Carbide factory site, which is just lying in decay and disrepair. You have to go and get permission from some branch of the government to do that as well, so I was delegated organizer of that particular activity as well. The other item on the agenda was to go and get a couple of pairs of pants! So I an around collecting passports for photocopies and other documentation, and then set off with Masaum. On his motorcycle.

I should mention that everyone in India drives motorcycles. They outnumber cars on the street about twenty-to-one by the looks of it, and I’m sure that you can see in my photos how large and awkward cars are on small Indian streets. Absolutely no one wears helmets, neither driver’s nor passengers, although I have noticed that they sell them at every street corner stand, especially in Delhi. Maybe they’re crappy quality anyway… at any rate, this was my first motorcycle ride ever, so I told Masaum that, and told him not to drive too fast because I would get scared and fall off. He’s a good driver though, and by Indian standards, I would say that he’s fairly cautious too. I have to wonder what people here thought of this skinny little guy zipping around town with a white-knuckled white girl clinging to his shoulders (no one here holds on to the drivers, you see women in saris sitting side-saddle, talking on cell phones and looking generally bored with the whole experience).

I didn’t have long to get used to it though, because not ten blocks outside of Qazi camp Masaum’s motorcycle got a flat tire and we had to stop. I put some more minutes on my cell phone while we waited, and then we went back to Sambhavna so that I could get some more money for pants shopping. So we were off once again! After I got used to the initial shock of the whole thing it was actually quite fun. It was really nice to be out and about it the city, particularly with someone who knows it well. So I ended up having a really good time just zipping around doing errands.

First we went to get the permissions to visit the Union Carbide factory. It was in this decrepit old building where the biggest line-up was at the photocopy place (Indian bureaucracy loves multiple copies of everything, and luckily Masaum knew to stop at on of the many roadside vendors that make dingy, barely legible photocopies, so we already had two copies of each of our passports and visas ready to hand in). There was a dank and filthy room full of men crowded around one heavy-looking desk, each of whom stared at me like I was crazy and most certainly in the wrong place when I came into the room. I said “I’m here to get permission to go to the Union Carbide factory”. There was a few minutes of silence and then one yelled at me “Union Carbide permissions, hanh?”. We were told to come back between three and five o’clock to pick up our letter of permission.

Next Masaum and I went further down the same row of dingy buildings in order for me to register as a foreigner. We were directed into yet another dank dingy room with swirling ceiling fans, and a man wearing sunglasses told me in heavily-accented, rapid English which documents I would need. As the list grew, I stopped him and got out a piece of paper so that I could write it all down; in addition to eight passport photos, a letter from Sathyu conforming that I am staying at Sambhavna, and copies of my passport and visa, I was also told to make duplicated copies of everything. Phew… the funny thing was that the two people sitting at the desk in front of me remembered Diana and Jennifer, the two CIDA interns that were here last year. I guess there aren’t that many foreigners registering with the police in Bhopal!

After that Masaum took me to the first North American-style store that I have seen since getting to India. It was four floors high and very air-conditioned. They had mostly more western-style clothes, but I ended up buying what I would consider to be somewhat Arabic pants in both black and brown. Both pairs of pants cost me about Rs. 880, the equivalent to about $23 CND.

After that we decided to head back to Sambhavna to wait for our letter of permission to be ready, which we did t about 4:30pm. However, you know how I mentioned that I had been rather miffed that it hadn’t rained at all while I’ve been here? And it’s supposed to be monsoon season? Well, on our way back, the grey skies that had been progressively turning darker opened up on us. Luckily we were almost back at Sambhavna so only my shirt got really wet. At any rate, we got our permissions letter and then came to pick up all of the others going on the factory visit.

The factory is only about a fifteen minute walk away from Sambhavna, and that’s even in Indian traffic, so that’s pretty close. It was raining pretty steadily by the time we got there, so we were already pretty wet. The grounds are all enclosed so that people can’t get in, but that doesn’t stop the cows, goats and other wildlife feasting on the greenery inside the grounds. It was a little more than worrisome to see that, because the grounds of the factory are especially contaminated with the waste leeching into the groundwater, so I’m sure that all of the plant life in there is contaminated, too. However, we stopped at the dingy little guard booth and showed them our paperwork. After some deliberation, the guards told us that we were too late for today. Unfortunately we would have to go through the entire process with the paperwork all over again if we came back tomorrow. We waited under the narrow awning of the building that the men were in for a while for the rain to let up a bit, and eventually Masaun indicated that they wanted money if they were going to let us in. So we agreed to pay then Rs. 200 on the condition that they let Masaum in with us, even though he wasn’t on the letter that we had got from the collectorate, and they seemed satisfied with that.

