Chasing Waterfalls

After 9 weeks of talking about how much we wanted to go swimming, we finally got to go yesterday! And in a waterfall no less! We had a campus wide outing with many of the teachers and the kitchen staff and their families to a fort and a large temple about an hour or so away from Banaras. It was so much fun to spend some time out with these people that we see everyday but never really have time to get to know. It was a very hot day so we got tired out at the fort and the temple pretty quickly. Especially because the hour plus ride in an overstuffed car was very rough and there are much more interesting temples and forts about 5 minutes from Nirman! But the scenery was beautiful and it was nice to get out.

            We had a nice picnic at the temple but everyone was still somewhat disappointed by the outing. We had passed some pretty rivers and streams on the way so we convinced the driver to stop on the way home. Instead of just stopping at the place we had seen on the side of the road they took us to an amazing area where the river was much wider and rolling down the boulders. There were lots of people bathing in the falls and cooking and eating on the banks. While we thought we would have to sneak off to get in the water, instead everybody ended up getting in the water with us! We had so much fun splashing around and climbing on the rocks. It was definitely in my top favorite moments on study abroad thus far!            



Waterfalls!!

            I am completely over my illness now and so happy about it! Even though I was feeling better last week and able to go out and everything I still didn’t have much of an appetite, and since the food in the canteen isn’t always particularly appetizing to begin with, I was having some trouble making myself eat. So instead, one of the nights we decided to check out McDonalds! It was a happenin place! They don’t serve beef, of course, so no hamburgers but they have chicken sandwiches, vegetarian burgers, and lots of egg sandwiches! I’ll have to try one of those sometime when I’m feeling more adventurous. We were all just excited about their ice cream selection!

For my research project that I will complete while I am here, I am studying the treatment and education of disabled students in Banaras. The other day I went to visit Kiran, “a center for the education, training, and rehabilitation of children with different abilities” which is very close to Nirman’s village campus. My professor had called the director to inform them that I would be coming sometime but she didn’t set up a specific time so I just kind of showed up. I was amazed by how friendly and accommodating they were anyway! They set up a full tour for me with a student in class 11. Most of the students at Kiran are physically disabled and I didn’t realize how hard it would be to go to school in the city on crutches or in a wheel chair until seeing this place! They also have several deaf classrooms, a “special education” class, and classes for families from the close-by villages on how to best help their child with special needs. They have a shop where they make leg braces for the students and people in the villages, a farm where they grow most of the food for the canteen, dorms for the students, a swimming pool, a wood shop, art facilities – I was endlessly impressed! I am hoping to go back and observe in some classrooms at Kiran and also spend some time at other schools around Banaras. After observing in other schools I am supposed to work with some disabled students here at Nirman. I am so excited to be doing this project!

            Wednesday is the last day of my first quarter of classes here. I can’t believe I am almost halfway done with the program! We have a two week break before the next quarter starts so we are going on a big trip to Mumbai and Jaipur (the city where The Magnificent Marigold Hotel movie was filmed). It should be an amazing trip but I am a little worried about the 27 hour train ride from here to Mumbai! We have some cool things planned for both cities including visiting old Buddhist caves in Mumbai and riding elephants in Jaipur! But I think I am most excited just to experience such different parts of the country.

            Tonight to celebrate the end of our quarter Nirman is throwing us a dinner party with some of the staff and our friends. It should be fun but I am mainly excited because we are going to try out the new saris that we bought last week! I’ll talk let’s of pictures!

 



My sari wearing debut!

 



This has just not been my week!

First my computer broke down. Macs are very uncommon here but luckily we found somebody who had the means to reinstall my operating system which is making it work now! I have never been so worried about an inanimate object before! While I'm sure I would have found a solution and made it through, I was so worried that I wouldn't be able to talk to my family or friends, plan my travels for after India, or do my homework! The guy was pretty efficient though and only asked me to marry him once, so that's a plus!

We are finding friendships with men to be a really difficult thing to navigate. Men and women are not usually friends here, and most people still have arranged marriages. Because of this and people's preconceived notions about Americans people are often extra... friendly.... with us. It is very frustrating because we really want to make friends! We're still working on it and trying to see if we can go to a women's studies class at the university near by and hopefully meet some women!

Right now I'm sick so that's not helping anything. It's nothing bad - I just haven't had an appetite and am feeling weak but I have been lying in bed for the last two days and am starting to get bored! Hopefully I will feel better soon! Everyone has had problems like this though and they go away quickly so I am not too concerned.

