Reverse Culture Shock!

I have always had major problems readjusting back to life in the United States. It seems to get a bit easier the more I travel, but still the shock to my senses and the order and cleanliness of everything, combined with intense jetlag, can make me very emotional upon returning.

I spent my last few weeks in India preparing myself to return home. I had long talks with my friends still in India over chai about our fears and vague plans for eventually diving back into the working world. In my head, I went over and over past episodes of reintegration to try and remember what the United States feels like after being away in a developing country for so long.

When I was sixteen, I spent two months in Merida, Mexico, during which time I lived with a Mexican family and slept in a hammock like a local! When I returned home, the first thing I said to my parents upon entering the house was, "Oh wow, you all painted the cabinets!" Our kitchen has always had white cabinets, and they suddenly looked so bright and new to me that I was absolutely convinced that my parents had repainted them bright white.  They hadn't.  I also remember being fixated on the thick, painted lines down every street and wondering how they could be so perfect and why Americans weren't constantly swerving across them.

I had assumed that the same things that shock me every time upon return would be my struggle this time as well. But instead, different things have been difficult. I haven't been disgusted by high prices. Even in India, I remembered that a cafe latte over here costs nearly $4. And yes things are neat and clean and shiny new. But here is what has really thrown me off:

Shoes. Everywhere I go inside I want to slip off my shoes at the entrance and pad around barefoot.

Waste. How do our trash bags fill up so fast? Everything we buy is plastic wrapped and grocers only fill our bags half way before putting them in the cart.

Car time. I forgot about how much time we spend in our cars. It's exhausting and disgusting and unfortunately, in Louisville, unavoidable.  And in general everyone is just so busy all the time!  What happened to just sitting and talking?  Afternoon tea?  A good book?

Grocery stores. Even the local food mart is a palace of wonders. I could marvel forever at the chocolate-covered banana chips and wasabi peas and bottled ginger-infused antioxidant-powered Chinese herbal chilled green tea. The produce section is like a dizzying kaleidoscope, and the search for avocados nearly put me in tears.

Bare legs and tank tops. Today for the first time I am wearing a short jean skirt with no leggings underneath, but just around the house. I feel naked.

Power outage and utter chaos. When the power was out last week, everyone was complaining (among other things) of hot nights. But I say unless you have slept butt-naked upside down on the bed with your head directly under a fan going at turbo speed - and were still sweating, you have not been hot.

Customer service!  It's really an amazing concept.  At a restaurant I ordered sauce on the side and it came that way - no problem!  Everyone behind the counter is so friendly and accommodating.  If I want lemons in my water when I eat out, the waiter smiles and actually brings them, instead of casually pointing to the produce shelves so I can get them myself and not disturb his nap on the floor.

I miss India.  But I'm glad to be home.

Parting Thoughts

Today I am leaving India.

It's a weird feeling - I can't quite get my head around it. Looking back, it seems like the months passed in the blink of an eye, even though at times I felt like I would never get through the week.

I know I will go home and people will casually ask me, "So how was it?" But how do I sum up eight months of living and traveling and working and laughing and crying on the Indian subcontinent? It's not possible in a sentence, and not even possible in this one blog post.

The problem with describing India to someone who has never been is that it seems to be everything at once. It is simultaneously beautiful and nauseatingly ugly. It is colorful and mesmerizing, but also at times cold and depressing. The endless crowds can bring on a deep sense of loneliness, and the vast, open, empty spaces can inspire a sense of inner peace and pleasure. There is an abundance of glitter and gold and opulent wealth with sewage-smelling slums at its doorstep. The streets are at once full of joyful dancing and pain and sorrow. Markets smell of mouthwatering spices and fried delicacies, but everywhere people are going hungry. Life and death are constantly battling it out right in your face. Even the wealthiest tourists cannot completely seal themselves from the confounding, overwhelming, and fantastic complexities that define India.

I think when I am asked, over and over, "How was India? Did you just love it?", I will smile and respond, "India is really amazing." What else can be said? It is such a unique place and I have had such a multidimensional experience that I am left with too few words to describe it.

Chai & Chatter in Little Tibet

I returned to Dharamsala for my last week in India. I was worried I would be a bit bored - but not at all! I have been busy busy busy, which is a nice relief from the slow pace and occassional boredom I have been feeling while traveling alone. I like to have a base when I am spending a lot of time hopping from place to place on the road, so I left a small bag at Jamyang-la's apartment, and I wanted to end up back here in my last days to spend some quality time in a familiar place with this good family friend.

On my second day back in Dharamsala, Jamyang's cousin Nima Dolma put aside her entire day for me. She is a nun, though since she is living with and taking care of Jamyang she does not wear robes. She is also a recent refugee from Tibet, only having come here about seven months ago primarily to take care of Jamyang, who has tuberculosis. Nima Dolma is a bit of a crack-up, constantly making faces and blurting out random new words she has learned in English or Hindi. Every one of her facial expressions is a form of a smile - sometimes a worried smile, sometimes an "I'm sorry, food no good" smile, but often a very proud and happy smile, showing the white rows of her teeny teeth.

So after breakfast on Wednesday, when she finished cleaning up the apartment, we went on a walk up the mountain to a waterfall. As we were hiking up the trail, we came upon an Indian woman herding her goats. Out of nowhere, Nima Dolma breaks the silence with an obnoxiously loud "Baaaaaaaah! Baaa-haaa-haaa!!!!" imitating the goats. The woman turned and gave an amused smirk, and Nima Dolma kept baa-ing her way up the mountain. Then the woman said something to her in Hindi (Nima Dolma doesn't speak Hindi), to which she replied in Tibetan, and the woman turned around, passed Nima her herding stick, and walked away back down the mountain. So there we were, suddenly herding someone else's goats up the hill. Nima Dolma told me in Tibet she used to herd yaks, so apparently we were good to go. Later, we left the goats to graze in the grass near the path, and after that I don't know what happened to them, but Nima Dolma didn't seem too worried about it.

After a visit to the waterfall, we headed to some natural pools that have a constant flow of Himalayan glacier water coming through them. Nima Dolma wanted to swim, so I swam too. It was full of Indian tourists - mostly men in their underwear (women have to swim fully covered in their clothes). So I took off my shoes and jumped in to discover the water was painfully ice cold. I jumped in three times total, but swimming around in there was impossible.

In the afternoon, Nima Dolma took me to visit her Tibetan friends who she met in Nepal when she was on her way to India. We walked through the market and found the two women sitting on the side of the road watching shoppers go by. We drank some chai together, then went off to walk around the Dalai Lama's residence.

The women live in one tiny room in a dorm near the temples around the Dalai Lama's house. They have one gas stove on a table, with food cluttered around it on the floor. There are two twin beds, and a shelf built into one wall. There is not space for anything else in the room. The bathroom and the sinks for washing dishes are outside in the hallway. The women made us chai and cooked up four bowls of ramen noodles for a snack. One of them spoke a little English, so I asked her some questions about Tibet.

She said they left because "no freedom." They came to Dharamsala to be near the Dalai Lama, whereas in Tibet, even his photograph is banned. To get here, she and a small group of people hired a man to guide them through the mountains, traveling by night and sleeping undercover by day. They walked for 28 days before arriving clandestinely in Nepal, though they did not even possess passports to enter the country legally. From Nepal they traveled by bus to Dharamsala, India. The woman who spoke English has a husband living in New York, who periodically sends her money. There is no work for her in Dharamsala, so she and her friend attend a free English class for one hour every day, and literally spend the rest of their time bumming around town, which is why we found them just sitting on the roadside people-watching. Now that she is here in India, she cannot talk to her family in Lhasa because the Chinese have banned incoming telephone calls from Dharamsala. So she does not know anything more about her family.