The factory itself is really quite a strange place. It is certainly the most quiet and still place in all of Bhopal, because it is the biggest piece of land that no one is allowed to go into. The still and calmness of the place makes it feels like some sort of sacred ground or something. I guess in a way it is, because it is the cause of so many deaths. The strange thing is that it is absolutely lush and green everywhere, with picturesque little flowers and greenery bursting from everywhere. The rusting old machinery seems incongruous with the rest of the setting. Masuam had been to the factory four times before this, and was a good tour guide, pointing out where the half-full tanks of MIC were buried, and where the breaking point in the pipes was that the gas leaked out of. You can look at the photos for a better idea of what it all looked like. But one quick aside, mother nature seemed totally intent on re-claiming this land, and there was a ton wildlife in here. There was this stray dog that was kind of following us from afar, and because the air was so still, and the dog was so quiet, it really seemed like the dog was kind of watching over us or something. And then at this one point, when we were all standing underneath some huge machinery we heard this great flapping noise. We all looked up and saw this enormous white blur flapping not ten feet overhead and out from under the machinery – it was an owl! Anyway, I just liked that even though the water is still poisoned in there and that the grounds are so contaminated with toxins, nature is still trying hard to take back that piece of land.

Its now Monday morning for me, and I have been out of town for the weekend, so this is a little bit out-dated. Hopefully over the course of the day I will have the chance to update the old blog about the weekend adventures:)

boring days and sleepless nights

2007-07-25T17:19:00.000+05:30

Well, yesterday, after deciding that I need to get out of the compound some more and explore the city a little bit I was hit with a really nasty cold. I had the one-nostril breathing going on, and in my attempt to prepare for the diarrhea and yeast infections I never thought to bring some nasal spray!! So I went to sleep at about 9pm without any diner last night, too exhausted from the day to eat anything – especially spicy! I woke up at about midnight and decided that I needed to take my anti-malarials, and went promptly back to sleep….until a few hours later, when the dreaded shits took hold of me. So I was up half the night on the toilet, trying hard not to feel terrible. When I woke up this morning, I felt even worse, so I basically spent the entire day in bed, save the few hours I took to phone my mom and dad for some parental sympathy. Anisha gave me some Tylenol, which didn’t help the stomach problems, but it did help the aches and pains in each and every joint in my body.

So about half an hour ago, I decided it was time to get out of bed for a little while, and try to answer some emails. And wouldn’t you know it, but the sky had clouded over and it looked like it was about to start pouring rain! Hallelujah! All I can say at this point it that it had better rain hard enough to actually cool things off a bit, or at the very least it had better continue to rain for a few days so I can get out of the goddamn sun. Those of you who know me know that I don’t particularly like the sun, especially when it’s hot. Give me some good old-fashioned British mist any day of the week and I’m happy. I can only hope that that is what is in store for me for the next month until the weather start to cool down!

As for Tuesday, I spent most of the day farting around with very little to do, which is becoming increasingly annoying and frustrating. I think that I dread the days because I feel as though I should be doing something productive here at the clinic but have nothing really to do. The original idea for my internship was that I would be able to do focus groups with women about health (specifically reproductive health) as it is a subject that is still quite taboo in conservative Bhopal. However, because my Hindi is far from what I would call fluent, Sathyu suggested a different project for me. (Skip this if I’ve already griped about it, but I don’t think that I have.) His idea was that I would do research into skills and techniques that could then be disseminated to the community health outreach people (who are volunteers living in the gas-affected communities) via the professional community health outreach workers here at the clinic. Even though this seems somewhat far removed that what I had thought I would be doing, I still thought that it wasn’t a bad idea. The only thing is that there are two other volunteers here right now who are helping to conduct a study about premature menopause with the community health workers at the clinic, so they are busy with that right now. Tuesday morning I went to a meeting with all of them about the survey, which Sathyu had some criticisms about, in an attempt to insert myself into the workings. Unfortunately I don’t think that my evil plan was all that successful because Anisha and Sathyu just had to translate whatever was going on in the meeting for myself and Casey (the other volunteer). At any rate, I’m hoping that eventually I could go out to some of the communities where they are doing the surveys, so perhaps tomorrow I’ll feel good enough to do that.