The other exciting thing going on here are strikes, protesting inflation. Yesterday businesses, students, and just about everybody else was on strike so schools, shops, and businesses were closed. Although the police are employed by the government, they were all over the streets making sure that shops were closed and rickshaw drivers weren't working for fear that people would become violent against those not participating in the strike. Seeing as police discipline people by hitting them with sticks, however, I didn't exactly feel that they were reducing the violence in the streets. My favorite thing about it however, was that everybody described what was going on as "India is closed". It's pretty amazing that such a big country can just shut down like that!

I am really not very good at this blogging business…

Two weekends ago now we went on a trip to Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. The city was very important during British rule and it still has very clear influences of colonialism. Our biggest tourist destination was the Bara Imambara (Big Imamabara) built in 1784, in which we were led through a labyrinth in the walls, coming out on the roof of the huge building and a verandah along the ceiling on the inside of the main hall. We also visited the Residency, where the British lived during a huge mutiny.

Bara Imambara

Our favorite part, however, was probably our accommodation. We stayed at our director’s mother’s “bungalow” in the cantonment area of the city, where military personnel live. She has a beautiful, gated estate, a small staff, and was incredibly nice and hospitable. The neighborhood itself was beautiful as well. The streets were very nicely paved, there were signs discouraging littering and pollution, and police guarded every entrance. The best part is that there are “walking” times every morning and every evening where only residential traffic is allowed in, music is played from loudspeakers lining the road, and residents go outside to walk or jog. We were really enjoying our evening walk when a policeman approached our director and informed her that foreigners are not allowed in the cantonment area because of the military activity, so we quickly changed directions and tried to avoid the policemen after that…

Our whole group on the roof of the Bara Imambara

After Lucknow it was back to crazy Banaras! Last week, my 6^th week in India, is the first week that I can safely say I started feeling comfortable and overall positively. I didn’t realize quite how uncomfortable I had been feeling until it started to get better! Our classes are in full swing, accompanied with plenty of homework and fieldtrips, and we go on lots of our own outings in our free time. We are starting to frequent the same places regularly and see the same people again and again which is making me feel more at home.

 We have started teaching English classes to the teachers at Nirman, which I am really enjoying. Some of the teachers speak English very well and just need help with grammar, some are just timid and need practice speaking, and others know barely any English at all. So far, the classes have just served as a fun time to chat with the teachers and to start to get to know each other and I think we are all really enjoying it! The other day one of the women told us the story of how she and her husband overcame their families’ objections to their love marriage, complete with her month long stay in the hospital because she “couldn’t live without him!” People’s openness to share their lives with you is one of my favorite things about being here.

Last week was also the celebration of Teacher’s Day, the birthday of the second president of India which he dedicated as a day to honor teachers. The kids at both our campus and the rural campus choreographed dances, made up skits, wrote speeches, and practiced songs that they then performed in front of everybody. They also facilitated games for the teachers that we had to participate in as well. The best was a game like hot potato but when you lost, you had to do something embarrassing. While many of the things were really easy (color in the picture in 30 seconds!) I, of course, ended up singing a camp song in front of everybody! For a couple days afterwards all the kids were coming up to me asking me to sing them the bear song again. All those years of being a camp counselor really paid off!

Pre-nursery Dance for Teacher's Day

We like to spend time at the Banaras Hindu University whose campus is very close to ours. This past week we went to the art museum, the amphitheater, where there are always people playing sports, the big temple, and a couple of restaurants. It is so much calmer and greener on the campus – it’s a nice escape!

On Sunday we went to the home of a weaver, who is the father of a student here at Nirman. The family owns three looms and two of his nephews were working on them making saris while we were there. They let us try weaving – a process which includes 5 foot pedals and at least three spools of thread which they flick effortlessly across the fabric. We weren’t quite as graceful… The women of the household attach the border to the saris on a sewing machine, but weavers are exclusively male. Weavers are usually very poor, and one would think that the fact that the three children in the family sleep all together on the cement floor, with only a sheet laid down, is a sign of their poverty. However, this is a very typical way of life for many families in Banaras, even those who could afford a more comfortable bedroom situation. That would certainly take some getting used to for us!

Train Trips and Palace Visits

I have now been in India for a month! It is hard to believe – it feels like I have been away from home forever but it has also been going by quickly!

3 AC section of the train

Last weekend (a week and a half ago now. We haven’t had internet in a while.) we went on a trip to Agra and Delhi. It was immediately clear why the Lonely Planet Guide to India lists the railway system as one of the most important things to see in the country!  The ride from Varanasi to Agra took about 14 hours so we left on Friday evening and arrived in Agra early Saturday morning. Once we got settled on the train it was actually fairly comfortable but the frequent bumps, yells of “Chai? Chai??” and people getting on and off made it hard to sleep.