Today, I accompanied Jamyang-la to the local hospital for a check-up. While we were waiting our turn to see the doctor, we walked around the government-in-exile offices and toured the library. All over Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj are giant wall-sized posters with pictures of Tibetans who have recently gone missing in protests of 2008. Jamyang pointed to one small photograph on one poster who he identified as his sister. She is only 17, and just this summer she participated in a Free Tibet protest during which she was arrested and subsequently disappeared. The family has no idea where she is or what happened to her.

Stories like these are commonplace. And it breaks my heart to see how much Jamyang and Nima Dolma miss their homeland. Jamyang-la repeatedly asks me if I will go to Tibet one day. He says (in bad Hindi), "If you go Tibet, you are veeeery happy." And every free moment she gets, Nima Dolma plops herself in front of the television to watch home videos on DVD from her family's Tibetan New Year's celebration. I don't know if she brought it with her from Tibet, or if her family mailed it to her, but she watches it over and over, pointing out her parents and siblings and cousins performing traditional dances in circles outside of their home. Other videos will simply film the family standing in a line in a meadow surrounded by spectacular mountains, or film a monk friend giving a tour of the family home or local temple. Another favorite video she calls "Black Yak," which literally just has scenes of mountains and grazing yaks accompanied by traditional Tibetan music.

On a more positive note - I saw the Dalai Lama! Finally! I was walking by myself down the street from McLeod Ganj to Dharamsala. Suddenly I heard sirens coming from the road below, and the man walking in front of me shouted something in Tibetan. Everyone around me hurried to the side of the road, dropped their bags, and crouched down. I asked what was going on, and he said "Dalai Lama-ji. Second car." I realized everyone around me was already crouched into a bow, so I pressed my palms together as well as the entourage of cars approached. And there, in the front passenger seat of the second car, was Dalai Lama-ji, sitting and smiling and looking exactly as he does in all the pictures. I was elated. Just seeing him for a split second was such a rush!

Mountains Beyond Mountains

After I left Leh, I spent an entire day on a local bus on my way to Spitti Valley, an amazing part of northern India not too far from Tibet, with small towns cradled closely between high, snow-capped mountains far above the tree line. Mostly I was drawn here by Graham's photos from his travels here last summer.


My first destination was Ki Gompa - a Buddhist monastery perched on a high peak overlooking the valley and the snaking Spitti River below. I was planning on spending one night and one day at Ki Gompa, but I ended up staying for three days and three nights.

To get to Ki Gompa, I chose to save money on a taxi and take the single, daily local bus to Ki, which was supposed to leave Kaza around 5:30 pm. Instead, the bus left around 7pm. I was incredibly nervous waiting for the bus, because it was dark by the time we left, and I worried I wouldn't find my way to the guest quarters at the Gompa, or that it would be full and I wouldn't have any other sleeping options for the night, or that it was past dinnertime at the monastery and I would go to bed hungry (I was already starving at 6pm). Luckily, two Ki Gompa nuns were also on the same bus and they were fascinated by me and pelting me with questions on the ride there, so I knew they would take care of me. When the bus pulled up to Ki Gompa, it was pitch-black. The nuns pointed up a winding road to the flickering lights in the windows above, while they headed a different direction to their personal quarters. With my huge backpack, I slowly made my way up the curves of the road in the dark, breathing hard in the thin air (4116 meters high!). When I arrived at the front door, a monk sort of pointed me inside and down a dark hall way, where another monk met me and whisked me into the dark kitchen, lit by a few skinny candles. I dropped my bags, and the monk in the kitchen (who I later learned is named Thandup) pointed to a chair and immediately passed me a hot cup of chai. Then, without asking any questions, he poured me a bowl of vegetable stew and reheated some chapatis. I was so relieved and happy. There is nothing more comforting when travelling than kind monks and a good, hot meal. When I finished, Thandup showed me to my room. The monastery has five dorm rooms that can sleep about four people each. Luckily I had a room to myself, and it was clean and cozy. The bathrooms, though, were sincerely lacking both cleanliness and comfort. I refrained from bathing during my stay in Ki, mostly due to lack of hot water.


In the morning at 7am, Thandup blew the monastery horn (a conch shell) to awaken all the monks for breakfast and morning puja. I was already awake and dressed. Thandup gave me a bowl and a spoon, and wrapped in my amazingly warm yak-wool blanket, I made my way to the prayer room for puja. I sat with the monks on the long carpeted benches and drank hot chai from my bowl, which a very small monk was constantly refilling. It was so wonderful and I was so happy. About an hour into the puja, the little monk served us butter tea with barley flour, which we mixed with our fingers to make tsampa, a barley pooridge that Tibetans love and routinely eat for breakfast. Personally, I could never see tsampa again and be happy, but it's good to try traditional foods at least once. So the monks paused the puja to eat their pooridge, then continued the chanting and bell-ringing and drum-beating for another three hours. And I'm very proud to say that I sat through the whole thing - from 7am to 11am!

After puja I went on a solitary stroll down the path and around the mountain to see some of the valley. It was spectacularly beautiful. The mountains are such amazing colors - a swirling blend of red, purple, black, green, yellow, brown, gold. From the mountain where the monastery sits, there are euphoric views of valley. (See attached pictures.) In the afternoon I helped Thandup cook dinner - a significant feat for a monastery of 150 monks! Monastery food isn't the best - mostly variations on bread and a vegetable dish. So we peeled and chopped many, many kilos of veggies, threw them in a pot with some water, some spices, a little dirt, maybe a few pebbles, and soon after dinner was served.

After preparing dinner on my first day at Ki Gompa, Thandup told me, in his bad mix of English and Hindi, "Abi we go, gayi. You come, thora thora." And before I knew it we were trekking down the mountain to Ki village to retrieve the monastery's cows. So I became the monastery cow herder during my stay at Ki, guiding them up the mountain and into their shed. It was quite exciting, actually. And on my second morning at Ki Gompa, I took a break from the four-hour puja to help milk the cows too! Sadly, I sucked at it, but at least I got some milk out.

I made some good friends with the monks at Ki Gompa. Only one really spoke decent English, and the other spoke to me in a mix of Hindi and bad English. A lot of our communication was me teaching them new words in English. Then I would walk around the monastery and monks would randomly shout out words I had taught them earlier, so that I was constantly greeted with random words like "Summertime!" or "Eh-snake!" or "Dirty!" or "Goodmorninggoodeveninggoodnight! Food!" It was quite endearing.

After my stay at Ki Gompa, in which I sat through four-hour morning pujas, slept in a monastery dorm but did not bathe, and milked and herded the cows (I'm repeating all this so everyone knows how hard core I am), I went to a another small town in Spitti called Tabo. Most people come to Tabo to visit the Tabo Gompa, which has been declared a World Heritage site, and preserves "some of the finest Indo-Tibetan art in the world." It was founded in AD 996, and has amazing murals in its various prayer halls. I also attended morning pujas in Tabo, which began at 6:30am but only lasted about an hour. Not so hard core.

On my way back to Manali from Spitti Valley, our bus went through a serious snow storm. In the morning in Kaza, where I woke up to catch the 7am bus, some of the mountain tops were already covered with snow. Then, while we were stopped at a local dhaba (food stand) in a tent in the middle of nowhere for lunch, some very wet snow began to fall with the high speed winds. Then, as we kept driving, it turned into thicker snow. Eventually huge heavy white flakes were falling all around us, and the ground was quickly turning white. I could no longer see across the gorge or any of the mountain tops around us. We were litterally driving through a white cloud of snow. Also, the bus only had one windshield wiper, which kept about one-fourth of the windshield clear during the storm. The driver and his assistant kept stopping to dump water over the windshield to clear it of ice, though it only made more ice. It was very reassuring to be riding along mile-high cliff edges like this.

Now I am back in Manali for two days before returning to Dharamsala. I'm staying in a lovely guest house a bit removed from the tourist traps of Old Manali. Its balconies face green mountains and the house is surrounded by apple orchards where the tree branches are heavy with ripe fruits. There is also a garden of sunflowers and marigolds. And - I have my own bathroom with a hot shower! Such luxury.

