I made it to Mumbai after rain delays to find a city very different from what I was used to. I had been told by many people that the slums of Mumbai are unlike any other. I didn't believe them; I've seen the slums in Delhi, the homeless people lining the streets in Jaipur and the poverty of the villages, but I never, ever expected to see what I did in Mumbai. If you've seen Slumdog Millionaire, it's worse. I flew in over the tops of them and could see nothing but blue tarps for miles. Dharavi is a 550 acre slum, one of India's largest. It's a maze of dilapidated shacks and iron-corrugated roofs amidst narrow alley ways that is home to over a million people, an average of 15,000 sharing a single toilet. While seeing them brought tears to my eyes, I learned that this isn't an ordinary slum; they employ over half a million people in around 15,000 small one-room factories, turning over around 1.4 billion US dollars a year! They are based on waste recycling, residents scavenge garbage piles for bits of old soap, plastic bottles and bags, oil drums etc. and re-model and mold them into something new to sell. However, the government is now in the process of displacing them, offering them an apartment space in order to complete the radical makeover of Mumbai. We'll see how that works.... It was pouring rain when I arrived. Absolutely pouring, the kind where you can't see two feet in front of you in a car, thus making my 20km cab ride from the airport into over an hour and a half. But I finally met Jori and she showed me around the city she'd been living in for the past month. Many of the buildings are from the Portugese, as it was a Portugese colony, and the architecture reflects that. We were near a widely Catholic area and I saw more crosses than Ganesh's for the first time in India. We spent our two days there walking around and seeing the city.

We flew the next day to Kerala, our first time in South India. What struck us the most upon arrival was the lack of Hindi, and the presence of Malayalam. I immediately started speaking in Hindi to a shop-owner, and he looked at me baffled until I finally realized, as Jori laughed at me, that he had no idea what I was saying. I find myself excited when I see a Hindi road sign or billboard, a language I can understand amidst the scribbles of Malayalam. Kerala is the most literate state in all of India, boasting over 98% literacy, yet they also boast the highest unemployment rate. Kerala is an arid state, with no issues of drought at all. They get plentiful rain and, although like most of the rest of India conserve their water, have few issues with scarcity. What they do struggle with is contamination. One of the men I spoke with was telling me that so much raw sewage gets leaked into their water that many residents in his area have resorted to bottled water lately. I feel like no matter where I go, in terms of weather, and water quality and availability, these people just can't win. It's either a drought in the desert, or pouring rain that doesn't stop, inundating dams and low-laying villages, killing hundreds. Can't there be a happy medium?

We did a short sight-seeing tour of the city that started with the oldest synagogue in all of the commonwealth. What used to be home to over 5,000 Jewish followers, now only has 10. We got to meet one of them, she is probably somewhere in her early 80's and sat knitting while she spoke to us. Tourism is keeping the synagogue alive, as there is no one else to visit it in all of Kerala. We went from there to a Catholic church where we saw the tomb of Vasco de Gama. I was most excited for the Chinese fishing nets, an ancient traditional way of fishing that has been nearly lost elsewhere in India aside from Kerala. They were interesting to watch, but it saddened me to hear that the old wisdom and tradition was supported 80% by tourists coming to watch and participate. The commodification of culture at its best.... Here is one of the nets being taken out of the water. They let tourists help do this to make money, as over-fishing has led to there being very few fish, as you can see in the net.

We watched a traditional Keralan dance that evening, but only saw a small piece of it as it usually lasts from early evening to early morning. It was a re-enactment of a scene from the Ramayana, a Hindu epic. Men study for 12-16 years to perform these dance routines, as they require not only dances but impeccable control over the body and facial features. The men play the parts of both the men and women. A green-painted face means he is part of royalty, and a "good guy" as they say, where a black face means demon, and a red-painted face means the character is nice on the outside, but a demon on the inside. Here we are with the good guy after the show.

We spent one night on a houseboat in the backwaters after that. We ate traditional lake fish (with the eyeballs still intact when they served us...) and all our meals off large banana leaves. They served us fish curry, dal, coconut cabbage, fresh pineapple, mango, bananas, among many other vegetables. Dinner was large prawns the size of lobsters that we had no idea how to eat. The boat cruised through the canals of Kerala, and we got to see a snake boat race. The race is once a year, called the Nehru race (after the last Indian president) and we think they were practicing when they went past us. Below is a video of it.

