It's hot.

I just awoke from a nap in a hammock chair, sticky with sweat. Besides being pretty dirty, jet-lagged, and hot -- it was about 110 today -- I'm doing extremely well. I've retreated to the sole semi-air-conditioned spot we have to write my first official blog post from India (horray!).

It finally hit me that I'm back here in India on the 2-hour drive from the airport to Pondicherry area, where we're living. The familiar South Indian sights, scents and sounds were suddenly all around me: the drab brown landscape behind the bright, beautiful colors of women in saris; plastic bags and other trash scattered at the roadside being scavenged and chewed at by cows, goats and stray dogs; the smell of burning trash; dusty, dilapidated homes next to large, impressionable hotels; cars/auto-rickshaws/motorcycles/buses/trucks honking frantically as they swerve around each other on a highway where the foremost rule is that the biggest car has right of way; bare-bodied children peeing into ditches on the side of the road; their mother or father sleeping on the dirt ground a few feet away; roadside chai stands; the rubble of abandoned buildings; cows ambling across the street as cars try to honk them away. Unexpectedly, I felt an overwhelming sense of familiarity as I took in the sights.

Yesterday might have been the world's longest day. We arrived at the Chennai airport at 3:30 a.m. after 24 straight hours of travel. I had my first run-in with an Indian toilet - which consists of a basin in the ground that you squat over and if you're lucky flush by lever, but more often by manually flooding it with a bucket of water - at the airport. Once outside, the heat hit us like a very large sack of potatoes. Other students had many questions as they took in the sights during the ride from the airport, which the other TA (Sara) and I tried to answer. We stopped for breakfast at a rest stop area, and everyone experienced a South Indian breakfast: a large crepe-like pancake called a dosai filled with potato (my favorite), fried spicy donuts called vedas, spongy dough balls called idlys, and a thick, latka-like pancake with onions and veggies, all served with several spicy chutneys. Its often odd to bite into the spicy South Indian dosais and vedas first thing in the morning when my palate is expecting a fluffy, sweet American pancake or donut. But it's pretty delicious anyhoo.

When we finally got to the FERAL campus, we showered and immediately got sweaty again, even though we were sitting in a breezy and shady place. By the way, FERAL stands for Foundation for Ecological Research, Advocacy and Learning. It's an organization that Dr. Pelkey, an environmental science and economics prof at Juniata, helped found with an Indian couple he taught in grad school here. It's a great and growing organization, which runs many ecological initiatives to restore the surrounding barren wasteland and also women's "self-help" projects, which I can write more about later. It was amazing to see the FERAL staff people again, as well as the house-help ladies I became close with last summer.

Since this summer our student group is a large 14 people, split between two courses (Sustainable Agriculture, which I'm the TA for, and Gender, Class and Culture), the SusAg group got relegated to a nearby guest house compound called Reve, which we initially thought was pretty sweet, but we weren't quite set up well enough to enjoy the place. Instead, we enjoyed a series of unfortunate events. The electricity hadn't been turned on in our poorly-ventilated hut homes, so we slept our first night without fans or bugplugs in an oven-like climate; we would've stripped naked if there wasn't the fear of being butten, I mean bItten, alive by all sorts of critters. Even though we were sooo exhausted, it was a struggle to fall asleep (mom, you probably would've killed someone!). We woke up to the screeches of the resident peacock. Anyone ever heard a peacock? If not, imagine the sound of a crying baby mixed with a strangled cat, as Dr. Pelkey so adequately described. I went to set up breakfast to find that our bread had been enjoyed by some sort of scavenging critter, probably a rat, and we had no means of lighting the stove to make our oats and/or tea. There wasn't a fridge, as expected, so our milk to eat with our Indian cornflakes was warm. The kitchen was a bit in shambles, so the cups, plates and cutlery were questionable. Worst of all, we weren't sure which water jug, brought during the night, was the safe-to-drink one. Lucky for me, the SusAg group is incredibly awesome and incredibly hardkore, so we took it all in stride and got water and some fruit to eat as soon as we made it to our first field visit site. (We had salvaged what we could from the bread loaf, but were still quite hungry.)

Well, speaking of food (sapadaa in Tamil), it's time to get some dinner before we head back to Reve, which will be much more pleasant this evening, as much of the aforementioned issues have been resolved. AND, we get to have breakfast made for us here at FERAL tomorrow morning! Yum.

More soon. Post questions as comments if you have any, and I'll answer!
LOVE.