Highs and Lows (written Friday, Sept. 28th)

Tomorrow marks my first month in India! So far, life here has been largely an experience of riding my own emotional roller coaster, waiting out the truly demoralizing times and waiting patiently for the exciting and heartwarming experiences that unpredictably come as well (although not as frequently, darn it). Yesterday was a hugely frustrating day for me, and for the first time I finally let all my negative emotions spill out into my journal, and after finally purging them, I felt much better.

There are two other interns here, one of whom leaves in a week and another who will remain until December. They were both away at trainings yesterday, leaving me alone to assist the staff when usually there are more of us. According to Barbara, who’s been here for six months and is Scotttish, whether there are seven interns or only one, the amount of work is always overwhelmingly huge. So I felt the full burden of that yesterday…..typing emails for everyone, editing things, fixing fax machines, helping people use the internet and trying to work on my own projects. The expectations and customs here are extremely challenging to adjust to. People don’t say please and thank you; they simply tell you in a matter-of-fact way they are giving you a task. They hover over you on the computer and say they need to use it, and do not budge until you have stopped what you’re doing and relinquished your chair. The culture here is just very straight forward….which at first I though may be a language issue. That perhaps they just didn’t know the conditional tense, politities, etc. BUT, from what I’m told, whether they were speaking Hindi or Marathi, their approach with still be just as demanding. That’s just their style J Which, over time, can make a girl go crazy.

However, unlike yesterday today has been fantastic. What I thought would be a disasterous attempt at teaching English (for two hours!) in Brenna’s absence was actually the most fun I have had since I got to Mhaswad. There are five young college students, all twenty-year old women studying chemistry or botany, that make up the twice-weekly advanced English class taught in our office. I was feeling HUGE trepidation about how this would go…..I really don’t know advanced English grammar, and unlike Brenna I have no experience writing curriculum or teaching foreign languages. My approach, then, was pretty simple. I just passed out newspaper articles, and asked them to circle words they didn’t understand. Then, we talked about them, defined them, and identified three synonyms. The words were actually more challenging to define than I expected! Tournament, admire, hogging, (full) throttle, petition, hurling, interveners, harassment, orchestrated, thorough, psyche, crucial, dwelling…it gets really difficult to define words using words they already understood. But they seemed to really like the approach, and it wound up facilitating broader discussions that lasted well over the two hour class period. It was so much fun! I was shocked. Unfortunately, when Barbara leaves in a week and I get handed off one of the classes, I’m going to have to teach more than vocab. Meh.

Anyway, this illustrates the highs and lows of living here….yesterday I was ready to scream at someone or start crying, and today I’m completely refreshed and happy. From what I’m told, that will never change, no matter how long I stay. Flexibility and patience, patience and flexibility…..

The Holiday Season

We have been in the midst, since the day I arrived in Mhaswad, of the holiday Ganpati (pronounced gun-paw-tee). I can’t profess to understand completely what the holiday is about, but the general gist is this: it was created during the independence movement 60+ years ago with the intention of uniting the very fractious colony and fostering a sense of nationalism. The ten-day celebration heralds Ganesh, a favorite Hindu god in Western India (especially among children), and for a short interval of time, his sister Gouri (gow-r-di). Painted plaster of Paris figurines are decorated like idols in nearly every home, with trays of snacks and fruit placed before them and strings of lights and colorful fabric framing the alter. For ten days, businesses and families blare pounding music day and night from outdoor speakers, and statues of Ganesh are paraded proudly from larger cities (where they must be purchased) to smaller towns and villages by groups of young/teenage boys (usually members of a boys club). The celebration ensues very differently for men and women, as well as for cities and villages. In Pune, the largest close city to Mhaswad, huge, elaborate and corporate-sponsored Ganpati alters are housed in cloth tents throughout the city. The music is louder, the nighttime celebrations more raucous, and dancing in the street more common for men, women and children alike. In Mhaswad, the men celebrate more publicly and the women more privately. The men parade the statues around, dance in drum circles and essentially make as much noise as possible. In a village, none of that is appropriate for a woman to partake in (bummer:). The women, especially when Gouri is celebrated with her brother Ganesh, invite other women into their homes to receive painted bindis (the forehead dot), admire their Gouri displays (also a plaster of Paris idol), and sit and eat the sweet snacks laid before the alter. As you leave, you’re given a teaspoon of sugar to eat, and generally some fruit. After visiting the home of an employee at our NGO, Brenna (another intern) and I were invited, on our walk home, to nearly 15 other homes along the way. That is A LOT of sugar to eat, and more fruit and snacks than one can handle. It’s pretty wonderful though, and served as a fantastic introduction to and tour of Mhaswad when I first arrived.

