Updates from the Workplace

Working in India has been a serious roller coaster of successes and failures. Mostly failures, actually. It took me a good three months to understand more or less how things work at KVK, and then developing my own project took obscene amounts of patience and energy and self-initiative on my part. Though I have taken on several small responsibilities at the office and have participated in some short-term projects, all of my attempts at bigger projects have failed miserably.

I remind myself of words of comfort from a former FSD intern - that I am seeing development at its worst. Working at an NGO in small-town India is bound to be frustrating as anything. But I do realize that I have learned much more here than I ever anticipated. And I have learned an entirely new concept of the idea of "work."


Organic Farming

I started planning one organic farming project that I was very excited about. The office staff also seemed excited about it as well. Then, several weeks into it, I asked a question about getting a "package of practices" on organic farming, which means data on organic farming methods, such as amounts of compost needed for different soil types in various villages. The scientist nodded and said, "Yes, yes. We don't have the package of practices yet. They have not finished the research at the university yet." Means? "Means, we cannot advise farmers on how to do organic farming until the research is finished." So KVK won't promote organic farming? "Right." So I can't do this project right now? "Right. We need package of practices before we can do anything. How can we tell the farmers how to do organic if we don't know how ourselves yet?"

So I sourly abandoned that project. In the meantime I have been writing case studies, or success stories of farmers who have benefited from KVK different programs.

Now, I have a new project. I am going to conduct a workshop with some women in a nearby village on vermicomposting. KVK did one training on vermicomposting in this village before, but now years later many of the farmers have abandoned their compost pits. So after I poke around the village and figure out what went wrong, I will attempt to revive vermicomposting and maybe find some way to make it a more sustainable practice. But who knows, any number of things could go wrong by that point.


Afternoon Naps

This is classic India. This week, I was preparing an office Powerpoint presentation and needed advice on which digital picture to paste into a slide. In the afternoon, I peeked into my coworker's office and saw Mr. Mattur asleep at his desk - as usual. He always takes afternoon naps and I never hesitate to wake him up when I need to.

So I yelled, "Mattur sab! Can you come help me with something?!" He swung his feet off the desk and put on his glasses and shuffled down to the computer room.

I asked him which picture. He told me which one.

Then he said, "That is all? Finish?"

"Yes, Mr. Mattur, that's all I need."

"I back to sleep now?"

"Yes, you can sleep."

"Haha, ok! Cause you disturb me! I asleep!"

And laughing, he goes back to his office. He was sort of kidding, but also serious. So he went back to sleep.


Digging for Water

One project I am working on now is the construction of a new model nursery at KVK for the horticultural department to use for trainings. The first step is to build a tube well. I'm not sure what that is, but we're making one.

So we hired a man to come find water on the land where the new nursery will be. The man took a forked stick and held the ends apart very tightly and slowly walked across the field. At one point, the stick started spinning under his tight grip. He repeated the exercise over and over to confirm that he had indeed felt the pull of water underneath him.

Then he tested the location of water with another method. He held a coconut in his hand and walked back and forth over the identified spot. When the coconut rolled and nearly fell off his hand, it meant he was standing over the water.

Then, he confirmed this with yet another method. The water man held the coconut in his hand, placed some rupee bills on top, and lit several sticks of incense. He said a prayer. Then he pocketed the money and gave the coconut to the gardener, who walked about 30 meters away. The gardener put his feet on the coconut and squatted on the ground, balancing himself carefully on the coconut. Then the water man slowly walked with the incense over the field where the water was. Supposedly, when the coconut rolled a little and the gardener fell off, it meant the man with the incense was standing over the water. I'm not sure it ever really worked.

But the man eventually identified the point where we should dig for water. Yesterday we dug down and down and down. No water. The angry horticulturalist called the water man and told him he was wrong. The man replied with some excuse about how the water must have moved to another spot. Anyway we all had a good laugh about it.

Goodbyes and Hellos

When I first arrived in Udaipur in February, I was one of 11 FSD interns. By March, there were 14 of us. This week, I am one of only 3 interns left in Udaipur.

My friends have been steadily trickling out of the city for the last few weeks as they are finishing their internships and moving on to other cities or countries or heading home. Since FSD has so many different start dates throughout the year, and each person decides how long to stay, there is a steady tide of people coming and going.