On Tuesday late in the afternoon I went to the Bhopal train station with Anisha, Joe and Casey to get our tickets to go out of town for the weekend. The train station was air conditioned (thank god, the only other place I've found that has a/c is the tiny little cubicle the ATM is in), so the trip was actually kind of fun. the traffic is starting to make me les nervous, and we always take one of two rickshaw drivers that hang around the outside of Qazi camp, and they both seem to go at a reasonable pace. This is for mom's benefit, because our neighbour in Toronto, Rena, has made her utterly paranoid about the taxi drivers here. Originally we were going to go to some erotic temple, but it turns out that despite being only 250Km away, it is about an eight hour drive. So we’re going somewhere else (don’t ask me because I can’t for the life of me remember). But I decided that it was time to stop moping around the clinic missing Dan, and go see some of the rest of the country. So hopefully my diarrhea will have subsided by then…

The photo project is on hold for the time being, as I think that it is going to take some time to get a group of kids that are mature enough to do it. Although they are all really sweet, a lot of the kids are totally undisciplined, making it hard to get them into a group for something like this. As per my mom's advice, I'm going to slowly infiltrate the group and pick out a few of the kids that I think would be able to handle it. I already have a few in mind!

Keep tuned for tomorrow's updates, as I have to go and register with the provincial police because I am here for longer than six months! Hopefully they don't give me a hard time. I'm going to get Masaum to take me, because he's so good about doing things like that.

sanchi and dinner

2007-07-23T14:09:00.000+05:30

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Yesterday a group of us went to Sanchi, which, according to the Lonely Planet, is indeed an ancient Buddhist temple, about 45km outside of Bhopal. We got off to a rough start, because the private company we had called to take us out there the previous day didn’t show up at the scheduled 10am. After an hour of waiting and several unanswered calls to the office, we looked to Sathyu for help (who was at the clinic from 9am to 9pm despite the fact that this was Sunday, the one day the rest of the clinic takes off). He phoned a friend of his who runs a similar business of renting a car and driver for the day to come and get us. However, not five minutes after Sathyu’s friend confirmed, the original driver phoned to say he was waiting down the street. Apparently none of us were quite on “Indian Time” yet… in retrospect, we should have anticipated his late arrival, but I guess you learn these things. After a couple of awkward conversations with the dispatcher from the original driver we ended up taking Sathyu’s friend’s car instead.

Although we got stuck in major traffic at some train tracks, it was absolutely amazing to watch the various different neighbourhoods of Bhopal that we passed though on our way out. You can tell that the outskirts of the city is much poorer than the centre, because there wasn’t much other thank little shacks along the roadside. Each was selling something: live chickens, freshly slaughtered and fly-covered goats, bags, children’s clothes, bangles. Some of the littlest vendors only sell these tiny packets about the size of a condom wrapper that are filled with powdered candy not dissimilar to Fun Dip.

Right next to the train tracks was definitely the most desperate looking field of tiny shanties. I had thought that the community where Sambhavna was located was pretty dingy and grubby, but at least the homes around here have concrete or brick walls and floors. These homes were just row upon row of tents made from tarp, wire, plastic bags, leaves and whatever else these people could scrape together. There was certainly no running water or proper toilets of any kind in this neighbourhood, and the surrounding field looked as though it was slowly being buried in garbage from the homes. I wanted to take a picture of this, but didn’t feel that I could, so you’ll have to use your imaginations.

After we passed this particular area, the crowds thinned out almost immediately, and we were suddenly on a country road. Fields stretched for miles, and in the distance we could see these large flat hills looming. Even though it still has yet to rain since my arrival, the fields all looked a fairly lush shade of green that was really quite beautiful. I think that the nicest part of the while trip was the drive, with the wind whipping through the open windows, and without the massive and sickening amount of pollution in the air.

