march came out of nowhere

I left home six weeks ago Monday, and I've been in India for five! This week after Aligarh I've been in Delhi for class, but this post is coming at you from a bus somewhere in Rajasthan. I think it's time for a travel map gadget for this thing so distance can be visualized... I'll work on it. This is a pretty disjointed account of the past week in Delhi, but here are the highlights:

So...

Last weekend, after Aligarh, I stayed home and got to relax with my homestay family. I watched another Bollywood movie with Aamir Khan (I think it’s in his contract that he has to cry melodramatically at least 6 times per movie). On Saturday I ran some errands, took Coco for a walk (I’m trying to win over the beast… and it’s *kind of* working), and went out to dinner with some of the other girls who had stayed in Delhi for the weekend. We had Italian food at a swanky Delhi place, which was great, but I easily spent more that night than I do on 4 Indian dinners (about $12). Still not terribly expensive, but when you compare what you could get, it was a crazy comparison. But it was nice to see some Delhi nightlife. I think my homestay mom worries that we don't get out enough (which is ridiculous because we're constantly traveling/working/sightseeing) and laughed when I came home at 9 ("You're already back??") despite the fact that our program told us we shouldn't be out past 9/930. Hmm...

This past week of schooling consisted of very intensive Hindi, and it’s going pretty well. We had our Hindi midterm on Friday. At this point it's just straight memorization - basic tenses and some vocabulary. In the next few weeks we'll be moving to mostly oral exams and testing out ability to use the knowledge we've gained. The coolest thing about learning Hindi is the reaction of Indians to our meager attempts. The girls in one village in Udaipur were so giggly when some of us said just simple phrases. So few foreigners (even students) make attempts to learn Hindi since almost everyone speaks English, but that's not the case in the rural areas that we visit (in these areas, most people speak 2 languages: their local tongue in addition to Hindi which they learn in school). Everyone is so encouraging when you can make even small attempts at the language, though I try to limit the situations where I use it because, for example, mispronouncing directions to a rickshaw driver when they clearly speak English is just plain condescending. 

Other news...We decided on locations for our one week internship. In a few weeks I will be traveling to a rural village near Mumbai/Pune called Jamkhed to see an NGO at work! I am SO EXCITED for it! We had four locations to pick from, and it was my first choice, and my favorite teacher, Abid-ij, is going on the trip too. The organization that we are going to see is called the Comprehensive Rural Health Project. More soon on specifics. I do know that we are staying in a guest house owned by the NGO, and that it will take 20 hours by train to get there. We're also going to be visiting some famous caves and temples in the area (!!!). To be honest, this trip does intimidate me (much hotter location, probably filled with bugs, and I can't imagine that the running water situation will be that sophisticated), but I picked it because it was the one of the four options that truly interested me, and I didn't want to let the challenge scare me off (ask me again if this was a wise decision when I get back...). At this point, bugs, bucket showers, and Indian style toilets are less of a big deal. We shall see. 

The other development is the Independent Study Project (ISP). Every SIT program has this component: a three and a half week project wherein we get a stipend to go almost anywhere and conduct our own research, resulting in a 30-35 page paper and a presentation. The ISP is at the end of the program, and you get Rs 32,000 to budget out in a formal proposal and conduct your own research on a topic that interests you. I won't be in class during those 3.5 weeks; instead, I'll be researching, conducting interviews, and analyzing the NGO that I intend to visit. I had to type up the draft of of my formal proposal for this past week, and right now I am planning on staying in Jaipur with a public health advocacy/activist organization called Prayas Chittor. The ISP used to intimidate me a lot (3.5 weeks in India by myself?) but all of the excitement around it and hearing everyone's cool plans have made me look forward to it more and more. 

Anything else.... hmm.. for most of this week we just came home after school and worked since we had so much due! Our lecturers included a guy who talked about health care financing (Mikey - you would have liked him), a woman from the government working on malnutrition who knew of the Tufts Nutrition School (!!), a guy who talked about communicable and non communicable diseases (which unfortunately was a boring review of everything I learned at Tufts about Epidemiology - I probably would have thought he was a better lecturer if the information had been new to me). 

I bought a pair of CRAZY pants. They're called patialas, and if I ever need to smuggle some small children, they could easily hold a few. They have every color of the rainbow. I'm pretty excited to bust 'em out on this excursion.

This past weekend before we left for Udaipur we watched Jab We Met with our homestay family, ate pizza (see previous post...), and on Saturday went to Dilli Haat market for a concert. I shopped around and got a cool incense burner for someone at home (your identity will remain a mystery, muwahhaha!):

The concert was by an Indian/Western fusion band called Indian Ocean. Our homestay family are HUGE fans, and have all of their CDs. The concert was in honor of International Women's Day, and everything was sponsored by an NGO called Care International that works on female empowerment. This is one of their songs that I really liked; it's a Bengali folk song about a river called Ma Rewa (literally "Mother River"):

Also, Aura insisted that Molly and I get hairwraps at Dilli Haat. She got two pink and silver ones down each side of her head, and I went for purple and silver. Flashback to age 12... except these aren't $1 an inch on the Ocean City Maryland boardwalk; instead they're Rs 20 (about 50 cents) for the whole thing.

I also got a new bag at Dilli Haat to use this week on the excursion for about 4 dollars. This is the pattern:

When we got home I showed Avigit and Jaorti my scrapbook of Tufts people, friends from home, and my family. It was interesting to explain what AOII was.

Sunday afternoon Molly and I frantically hand washed our kurtas and packed for our excursion to Udaipur and Chittorgarh. I brought Old Bay seasoning as a homestay gift from home, so Jaorti and I made lunch! It was my first salad in a looooooong time, and we were going to broil fish but lost power (happens a few times a week in India) so fried it instead. It was worth it for Arko to tell me "Maachli tasty hai" (Fish is tasty!). They liked Old Bay and said that it "tasted very Indian." We had salad with all kinds of veggies and hard boiled eggs, I made some honey vinaigrette (a new taste for them), fried sole in Old Bay, bread, and french fries. I also told them about my brother Joey teaching me to make his famous five hour spaghetti sauce as my Xmas gift, and have now been charged with that as my "next assignment.'

Within a few hours, we boarded a train for our 14 hour overnight journey to Udaipur. At time of writing, the Udaipur portion of my excursion is over, and I hope to blog about it in the next day or so. It is the most beautiful place I have ever visited, and I got some really good pictures!

Love,

laura

ps. Indians have issues with the "w" sound because it doesn't exist in Hindi. Instead they use "v." This means that last week at the program center, Dr.Azim told us when Dominoes arrived that chicken and "wedgie" pizza was served. Ew.