March in Mhaswad

Well, I’m now in the last big push of my fellowship. From now until I leave the village to travel, only 11 weeks remain. It’s pretty hard to believe. Being here 6 ½ months has the effect of all those hard-earned friendships, expanded comfort levels and acquired local understanding adding together in a way that makes everything more enjoyable. Mhaswad feels more like home than it did before (obviously), and my experience of things is increasingly less associated with its comparison to the U.S. or my norms back home. All this means that an adjustment period has reaped a lot of fruit that I’m beginning to now enjoy! In addition, having only 11 weeks left in my community makes me appreciate it all the more, knowing how quickly those weeks will fly by.

Here are some random updates:

Temperature:
I think we’re technically still in the midst of Spring, but a Northwesterner can hardly call 92 degrees F, INSIDE a cool building, springtime weather. It will reach up to 120 degrees in May and June, which I can hardly imagine surviving.

A Friend Arrives!:
My friend and former college roommate Rachel joined me last week for two months of interning with Mann Deshi, which has so far been great! I wasn’t sure how blending my home life and India life would change my experience of India, but luckily I think having someone to experience and process all the crazy and irrational daily stuff here helps me stay low-key and good natured.
So that brings us to three interns now—the third is Moniek, from the Netherlands, who has been with us one month and will stay until early April. We were recently invited to have lunch at our friend Archana’s house (see picture)—Archana’s mother made my favorite dish, grilled okra, and Archana drew sand designs around our plates with our initials! How sweet is that.

A Busy Week:
On Rachel’s first day, Mann Deshi was hosting a site visit for an RBI (Reserve Bank of India) conference on off-site surveillance (don’t ask me what that is). There were about 40 people from all over Asia, representing various microfinance and national banks, who came to Mhaswad to see our operations. We prepared as though the Queen was coming, with food and snacks on platters everywhere, many of our clients dressed in their finest jewelry to meet the participants, and even a local trumpeter to great them (see picture). One of the visitors, a man from Afghanistan, was trying to convince me to visit Kabul, which is apparently very safe so long as you hire a “shooter.” Convincing.
Saturday was World Women’s Day, and was an incredibly packed day. Rachel and I were honored guests at our friend Sejal’s free clinic day at her Ayurvedic clinic. Rachel, Chetna, a local doctor and I were given chai and breakfast at their home, and then we lit ceremonial candles at the clinic and said prayers to bless the day. We broke coconut over a stone to bless their renovated humidifier room, and then were given beautiful wool shawls as a gifts before we left. Once we got back to the bank, all the women were being given strings of Jasmine called “veni” to pin in their hair. Almost immediately after putting venis in our hair, our cook arrived at the bank to invite Rachel and I to eat at her house-- so off we went, following her down the winding and confusing alleys of Mhaswad, until we got to her little house and sat on her hot stone floor while she and her daughter cooked us absolute feast of a lunch. It was amazing. The final unexpected event of the day was being invited to attend an event at the police station after work. Rachel and I lugged our heavy bags to the station, assumed our seats at the front of the waiting room with Chetna, a politician and some police sergeants, and the hour-long event conducted purely in Marathi began. We were asked to speak a few words to the women, and got some interesting opinions from the police sergent about how America's society isn't as family oriented as India's, since Indian women stay loyally with their husband's family. He also chose that women's day event as the perfect opportunity to coach the women on the evils of girls running off with boys, thinking they were in love, and getting involved with crime. I wasn't a big fan of that guy, and Chetna was rolling her eyes through most of the event.

A trip:
I’m leaving tomorrow for a week-long site visit to Gujarat, a state north of Maharashtra made famous for a large earthquake that devastated the area in 2001 (which actually served as the impetus for creating the American India Foundation). My friend Brenna, who is also an AIF fellow, works there with an NGO called Khamir, which works with handicraft villages in the Kutch region. I’ll shadow her for a day as she takes some British researchers on a tour of various weaving villages, accompany her NGO co-workers on a retreat to the beach, and camp out in the desert with our friend Katy before heading back to Bhuj and departing the next week. My mentor, Chetna, is actually from this area and speaks glowingly about it, so I’m really excited to see it for myself!