Every few kilometers we passed a little roadside town, with rough homes of precariously stacked red clay bricks. Men rode by on bicycles piled five feet high with sticks, and enormous Tata trucks rumbled by full of god-only-knows. Although the drive was a breath of fresh air compared to the city, the driving was about as terrifying. The road is only two lanes, and is dotted with slower-moving motorcycles, bikes, truck and the like. So every time our driver wanted to pass into the oncoming traffic, he would simple honk his horn at the vehicle we were passing and speed into the oncoming traffic. We were, of course traveling at about 90km/hour the entire time, even through the little roadside towns that had 20km max signs posted. After I got a little more used to the pace and the way the traffic moves it wasn’t so bad though.

Sanchi itself was beautiful. As foreigners we each had to pay Rs. 250 (about $5 CND), while Indian Nationals only have to pay Rs. 10. I guess its only fair because we make so much more money than they do. But it was worth it, because it was so peaceful and quiet, especially compared to the city. The site is on top of this gigantic hilltop, where you can see for miles around. You can take a look at the pictures I am posting, but the temple thing is basically these big round tub things that Anja (one of the volunteers) told me that the Buddha’s body is buried in. There are all these ancient ruins around the tubs on these nice green lawns (the first I’ve seen since I got here). It was blisteringly hot yesterday (as it promises to be today, too), so I spent a lot of time seeking shade and benches to rest on. As an aside, on the ride there we passed a sign that said “Line of Cancer,” so presumably we were in the tropic of Cancer…so close to the equator. Before we left Sanchi we sat on the grass and had a drink next to some tourists from China, who seemed to be attracting equally as much attention as the white people. Nice to know that its not just white people, but people of any different race at all attract celebrity-like attention from the locals. All in all it was quite restful though.

When we got back it was about 5pm, and we had made arrangements to go to this guy Salman’s house for dinner earlier in the week. Salman had a huge crush on Mel, but has been making friends with all of the volunteers at Sambhavna for a few years it looks like. The few short blocks to Salman's house were intense, because pretty much every kid in a five block ran our of their house to scream "DIDI HI!!! HI DIDI" at us. there must have been a crowd of about fifty kids by the time we actually reached Salman's house. Unfortunately the day in the heat at Sanchi had done me in, and I didn’t have much of n appetite by the time we were there, which I felt badly about because Salman's mother had made an absolutely enormous dinner. We of course had diner on Indian time, meaning we were told that we would eat at 7:30, and then 8:00, and then dinner was actually served shortly after 9:00pm. My appetite was not increased by the heat in Salman’s living room. It is basically a large concrete room with no windows that absolutely exudes the heat long after the sun has set… anyway, after what seemed to be an eternity of sitting and trying to make polite excuses for not wanting anything more to eat, we were served our chai, and then headed back to the clinic.

The mosquitoes were especially bad yesterday, so when I tried to go up to my perch and say good night to Dan I got eaten alive despite the generous application of Deet. Eventually I moved down into the conference room and lay on the cool concrete floor for the rest of the conversation.

It has taken me most of the day, albeit with many interruptions, to write this, so today’s adventures will have to wait until tomorrow.

loneliest in the morning

2007-07-22T09:28:00.000+05:30

i'm beginning to understand why julie doiron was loneliest in the morning... at about 8:30am, when i am waking up everyone on the side of the planet that i hail from is just going to bed. i usually wake up and immediately call dan, so that i can get my last few minutes in with him before the "blackout" (thats what it feels like during the day, because i can't phone or talk to anyone back home, and the emails stop coming in). at any rate, i am going to leave for sanchi before long, so i am looking forward to that. i am also looking forward to having a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast (toast doesn't seem to be an option), since my trip to the market yesterday provided me with actualy bread and some other necessities!! more on that later though...

in the meantime, i want everyone to send me LOTS OF EMAILS in the meantime, so that when i wake up on monday morning i will not feel lonely, and i will have a small flood of emails to answer by evening my time!

speaking of food..

2007-07-21T16:01:00.000+05:30

This morning the other McGill volunteer, Mel, was supposed to leave to go to Chennai. There was a mix up with her train ticket though, because the only time printed on the ticket was the time that it was issued at, and not the time that the train left the station. So her train actually left at 2am yesterday… After about an hour of talking to various domestic airlines and a travel agent or two, she was able to book a flight to Mumbai, and then another to Chennai. I suppose that I should take this as a warning not to be overly confident in my travel arrangements, as even what seems simple enough may not be. Not that I am planning on going anywhere anytime soon.