During the last few days I have been feeling very ready to go home. Though I'm a bit intimidated to be returning to the States - and especially to Kentucky of all places - I am looking forward to the comforts of home. I miss coffee shops and clean streets and the way people actually stand in line at stores instead of pushing their way to the sales counter. This morning in Manali I treated myself to a cup of filter coffee at a very touristy, very hippie coffee shop. And while I was ordering, a local woman with a large basket tied to her back edged up to the counter next to me and handed over two large metal canisters of fresh milk to the man behind the counter. And as I was walking back to my hotel room, there were small boys and old men walking up the hilly streets selling incense to the shop owners who were just opening their doors for the morning. I could smell the incense burning already all over the town. These are the little touches of India that I will miss when I am home in sterile suburbia. Even in the most touristy of the tourist nests, India is still India.

This last picture I took on the drive through the snowy mountains to Manali. Even baby cows need blankets against the cold!

Leh!

Leh is maybe the most amazing place I have ever been. It is a very small town seated in a valley surrounded by the most spectacular mountains I have ever seen. Leh is in the eastern Ladakh region of Jammu & Kashmir, the most northern state of India, which borders Tibet and Pakistan. Though there is a lot of turmoil lately in other parts of Kashmir, Ladakh itself is very safe and peaceful.

The ride here was exhausting and uncomfortable but also spectacularly beautiful. It usually takes two days of driving to reach Leh from Manali, but I scored and found a mini bus (or large van) to take me in one day. It meant I was picked up from my hotel at 2am, and we arrived in Leh around 7pm. Somehow I thought I would be able to sleep the first few hours of driving, but ohhhh I was wrong. It was absolutely freezing cold, the driver had the windows down to defrost the windshield, and the road was so horrible that I was constantly being thrown around in my seat. It was quite miserable.

Then, around 5am, I looked out the window wondering why the sky was not beginning to lighten since the sun rises around 5:30am. Eventually I realized that in looking out the window, I was looking straight at the side of a dark mountain. I opened my window curtain fully, stuck my head down and looked up at the sky, where I saw the amazing jagged lines of the mountaintops against a light grey sky. And then I knew it was going to be a spectacular day.

At our first stop at a police checkpoint where we presented our passports, I threw on a second pair of pants and was immediately warmer. Also another traveler lent me her extra wool blanket, which worked wonders. Only then did I understand how the rest of the bus was surviving the cold ride with the windows down. As soon as I arrived in Leh I purchased a huge yak-wool blanket for future rides.

The mountains were beautiful beyond words. Manali, our starting point, is a small town in a pine forest about 2000 meters above sea level. There is nothing to do in Manali but smoke pot with Israeli travelers, so I only spent one day in transit there. As soon as the sun rose on our drive out of Manali, we were already above the tree line and into the dry, rocky terrain of northern India. The mountains were all different colors: black, red, and shades of brown and gray and sand. The trickling streams and small lakes that ran deep in the gorges were a soft sky-blue, a reflection of the deep periwinkle color of the clear sky above.

The highest point on the road was around 5300 meters, and boy could I feel it when we were there. I sat panting in my seat in the bus. When we stopped for a late lunch, we were all walking zig-zag from the bus to the food tents set up along the highway. Some people got very sick during the trip, and luckily I felt fine (thanks to my ginger tablets and ginger chews, I believe!).

As we drove into Leh, a magnificent sunset lit the sky and colored all the surrounding mountains. When I arrived in Leh itself, it was dark and I could not see the town. When I awoke the next morning and walked through town, it felt like I had entered another world, or certainly another continent. Everywhere I looked, mountains sprung up around me. Some were jagged and rocky and brown. Others, further away, looked smooth and gray like ripples of sand. Others were capped with snow or huge glaciers. Mountains aside, Leh itself is a wonder. Despite being a touristy town, it still retains its village feel. Many of the buildings are made of mud and bricks, and there are donkeys grazing in fields everywhere. Many Ladakhi women wear traditional dress and sell dried apricots and vegetables under the shade of trees. In the back streets of the old city, fresh Tibetan bread is baked fresh in traditional ovens. I'm in heaven. The only bad experience I've had here was being solicited by a male prostitute.

Every day when I wake up and walk outside my sweet little guest house and into the wildflower garden with spectacular Himalayan views, I remember my parents' arrival in Cusco, Peru, and how they were overwhelmed by the other-worldliness and beauty of the mountain culture where they suddenly found themselves. I feel this way every day.

In addition to numerous Buddhist temples and palaces and mountain views, Leh has many other wonderful things to offer. Since I am traveling alone, which I have come to love, I have complete freedom to pick and choose what I want to do each day. While I was waiting to acclimatize in my first few days, I visited the Ladakh Ecology Center and the Women's Alliance Center to learn about local issues and local efforts to preserve Ladakhi culture and way of life in the face of the many changes and challenges tourism has brought. I also visited a donkey sanctuary (!!) in a village just outside of Leh. Between all these activities, I take breaks at a local eco-friendly organization that sells glasses of fresh juice made from an orange desert berry called seabuck thorn. And, I have created a little routine for myself, wherein I attend a 90-minute yoga class each morning (we perform our sun salutations before a large Buddhist shrine) and a meditation course each afternoon. In short, I am very happy.

Toilet Tales

On my last day in Dharamsala, I lost my Indian mobile phone down a squat toilet.

I was at a restaurant having a cup of chai with my friend Cheryl. Since I spend a large part of my days in the mountains drinking chai in little chai stalls and cafes, I have to pee quite often. So I ran upstairs to the squat toilet on the roof of the restaurant, and forgetting that I had stuffed my mobile into the back pocket, I pulled down my pants and the phone went flying out. It seemed to skid in slow motion through the damp floor of the bathroom, into the toilet bowl, and then plunked into the dirty water below before I could catch it. The water in the toilet bowl was dirty (as in, pieces of poop were floating in it), and I could see my phone flashing and vibrating right there on the bottom. I tried to fish it out with a toilet scrubber, but with no luck.

So I went ahead and peed (I had to go!) and ran downstairs to tell Cheryl about the phone. I tried to whisper it through my giggles, but the young man running the restaurant must have heard us and asked across the room, "Your mobile go down toilet?" I laughed yes, and then he translated this to the entire restaurant full of Tibetans. There was a collective murmur and surprised chatter among them as they wondered what to do, and eventually lots of laughter when they saw that even I thought it was pretty funny.

The restaurant owners asked if I could see the phone in the toilet. I told them about the flashing lights in the bowl, and one of the women who owned the restaurant ran upstairs to see what she could do. But even after reaching her bare hand down the messy toilet, she could not find it. My phone had gone down the pipes.

Luckily I don't have a huge need for a mobile phone anymore, since I am traveling alone now and don't need it to meet up with anyone again in the future. When I was having dinner later with my monk friend Jamyang at his apartment, I told him the story. After his initial worry and sympathy, he had a blast making jokes about my phone in the toilet.

First Jamyang jokingly suggested we call the police and have them conduct a city-wide police search in the Dharamsala plumbing for my phone. Then he decided to call my number to see if we could hear it ringing somewhere in the city pipes. When it did not ring, he said, "Phone sleepy." Then Jamyang's cousin Nima Dolma, who was excited to hear a word in English she recognized, repeated, "Phone! Sleepy time!" Then after much thought, she added, "Phone! Break-fust! Eat!" Jamyang laughed and corrected her, "Dinner! Dinner eat!" Later, as we were watching the Olympics long distance swimming marathon, Jamyang exclaimed, "Morel - your phone Olympics! Toilet!" and made swimming motions with his hands in imitation of my mobile somewhere in the Dharamsala plumbing. It was a sad, sad day for my phone, but it seemed to be a good source of entertainment for everyone else.

