Home Sweet Home

I am back now. I realized that it's now been 5 months since my project ended, last July 2006. I spent a couple of weeks in August traveling around South India, and then helping out with new Fellow orientation in Ahmedebad. Orientation was great - to interact with the new fellows, help out on the staff side of things, and interact with my own class of fellows - Alesha, Prash, Juie, Asha - in a completely different capacity.

I then went back down to Tamil Nadu, visited family, and accompanied new Fellow, Roshini, down to her NGO partner in Dindigul. It was great to see the beginnings of a new project and new relationships I left India soon afterwards, spending a week in Malaysia on my way back to the U.S.

Since October, I've spent most of my time in Colorado. It took me a while to figure out how to talk about my project - how to answer the question, "How was India?!" I've had to learn to give a streamlined answer, and am hoping that my memory of the experience doesn't become similarly streamlined. I've traveled a bit, and am now back in Greeley, Colorado. I'm looking for work in the field of humanitarianism - immigrant/refugee services, educational services, disaster services - I'm open. I'm looking forward to being in a new place, becoming somewhat settled in that place, and begin working with the type of intensity and drive I had in India - I miss that.

Akkarapettai

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – cant' remember...





I spent two days visiting my friend and Indicorps Fellow, Alesha, down at her placement in Akkarapettai, Nagapattinam. She is working on empowering teachers who are involved in an activity-based educational centre there. I saw the center, and where she lives and the people that she is interacting with. It was great, after months of hearing so many stories about all of it, to put it into an actual context.

Alesha is living a village life there in Akkarapettai. Whereas I am working with people of fishing communities, Alesha is integrated into one. But the biggest difference of all is that she is living with an actual, real life family. Her life has some sense of normalcy, of routine. She has her daily chores (refer to picture of her helping to carry in the daily dose of water – needed for cooking, drinking, washing dishes, bathing, washing clothes… would take one person well over an hour to bring a sufficient amount of water to the house, making repeat trips). She has her place in the life of the family.

She sleeps on the floor. They go to sleep by 10. The mom wakes up around 5ish to start the daily chores before she has to get her kids up, get them ready for school, send them off, then be at work herself. Around 5:45 she starts yelling at the kids to wake up. I refused to actually sit up until 6. It’s at this time that Alesha’s water carrying activities seem to generally begin. I went with her the first morning and offered to carry the small pot of water back, but was reluctant to help again after all the women started laughing at me. So I swept instead.

Then of course, there was the fact that I didn’t sleep AT ALL the first night. There is no real door on the house. Just a metal grate with BIG openings, that BIG things could run in through. We were sleeping right in front of this. It was a restless night where I probably got 1 hour of sleep, off and on. Then there was the second night. Even despite mongoose incident (yes it was an incident, Alesha!) and waking up to find myself laying on top of a colony of ants and being bitten, it was amazing to me what exhaustion can cause you to overlook.

So apparently Alesha’s villages has mongooses—mongeese?—and I really don’t know if this is true of all fishing villages. We decided that they eat eggs, but probably not fish… As we were walking around in the evening, a HUGE animal ran across the path in front of us, in between the houses. When I lay down to sleep on Night #2, I saw the mongoose (I wouldn’t have known what the oversized ugly rat thing if Alesha hadn’t mentioned it earlier) run into our house compound. It ran around the bathroom area, literally a few feet from where I was. Alesha pretended to be unconcerned. (I really do applaud her for this.) I was a bit nervous, and tried to use Alesha as a shield from any potential rodents or mammals for the rest of the night.

It was great to see a Fellow’s project – their challenges, but mostly their triumphs. Their hard work. Their integration into a community. Their understanding with the people there. Their camaraderie. Their common spirit of service.

MEENA

So we've started this new program called "MEENA," who's an animated character set in rural India. She's a little girl, about 10 years old, who goes through various experiences and teaches various lessons - like girls should go to school, and boys and girls should be given equal food in quantity and quality. LEAD is taking this show to the 84 coastal villages in Cuddalore District, and every once in a while I go along for the ride (see picture!)

The other day, we convinced Ram Anna (the driver) to let me drive the van a bit. I felt bad for him, and turned the van back over to him after driving just a little way. He was SO nervous! But he did concede and tell me I was a good driver -- only after I was out of the driver's seat!

