Desert Days

The real reason I came back to India after Thailand was to see Sári, my good friend from Hungary with whom I volunteered at Corrymeela for one year, in Northern Ireland. Sári is one of my favorite people; I was very close with most of my volunteer team, and she was no exception. Sári turns 31 in October and complained constantly at Corrymeela about being "so old" compared to the rest of us (except for Roland, who was also 27 at the time), which always cracked us up. Before she came to Corrymeela, Sári spent nine months traveling around India and became very close with a guy she stayed with in Kashmir for several weeks, named Farooz. Sári always talked most fondly about Kashmir and we decided that's where we would go upon her arrival. First, however, our friend Ethan, who was on the Corrymeela volunteer team the year before us, was in India and going to visit a place in Rajasthan, Western India, where he had volunteered a few years ago. Ethan is an awesome person doing amazing things, including starting a nonprofit called Peace by Piece, focused on peacebuilding and sustainable development in the UK, India and Kenya (so far). He was traveling with his friend Antonio, networking in India for the organization and exploring possible projects. Ethan has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair, which never seems to slow him down from what he sets out to do, but it did prompt us to hire a car and driver to take us to the tiny rural village in Rajasthan where Ethan had stayed.

Corrymeela goes desert! Starring Yael, Sári and Ethan

After a misunderstanding with my landlord about paying rent for the month of April, I moved all of my stuff out of our apartment, leaving a suitcase at a friend's house and taking only what I would need for the next two weeks in my trusty backpack. When Ethan and Sári picked me up to go to Rajasthan, I officially moved out of the apartment in Malviya Nagar, which (surprise, surprise) prompted a nice, big, emotional cry the day before. In any case, I walked to the market with my all my stuff and enjoyed my last few moments in the early morning at Malviya Nagar market before the van pulled up and we were off to the desert.

We drove mostly west and south for six or seven hours, stopping a few times to stretch our legs, through the dry landscape of Haryana and Rajasthan before pulling up around 5PM to the dusty campus of Singla's Barefoot College. The Barefoot College is an organization that seeks to teach rural villagers, especially women and children, skills and knowledge to make their families and villages sustainable. Some notable projects include training villagers to create and install solar panels to get off the notoriously unreliable Indian power grid, rainwater storage in the desert to prevent the damaging practice of pumping groundwater, and creating high quality handcrafts for sale to visitors and locals. The Singla campus, where we stayed, functions as a night school for rural children, and serves to catch them up to speed so they can enter school at grade level, since many kids miss out on years of school they are supposed to attend, mostly because they work on their family farms or need to spend half the day fetching water for the house. We were met by the friendly workers who run the night school, and were so delighted to see Ethan again. One of the main administrators, Shivraj, is a man who was clearly disabled by polio as a child. His upper body strength is pretty intact, but his legs are of little use to him, and he alternates between hoisting himself along the floor cross-legged using his hands, and getting around in a wheelchair that looks like an adapted tricycle for adults that he propels with his arms. It was striking to note the contrast between Shivraj and Ethan, both brilliant people doing great things, one who sits in a wheelchair that can fold and pretty much go anywhere, and one in a converted bicycle whose only indoor mobility is on his hands. It's also pretty heartbreaking to see Shivraj, who is obviously very bright and exceptionally motivated, whose life is so limited because he contracted this highly preventable disease and lives in a place with little access to resources that could significantly improve his quality of life. He told us about how sad it is for him to not be able to find someone who will marry him, how difficult it is to take care of his family in his condition. He was a really great, fun person and I was very grateful to have been able to meet and spend time with him. 

Shivraj wanted me to give his chair a spin 

Sukijee makes chapattis on the first night 

Feast!

That night, the cook, Sukijee, a lean man with the traditional gold hoops in his ears, multicolored turban on his head and the characteristic white dhoti worn by many villagers, made dinner which included chapattis (round, flat bread, like pita without a pocket) over an open fire. It was delicious!! Then Sári and I moved our mattresses outside and slept on the terrace under the stars.

Tilonia showroom and store 

Library friends!

The next morning we drove to Tilonia, a larger Barefoot College campus, where a lot of the crafts are made and where they have a store in which you can buy them. Ethan and Antonio are fundraising by buying lots of the goods from Tilonia and reselling them in the UK. This meant that they were buying a crap ton of stuff, and, more importantly, that we had free reign of the store to pick stuff out for them to sell. It was hot, but the "work" was fun, and the goods were so beautiful. We had lunch there and saw the puppet workshop they have, before hanging out with some kids in the library they have there for the villagers. By the end of the day, we were outrageously hot, dusty and exhausted, and Sári pretty much had heat stroke. W returned to Singla in the late afternoon to rest, and then I helped Sukijee make dinner.  He does everything on the floor, where the two-burner stove is, from washing to peeling to cutting to seasoning, opening jars of this or that spice and combining them in the lid of one of the containers before dumping the mixture into the pot and turning its contents completely red or yellow.

After Sári's strong reaction to the heat, we spent the next day taking it easy, relaxing, napping, reading, cooking and playing cards. At one point I became confused when I couldn't find my flip flops after a card game and realized that the driver had walked off with them. He offered to return them but I preferred to just let them stay his. It was weird. Sukijee eventually got used to my insistent help, (he tried to discourage me in the beginning), though if I was doing something too slowly he would just take it out of my hands and complete the task in two seconds. He was such a kind man, with a great smile and a generous spirit; cooking with him was definitely a highlight. 