India in Your Face

This is what I love about India: everything is always in your face. People have always been asking me why I wanted to come to India, and I have never really had a good answer. But now I realize that I love traveling to foreign countries where I am surrounded and immersed in everything different from what I am used to and what I know. I love being overwhelmed by the foreignness of the sounds and smells and being baffled by the way life chugs along so differently from the way it does in the United States. Before I left home, someone told me India was an absolute "invasion of the senses," and that is precisely why I wanted to come.

The intensity of India is also the biggest challenge for me. Sometimes I think it's odd that the same things that I love about India are also the things I will be glad to escape when I return home next month. Perhaps my favorite description of India in this way is by Diana Eck, Graham's favorite Hindu scholar. In her book Darshan, which explores the importance of seeing in Hinduism, she writes:

India presents to the visitor an overwhelmingly visual impression. It is beautiful, colorful, sensuous. It is captivating and intriguing, repugnant and puzzling. It combines the intimacy and familiarity of English four o'clock tea with the dazzling foreignness of carpisoned elephants or vast crowds bathing in the Ganga during an eclipse. India's display of multi-armed images, its processions and pilgrimages, its beggars and kings, its street life and markets, its diversity of peoples - all appear to the eye in a kaleidoscope of images. Much that is removed from public view in the modern West and taken into the privacy of rest homes, asylums, and institutions is open and visible in the life of an Indian city or village. The elderly, the infirm, the dead awaiting cremation - these sights, while they may have been expunged from the childhood palace of the Buddha, are not isolated from the public eye in India. Rather, they are present daily in the visible world in which Hindus, and those who visit India, move in the course of ordinary activities. In India, one sees everything. One sees people at work and at prayer; one sees plump, well-endowed merchants, simple renouncers, fraudulent "holy" men, frail widows, and emaciated lepers; one sees the festival procession, the marriage procession, and the funeral procession. Whatever Hindus affirm of the meaning of life, death, and suffering, they affirm with their eyes wide open.

Maybe it is for this reason that I have been craving mountains since my last week in Udaipur. It's an odd but very very strong craving. I've never craved any natural environment ever like this before, but now my whole body and soul is absolutely aching for cool mountain air and the desert, snowy, jagged landscape of the north. Granted it is still India, but in my mind it is completely removed from the intensity of Indian life in my face as it has been in Rajasthan. Yesterday my friend told me that my craving makes sense, because with the high Himalayan mountains come isolation, silence, and solitude, all of which have been lacking thus far in my life in India.

Nepal did not quite satisfy my craving for mountains, only because it was still hot (I was counting on sweater-weather) and because the monsoon clouds were covering a lot of the good mountain views. But it's not just views that I want. I want to be in the mountains. So that is why I am heading north tomorrow, where I will spend the last few weeks of my trip holed up in the Himalayas and soaking up its own, different kind of intensity. From Dharamsala, where I am now, I am going to Ladakh - the most northern part of India - to the charming mountain town called Leh, which sits at 3505 meters above sea level. It will take me the next three days to reach Leh, traveling by bus over the second highest motorable road in the world. (The highest runs north of Leh, where I won't be going.) From Leh, I will go down (as in south, not down in altitude) to Spitti Valley, which is full of amazing Buddhist gompas and stupas and farming villages and, of course, Himalayan wonderfulness.

From here on out I will have little access to internet and may not update this blog much. But if you do read this, say your prayers for me while I ride on the high mountain roads over the next two weeks. Even though I'm not Catholic or Buddhist, I may have to buy my own set of rosary beads to finger during the hair-raising bumps and turns.

I've spent a wonderful week in Dharamsala with my aunt Valle's Tibetan monk friend Jamyang. I've been dying to meet him, mostly because he took such good care of my little brother last summer when he was in India and is a very dear family friend to both Valle and Graham. Two of my other intern friends are in Dharamsala also this week, so I have been splitting my time between drinking chai and going on walks with them, and hanging out at Jamyang's apartment. It's become my habit to throw on some sweats and wander to his apartment early every morning for Tibetan breakfast, and then to visit again in the afternoons before or during dinner. Jamyang is such a sweetie and so hospitable. He speaks almost no English, so we get by using Hindi and pantomime. After I finish exploring the north of India, I will return to Dharamsala to spend my last few days in India chillin' with Jamyang and drinking chai in cafes with good views of the green mountains.

Part III: Back to India

I have decided that my India trip has been divided into three phases. In the first phase, I settled into my life in Udaipur, made friends, got to know my host organization and my cute little city. In the second phase, which began around the end of May, most of my intern friends left, I dealt with a lot of frustrations at work, had a somewhat lonely and very hot summer, but finally completed a small but successful project at the end of my internship. Then I journeyed to Nepal, which was a sort of transition between phases two and three of my trip. Now I have returned to India for the last leg of my trip, which will be spent traveling in the north of the country and exploring the amazingness of the Himalayas.

I kind of hate Delhi. I dread coming here, and unfortunately I have to pass through Delhi to get to many of my destinations. Mostly it is the thick, humid heat that gets to me most, but even without the heat there is still the awful noise and smelly trash in the streets and smoggy polluted air.

I splurged on a flight from Kathmandu to Delhi to get me back to India. I mentally prepared myself for a depressing arrival and horrid night in a dirty hotel. So I was quite surprised when I arrived in the Delhi airport to find that all my memories were completely wrong! I had remembered the airport to be depressingly dark and filthy and unwelcoming; instead, it was bright and shiny clean and beautiful like any other airport anywhere in the world! I was convinced maybe I was in a different terminal (I wasn't), or that they had recently remodeled the airport interior (they haven't). Instead, I guess my eyes have become adjusted to India and what was once disgusting is now perfectly normal.

I also remember the ride from the airport to the Tibetan colony Manju ka Tilla (where I stayed my first night in India in February) was a scary ride. Since it was February, it was very cold, and since it was later at night, the streets were mostly empty save a few crowds of homeless people huddled around street fires or under blankets. This time, however, as I drove again to Manju ka Tilla, the streets were full of Indian wonderfulness. The shops were lit up and crowds were bustling through side streets doing last minute shopping. Since I arrived on India's Independence Day, there were fireworks in the sky and kids were flying kites all around. It was a wonderful welcome, and I was very glad to be back in India.

The hotel I stayed at was not the same as my hotel in February. It was dirtier, which is fine because it is also cheaper, but equipped with a television! I was excited to watch a Shah Rukh Khan movie before bedtime, and I was able to catch up on all the new skin-lightening face cream commercials and Bollywood music videos I have missed out on while in Nepal.

Today I have been wasting time until my bus leaves for Dharamsala at 6pm. I spent a whole 2 hours trying to find an ATM. A kind young man from my hotel came with me to direct me to the ATM, but traveling by cycle-rickshaw on the Indian expressways was not the speediest solution, and it ended up being quite a journey. After I refilled my wallet, the monk Geshe Petu who runs the hotel (and who is also a family friend via my aunt Valle) gave me the key to his bedroom upstairs where he let me watch TV, use the bathroom, and relax for as long as I wanted since I had already checked out of my room. So kind!

Now I am looking forward to a good night's sleep on a bus (fingers crossed!), awakening to wonderfully crisp mountain air, and meeting another one of Valle's monk friends, Jamyang, who also became my brother Graham's good friend last summer in India.

Living Goddesses and Animal Sacrifices and Everything Else I Love

For anyone who comes to Nepal ever, Bandipur is a required stop along your tourist route. Lonely Planet describes it as, "draped like a silk scarf along the high ridge above Dumre, the town is a living museum of Newari cuture." Indeed, it was beautiful and picturesque and peaceful. I only spent one day and one night here along the way from Pokhara to Kathmandu, but I could have spent several more days drinking tea in the cobblestone town square, going on solo walks around the valley to moss-covered stone temples, and playing with kids in the hills. The town used to be on an old trade route between Tibet and India, and there are still abandoned shop houses in place along small alleys in town. Not many tourists stop here, so there was only one budget guest house to stay in, and miraculously, there was not a single store selling the usual tourist knick-knacks and pashmina scarves.