Our first stop in Agra was the Taj Mahal which was so much more shockingly beautiful than I expected. We took lots of pictures before we even made it up to the building. At one place that we were taking pictures, a man came up and began shaking my hand and had his family member take a picture of him shaking my hand in front of the Taj. He then proceeded to line his entire family up and try to take pictures of each of them, one by one shaking my hand. This would make me feel like a celebrity if I had actually done anything to warrant this attention, but instead it made our whole group rather uncomfortable.

The inside of the Taj is equally as amazing as the outside, with the tombs of the commissioner and his wife whose tomb he had the palace built to hold. The walls are decorated with semi-precious stone inlaying and after our Taj visit we went to an emporium where they make similar marble art with semi-precious stone inlaying, employing exclusively ancestors of the builders of the Taj, of course.

In the afternoon we went to Agra Fort where we were most interested in the ancient form of air conditioning that we wished was still functioning and the beautiful view of the Taj down the river. That evening we took a much shorter train ride from Agra to Delhi where we were staying in the apartment of one of teachers here at Nirman.

We saw a lot in Delhi including the National Museum, Jantar Mantar, our personal favorite, Qutub Minar, and many markets and emporiums. Delhi is a completely different world from Varanasi. It has a very big city feeling. People somewhat obey normal traffic laws like driving in lanes and stopping at lights and there are no cows in the street! The streets are also much cleaner than in Varanasi and we were surprised to see so many big buildings and people wearing western style clothing. In the end, it was a very nice break from the craziness of Varanasi but I am overall happy that we are living in this hectic city. It is the most quintessential Indian experience there is!

Jantar Mantar

Qutub Minar

We came home from our exciting adventure for another week of classes and are now onto another week until this weekend when we will be traveling to Lucknow!

We had another funny interaction this weekend when we were preparing to make an American dinner and wanted to make chicken burgers. We told our friend who was helping us collect ingredients that we would need minced chicken meat. He tried to help to the best of his understanding and took two of the girls to a shop where they killed a chicken right in front of them, skinned it, and handed it to them. We had to explain to him that we would not be able to grind this up to make a burger, but in the end had to get mutton instead. We really enjoyed our American meal of mutton burgers and mac and cheese but our Indian friends found it somewhat bland... 

We are having another eventful week! Luckily it did not include anymore trips to the hospital.

On Sunday we went to Sarnath, the town where the Buddha is said to have preached for the first time, with our art history professor. The town is only about 15 km out of Varanasi but it took us almost an hour to get there in our professor’s car because of how slowly the roads move. It’s good though – if people drove any faster I don’t think anyone, animals or people, would survive! I think my favorite thing that we saw was a Japanese temple whose walls were painted to depict the story of the Buddha’s life. We also saw the exact tree that the Buddha sat under to give his first sermon. Ok, approximately the exact tree. Ok it was in the same vicinity as the exact tree… at least the same species? Everything here seems to be approximately exact.

We walked through the ruins of the place where the Buddha lived, the Stupa where he prayed and even the small temple on the way from his residence to the Stupa where he would stop to pray, even though the two buildings are about a 5 minute walk from one another. Finally, we went to the museum which houses the relics found in the ruins. This was very interesting because we saw many of the pieces that we have been looking at in class. Also because there were a lot of pilgrims there who wear exclusively bright orange. My favorite was a guy who was wearing bright orange board shorts as a part of his pilgrim uniform.

While the history was all very exciting, I think our favorite part was when our professor told us we were going to stop for chai on the way home and then we pulled over at a small shack on the side of the road. They served us chai in the usual small disposable clay cups which we really enjoyed only after closely watching to make sure they boiled it.

Tuesday was one of the teacher’s birthdays which he first got to celebrate by catching a snake in one of the classrooms. After all of that excitement however he invited us all to his own surprise party which his fiancé had planned for him and then told him about just in time for him to clean his house and make dinner! The food was great and it was so nice to be in a home setting! We are also very happy to be making friends!

Yesterday was Indian Independence Day which is a big day for everyone. First the kids at the city campus where we live did a performance in the morning. They did adorable dances that one of the interns taught them and some groups sang songs. They all looked so cute with their face paint and flags! Then we went to the rural campus for the first time, which is in a village called Betawar, to see the kids there do their performances. It is so different there! It was great to see so much green and get some peace and a break from all the car horns and busy streets. It was so interesting to see an independence day celebration that is so different from our own because of how recently independence was attained. We have been picking up on a lot of lasting negative feelings about the British which has been interesting and the day was so much more about independence than our 4^th of July celebrations. The director of the school gave a speech about how people need to fight for a release from the trash as hard as they fought for release from the British. Can’t argue with that!