As it stands I have been patiently waiting all morning for Sathyu, the managing trustee of the clinic, to have a spare moment to talk to me about the work I am going to be doing here. I’m quite accustomed to this, because Shree, my boss at the MCRTW worked on a similar schedule (ie. no schedule, just very, very busy all of the time, so you have to wait until you can catch them), so normally this would not bother me at all. Unfortunately, because I am still somewhat homesick, I would really like something to do during the days that would distract me from my homesickness. Mostly I have been responding to e-mails and sitting up in my perch trying to keep cool.

Yesterday night all of the volunteers and a couple of the clinic staff went out for dinner in honor of Mel’s last night in town. We went to this place called Wind’n’Waves right next to the lake (yes, there is a lake in Bhopal, it just doesn’t happen to be anywhere near the clinic). The restaurant was this odd combination of shwank and fast food. The prices were pretty high, especially by Indian standards, but the décor was very spartan fast food colours. I still didn’t have much of an appetite, especially since we didn’t get our food until well past 9pm, but I did have some excellent naan. Some of the other volunteers had Kingfisher beer, but I was nervous that my stomach wouldn’t like that because I hadn’t been eating much, so I had a Limca instead. Although I did try the beer, and it was definitely one of the lightest beers I have ever had. After dinner we rode back to the clinic in two auto-rickshaws and a couple of the volunteers doubled with the staff on the back of their motorcycles – I can’t say that I participated in this myself. I’ve heard too many gruesome statistics about road accidents in developing countries, and the traffic is scary enough in the rickshaw.

This morning I woke up early in order to say goodbye to Mel, but quickly discovered that she wasn’t going anywhere until this evening. Consequently I have spent most of the day moping aimlessly around the clinic looking for things to entertain myself with. I think at this point I’m ready to watch a good old-fashioned movie (preferably not Bollywood at this point). I’ve been reading Friend Green Tomatoes before bed every night, and that has made me want to watch the movie. It has also made me absolutely crave southern food…which I am obviously not going to have for quite some time.

Speaking of food, there are a number of things that I would really enjoy right about now. I did manage to buy some weird toasted-bread type stuff (which is actually more like old toast with fruitcake stuff in it. Its actually kind of gross because its so hideously sweet) and peanut butter, which I had for breakfast this morning. I am seriously wishing that I had taken Diana’s advice about food though. Diana was one of the interns that was here for eight months last year, and she told me to bring some non-perishable food things that I wouldn’t be able to get over here. I had kept this in the back of my mind, but because I was so rushed by the time I left I never got around to going through the supermarket and buying things. At any rate, I’m seriously regretting this now, because there are a lot of things that I would love to have, like granola bars, Kraft Dinner, Vinta crackers and so on. Maybe mom and dad will read this and xpresspost me some food….

I am getting more accustomed to the food here though. The clinic has a canteen that makes breakfast and lunch everyday. Breakfast usually costs under Rs. 10 and lunch is free for the volunteers. In the evening at about nine, someone comes and makes dinner for any of the staff that is still around (meaning Sathyu) and the volunteers for free as well. The food is generally pretty good, but everything has a bite to it from the spice (including breakfast) which takes some getting used to if you have a specifically British palette like myself. This morning I had the gross toast things, and then felt better to eat lunch. But I think I need to make an effort to go the market at some point and get some other snacks, especially bread. The last time I was there I was just too overwhelmed to make any real decisions, so I just bought the peanut butter and the toast stuff out of desperation.

Some of the other volunteers are planning on going to Sanchi tomorrow. Sunday is the only day that the clinic isn't open, so it is officially the weekend. Sanchi is some sort of extremely old temple that is quite close to the outside of Bhopal. You’ll have to forgive my ignorance, but I don’t really know anything about it. I’ll be sure to look it up in the Lonely Planet tonight before we go.

Well, the power just went out, and my laptop only has another half-hour of juice, so I’m going to have to call it quits for the time being.