In the afternoon in Bandipur, the clouds parted and I was able to see the snowy peaks of numerous mountains beyond the valley over which the town is perched. In the evening I walked to Tin Dhara ("Three Spouts") where spring water pours out of five (not three) beautifully carved stone spouts from the surrounding forest. Two young girls were washing clothes and their long black hair in the running water.

Check out this picture, which I took in Bandipur. Among the traditional textiles and corn husks hanging out to dry is an American flag beach towel with a woman's thonged bare bottom. Lovely touch.

Kali, the Goddess of Destruction

I have recently concluded that Kali is my favorite Hindu goddess. Call me a silly, idealizing American, but I love the darkness. Kali is an incarnation of the goddess Parvati, and she is often referred to as the Black Goddess or the Goddess of Destruction. "Kali" in Hindi means "black one." In paintings and statues she is pictured as a black-skinned woman with a garland of bloody skulls around her neck and a bloody knife in her hand. She is always standing on a corpse, which represents ignorance.

My first day in Kathmandu I took a local bus an hour outside of the city to a Kali temple. Since it was Saturday, many Hindu families also made the journey to worship Kali and make offerings. There were long lines of Hindus winding down several staircases to the small temple by the stream in the low forest. As a tourist, and since I am not allowed to enter the temple as a non-Hindu, I was able to skip over the long lines and go straight to the temple grounds below. Perched from some balconies around the temple, I could watch the pilgrims go inside with offerings of flower petals and coconuts. Many people also brought chickens and goats to be sacrificed inside, as bloodthirsty Kali requires the blood of uncastrated male animals to be poured over her image every week.

The sacrificing itself was very matter-of-fact. There was no ceremonious delay or chanting; a young man with a sharf butcher's knife sliced off the head and tossed the pieces back to its owner. Sometimes the owner would then clang the goat's head against a brass bell in the temple, and then the carcass would be carried over to the butchering station where men boiled off the fur and handed back the chopped pieces in a plastic bag.

Mostly I like Kali because I am fascinated by Hindus' worship of her. For a good hour I stood and watched lines of families pour into her bloody temple, and I couldn't help but wonder what they were thinking as they approached her terrible image and clanged her bell to announce their presence. For me it's difficult to conceive of God as bloodthirsty and frightening, but it's useful for me to try, which is why I like to think about Kali.

Family Ties Across the World

My second day in Kathmandu, a Nepali family friend named Nima picked me up at my hotel and took me to some Buddhist stupas and gompas around the Kathmandu Valley. It was very kind and helpful, because I would not have been able to figure out the buses around the valley on my own!

Sometimes my family ties in places as far away as Nepal amaze me. This is how I (now) know Nima:
Geshe Gelek is my aunt Valle's Buddhist teacher at her Tibetan Buddhist center in North Carolina, and now he is a good family friend of the entire Jones extended family. Geshe Gelek's sister is Sonam, who lives in New York and is also the nanny for my little cousin Dora. Sonam's husband is Pasang, and Pasang's brother is Nima who lives in Kathmandu. Even though I have never met Sonam or Pasang, they arranged for Nima to meet me in Kathmandu yesterday, and now I am invited to dinner at their home on my last night in Nepal. Fabulous!


What does a living goddess look like?

She is dressed in a fancy red and gold Nepali dress and wears a lot of makeup, and she is very beautiful. Today I saw her. Nepalis call her the Kumari Devi, and she is eleven years old. She resides in the Kumari Bahal temple in the old city of Kathmandu, and as I was standing in her courtyard she poked her head out of her window upstairs to give the hungry tourists a glimpse.


Nepal actually has several living goddesses, but this Kumari is the most important. I learn these things from Lonely Planet Nepal. She is only the Kumari Devi until she reaches puberty; after her first period she becomes mortal again and a new Kumari Devi is identified as the deity's reincarnation. The Kumari must always come from a Newari caste of silver- and goldsmiths. She must pass a series of tests - one of which involves being trapped inside a dark room with scary noises and masked men and 108 buffalo heads on display. The true Kumari will not be scared. She also has to have certain physical characteristics, the appropriate horoscope, and she must select certain objects that belonged to her predecessor. Several times a year she comes out of her temple in a festival procession through the old city.



I'm ashamed to admit that I have become a full-blown tourist. It's embarrassing to be constantly snapping photos, and though I'd still like to pretend I'm "different" from them all, I'm not. To prove it, here is a horrible photo of me posing with a fake Hindu priest, for which I paid him 10 of his requested 200 rupees.

"Naturally Nepal"

I spent the last four days trekking in the Himalayas. Even though it is monsoon season - not ideal for trekking - I couldn't avoid the obligatory mountain hike that beckons tourists from around the world. So I chose a short four-day hike to Poon Hill, mostly because the picture of Poon Hill in the Lonely Planet was so beautiful.

I did not realize that this would be luxury trekking. The trail was sprinkled with restaurants and lodges. My guide did not bring any food or tenting gear for us, since we ate in these village restaurants along the way and slept in lodges. Each night I had my own private room with a comfy bed, blankets, and access to a real bathroom and hot showers! If I had known I would have brought a towel and soap!

The only bad part about the trek was the leeches. Leeches everywhere. We were constantly picking them off our shoes and our clothes. I found three on my body - one on my ankle, one on my hip, and one on my arm. They bled a lot and were very gross.

The spectacular views were lacking a bit on this hike, since monsoon clouds often covered the snow-capped mountains surrounding us. We didn't even make it up to Poon Hill, since we were scheduled to climb it for sunrise on the third day, but it was pouring rain all morning. Still we caught occasional glimpses of the mountain range along the way, and the quaint villages hugging the mountainsides along the way were beautiful in and of themselves. We walked through a magical rhododendron forest on the third day, which literally felt like the Elf Forest in Lord of the Rings's Middle Earth. And every time I looked across at the mountain on the other side of a gorge, it was covered with sparkling waterfalls and bright green rice paddies. Spectacular.

Now, unfortunately, my legs are like lead from going downhill for two days. Even walking on a flat surface is quite painful, but I am trying to stretch it out.


Nepal vs. India

Here are some little things I have noticed in Nepal that are different from India.

• The cows are furrier here.
  
• Women carry heavy loads on their backs instead of on their heads as they do in India. Either they wrap them in cloth on their backs and around their chest, or they fill huge baskets on their backs and place the handle over their heads (Ecuador style!).
• The women are all wearing green bangles, which I learned is for a monsoon season festival.
• The food is not as spicy.
• There is beer on restaurant menus! No more waiters hiding our beer bottles under the table as they do in India, where restaurants rarely have a liquor license.
• There are chickens in the streets, in addition to the normal cows, water buffaloes, and goats.
  
• THERE ARE SIDEWALKS. Amazing.

Bus Rides from Hell

When my friend Tammy came to visit me in India, we took one 5 hour bus ride on a local bus - the cheap way. We started at 5 am, when the bus was almost empty - though not for long. The whole point of the local bus is to cram as many people in as possible and charge very low rates, so the ride only cost us a few dollars. Unfortunately, in India, the local bus can be a bit overwhelming. On one side of the aisle there are two seats, and on the other side three seats, though people commonly insist on squeezing four on one side and three on the other. They are also very old and dirty. Sometimes the windows don't close, or two seats have to be tied together to keep one sitting upright. Sometimes I am surprised they still run at all, because they look like they have been through a war.

A few hours into the trip, the people started piling in. Our giant backpacks were in the aisle, but it didn't seem to phase anyone. Even the very large Indian women just pulled up their sarees and climbed over the piles of luggage, passing bags of crops and small children over our heads into the nearest open space. For Tammy, it was very overwhelming. "Sensory overload," as she put it, and she couldn't understand how I actually enjoy riding the local bus. When I used to go to the village in Dhariawad for my first project at KVK, I rode the local bus for four hours there and back. For me, it's a fabulous way to immerse myself in India and everything I love and hate about it: I can feel the invasion of my senses from all around me and still be able to look out the window and enjoy the beautiful landscape.