There’s the update for now—I’ll write more after my trip to Gujarat and the holiday of Holi. I should have plenty of stories by then! Much love-

were asked to speak

Back to the Grind

Hello friends! I’m very excited to say that it’s good to be back in the ‘Wad.

When I first returned, I was a little overwhelmed to find that I had about a week of travels planned for me as I attended two back-to-back conferences in Pune and Hubli, but in the end, of course, they were both interesting experiences and I was really glad I went.

The first, in Pune, was a microfinance conference (called ‘Conference in Microfinance’—very clever) aimed at bringing together the practitioners of microfinance and the academics who study their impact, methods, philosophy, etc. Among the speakers were some big names from Harvard, MIT and NYU, including the directors of the Poverty Action Lab and many Indian bigwigs. Although it took me awhile to get out of my jet-lagged stupor, I met some really friendly people during the networking breaks and finally had some snazzy business cards to distribute—yay! It’s amazing how handy they are.

A Bank holiday immediately followed, which allowed me to stay in Pune for a couple days, hang with my fellow fellows (see picture) and do some shopping. Patiala pants, which are the biggest, fluffiest Indian pants you can find, are my new love, and luckily I was in need of some replacement pants after an unfortunate shrinking laundry incident, so I hit Lakshmi road up and reconnected with the Indian market scene. It felt good. To extend my time in Pune, I had decided to take a night bus to Hubli just in time for the second conference (always cuttin’ it close) so I had the unfortunate experience of tossing and turning at a 45 degree from 11:00 pm to 6:00 am on the Indian equivalent of a Greyhound. I’ll never do it again.

In Hubli, I attended the three-day Development Dialogue Conference hosted by the Deshpande Foundation, which is a family foundation run out of Boston but benefiting the Hubli-Dharwad community in Northern Karnataka (the state below Maharashtra, which is where I live). The conference was pretty big (about 250 people) and touched on basically every sector of development in India with panels of practitioners speaking about their personal experiences. I was really excited to sit in on an agricultural session, and made some really useful connections with other organizations that I’m hoping to collaborate with on a project. I also got to meet up with fellow fellow Menaka for dinner, which was nice!

What else….now back in the ‘Wad, the excitement continues. We have a new intern on the premises, Claudia, and because of her arrival we had a really constructive meeting with Chetna (my boss) about the division of projects. I had roughly outlined an agenda for the meeting after reflecting on things while in the U.S., and luckily it served as a pretty good guide for the discussion and I’m very excited about how I’ll be spending my time during the final 5 months. I’ll be helping with the community radio project (licensing, procuring a building and equipment, designing on-air programs, etc.), creating an action plan for a potential sustainable agriculture curriculum for the business school (!), and hopefully encouraging greater cohesion in the office and for the interns by authoring and designing organizational materials that make sense of this madness. Some of my greatest frustrations with the Bank stem from the fact that things don’t feel connected, systemized, organized, or intentional. I’ve never seen a mission statement, a 5 year growth plan, etc. That’s not to say they don’t exist, but just that you have to trip over things sometimes to realize they exist (which is really problematic). I’m hoping to spend time with the staff over the next few months, fleshing out these things and writing them/publishing them in a form that can be easily used for interns, potential donors, in grant applications, for clients, etc. And of course, the financial literacy—I’m hoping I can hand this off to another intern when they start to arrive in the spring, but in the meantime, I’m continuing to work on the curriculum. I’m starting to feel overwhelmed with how much I’m working on, not to mention the continuous flow of grant applications we’re always working on, but….it’s only 5 more months, so I’d like to get as much done as possible. Go big or go home.