A Photo Tour of Samhavna Trust Clinic

2007-07-20T19:22:00.000+05:30

Sambhavna - A Photo Tour">Sambhavna - A Photo Tour" border="0" alt="" />
i'm going to post a whole whack of photos of the clinic that i took this evening right before the sun set. the sun sets super fast here because its so much closer to the equator. its kind f weird to go from those three hour long canadian summer sunsets to this...

if the photo turn out funny let me know because i am still trying to get te stupid picasa web thing to work properly.

the two markets and a little haven

2007-07-20T16:33:00.001+05:30

I’m still trying very hard to get over my culture shock, which has affected me far more than I thought it would. I have been pretty homesick and lonely for my Danny, which is hard to deal with when the other volunteers are so involved and happy to be here. But as they day progresses, this one seems to be turning out okay. I even had a pretty good appetite for lunch! Yay! The heat and the time difference has been making it hard to eat at the right times. When I get up to have breakfast at nine in the morning, my body thinks that it is midnight, and doesn’t want much. By the time lunch rolls around my stomach thinks that it is about three or four in the morning, and definitely isn’t interested in food… at any rate, I had a pekora for breakfast, and some roti, dhal, okra and rice for lunch, so I’m feeling pretty good today.

Yesterday this guy Masaum too a bunch of the volunteers to the market to get some things we needed. He speaks pretty good English, and seems to be a bit of a welcome-wagon/babysitter for the volunteers here. One of the old volunteers had left a cell phone here, so Masaum helped me to get a sim card and put some rupees on the cell phone so that I could call home. After I got it home yesterday I was SO excited about calling Dan, because we hadn’t had a real conversation since I left, and I was missing him terribly. But when I tried to call an international number it wouldn’t work!!! I got so frustrated, and felt like I was in absolute hell. But eventually I got my paypal account to work for Skype, so I was able to talk to Dan for over an hour that way (at only two cents a minute!! What an amazing deal!). At any rate, I was still upset that I couldn’t get the cell phone to dial internationally; it made me feel all the more isolated from the people that I love back home. So by the time I got on the phone with Dan I was in tears of relief that I was finally able to get in touch with him. Needless to say the conversation made me feel much better, and I (finally) slept like a baby last night.

I had also slept for two hours in the afternoon yesterday once we had gotten back from the market. It was intensely hot (or what I consider to be intensely hot, which is not what is considered hot to Bhopalis at all) while I was at the market, so I was really over-tired by the time we got back. I found the market really stressful for a lot of reasons; the sights and sounds and smells are just so overwhelming. Nobody here signals when they drive, they just honk to let the other drivers know that they are moving in that general direction. We took a couple of auto-rickshaws between the two markets (New Market and the Chok, if you will recall from yesterday’s entry) and I thought a few times that we were going to die. I had taken cabs in Delhi to and from each of the airports, but the traffic moves quite a bit slower because there is so much of it. In the markets here people come racing through on motorcycles honking all the way to signal to you to jump out of the way. Once you are in the auto-rickshaw you start to see the pattern and how everybody isn’t crashing into everyone else all of the time, but as a pedestrian it is something I am not sure that I am going to get used to any time soon. I had brought my camera and had planned to take some photos while we were there, but it was just so crazy the thought of taking pictures of everything was just too much. I’m sure that once I am a bit more accustomed to things here I’ll have the chance.

While we were at the market these three absolutely adorable little girls started to follow us around and ask us for money. They really were quite masterful at looking dejected and sad. It was so hard not to give them anything, because you just don’t see little children like that in Canada, not that young and on the street on their own like that. The two smaller ones couldn’t have been more three or four years old (although I am starting to realize that my estimation of ages is off a lot of the time here, because people seem to be older than they look a lot of the time. Maybe it’s the result of poor nutrition or something, but a lot of the kids at the clinic are smaller than North American kids their age). Anyway, Mel ended up by buying them some bananas and giving them ten rupees. I sort of know that you can’t do that, because everyone in Canada had warned me about it before I left. Not only will you end up with a trail of beggar kids following you around while you shop (which is precisely what happened to us), but there is also always a danger that the kids are working for someone who exploits the shit out of them (a la A Fine Balance). As we were getting into the auto to leave, this true beggar-woman approached Joe and I holding a small child in her arms. She spoke in rapid Hindi to us and kept motioning to the child’s leg, which appeared to be limp, and injured in some way. We drove away without giving her anything, but it felt so awful to do it, because she had the look of a desperate mother in her eyes. Joe and I were talking about it though, and agreed that it was the better thing to do, because beggars have been known to injure their children in order to make them look more pitiable. I can’t say that I don’t feel like a total asshole though.