So we are in Kovalam now until we fly to Tamil Nadu in a day or two. I love the South, and am learning just how different it really is from the North, aside from the language differences. The dress, all of the food, even the looks and features of the people are different. It's like we're in a different country. And I hear Tamil Nadu is even so much different from Kerala.

Moving On

I am officially done with my internship in the village and have finished teaching and working on the farm. It was quite an eye-opening experience, one that kept me wanting more, wanting to stay longer. It was a tearful goodbye with my family, but I knew leaving there that I would be back someday, and I think they knew it too. They always asked about my own family back home, and I told them that next time I come I won't be alone; I hope that is true!

I knew I would learn so much from working on the farm and traveling throughout the village (and I did!), but I never in a million years thought I would learn so much from teaching in the school. It was a new experience for me, and one that proved to be amazing. To give you an idea of what I was working with: of every hundred children (of school-going age) in India, around seventy enroll in Class I. Half of these drop out before they complete the primary level; less than ten of the remaining thirty-five make it into Class VIII, and fewer than five finish high-school. So, as an NGO, "Eklavaya," puts it, that says that of the massive school system in India, it boasts only a five percent efficiency. (For the lower-and lowest- castes, these numbers are much, much lower.) This is not to say that many Indians do not finish school and attend University, they do. India produces many of the worlds best engineers and doctors (and IT technicians!), but in terms of their massive population, the percent is still low in comparison. In terms of teaching, more than sixty percent of primary schools in India only have one teacher (or at best two) to take care of all five classes, and there are over 2,628 primary schools with simply no teachers at all. Along the lines of my research: of 5.29 lakh primary schools, over half of them have no drinking water facilities, and eighty-five percent, no toilets. Learning all of this certainly made me want to stay longer, to help in some way, somehow, to keep these kids in school. I learned that in many rural villages like the one I was in, literacy is replacing education. The government is passionate about increasing literacy, especially among girls, and has created numerous programs to aid in doing so. However, in many of these rural programs they are peddling literacy as a substitute for education, teaching them to simply read, and sending them on their way. As P. Sainath puts it in an article in The Times of India, (from where much of these statistics came from) "Literacy is a vital social tool. It is not an education..." It is probably true that there is no literate population that is poor, and no illiterate population that is other than poor, but that still does not eliminate the need for a well-rounded education. This experience changed me in a way I never imagined, causing me to look deeper into the roots of education and consequently social change, economics and development. I can only hope that in some small way, I have made as much of a difference to at least one of these children as they made to me.

So, I am back in Jaipur now, and preparing for my flight to Mumbai tomorrow to meet Jori (she goes to Hamilton College; we went abroad together last semester and she is back in Mumbai for a month researching Bollywood films). I imagine being in the enormous city will be quite different than where I have been! We will spend two days in Mumbai and then fly on to the South, where I will continue my research in a much more arid region. I have been praying to the rain god to keep his showers moderate over the next few weeks, as the South is known for much, much heavier monsoon seasons. Maybe he can come visit Rajasthan for a bit and give some rain to them! I can only imagine us trudging through knee-deep puddles in the streets of Kerala-what a change in scenery from the dust storms in the desert!

While moving on (from my village family and my family in Jaipur) will be and has been sad and difficult, I am excited to embark on a new journey, venturing into the unknown, as they say, and experiencing all that the South of India has to offer!

Photos

I figure I've been doing a lot of talking, so here are some photos to show what I have been doing.

With some of the 4th and 5th grade students after school

Most of the school lines up outside, doing prayers and reciting English numbers and poems and before being released to go home. (I'm in the middle!)

With my 4th grade class

Some village kids near our farm (also my students)

Our small piece of land just down the road (for cow food and some vegetable growing only) after the government came through and dug up to insert a phone line underground. Note the difference towards the background of the photo in our green land and the neighbor's land.