To add to the insanity, I’ve been staying with Chetna and her family since getting back to India because my host family is out of town. Women simply do not stay alone in these parts, so I’ve been sleeping in their “middle room,” (what Americans could call a HALLWAY, reference picture please) living out a bag and rewashing the same three outfits every few days. Chetna’s house, which after some adjustment definitely has some perks, is a bit of a madhouse. Her mother-in-law is basically the reason for this. Akka is in her 70s, and basically terrifies me. She sleeps on the floor, not for lack of mattresses but because she’s Akka, and begins to sweep through the house at 6:00 in the morning, banging doors, turning on lights, and growling at people to wake up. One morning, she shoved my face until I woke up so she could yell incoherent things at me in Marathi. I yelled incoherent things back at her in English and turned over. Chetna and her family have this attitude of bemusement concerning her all the time, and luckily for me, I never know what she’s ranting about so I can be bemused by her, too.

Fortunately, the Narales are getting back tonight, and I’ll finally regain some personal space when I move back tomorrow. Thursday night, I’m happy to say, I’ll be catching a night train to Goa to meet up with fellows Ann and Diana for a few days on the beach, doing nothing but swimming, eating and relaxing. I cannot WAIT!

That’s all the news that’s fit to post—hope you all are staying warm and healthy! Keep in touch and much love to you all :)

Back in Bombay

Hello once again! I know I have a LOT of catching up to do after such a long hiatus from writing, but the short of it is that my laptop, shortly after writing my last post in October, went completely haywire and was in a shop for about a month, followed by a very hectic few weeks leading up to the AIF mid-point conference and a trip back to Portland.

As most of you know, I trekked home in mid-December for my sister's wedding and Christmas, both of which were fabulous and joyous occasions. It was wonderful to be back, despite the whirlwind of craziness and activity that could be a little overwhelming for a jet-lagged, road weary traveler. After about 24 more hours of being in transit, I'm back in India, enjoying the last few hours of western civilization in Vaani's (a fellow fellow) family's 5-star hotel room before I take the plunge into the madness of Mumbai and catch a bus back to Pune, and then Mhaswad.

As I was expecting, it's a little strange to be back, and yet also really special to feel a sense of familiarity and confidence in a such a distant and vibrant country. Mhaswad is going to be a different place without any other westerners there (Brenna returned to Syracuse to finish her graduate program right about when I left for the wedding), and I’m definitely feeling some of the pangs of homesickness that will take some time to get over. The re-adjustment period, though, is probably a small price to pay for the perspective I gained by being away, and I’m really looking forward to upping my productivity now that I have a mere 6 months to accomplish some big goals with Mann Deshi. Our Financial Literacy curriculum is in it’s final stages of development, and I hoping to start working with another staff member, Padma, on beginning a local community radio station this spring.

Stay tuned for some recaps of stories from the past few months! Hope to hear from you all soon, and take care.

New Posts!

Sorry for the overkill, but I have been storing up some blog entries and have three new ones below. Hope you enjoy them, and don't forget to check in and say hello!

*please also note that, in preparing your care packages, I no longer have need of a pillow case or hankerchiefs. Homemade cookies, however, are not yet covered.

Some Random Stories

For awhile now I’ve been wanting to write little anecdotes about funny things that have happened or are reoccurring. This’ll be a random hodge-podge, but it’s a sprinkling of daily life:

The Doctor: As I’ve said before, I live with a three person family—the wife Jayshree works as the branch manager for the bank I work at, the husband is a veterinarian, and the daughter, Shweta is roughly 8 years old and in school. The husband, who presumably has a first name, is referred to by his family as “The Dr.” Apparently, in India, there are two professions that warrant calling you by your qualifications and not your good name: being in the medical field (in which case you’re The Doctor) or being a teacher (The Teacher). So, the Dr. is a very sweet guy who is probably the ideal adoptive father and is always making sure we are comfortable, healthy, and living safely uneventful lives. Every evening at dinner he goes through the same routine. He says “Do you have any problems today? You should have no problems while you are here, and if there is any problem, you call me and if I am within 30 kilometers I will come.” Almost every day, he assures us of this. He also, being a vet and therefore a scientist, likes to keep us abreast of the beneficial elements of our diet. As we eat dinner, he regales me with the nutritional value of our lentils, buffalo milk, papaya, or eggplant. He is so earnest about it, and so predictable in his timing, that increasingly I can hardly suppress laughing every time he starts in.