It has been interesting to form friendships with the people who come through FSD. There is also a nice group of young foreigners in their 20s working for various NGOs or universities in Udaipur who I have gotten to know. They come from all over the world – U.S., Canada, Australia, U.K., Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Colombia, Sweden, Norway. Some are taking a semester abroad during college. Several others left fancy, high-paying jobs in the corporate world to try something different. And almost everyone I have met is, much like myself, trying to just figure something out.

We have all found that India challenges us in a way that pushes us to our limits – both physically and emotionally. And because life is so extremely different here than it is in the United States, or wherever we came from, whenever we meet up for dinner or breakfast or a beer, all the thoughts and emotions of the past few days just pour out. Also, with such a slow pace of life, there is plenty of time to have these never-ending conversations about career paths and lifestyles and happiness. Sometimes we meet for lunch and lie around on comfy couch-seats for the hottest hours of the day until its time to order the next meal.

For most of the foreigners I know here, living in India is a temporary ordeal. Most of us have a general idea of when we are leaving the country, or at least plan to at some point, and thus we all have to think a lot about what exactly we are going to leave to do. Or even, in my case, where I am going when I leave. So for me, it has been nice to be able to talk to people who are also as confused as I am and can help give me ideas or just listen while I think through my life and what I want for myself in the future.

Now that there are so few interns in Udaipur, I think my life will undergo a major shift this summer. Though more are coming, they are all short-term interns, and I anticipate being very busy with my work and with travel plans in the next few months. I will probably spend more time at home with my Auntie, maybe volunteer some with another NGO in Udaipur during my free time, and feel simultaneously more at home here and more lonely.

Granted, I have always felt somewhat lonely in India – it seems to be a common feeling for many people here. The days are emotional roller coasters. Every so often I have mental break-downs when I freak out about my future, frantically trying to decide what country I should move to when I leave India, or what kind of job I want to look for, or what subject area I should focus my career on, or what subject I should study in grad school. At home, I am often so busy that I have no time just to feel or to think. Career paths seem so much more logical and pre-planned that it is easy just to follow along down the path ahead and assume it is the best option. Still, I think this is all very healthy for me, and I am glad India has forced me to really examine my life in this way. So many people I have met in India have had life-changing realizations, finally figuring out what they really want. I think I am experiencing something similar.

These last few weeks have been full of exhausting goodbyes, which are especially difficult since I am not sure if I will see some of my friends again. In a week, ten new interns will come to Udaipur, and it will be hellos and goodbyes all over again. It makes me look forward to a time in the future when I won’t have to lose my entire base of friends and can have more time to develop my relationships with people. But in the meantime, as they say in Almost Famous, “the people you meet on the road are really amazing people.”

This Week in Udaipur

Mangoes!

Mango season is in full force now – vendors are parking their carts full of yellow and green and red fruits all over the city, and I have been trying hard to learn all the different varieties. Auntie occasionally makes a chilled mango soup that we eat for dessert at lunch time, and it is amazing.

This weekend, I stopped by one phulwala’s cart and bought one of each kind of mango he had – a total of four, though there are literally hundreds of varieties in India. At home Auntie chopped them up for me and laid them out of a big platter. The cheapest and least tasty mango was the one I recognized as the mangoes we get in the States. Not impressive. The other three were amazing and so different. I couldn’t decide which I liked best, and there I so many others I have to try this summer.

Salsa Dancing in India?

I attended a dance recital of one of my Indian friends here who decided to take up salsa dancing. Apparently, salsa in India really means doing lots of twirls and spins to upbeat Bollywood songs. It was barely recognizable. There was also a waltz number, but for all I know it was the cha-cha to techno music. Still it was amusing. I was especially surprised at one dance number a group of little girls did to the song “Smack That.” I assume in uber-conservative Rajasthan no one knows what the lyrics really mean.

Circus

This weekend my friends and I went to the circus. We were drawn to it by the very old-school colorful circus posters around town, advertising bearded ladies and other sideshow characters you would think just don’t exist anymore. Only in India.