This week, Megan, Michael, and I left Varanasi on a night bus to the India-Nepal border. It was a local bus, but very cheap and our only option for traveling at night. We sat on the right side in three seats next to each other. I volunteered for the middle, since I had a blow-up neck rest that I was sure would enable me to sleep. We were also told that since it was a night bus, it would probably not be full, so we could each claim several seats to ourselves and lie down.

Soon after the bus started, it began to rain. Of course, right above my head, there was a leak in the ceiling, and water came plopping down on me. We rode for several hours, it kept raining, and people kept coming on and off of the bus quite regularly - standing room only. I had to wear a raincoat to keep dry, which was quite comical but also very hot. As we got very tired and wanted to sleep, not only did the seats not recline, but also they were not wide enough for all of us to sit with our shoulders squarely forward. Someone had to shift sideways a bit for us to be comfortable.

At some point past midnight, the bus seemed a bit empty. I got up to check out the empty seats, and realized that everyone else had claimed a row of seats for themselves, and we were stuck still sitting three across and squished like never. Around 2:30am, there were rows available and we all spread out. The rain was still trickling down onto me, so I still had to sleep in my raincoat, but it was a bit better. Every 20 minutes or so I woke up when we went into a huge pothole, but it was better than sitting anyway.

We arrived at the border around 5:30am. There were two separate arches to walk under - first the one that said "Indian Border" and the second that said "Nepal Border." I'm not sure what was in between. We had our passports stamped at the Indian immigration office, and bought our visas at the Nepal immigration office. Somehow I expected the offices to be sterile, A/C ed, brightly lit cement buildings, but they were nothing of the sort. Instead it was like walking up to a hole-in-the-wall chai stall. The men yelled, "Going to Nepal?" from across the street and we walked over to their wooden tables and they gave us the stamp. Easy as pie.

We spent the day in Lumbini, Nepal, the birthplace of Lord Buddha. We visited some the monument marking his birthplace and some nearby temples. We planned to leave Lumbini the next day, but were stranded due to strikes and roadblocks all across the country. So we rested for a day, then caught an early bus the next morning to Pokhara. Actually, we were at the bus stand at 6:30am, but there were technical problems, so we waited until 8am for the bus to start. Then we switched to another bus at 9am to take us to Pokhara.

Our bus to Pokhara was nice. It was a minibus, with cushioned seats and curtains on the windows. It was supposed to be a 7-8 hour bus ride. At 11am, however, our bus stopped on a road lined with buses and cars. Up ahead we saw black smoke and an ambulance drove by. A few hours later, we learned it was a strike. It was very hot and sunny outside. We had a chowmein lunch out of someone's kitchen. Around 2:30 Michael and I walked up the road to see what was going on. There was a long iron pole laid out across the bridge over the river, and on either side of the pole were two black tires on set on fire. Everyone around was just kind of staring at it, talking, watching kids jump back and forth over the pole. Finally someone told us the student protesters would clear the way and let us through at 4 or 5pm.

So we sat around some more. I read in the shade of a tree, sweated a lot, drank a coke, played word games with some Swiss girls on our bus. It was a long day. At 4pm we finally got back on the road, only to be stopped again at another road block at 6pm. We waited there for another hour, then proceeded on to Pokhara.

The bus went through the mountains to Pokhara at lightning speed. I was a bit scared when we passed several overturned buses on the side of the road. Eventually I was so tired I nodded off to sleep, but every few minutes I was awoken as we flew over a bump and I literally bounced so high I got air and came completely off the seat. One time when we went around a sharp curve, Megan flew out of her seat into the aisle. Sleep was not possible.

We finally arrived in Pokhara at 11pm. It was a long day, and my booty was quite tired. We have a lovely hotel set back in a garden on the main road through town. Today we are going hiking to try to catch a glimpse of the Annapurna mountain range. Besides the hellish bus rides and stomach bug I'm currently nursing, I like Nepal very much so far.

Adventures in Varanasi and Beyond

Train Disasters

I departed from Udaipur on Monday evening on the 6:30 train, and I arrived in Delhi early the next morning. There, I met up with my brother Graham's friend Megan (who he knew from study abroad in Cairo) and her fellow intern in Punjab Michael, who is from Germany. We spent the morning in Delhi together and booked a train to Varanasi that was to depart at 1:30 p.m.

We arrived at the train station promptly at 12:30, with time to collect our luggage from storage (which was crawling with giant rats) and find our platform. There were some major train delays because of an earlier accident on the railways, so our train did not appear on the information screen. When it was almost 1 p.m., we asked around for directions and moved towards platforms 7 and 9, based on different information given to us by different train station agents. 1:30 came and went, and still our train had not arrived at the station. Around 2 pm, over the loud speakers, we heard what we thought might, possibly, be an announcement about our train leaving from platform 12. I inquired in another inquiry office, and the woman told me that yes, our train was leaving from platform 12 - at any minute!

Unfortunately, I had everything I own with me in my giant backpack, so it was not easy to move. Michael graciously carried it for me and gave me his almost empty backpack and we went running to the train. At the door I shoved our ticket into someone's face, he looked and nodded, and we boarded. As soon as we were on the train started moving. I showed some train employees our seat numbers and they pointed us to the front of the train. We struggled through about 10 cars to the front of the train - everyone insisted our car was at the front. When we reached the front, we showed some more people our ticket. Then we knew there was a problem. They shook their heads and muttered in Hindi and finally told us we were on the wrong train and this one was not going to Varanasi. What followed went something like this:

Train man: This wrong train. Not go to Varanasi.
Me: Oh shit, oh shit.
Megan: What should we do? Sir, can you tell us what we should do?
Me: Oh shit, oh shit!
Train man: You get off train! Otherwise you have big problem!
Me: Just get off?
Train man: Yes!
Me: Right here?
Train man: Yes!

Luckily, as the train pulls out of the station, it moves very slowly and often pauses. So when the men told us to get off, the train happened to lurch to a stop, and we got off. It was a far jump down (poor Michael with my bag as heavy as me), but we just walked along the tracks back to the station, much to the amusement of all the Indians watching us from the train windows. When we arrived at platform 12 again, our train was there waiting for us! We boarded, showed our ticket to every person we saw and asked about 15 times if it was going to Varanasi, and soon thereafter it left!

We were so sweaty and exhausted from running and jumping and walking along the tracks that the clean, cool, A/C cabin was a welcome relief. We all took very luxurious naps in the sleepers and still slept well at night.


India's Holy City

Varanasi is an amazing city. We are lucky to be here for the Shiva festival. The city is full of Shivite pilgrims dressed in orange and carrying poles on their shoulders from which hang canisters of smoking incense and flowers and sparkly Hindu decorations. Last night we went to the ghats to watch the festival on the banks of the Ganges river. We lit candles in little banana leaf boats full of flower petals and placed them in the river. We also convinced a group of young Shivite men to hold a sign that said "Happy Birthday Graham" and pose for a picture to send to him. They loved it, and so did Graham I think, who loved Varanasi so much.

Since the river is so high and the current so strong, the police have forbidden boat rides. This morning we awoke at dawn and watched Hindus make puja on the ghats again. We tried to secure an illegal boat ride, but after our guides paddled for two minutes, a neighbor warned them of police trouble nearby and we had to get out without really going anywhere at all. So we walked along the ghats instead, which are not only sprinkled with shrines and temples and bathing pilgrims everywhere, but which are also on the edge of some beautiful, crumbling, ancient and majestic Indian buildings. They look like the palaces of Rajasthan, but darker and more weathered and abandoned.