Animal House: Around Mhaswad, domestic animals run amok. Black bristly hogs are everywhere, and always with their hoards of piglets in tow, rummaging their noses through sewage and squealing the most surprising and blood curdling scream you’ve ever heard when they’re upset by something. I’m sorry to say that mangy dogs are also everywhere, sleeping in such random places that you would swear there are dead dogs lying everywhere when in fact, they’re alive. Unfortunately, I seem to inspire fear in two things here in India: babies and dogs. It seems, without even meaning to, I can cause hysteria in both. The other day, I made what I thought to be a benignly funny face at a baby and it proceeded to explode in screams in front of a whole lot of amused people. I also got stalked by an inexplicably angry, nastily growling dog down the main road of the village even though I did not even look in its direction. I eventually had to walk into a store to escape it, at which point some boys kicked it to get it to leave. Which it fully deserved. There are also donkeys everywhere, falling asleep in the most random of places, standing up of course, and swaying a bit to the rhythms of their dreams. And of course, there are lots of water buffalo and the random Holstein cow. There are also gobs of sheep and goats, which are a little hard to differentiate between because the sheep seem to be perpetually sheered. The goats make this near-human noise, so that Brenna and I are always laughing hysterically as we walk to work because it sounds like there is a crazy bellowing man walking behind us, when really it’s a goat that sounds like a bellowing man.

Speaking of crazy: There is a man here in the village, who can’t be completely off given that his English is very good, who stops what he’s doing whenever he comes upon us and gives us a salute and a “Good Morning!” Every time. (see picture)

Indian Meddling: Unfortunately, the famed Indian Meddling has recently succeeded in driving away the cook that makes me three meals a day. Because the women in our office are so sincerely interested in not minding their own business, they have apparently been giving relentless feedback to Vandana (our cook) about our likes and dislikes. Some of this is warranted, because her food can be overly oily, or unbalanced (we once ate a lunch consisting of tapioca balls cooked 5 different ways), or overcooked (blocks of rice substance more often than grains of rice). However, the food is good enough, often enough, to warrant bearing the inconvenience of the bad days, and by no means did we hope she would be driven off. Unfortunately, yesterday a tearful Vandana came to the office with our lunch tiffin and give a final “screw you baby” speech to our boss, in front of the whole office, and basically quit there and then. It must have been a glorious moment for her, and I wish I had understood what she said. Now, my poor host mother (who actually can probably blame herself because she was a major meddler in this situation) has taken on an extra domestic helper to cook our meals and seems to be perpetually in the kitchen. And nothing I say or do will ever persuade her to let me help.

Another example of Indian meddling is when it comes to shopping. People here always want to know how much you spent on something, and it’s not considered the least bit rude to slip it prominently into a conversation. An example:

“What a nice sari. How much did you pay? That's too much! Where did you go? It is not a beautiful sari, you should not have paid that much. Next time, I will take you.” (which is often not helpful at all)

The White Girls: Lately, the local children have taken to following Brenna and me home from work. They literally gather like a pack of giddy wolves, maybe up to 15 in total, and are hot on our heels the whole 20 minutes to the house. We receive this with varying levels of amusement/tolerance/frustration. In theory, it’s cute. But in reality, it draws huge amounts of attention to us, attention that we’re trying to diminish. It seems hopeless to ever blend in to village society and be an accepted norm. We will always be novel.

Which leads me to my last story. Last night we were invited to attend a drama put on by the Jain community. It took place in a meeting hall, and the men and women sat on different sides of the room on mats on the floor. A man went before the ~100 person audience to pray/give opening remarks, after which he signaled to Brenna and me that we should ascend the stage. We did, and lit ceremonial candles with a very very senior member of the group who probably actually deserved to be up there. Pictures were taken, and then we were allowed to rejoin the crowd. Unfortunately, our ride to town was leaving early and because it’s not safe to walk the country road back home alone, we had to leave to take advantage of the car. Grievously, we unknowingly ducked out an hour too soon because they had planned to present us with coconuts at the end of the drama to thank us for attending. Which of course we could not have known, but nevertheless feel TERRIBLE about.