Everything is going very well but everyday is still a challenge. We have been trying to figure out what exactly is hard about being here. The power and water going out periodically and the intense humidity are inconvenient but not impossible to deal with. Instead, it is just the completely different culture, the inability to communicate effectively most of the time, the effect the heat, humidity, and pollution have on our bodies, and the knowledge of how long we are going to be here that seem to be causing us the most trouble. It is just starting to dawn on me that we are actually living here and that has actually been helpful. I no longer feel like we have to be doing something every minute and I am realizing that the classes we are taking actually count for credit at school. It is good to start feeling like we are on a normal schedule again. We’re doing it!

Tomorrow we are leaving for a weekend trip to Agra and Delhi! I am very excited but a little apprehensive for the overnight train ride… 

So much has happened in the short week and a half that we have been here – some planned and some surprises.

One of the women in our group spent last weekend in the hospital because she had had a fever for the whole first week we were here. After the doctor’s initial assessment at the hospital, they immediately diagnosed her with Meningitis. I was pretty angry that they scared us like that because after a CT scan and blood tests, she didn’t have any diseases and they changed their diagnosis to “viral fever,” meaning they didn’t really know what was wrong. The hospital was clean and comfortable (her room had air conditioning!) but it was still very different and frightening. The doctors did not take a medical history and they were treating her with a lot of meds that we did not recognize for symptoms that she wasn’t experiencing. One of us stayed with her each of the three nights she spent there and on the forth day she got to come home. It was a bit of a shock at first to come out into the dirty, hot city after the clean, cool hospital but she is adapting and starting to feel much better!

Yesterday was our friend who works in the shop, Sunil’s, birthday… or at least we think it was. He was having a little bit of trouble communicating this point but eventually we reached the consensus that yesterday was the day! We went out and got a couple of small cakes from a near by bakery and after dinner we surprised Sunil with the cakes, sang happy birthday, and gave him a U of M shirt as a birthday present. It seems that birthdays aren’t as big of a deal here as we make them at home but he really enjoyed the surprise and was so happy! And we’re so happy to be making friends already!

After leaving the bakery I had the very haunting experience of having a child follow me all the way back down the street begging. He followed pretty close behind us and would periodically come up and touch my arm. We have not experienced a lot of this yet because beggars often have more luck with tourists so they are more common in the big cities where they are many more foreigners. Begging is very different in India than in the US where it is usually people who cannot work for whatever reason – drug use, injury, mental illness, etc. In India, it is much more common for people to take on begging as a profession instead of working. It is much easier to get work here or self-employ, but some people find begging to be easier. Most of the children who are begging are put up to it by their parents and giving them money only encourages their parents to keep them out of school to continue the practice. This is definitely something that is going to be hard for me to get used to.

 Another thing that has been hard for us is the realization that we will never be able to totally fit in (or even fake it) here. We have been having clothing made and we are starting to pick up a little bit of the language but that doesn’t stop people from starring at us in the street or ripping us off at the shops. I can’t blame them though – I even have the urge to stare at foreigners whenever we see them, wondering where they are from and what they are doing here! We will keep trying to integrate into the society but mostly I am just concentrating on absorbing the culture and customs and becoming a part of it that way.

It has also been interesting to see what things I really miss when I am without most things that I am used to. While I would love a milkshake and French-fries or a warm shower these are definitely things I can live without. I have already started to realize that the only aspect of my life at home that I truly cannot live without are the people that I am close to, and along with that, who really is important. This makes my family happy, knowing that I could never move away too far forever… So stay in touch! If you’re reading this that probably means I am missing you!

Trying to entertain Amy at the hospital by wrapping their scarves
like the Indian women do, but instead looking like ninjas.

Happy Birthday Sunil!

The boys got frosting everywhere of course

Madee and I in our Indian clothing
strait from the tailor!

Monsooning

It finally rained last night for the first time since we arrived on Monday! A long dry spell for what is supposed to be the rainy season... It started to feel cooler immediately when the rain started and then it stormed much harder in the middle of the night and it is actually a comfortable temperature now!
It has stopped raining now but the kids do not have school today and we are fairly certain it is because of the rain...

The only problem is that rain + dirt roads = mud... and that makes it harder to cross the street to get away from things like the mean bull that lives by the dumpster outside of NIRMAN. But hey - normal daily struggles right? :)