Tonight we are taking a bus to the Nepalese border where we will process our visas in the morning and then make our way to Lumbini, the birthplace of the man who would become the Buddha. Then we will venture into the mountains of Nepal. I am so tired of being hot and sticky and constantly sweaty that I have decided to stay in the mountains for the rest of my trip in Asia. I will only venture down from the Himalayas for required travel through Delhi. The heat is just not fun anymore.

On Leaving Udaipur

This month I took a two week vacation to travel with two friends from home. It was a welcome break. We went to Dharamsala, trekking in the Himalayas, Amritsar to see the Golden Temple, Jaipur, and finally the Taj Mahal. The Golden Temple and the Taj Mahal were especially spectacular – I won't attempt to describe them. Now I am back in Udaipur but soon to leave again. I have finished my project, completed my last day at work, and in two days I will leave for Varanasi and then Nepal.

Goodbye Rituals

Since I have been back, I have been facing goodbyes everywhere. At my office, the staff held a small farewell ceremony for me where they presented me with a coconut, a garland of marigolds, and put a dot of pink powder on my forehead. My host mom thought I had gone to the temple, as these are all Hindu rituals. Then all the staff members said some words about me, which all came out sounding like eulogies.

One staff member kindly invited me to his home for dinner a few nights ago. His wife cooked us my favorite meal – dal bati churma – though this time not cooked in a cow dung fire. As we were sitting on the cement floor watching Bollywood music videos and eating with our hands, I was quite content and in my element. And then my coworker let out the loudest, never-ending fart that was unfortunately amplified by the cement floor beneath him. No one even flinched. After that I lost my appetite.

Something Sustainable?

I recently watched J.K. Rowling's Harvard commencement address on youtube – a fabulous speech I highly recommend (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L445BmUEXH4). In the first part of her speech, she talks about failure and the role it played in her life and in developing her as a person.

It made me think a lot about failure in my own life. I think mostly I have been blessed with many successes, until now. Though my internship wasn't necessarily a complete failure, at times it did certainly feel that way, and it was certainly full of many small failures. Still, I think all of these frustrations have taught me more in the end than one big successful project would have.

I spent many, many hours sitting at my host desk in the hot office trying to pull a project (or myself) together. And in that time I learned a lot about myself – both strengths and weaknesses. For example, I learned I have a mammoth amount of patience (came in quite handy!). I learned I am resilient in the face of frustration, boredom, and defeat. I learned that if confronted with a task or project that I am in the least bit excited or passionate about, I have energy and self-initiative. When the task is not very exciting to me, I have to dig very deep to find the resolve to pull through. One of my main weaknesses that I had to eventually overcome was my repulsion of asking favors and being the slightest inconvenience to anyone. Since I could do nearly nothing on my own at KVK, this was at first a big problem. I'd like to think that now I am more or less over that hurdle.

In fact I have been able to overcome many of my personal flaws that at times set me back. Often crippled by over-politeness, I learned to openly speak my mind without feeling guilty for telling someone else his idea is not good. I quickly learned that Indians speak in a very blunt manner that often (unintentionally) comes across as rude to Americans. I learned that I must speak back in the same way if I wanted anyone to hear what I was saying.

I gained some good insight into the face of development in India. First and foremost, it is very privileged, and though many organizations boast a "bottom up" approach, I am not sure that is the reality of it.

In addition, the task of social change in a country like India is a daunting one. The population size is such that any efforts can barely make a dent, and it is marked by deeply-rooted traditions, beliefs, and social systems that will be in place for a long time to come. I also learned that as an outsider (by which I mean, not an Indian villager), development projects such as the ones done at KVK are incredibly difficult. There are incalculable, unforeseeable complications that arise from systems of caste, gender, religion, economic status, social hierarchy, and village customs.

I have been asked several times about the meaning of sustainability and how it can be achieved. The more I learn about sustainable development, the less answers I have. Sustainability is surely the biggest challenge in all this. I am nearly certain that my little project at KVK is not sustainable. I only hope that people who actually work in the development sector have more luck with it than I did.

Reflections on Life in Udaipur

Amazingly, I have been very busy over the last few weeks! May was not the best month in Udaipur for many reasons. Most of my intern friends left, it was hot as Hades (which made it difficult for me to do anything during the day besides sit under a fan), and work was frustrating as always. In early June, the pre-monsoon weather started, which brought cloudy days, drizzles, occasional rainstorms, and cool breezes. It’s amazing how weather can change your mood – I feel so much more energetic!

The Pleasures of India

Since I have two friends coming to visit me in India for two weeks in July, and we are planning on doing some trekking in the Himalayas, I have been trying to exercise a bit more and gain back some of the muscle I have lost from being so lazy in this heat. Several mornings I have taken early morning hikes up a small mountain called Neemach Mata, which has a pleasant Hindu temple at the top and beautiful views of the lakes and the city. There are always people there in the morning, but it is never too crowded. Families, groups of teenagers, or a pair of girlfriends will come here in the mornings to offer prayers before the day begins. It’s very relaxing, and best of all - no one bothers or hassles me. I love to see the same man sitting there reading the newspaper every morning. It’s so refreshing – why not sit on a mountaintop and to read the morning paper?

Also, since a former intern recently found out he got scurvy in India, I have been making a conscious effort to eat more fruits, which are cheap and plentiful. So now, after my hikes to Neemach Mata, or on my way to work, I stop at the local juice stand in Fatehpura (my neighborhood), and buy a glass of fresh mango juice for ten rupees (25 cents). It’s a nice treat, and one of the simple pleasures that I love about India.

Auntie recently purchased a mosquito zapper that is shaped like a tennis racket. It is fabulous. Once it is charged, you hold down a button and swing the racket through the air until it zaps loudly at having killed a bug. It is Auntie’s favorite toy, and everyday after her evening prayers she whips it out and zaps all the little bugs who disturb her. Quite gratifying.

Successes at Work

Even at work I have been keeping myself busy! For the last month or so, I have been working on a vermicompost project that actually seems to be going somewhere. I did a brief needs assessment in a nearby village on vermicompost (or worm compost), and learned that many of the women who had previously prepared compost had had many problems with pests eating the worms. So I put together a workshop in the village on compost protection measures. With some money provided by FSD, I purchase new worms and new plastic sheets for the women to protect their compost beds. This week, I traveled to the village with a scientist from KVK to give a talk on ways to keep ants, crows, mongooses, and other pests from eating the worms. Then we helped the women refill the compost pit, add the right amount of water, and then add the worms. During the demonstration, I kept being showered with small purple berries, as our jeep driver was in the trees collecting as much fruit at he could to take back home.

Originally this project was supposed to take me a few weeks at most. I was racking my brain trying to come up with a second project to work on simultaneously or when I finished the vermicompost workshop. Instead, it took me about 6 weeks, and there is still more work to be done. During the last few weeks of my time at KVK I will return to the village to do some follow up work, such as delivering more worms and observing progress of the compost pits.

When I do not have much to do at KVK, I have been occupying myself at Animal Aid, which I still love and which helps pass the time. I have also been trying to organize a workshop for FSD interns and host families with one local NGO called Shikshantar that promotes zero-waste living and healthy cooking.

Women and Men and the Space in Between

Living in India has been a real challenge for me, much more so than I ever anticipated. Though I love Rajasthan and would not want to be anywhere else, it is one of the most conservative states in India. Historically, Rajasthan was very isolated from the rest of India in its traditionalism, and only very recently it has become integrated into the modernization of the country. Thus, a strict social structure still dictates how relationships between castes and between men and women should be.

When I first arrived, I thought there was something nice and romantic about such traditionalism and conservativism. Now my feelings about Rajasthani society are much more complicated and difficult to untangle. Obviously, as a liberal American woman, it is difficult to live here. It is one thing to travel in Rajasthan, another thing to live here for a month or two, but it is an entirely different experience for me to live in Udaipur with an Indian family for six months.