A man walking his camel home at dusk

The desert sunset

Village Updates

I spent this past week in school working with the teachers to create a schedule of periods for each day. This way, it is not a "free-for-all" of who teaches what to whom and when. Every teacher now has 8 total periods in every day where they move from class to class teaching only their specialty subject. It is a much more organized system now and seems to be working quite well so far. The children are getting used to a schedule and no class is left without a teacher at any point during the day. School days are longer now that it is cooling off a bit. The day starts an hour earlier and ends an hour later, now that the children can walk home in the afternoon without being scorched. In the summer months the children that walk 4 or 5 kilometers complain that there is no water along the way, making the journey treacherous.

I noticed very soon on that not every child has a book. Most have notebooks and tiny little knubs of pencils, but the textbooks are lacking in the classroom, making it hard for most students to keep up or follow along. I donated a new book, pencil, and pen for each of the children today, hoping that new supplies will not only help their experiences, but get them excited to come to learn more using their new things.

The frustration I experienced early on in communicating with the children has subsided; I have mastered the "Indian head nod" and many of the Hindi commands needed in the classroom and most of the students are better behaved now that they know me. I am still having trouble adjusting to their methods of discipline; they beat the children, whip their hands with wooden sticks and slap them hard across the face when they don't do their homework, spell a word wrong or misbehave. I tried explaining that taking away recess or making the child sit in the back of the room may be just as effective, but there is no changing this system. Maybe that's why my students like me so much, they know that when I am teaching no one is disciplined in such a manner. Just another cultural difference that takes some getting used to...

Work on the farm has been slower the past few days as we are just waiting for rain. I ride everyday to our farm down the road and collect the cow food, then feed and milk the cows every evening. I weed a little, but the plots are ready for peanuts now, it's just the clouds that aren't. I have found myself doing more odd jobs around the house and kitchen work with the women than working in the fields. I re-string cots and sweep the house and porches; I was the dishes and help prepare the fire for chappatis two times a day. I learn more from talking with the family members during work than I ever imagined. I have found that they are very responsive to my questions, and love telling me all about their lives. I have taken a good amount of photos as well, which I will put up tomorrow (when the internet is faster!).

Family Farms

After school I change out of my sari and go to work in the fields. I have recently been weeding waist-high wild trees that grew in the winter on the plot where they will eventually plant peanuts. There has still been no rain, so they have yet to plant anything. I doubt I will be here when/if they plant this season. The trees are so deeply-rooted and thick that I ended up slicing my fingers open one by one just from tugging.

I have spent the past few afternoons and evenings on a motorcycle going around to different family farms and homes in the village and surrounding area. Not only do I love riding the motorcycle, the wind blowing in my hair as the sun sets in the desert, but seeing the different homes and farms has been interesting as well. My family owns a small piece of land about 5 kilometers out that we visited last night. Many of the homes I stop at are those of children that I teach. I should note that they walk 3 or 4 kilometers to and from school everyday, many without shoes. (That is one of the things I am donating before I leave, among pencils, pens and books, to the school) Their land is mostly barren and brown with nothing growing, their homes small and open-air, some looking simply like an organized pile of bricks. Our land is next to one of those homes. Green, plush vegetable patches and waist-high cow food, our land is full of hearty brush and crops. Not two feet over, separated by only a barbed wire fence, is the neighbors' land, brown and empty. How is that possible? I couldn't understand how two pieces of land right next to each other could be so opposite. If there is water for us, why isn't there water for them? The answer: we have an electric pump; they have a diesel pump. With the rise in diesel prices recently they can't afford to water their land, as one liter of diesel is 40 rupees and only about 30 minutes of watering. So, my family lets them use the cow food we grow and some of the vegetables, when they are ripe.

I have to say, this is the most interesting internship I have ever had, with enough excitement and differences in work to keep me content. From teaching, farming, touring the village and our land, being with the family and learning to cook, I have done more in the past few weeks here than I could have ever imagined.

School

I think part of the reason I am attracted to living in this country is the excitement of it all. I can wake up every single morning and know, without fail, that I will see or do at least one thing I have never seen or done before, at least one thing that it is not possible to do in the United States. I had a few of those moments yesterday. I needed to re-charge my phone and we needed some more mangos so I volunteered to take the government sponsored twenty-minute Jeep ride into the nearest town. I have never been in a vehicle with more people in my life. A small Jeep, made for maybe 8, crammed almost 40 people. 6 in the front seat, 6 in the middle, 5 on the hood, 8 in the back seats (not including the 4 children on laps) 3 hanging out the driver side, 4 hanging out the passenger side and 6 on the roof. It was quite a squished and sweaty experience, and the same on the way back.