It's mid-June, and the end is approaching fast! Lots of documentation to do, but I still feel like I'm right in the middle of my field experience. Anyway, now that they've installed air-conditioning in the internet cafe, I'll try to come by here every once in a while and keep updating with pictures and messages!

Picture from Raja Anna's wedding to come soon... forgot to bring it with me...

2 Months 2 Go

I've been titling a lot of documents as "2 Months To Go" lately, and as of today, May 27, I have exactly 2 months left until my last Indicorps workshop and leaving my project at Cuddalore.

I just spent a week in Bombay with the other Indicorps Fellows discussing Measures of Success (a.k.a. "How Not to Be Upset By Not Having Done Anything") and Sustainability (difficult to sustain something when there is nothing).

So towards making these last months as useful as possible, I have decided to focus on two areas of my varied existence here: working with a small core group of adolescent girls through a LEADership Camp, and unstructured/informal staff capacity building.

The Staff Capacity Building has been going on without anyone's knowledge but my own since my second month here. I both work and live with these staff. I always wonder why the other Fellows seem to have so much more time to read and reflect, and I realize that there are two reasons. 1) They manage their time better and probably sleep less, and 2) They do not live with their communities in the same way I do. Every waking minute I have, I try to seize as an opportunity to engage with the young girls who are residential staff members. I have grown closest to them, and regard them as my primary community. So in the short time that these young girls are working here before they are "married off," I try to engage them in conversations about their health, their ambitions, their personal talents, etc.

The LEADership Camp starts tomorrow. The objectives are:
- To create a core group of strong, active and voacl participants in the VIP Project's participant base
- To encourage participants to take leadership roles in VIP programmes (I spell like the Brits now) and within their communities by enhancing skills such as Critical Thinking, Decision Making, Goal Setting, Public Speaking, Self-Esteem
- To form a strong team network
- To engage participants in cultural activitise and expression

I want to create a core group of girls who are active and strong participants, who can help to propel whatever project is implemented when I am gone, in some ownership capacity. And it is also my final attempt to reconnect with the girls as I had become a bit removed by administrative duties in the last month or so.

So any ideas/suggestions with regards to Topics to Address or Activities to Use, especially from the adolescent girls who may be reading this blog (i.e. those of you in Harrisburg or Fort Collins), are more than welcome, and can be directed to my email. Extra gifts from India may be in store for those who help me out... :)

To Post Pictures Soon...

Tirupati

I went to Tirupati temple in Andhra Pradesh this past weekend. (Photo coming soon.) I thought it was a day-trip type of ordeal. But I was wrong.

Let me start at the beginning. So I went out of town for about 5 days. First I went to a place called Thiraputthur to visit an NGO there called WORLD Society. There will be an Indicorps Fellow placed there next year. I went to observe their adolescent girls project, and perhaps get some new inspiration for my project. Their project was really great--what was greatest is that it's not really a formal, structured program. Rather, each of the field staff managing Self-Help Groups in their areas take it upon their own initiative to organize the adolescent girls there and share whatever learnings they may have gained at their own trainings. It was refreshing. The next day the staff took me up to the mountains (Nayakaneri Malai) to see the work going on in the tribal areas. It seemed like a SHG program that was actually workign in the intended way! Women of these microcredit groups were meeting on their own and taking responsibility to manage their accounts, etc. In our tsunami area, on the other hand, the staff has to pull teeth to get the members to come to meetings, and it is the staff that runs around trying to collect repayments...

From Thiraputthur I went to Vellore to visit an NGO there called SHARE that does palm craft training. Since Tirupati is 2 hours from Vellore, we decided to make a "quick" detour.