The circus was awful, but also amazing. It was under one circular tent, where plastic chairs were set up around a stage that was literally a pile of shoveled dirt. The “stage” was hard to see sometimes because of all the poles and ropes holding up the tent. When we arrived, there were ten white fluffy dogs prancing around the stage doing unimpressive tricks – like walking on their hind legs, or standing on a ball. Later came two elephants who played cricket, then a strong woman who lifted a large dumbbell, then little girls who twirled plates on long poles. There was also a tightrope walker. During the whole performance there were several characters always onstage, including a very fat little man dressed in a red polkadot jumpsuit and a clown. At one point between acts, the little man took off his shirt and the clown started spanking him with the cricket bat. Fabulous!

In short, the whole show seemed like a dress rehearsal for a bad magic show for kindergarteners. There was no lighting at all, no transitioning between acts, and the music was mostly dance remixes of bad 80s and 90s songs, including Backstreet Boys and Shania Twain. Though the whole show was three hours, we left after one.

Bombings in Jaipur

About an hour after the bomb blasts shook Jaipur, the capital city of Rajasthan, someone turned on the news where I was sitting and we saw the Pink City in shock. I had just been to Jaipur about two months ago and recognized many of the places where the bombs were planted. Everyone here was so surprised that this happened in Jaipur, and though everyone feels safe in Udaipur still, the city was put on red alert the next day. I didn’t go to work the next day because all government institutions were closed (and apparently my NGO is part GO). I did take an auto through the city to meet up with some friends for lunch, and everyone was eerily deserted. Today, two days later, things seem back to normal.

Some pictures of the circus...

Village Visits

I have been very busy the last few weeks finalizing my project at work, taking weekend trips with friends, and making some preliminary village visits. I chose one village called Jawahar Nagar where I was going to conduct my project (which I may end up abandoning or cutting very short – it’s a sore subject). Last week I spent three days and two nights there, then returned this week for a two-day, one-night visit.

It is a four hour bus ride to Jawahar Nagar from Udaipur, which I don’t mind at all because I love bus rides in India. The road there is bumpy and dusty, and I take the very hot, crowded local bus full of turbaned farmers with bags of crops and people lunging through the windows to get a good seat every time we stop. The bus drives through miles of dry, arid farmland. We pass through many small, colorful towns with people lounging under the shade of huge banyan trees, and past fields of wheat with makeshift scarecrows wearing bright saris.

My supervisor at work arranged for me to stay with one family she knew in Jawahar Nagar. They were so kind to me and refused to take payment in compensation for my stay there. (I have started bringing them vegetables from the market as a form of payment.) The mother, Kanku Bai, is in her fifties, though she looks much older. She has a very narrow, manly face with thick black eyebrows, and her hair is colored bright orange from soaking it in henna. Her husband is Dhanraj – he is about seventy, and always wears a dhoti and a white undershirt with holes in the shoulder. He is very skinny and had deformed feet, so he mostly sits in the shade and speaks to me in very limited English. He seems to think that the louder he speaks, the more I will understand. So he shouts phrases in English, then repeats them – backwards. Like so:

Dhanraj: India is very poor country!
Me: Hmmm.
Dhanraj: Country, poor, India!
Me: Hmmm.
Dhanraj: Haha! Hindi is language of Hindustan!
Me: Yes, I --
Dhanraj: Hindustan! Language is Hindi!

Otherwise I mostly spoke Hindi during my first visit to Jawahar Nagar, since I went alone. On my second visit, I brought a translator so that I could start conducting interviews. Still, I spoke Hindi when I could and found I could generally get by.

On my first visit, I mostly just hung out with the family so that I could get to know the village and make friends with people there before I started my project. Kanku Bai’s daughter, Mohini, is 19 years old, and I quickly became friends with her. One day we went (with other female neighbors) to the river to wash clothes. As we were waiting for them to dry, we all jumped in the cool water and swam, which was so refreshing and wonderful in the midday heat. Otherwise in the middle of the day, there is nothing to do but nap. From 1pm to 3pm I was always ordered to “take rest,” and I would lie on one of the beds and doze, waking up every ten minutes dripping in sweat.

The nighttimes were cool and pleasant. After dinner (the spiciest vegetables I have ever hd) we all sat around on the patio outside and talked by candlelight. I was lucky enough to sleep on the roof of the house with Mohini and her little cousins. I fell asleep looking at the stars, and later in the night it got cool enough that I could sleep under the thick blankets – a welcome relief from my hot room in Udaipur.

I had a great picture to post but my camera has a virus at the moment. Maybe next time.