Alright, there’s my random assortment of stories. More to come!

Some Musings on Work

Thankfully, as I have begun to feel increasingly settled in the village and with my host family, my comfort at work and with my projects is gradually following suit!

I had been putting off facing the most daunting of my projects for a few weeks now, but finally determined yesterday that I need to put my hand to the plow. The dreaded task is developing the advanced financial literacy curriculum I mentioned in an earlier posting. Basically, I have absolutely no interest in developing curriculum or in financial matters, which may largely stem from the fact that I feel pretty insecure about both. But as I was saying, I steeled myself yesterday, and sat down with piles and piles of resources to begin piecing out remnants of an action plan. Barbara, our recently departed intern, received a formal training in how to go about this project (and keep in mind the student handbook I’m developing must be catered to semi-literate women. So largely image and activity-based material. For someone who loves to write, this is not good news.) Unfortunately, she never got around to tackling the project, so all I have are her notebooks of material. Luckily, they are incredibly helpful and designed by an organization called Micro Opportunities, funded partially by Citi Bank’s foundation. I’m beginning to see how edifying and educational this whole process will be for me:

Right now, I’m designing market research surveys to assess the needs of our target population and the abilities of our trainers using a Participatory Rural Appraisal approach. The most exciting part about this is that my university education, it turns out, was not a total waste of time! I learned all about PRA methods in a class once upon a time, and amazingly enough, I’m about to use them. It brings tears to my eyes.

Next, I’ll write a report for our funders about my findings. And then I’ll begin to draft a curriculum prototype (one set for trainers, one set for learners) to pilot-test on a focus group, and then tweak. And then I’ll finalize the material, make it look visually ‘pretty,’ and send it off to be printed. That’s right, I am to be a published author on financial matters. This should give my dad a good laugh.

Once printed, we will have a kick-off in February for the material with representatives from the Brookings Institute. So there’s no pressure, obviously.

As you can see, things are picking up. Luckily, I’m now really jazzed about this project. The more I work here, the more enthused I am about the merits of micro finance. It really feels like an ideal, capacity-building approach to development. It’s not a hand-out, it’s not charity, and it doesn’t perpetuate a role of dependency. It instead allows people to take initiative in their own lives in the same way we in the States do every day. A woman who tends goats and works as a sugarcane picker for a corporate owned farm can become a player in the market because she has access to money she can invest in economic pursuits. Seed money that will help her make MORE money that can, in turn, allow her to utilize other micro-services: pension plans, life insurance, health insurance. It’s pretty exciting to not only work with such an organization, but live in a village that considers its services a way of life. So many entrepreneurial women in Mhaswad who seem to have good lives and make an adequate income are regular customers of the Bank. It’s very impressive.

A success story, at last!