Last night Mel showed me the “smokers area” for the volunteers. It is this little hatch that leads up to a quite beautiful terrace on the top of the volunteers’ workroom. It’s quite spacious and has the best view and the best breeze of any place around. It’s so nice and cool that it really is a great place to hang out – especially since none of the other volunteers come up here. So it’s nice and peaceful to rest and clear your head. I’ve been sitting up here writing this, and its really great. Although I did just notice a few minutes ago that I am sitting next to the trapped carcass of an Indian chipmunk, that is mostly decayed and is just bones with a bit of fur stuck to it. Yuck.

This morning I spend my time hanging out with the kids that Mel has come to know in the gazebo here at the clinic. She had warned me how intense it is, but nothing can quite prepare you for the screams of “DIDI” (meaning big sister) coming from about thirty or forty Indian children. They were really sweet though, and I can see hoe Mel has become so attached to them. They all want to have their picture taken with you, sit next to you and touch you. One of the littler ones, Nansi (pronounced “Nancy”) got me to stand up and raised her arms up for me to pick her up. I guess some gestures are international. It was really nice to have some human contact though, and the kids seemed a little starved for attention (although I guess all kids appear that way).

Masaum came back this afternoon and was sitting with the kids for a while. I asked him if he could figure out why I wasn’t able to call Canadian numbers on my cell phone. He looked at it for a few minutes, and couldn’t figure it out, so he says “I come back in fifteen minutes!” and walks off. He went all the way back to the market to ask the storeowner what the problem was, and when he came back he was like “it’s not the phone, there’s a problem with the number you are dialing”. Apparently, Emily the idiot had been dialing 011 instead of 001 to call Canada, and that is why it didn’t work. Poor Masaum, I have the feeling he spends a lot of time dealing with North American incompetence here at Sambhavna. Anyway, the phone works now (sorry I woke you up at 2:30 this morning Dan, I was testing it☺). The word on the street is that incoming calls are free in India, so if you want to call me, just email me and let me know, and I can sent you the phone number.

So I think that is it for now. The internet hasn’t been working this afternoon, so I will have to wait to post this. I’ll also try to post a few pictures from this morning…

bhopal...first few days

2007-07-19T12:22:00.000+05:30

Emily at the Montreal Airport">Emily at the Montreal Airport" border="0" alt="" />
well, after what feels like an eternity of air travel and the most frightening taxi ride ever at 1am in delhi, i finally arrived in bhopal the day before yesterday. i spent most of yesterday sleeping, so i haven't done all that much yet. but i id get a chance to meet some of the kids that mel (another sambhavna trust volunteer from mcgill) has been working with over the summer. god are they sweet!! i don't think that they could make me any more welcome if they were trying. they're all so curious (especially about my lip ring, which i left a clear plastic retainer in) and want to know everything about you. some of them speak a few words of english, which makes communication a little bit easier, but for the most part, its hindi all the way!!

at any rate, i ended up going over to this guy salman's house last night with all of the other volunteers for chai (tea and snacks). his english is so-so, but the rest of his family really doesn't speak a word, so there were a lot of long silences and waiting for anisha (another volunteer) to translate between us. after that we came back to the clinic and joe (yet another volunteer) showed me the trick to getting the wireless internet to work, and also hooked me up with a cell phone.

so this afternoon we are going to go to the two markets (the chok and new market) to buy various things, including a pillow that is not made out of rocks or possibly some sort of beans for me, as well as a sim card for the cell phone (whatever that is... joe tried to explain it to me but at the end all i understood was that i needed one in order for the cell phone to work). i'm also in somewhat desperate need of some new pants, as i only brought one pair that is actually light enough to wear around here, so a couple of new pairs would be really nice.

anyway, it is time for lunch, and i am starving, so i will have to give a more reflective account of bhopal and india later tonight.

also, if anyone understands how to set up picasa with these stupid blogs, please let me know because i cannot for the life of me figure it out.