While I was there I shared a pack of cookies with the children who surrounded me gawking, bought some nail polish and henna to do with the wives, picked up the mangoes and got caught in the pouring rain. I have never been dripping sweat in the pouring rain before; it was scalding hot water falling from the sky and the heat penetrating from the pavement as it hit didn't help either. But overall, it was a nice trip; it was good to get off the farm for a bit and walk around.

I guess I should describe the school I've been teaching at for the past week or so. It's a one-room school-house, but not really. It's a rectangular shape, with one hallway and six little "alcoves" cut out from the main hallway where the classrooms are. The children sit on the floor in rows. There is a small chalkboard in each one as well. There are 2 nursery classes with small children, and the teachers who are less educated teach them. Right now two girls, maybe my age, who have only completed tenth grade are working with them. There is one second/third grade class that gets somewhat left behind, shifting teachers daily. Then there are two more classes, one of fourth and fifth graders with about twenty students and one of sixth and seventh graders with about ten students. I alternate first and second periods between the two. (There are only two periods in the day, one before lunch and one after).

The government school just down the road is much more expensive, requiring a large initial fee and then 25 rupees a month. Our school requires a one-time payment of 50 rupees (and this is the first year they've required that). Still, there are many children in the village who cannot afford that, and there are many children at the school without pencils or pens. But, as I have noticed in the older classes, the students are bright, interested in learning and for the most part well-behaved. They study hard (most of the them) and are prepared for class. I have so far very much enjoyed teaching here the past week.

Back to the Village

I am quite pleased with how I spent my weeks away from the farm and out of the village. I visited numerous NGO's and went on a few "field-trips" for research. I frequented the Sikh temple down the street from my hotel and saw some touristy things in Delhi, as well as eating out every night with Jeremy and spending a weekend in Manali, high in the Himalayas. I left Delhi and returned to Jaipur, making only a 2-day visit with my homestay family. They were having their annual big puja (worship) the day after my return, and I just had to be there. As my little brother put it, its a day where they "waste 100 liters of water for no good reason." As my Dad put it, "we do it once a year to bring success, wealth, health, everything. We don't waste the water, we pour it on the god." So, I dressed myself up in my Indian attire and accompanied my family for the 13 hour ceremony. They treated me like one of the family, letting me hold the fire plate and wave it over the deity, and stand with the family in front while everyone blessed them. I'm glad I stayed for the celebration.

I came back here to the village the next day. The entire country was on strike; schools, shops, businesses, everything was closed in protest for, among other things, the high rise in petrol prices throughout the country. Therefore, I have only had 2 days at the school so far. If there's anything I've learned having lived in this country for a total of almost 6 months, its that nothing is learned without experience. How to book a bus ticket, how to agree on a rickshaw fare, how to barter a price, how to deal with the gawking stares and subtle touches of men and boys, the list goes on. Learning to do these things comes only from being forced into the situation and dealing with it. Teaching was no different. They threw me into the classroom with no instructions, no information on how old the children were, or how much English they already knew. They told me, like Nike does, to "just do it." I was teaching the second grade, kids way to young for me to be dealing with, given my limited Hindi. They misbehaved, asked me questions I couldn't answer and I could sense the frustration between both of us of not being able to communicate. Today, I was (thankfully and after some convincing) moved to 5th grade. It was an amazing day. The children behaved, listened to my broken Hindi commands and even learned something. We worked on grammar: I go to school, you go to school, we go to school etc. then even had the time to move onto present progressive, I am going to school etc... I quizzed them at the end of the day on what we learned, and most remembered. It's a rewarding feeling, and I am looking forward to seeing the children in the village this afternoon on my walk to see if they have forgotten what we did today! Two of the girls in my class are married (12 and 14 years old) but they live with their parents until they are 18. Just a fact I found interesting, sad, different, and intriguing.

When I look back on the past few years, I would never have guessed that I would be living in the middle of the desert in village India, wearing a sari everyday to teach English in a school for Dalit children. What an experience...