Written on October 19th

We are currently celebrating the holiday Navarati here in Mhaswad, and unlike with Ganpati, I have no idea what this holiday is about other than the fact that the name Navarati means “nine nights,” which is the length of the celebration. This festival is much more low-key than Ganpati was, but still involves large religious statues under colorful tents set up around the village and speakers blasting celebratory music from sunrise to midnight (which gets a little obnoxious). I’m sure it involves much more than that, but those are the most obvious elements from a foreign perspective. And as my mentor here at the NGO says (who’s not from here), this village celebrates enough festivals to render them all unremarkable. I’m beginning to see what she means. Brenna had heard that this particular celebration involved some sort of stick dance, and really wanted to see it. I wasn’t initially very enthusiastic given that I envisioned the same drunken mosh pit of local men coated in radioactive pink colored powder that we’d seen a few weeks before. But, thankfully this was almost the complete opposite. Thursday night, we met up with a friend from the bank who took us to a peaceful little courtyard right off the main road and next to a temple that I had never seen before. About 20 people were sitting on steps and on the ground, watching another 30 or so youngsters do “the stick dance,” or as they would call it, “playing.” There were two circles, one inside the other, which would rotate in opposite directions. Each person has two sticks, and to the beat of the music you hit your sticks together and then against those of your partner in a regular pattern until you slowly rotate to the next person and continue along until the song ends. Brenna and I were content to sit and watch this innocent little diversion, but of course were inevitably expected to participate. I went first, trailblazer that I am, and in my fumbling lack of coordination managed to make Brenna’s ‘playing’ look absolutely wonderful in contrast when I handed off the sticks. The sequence of stick smacking wasn’t hard to pick up, but it was amusing how much you had to adjust to each person’s personal style—the younger kids were more predictable, but the older ones had been doing this for years and had managed to individualize their stick-hitting to involve such varying flair and flamboyancy that they were practically unpredictable. It’s hard to hit a stick against another stick when you can’t tell where the other stick might be flying to, all the while trying not to laugh and fall and miss the beat. One girl seemed to prefer not hitting the sticks at all, so it was even harder to remember who she was, respect her boundaries, and mimic her “fake hitting” by missing her stick by just enough space that we were doing the moves but avoiding collision. Oy vey. But needless to see, it was highly amusing to the crowd that we joined in, and we had a lot of fun.

The next day got even better. After I taught my English class Friday morning, Brenna had been invited to visit a village school with Tinki’s (a employee at the bank) daughter Palavi on the birthday of the school, so I tagged along. Palavi took us to her classroom, past rooms teeming with children uproariously excited to see two white people at their school. They kept running up to us and yelling, “Hallo! Hut is your name?!” and furiously shaking our hands before running back to their rooms. Once inside Palavi’s class, perhaps eighty 8th grade students stood in unison and chanted “Wel-come Madame!” The teacher promptly told us the celebration must start immediately because we were an hour late (Palavi had been late in fetching us, and we had no idea where we were going). He then gave some sort of explanation as to why Brenna had been invited as a guest of honor, which included the venerable qualities of being a foreigner and speaking English. We were seated at the front of the room, and a smiling Jaishri (my next door neighbor), came from the back of the class to give us our two wild roses apiece, a candy bar, and a helping of some spiced rice puff-things. After the principal and another administrator had arrived and were seated next to us, it was explained to a bewildered Brenna that she, as the honorary guest, would be cutting the tiny chocolate birthday cake decked in flowers at the table in front of the student’s desks. At this point I could hardly contain my laughter, because this was so far from what we were expecting it was ridiculous. As Brenna cut the cake, the children cheered and a boy let off what seemed to be a hybrid between a blow horn and a silly string device, covering Brenna in sparkly foam and probably the cake, too. Then the administrator handed us our pieces of cake (which led to an awkward moment because it seemed like she wanted to feed it to us, wedding style, but it was really hard to tell), and after eating our bite-sized pieces in front of an audience of watchful, probably ravenous students, the teacher asked Brenna to give an encouraging message to the class. At this point I was thanking God I had come. This should be good, I thought. Brenna, being the roll-with-the-punches person that she is, began to tell the class with great verve and energy who she was and how Mhaswad in many ways was very similar to her native Iowa. And then she told the class about her favorite upcoming American “festival,” Halloween. I don’t know how this came to her, but the class had this glazed over look in their admiring eyes that it probably didn’t matter if she had read them a recipe so long as she was looking at them and talking. Once done, the teacher looked at me with anticipation and said, “Yes? You?” So, I proceeded to go through my introduction, and babbled on for awhile about my beloved Oregon, the importance of education, and who knows what else.

When we left, the entire class followed us to the hallway to send us off. I shook nearly everyone’s hand and gave my full name over and over and over until everyone was satisfied. We then, on our way out, were invited to every other class in the school to introduce ourselves and give a short speech (there were probably only 5 other large classes, so this isn’t nearly as impressive as it sounds). Surprisingly we were only there an hour, but if there had been any sense of order before we’d arrived, we certainly left a wake of chaos and near-hysteria when we left. The whole experience was as close as I ever hope to come to being a celebrity, but it was pretty fun, and a highlight of my trip so far.