Nothing beats a Sukijee smile...except a Sukijee parantha

For our last morning, Sukijee made the most incredible paranthas, fried flat bread stuffed with potatoes in this case, but often cauliflower or other vegetables. We were on our way after breakfast, and watched the desert scenery change gradually into the urban jungle of Jaipur and then Delhi. To avoid the sound of the incessantly whiny retro Hindi music the driver insisted on playing, Sári and I had a marathon singalong, completing the entire repertoire from the Sound of Music, along with many a Beatles tune and a few other favorites. It was so nice to be able to spend time with Sári and Ethan, neither of whom I had seen since leaving Corrymeela, not to mention the comfort of being with people who know you very well. Singla was also by far the most rural place I stayed in during my time in India and I was happy to get to experience that and see the Barefoot College.

To see all of my photos from Rajasthan, click here.

Me, Ethan, Sári, Shivraj and Amit the shoe-stealing driver

Indeed.

HEAT

I can truly say that there is nothing that could have prepared me for this heat. The air feels (and sometimes smells) like you are walking on the ventilation grates over the subway in New York in the middle of the day in the middle of the summer. Nothing can cool you down outside. Even the wind blows hot air in your face and does little to cool the ample sweat pouring from every pore in your body. Though the humidity is not as bad as I thought it would be, standing outside for even five minutes, whether in the sun or the shade, makes you desperate to get out of the heat. Walking even a few blocks leaves you exhausted and thirsty as hell; it gives you a serious appreciation for the street sweepers, outdoor vendors, rickshaw drivers, security guards and everyone else who makes their living outside, let alone the countless women, men and children who live on the street. The monsoon season will thankfully begin in a few weeks, before which I will have to relegate myself to being a hot, sweaty mess every time I set foot outside.


The past week has entailed meeting after meeting, a time consuming orientation that involved lots of practical training in teaching English, briefings on Indian education, and plenty of advice on how to not get assaulted/robbed/taken advantage of/into any trouble. By the weekend we were so eager to be done with being talked at and desperate to begin getting set up in the city, that we had completely forgotten the fact that two thirds of the group would be heading elsewhere in India. We suddenly found ourselves saying goodbye to people we had just met and become attached to in this foreign world.


The good news is that the four of us girls left in Delhi have chosen a very nice place to live, in a neighborhood called Malviya Nagar in South Delhi. The two boys will be living in a two bedroom, as one of them is a Mormon and isn't about to share a residence with females. The girls I live with are lovely: Hannah went to NYU and is from a suburb of Atlanta, Patricia is from Bellingham, Washington and went to Whitman, and Tangiah is from South Orange, New Jersey and just graduated from Spelman. I am sharing a room with Patricia, which is fine, as I had such a positive experience sharing a room last year and in general don't need much alone time. Our sharing a room allowed all four of us to pay significantly less rent (about $250/month) and to live in a very well-maintained apartment that ETAs have lived in for the past three years, when the English teaching fellowship began in India. It is fully furnished, with dishes and cooking utensils, a microwave, a purifier to make tap water safe to drink, and even a small library of books left behind by former fellows. Hannah commented that it feels like there were guardian angels that were looking out for us before we came! My sheets feel like sandpaper and I still haven't figured out which switch is for which light/fan/water motor/water heater/outlet/panic button, but there is air conditioning(!) and clean, hot showers and a lovely home in a lovely neighborhood.

One problem I have encountered in Delhi is that apart from the major roads, none of the streets really have names. Home addresses are according to blocks, as in our house, which is number 11, N-Block, Malviya Nagar. As a result, people, including cab drivers and the auto wallas have absolutely no way of knowing the ins and outs of every single neighborhood in Delhi. I should also explain that auto wallas are the guys who drive auto rickshaws, also called indian helicopters, which are the ubiquitous green and yellow three wheeled scooters with a bench in the back and a canopy. To ride in an auto is to entrust the walla with your life, in as literal a sense as possible. In any case, getting home in an auto requires you to know very specifically how to get home. Because we are so new here and had been driven to our home exclusively by drivers hired by the program center, we had a vague idea of where we live but not a specific knowledge of how to get there. As we made our way home in an auto from a big market in a neighborhood called Lajpat Nagar, we ended up driving in circles through the neighborhood, the driver stopping every 30 feet to ask for directions to get to N-block. I'm pretty sure Indians are like Argentines in that if they don't know exactly where you want to get to, they will make up directions rather than admit the defeat of not knowing. After nearly an hour of driving around, the driver announced that there was a "mechanical problem" with his auto and he could not drive us anymore. I will never know whether he just said that to get us out of his hair or whether he did end up stranded with auto trouble in the bowels of Malviya Nagar, but either way, we were out 90 rupees and walking on foot. I would swear sometimes that some guardian angel is looking out for me here, because I honestly can't say how we found out way home within minutes, or how the four of us managed through the dark at the end of a long day and avoided getting hit by one of the many maniac drivers in this country. Arriving home, sweaty, dusty and exhausted, the only thing I could feel was gratitude for successfully surviving this city one more day, and for the glorious air conditioning that flooded my skin with relief when we finally got home.