Today (happily), is the last day of pounding music and sugar overloads. The last day of Ganpati happens to coincide with the close of monsoon season. The Gouri and Ganesh idols are ceremoniously floated down the river, usually by the loud and dominating presence of the groups of men who bought them, at midnight. As the figures float towards the sea and gradually dissolve, the hope is that Ganesh will return the next year with enough rains to nourish their farms.

So, that essentially is Ganpati! Mhaswad has been living and breathing this holiday since the day I arrived, so it’ll be interesting to see the village climate in its wake. I’m looking forward to quieter nights….luckily my host family are quiet people, content to hang a picture of Ganesh on their wall and leave the noise pollution to their neighbors.

I'm Alive!

Hello, finally! There has been such a whirlwind of activity in the last two weeks, and internet has been so few and far between, that I’m only just now able to take a breath and try to condense it all down in about five minutes. I hope you’re all doing well, first off, and I miss you all A LOT!

As you might have noticed, the description on the top of my blog has changed because my assignment details have fleshed out to be very different from what I was originally told. Far from being in a large town, I’m actually in a large village, 4 hours from the city of Pune (6 by bus, which is my mode), and the only internet access being at my NGO. The village is very isolated, very rural, and yet, for what it is, fairly developed with roads and buildings. But I’m ahead of myself:
All the AIF fellows had a fantastic, 12-day orientation in Delhi where we networked with really interesting and prominent people, ate fantastic food, met with our stodgy Bush-appointed Ambassador, took tours of the city, and attended daily lectures on current issues in India including social exclusion, education, politics, the development sector, corporate and financial issues, and general fellowship details. It made for long days, but a great crash course, topped off with periodic Bollywood dance lessons from a dance choreographer- which was hilarious J We also went on two field visits to NGOs, one to HIV/AIDS clinics in Delhi, and the other a two day trip to Rajasthan to visit an NGO-run school and an agricultural project for vermicomposting and horticulture (which I LOVED!). We were able to visit with a women’s self –help group, which is a really interesting and fairly Indian approach to building women’s capacity and providing microcredit by forming groups of women and larger federations of groups, which allow women to share their struggles, successes, provide social support surrounding issues such as domestic abuse, and also partake in group-saving and –lending schemes. Very interesting. The women we visited with were the most animated, friendly women, and embarrassed me the entire time with their fascination of my blond hair and unmarried status. Sometimes a language barrier can be a good thing!
Overall, the orientation period was a really valuable time to adjust and bond as a group, and we were all SO sad to part ways last week when it all ended.

Now, as of three days ago, I am in Mhaswad, working with an NGO that is also part of the Manndeshi Bank and that oversees the Mann Deshi Udyogini Business School for Rural Women, which is most likely the project I’ll work most on throughout the year. For now, however, as they ease me into program work and probably get a feel for my level of (in-)competence, I have the pleasure of organizing a taste-testing contest for regional farmers in the noble pursuit of Maharashtra’s most delicious pomegranate. Changing lives, and only here three days ! Ha.

Despite having a concrete project, I am solely occupied right now with learning patience. My mentor, the president of the NGO, has left for the week to give a lecture in Michigan, and all the other English-speaking staff apparently didn’t feel like coming to work. I’m sitting here, with nothing to do, no direction, not even a novel to read, and can only imagine the week will be more of the same. I just spent the weekend, my first two days out of orientation, on an unexpected road trip to Hubli, a city 6 hours south of here, to inaurgurate the business school on wheels I referenced and all the elaborate and ceremonial details that went with it. Thank god I brought a book, because I understood only about 5% of what was said the entire weekend and was pretty much left to entertain myself and stay out of the way. We then left, for reasons I don’t know, at about 9 pm to come back to Mhaswad last night and arrived at 3 in the morning, driving all the while in an SUV filled to capacity of people who do not wear deodorant. “Be flexible” was the overarching theme of our orientation, and flexible I will try to be J

That’s it for now…I will try to add some new links about my NGO and the Manndeshi Bank. Please start booking your tickets for India. I can’t wait to see you!