Though I feel very close to my host mother, our conversations are still very censored and often I feel that I can’t be honest with her about my experience in India. For example, friendships between men and women in India don’t really exist the way they do in the United States. And since there is virtually no dating in Udaipur, there is little opportunity for me to interact with males at all in India. Of course, I do have some Indian male friends who sometimes hang out with our cluster of foreigners in Udaipur, but I have to approach those relationships very cautiously and never spend time with them alone. I often find myself being overly cold-shouldered towards them to discourage their flirtations. If a male friend gives me a ride home on his motorcycle or in his car, I have to ask him to drop me a block from my house so that Auntie doesn’t see me alone with a male and get upset.

I don’t have any female Indian friends my age. Though some of my intern friends have host sisters our age, they would never go out with unmarried men with us, and usually stay at home studying or doing housework. I feel I have good friendships with my coworkers and my host mother, but they are all adults with families of their own, and so for lack of Indian friends my own age, my experience here has been much different than past experiences in Latin America.

Still, Udaipur is not as conservative as other parts of Rajasthan, I hear. One intern from FSD’s program in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, said she is not allowed to drink alcoholic beverages at all, or interact with unmarried men, and many of the houses in Jodhpur have separate entrances and separate common living areas for men and women. Goodness.

The other difficult thing about these gender restraints is that I feel constantly on-guard and suspicious of people’s intentions. On any day, I am constantly aware of my surroundings, lest I get run over by a motorcycle, butted by a cow, or fall into a pit on the side of the road. But in addition to that, I have to make extra efforts not to make eye contact with men and not get too close to anyone so that I am not groped by wandering hands. All this can be exhausting, and it can make me feel disgusting inside even if nothing bad has happened that day.

On Slooowing Down

I have had to adjust a lot to the slow pace of life in Udaipur. On the one hand, it is a welcome change from the frantic stresses of working in a law office in San Francisco, or my packed schedules in college. On the other hand, the boredom can be maddening at time. Still, I notice I have become accustomed to this slow pace compared to when I first arrived. There isn’t a whole lot to do in Udaipur, so on an exciting day I hang out with friends (or by myself) at hotel pools or rooftop restaurants, where we lounge and drink cold drinks and eat and talk for hours on end, and I am perfectly content and entertained.

I went with my friend Susanna to a small town called Pushkar this weekend. We spent a lot of time just chilling out drinking soda, or sitting on the ghats by the lake. Before we left, we met two British guys who had just finished a three-month stint in Darjeeling, where they had been teaching English in different monasteries outside of the city. We sat and talked for several hours, not thinking at all about the sights we should be touring in Pushkar. We swapped stories about our respective lives, shared the same frustrations and the same pleasures of India. I thought I was a little bored in Udaipur at time, but their stories brought boredom to a whole new level. At nighttime in a rural monastery in the hills of India, there is nothing to do but sit in your room and read a book, which I can imagine would be mind-bogglingly dull after a few weeks.

In the United States, when I come home after a day or work or classes, there is always something to do. I fool around on the Internet, call a friend, cook something, go grocery shopping, ride my bike, go to a dance class, maybe watch television, clean my room, or just reorganize something. Here, at my home in India, there really is nothing to do. Nothing interests me on television and there is nothing I can cook. Sometimes I just open my closet where all my things are crammed and stand staring at it, looking for something to do in there. I wonder what things I could reorganize, pack up, unpack, sift through or throw away. But there is nothing. So I stand and stare until I get tired and pick up my book again. Then I go sit on the front porch in the garden with Auntie while she reads her holy books and I read The Grapes of Wrath. Sometimes I come home and she is sitting on the kitchen floor sorting through grains of wheat or peeling garlic buds, so I help her. When I need some kind of stimulation, I just go walking through the Old City or go buy another glass of mango juice. This is life in India. Sometimes fabulous, and sometimes... not.

Animal Aid

For the last few weeks I have been volunteering at an organization called Animal Aid, which is an animal hospital, shelter, and rehabilitation center in a village just outside of Udaipur.

Animal Aid was founded six years ago by an American couple who had been coming regularly to India for the last fifteen years. Before I visited the hospital, the founder Erica warned me that many of the animals are in much worse condition than I am used to or have ever seen before, but that it is also a place full of hope and happiness for animals who are given the treatment and affection that they would not be getting on the streets.

I am glad she warned me, because I was a bit shocked when I first arrived. Many of the dogs walking around are “draggers,” meaning their back legs no longer function (usually from being hit by cars) and so they drag themselves around on their front paws. Other dogs have huge gaping wounds that never seem to heal because they are constantly picking at them or scratching themselves. One dog called “Sexy” has a huge tumor on her bottom that was infested with maggots, and in the wound you can still see the bloody holes from where they were literally eating her alive.

The “hospital” was not what I had envisioned. It is mostly outdoors – the building itself has some cement kennels, one teeny kitchen, one medicine room, and one somewhat surgery room. Otherwise, the “indoor” section is built of bamboo, wood, and tin roofs.

As you can imagine, the hospital is mostly full of dogs. There are a few cats, two monkeys, a good handful of donkeys and cows, and some parrots and pigeons. Animal Aid’s policy is that they do not return animals to the streets if they know they cannot survive. So dogs with only two working legs, or a blind donkey, or even a dog who has been at the hospital so long that he has lost his pack and would be attacked by street dogs, have permanent homes at the hospital. Many of the dogs have free reign at the hospital; others stay on chains either inside or in the paddock outside to avoid fights. Dogs who come in to be spayed or neutered usually have an address to where the staff returns them where a local person may have been feeding them or even vaguely looking out for them on the street.

Once I got over the initial shock of so many wounded animals, I found it was a very, very happy place. One of the funniest dogs is Minnie, who had to have both back legs amputated at the torso. So really, her back end is just a round stump, just her butt. But, she is a very happy dog, so she is constantly running around playing. When she hops around on her two legs, her butt bounces on the ground. It seems like it must be uncomfortable since her amputations haven’t healed entirely, but nothing can stop her from bouncing along because she is just too happy. It makes me laugh every time I see it.

Animal Aid loves volunteers because there are so many animals that need extra attention that the staff doesn’t always have time to give. So when I go in, I take dogs for walks (every dog gets at least one walk a day), or I sit with a dog who isn’t eating and try to hand feed him treats. Other times I find a dog who is scared to death of people and sit with her in the kennel and slowly try to socialize her. (Yes, I have my rabies vaccine.)

My favorite dog is a yellow lab puppy who came in with two horribly mangled front legs. One leg they amputated; the other had a compound fracture that they put in a cast. Unfortunately the dog has had to stay in his kennel for several weeks because he is not supposed to walk on his front leg while it heals. If it doesn’t heal, the dog will not be able to survive and they will have to put him down. Fortunately, it seems to be healing well. Now every time I go in, I take the little guy out to roll around in the dirt and get some fresh air. He tries to walk, which the doctors now say is okay because it shows the fracture is healing since he can put weight on it. Mostly we just sit and belly rub in the sun.

Besides the dogs, my other favorite animals are the baby cows. There are two now – one teeny, super soft white cow just recently born, and another reddish cow named Apple who is very ill and not eating well. Both are the sweetest creatures ever, no bigger than a dog, and they are constantly wanting attention. Even the puppies love them. There is one puppy who just refuses to stay with the other puppies, and always curls up with the cows and sleeps in the hay.

Every time I leave Animal Aid I feel so inspired by the founders and so happy for the animals who are being treated there. Here is their website, it’s a fabulous organization. http://www.animalaidunlimited.com/

Favorite Pictures from Udaipur

Sunset.

Chilled beer.

Marc and a local Danny DeVito!

My elephant friends in the Old City!

Susanna taking a phone call on the road to Bundi.

This is how we start the engine on KVK's bus.

Dave at a chai stall, and a good example of daily life as a foreigner in India.

Baby cows! I love them.

My friend Ram!

This is how we eat lunch in Udaipur.

Midday traffic.

A random foreigner we picked up: Alex from Israel who teaches "laughing yoga."