We left at 5am on Sunday and started walking up the stairs to the temple at 9:30am. By 1:00pm we got to the top. It was so crazy -- the temple earns crores of rupees a day from pilgrims and so the place is incredibly developed. The whole staircase is covered by a sort of terrace roof thing. I believe we walked about 9 kms up to the temple. Once you get there, you have no idea as to where the temple actually is, but you are funneled through streets and buildings until they put you in a "holding cell" to wait for your turn to receive darsan (ie see the god, or have the god see you.) They actually put you, along with approx 500 others in a room and LOCK the door! I felt SO uneasy, especially when they brought food and all the animals in the cage--I mean people--started rushing the gate. (Sasi, one of the staff, had asked me earlier that day if we could go to the zoo afterwards... I told her that this was her chance!) Anyway, after waiting there for about 5 hrs (I've been told that we were lucky), they open up all of these similar cages, and thousands of people rush through the line. After waiting in that line for 2 hrs, you finally get inside the temple (which you never actually have a chance to see because you are being pushed through a line until you get there). As you walk inside you can feel the oldness of the place. Then you walk to the inner sanctuary (is that what it's called?) are pushed through, make a quick salute to Perumal, and leave. (Afterwards you get to stand in another line to get your 1 ladoo-- the sweet that Tirupati's famous for.) By the time we got out of the temple it was midnight. Then we went and collected our shoes, cell phones, cameras and found a place to sleep. We slept in this outdoor common hall. The next morning we bathed in a common bathroom. Two experiences I would have never thought I'd experience.

Now I'm back in Cuddalore, and trying to gear up to get some things done in this next month. I have a new idea to start to teach some basic finance/accounting to some kids who are recipients of a monthly stipend because they lost both their parents in the tsunami. Right now all there is to it is that one fo our staff goes out once a month and gives out some cash. I'd like to try to make the kids more active in the process. So blackmail them into coming to my training sessions every 2-3 months :). I'm aiming to teach them things like basic budgeting, accounting prioritizing, future planning, how to calculate interest, etc. any and all ideas/suggestions are welcome!

Time

I just realized that all of you in America experienced daylight savings... so now if you want to calculate what time it is for me, you have to SUBTRACT half an hour from CO time.

Just thought I would let you all know in the very (very) slight chance you decided to call me :)


(A picture from a "boomi puja"--or ground breaking ceremony--in Lenin Nagar, where I was one of the guests of honor...for no good reason)

A typical day

A disclaimer: this was written based on what my typical days used to be like. i no longer practice music. and i am very inconsistent about washing my clothes these days...

I wake up. I turn on the hot water heater (my greatest—and well appreciated—luxury). I soak as many clothes in water as I think I can handle washing that day. Sometimes I take care of other duties like brushing my teeth. Sometimes I get back in bed. Twenty minutes later I take my clothes up to the roof to wash. I scrub, I rinse (x2), I wring, I hang. I come back downstairs and get ready. On good days, I go back upstairs and practice music (the staff are supposed to teach me a folk song a week; we got derailed after Week 3, Song 2.5), or just sit. I go next door to the “mess” and help the cook finish breakfast if he’s not already done. I make myself coffee (although I recently gave it up on 4 days/week) and then eat. I pack some lunch in a box and then, before any of the other staff are even ready, I am on my way to the bus stop to catch my bus to Parangipettai. One and a half hours later I make it to Parangipettai, site of our VIP Centre. The staff give me a briefing on who has been there since the last time I was there, and the activities they engaged in. We sit for a while.

When the Centre first opened, I used to go to the nearby villages to see the girls and tell them about the Centre. A month or so ago, I began distributing field responsibilities, and I took the next few weeks to introduce each of my staff to their respective villages and the girls there. Since then, in the current phase, the staff-girls go to each village on a weekly basis and try to organize Adolescent Girl-Groups there. In that group they develop a rapport and an understanding, they talk about issues that the girls find important, they disperse information that might have been shared at the Centre during the last session held, they play games.

Now, some days I stay in Cuddalore to work on the IEC (Information Education and Communication) materials that have to be taught to the staff-girls. Some days I go to the village with the staff. Some days I make phone calls to arrange guest speakers. Etc, etc, etc.

I come back to Cuddalore in the evening. On good days, when the staff and I are all in good moods, we will sit in the office and sing songs. They will teach me folk songs. On bad mood days, we will sit in the office and just talk. We go to eat dinner. We come back around. We talk together for a little while longer. Some days the staff-girls will tell me things about their communities where they come from, or about issues they themselves are facing. Later, I go upstairs to my room, and I try to complete documentation that I should have been doing all evening, all week, all along! The staff-girls stay up talking for much longer. I go to sleep. Then I wake up again, and turn on the hot water.