Reminders of true innocence, happiness

As our group was waiting for our bus from a farm in Kodaikanal - a lush green mountain town at 7,300 feet - there were two young boys nearby. They looked seven and five. Our group stood amongst ourselves, chatting. The boys leaned against a masoned rock wall. I made eye contact with them and smiled. They shyly smiled back. In my little Tamil, I said hello and asked their names. They understood me and told me their names, but I quickly forgot. These boys leaned against that rock wall, the masses of green growth a beautiful backdrop behind them. I took a picture.

Then I took another.


Slowly, but quickly in the scheme of things, they warmed up to me. I handed the camera to the older boy and showed him how to take a picture. After a few blurry pictures of the ground, he refocused on his brother's face and started clicking away. As the pictures he took popped up on the review screen, he smiled and giggled and giggled and smiled. Then the camera was passed on to his brother, who took some more photos. Witnessing their laughs and playfulness was like peering into another world, a world of true innocence and happiness.

Holiday in Kumily

This post will mostly be me gushing about our last several days. I am having an AWESOME time!

I'm writing from a small room on the side of a post office in a cute mountain town called Kumily. Most of our student group travelled here for a 4-day vacation. This town is know for its nature reserve called Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary, a beautifully preserved area full of wild elephants, bisson, boars, sambar (an Indian species of deer), monkeys, otters, turtles, birds, frogs, spiders, leeches, and a vast wealth of flora-- including plants/trees of cinnamon, cardamom, pepper, ginger, tumeric, vanilla...pretty much everything! The other day, five of us took a guided 3-hour nature walk through the area, where we saw all of the above things except for elephants. But later in the day, we took a boat ride on the Periyar lake, and among the above things again, we saw a family of wild elephants! It was from a distance; our boat couldn't go too close to shore because the water was too shallow. I almost preferred to see them from the distance; these elephants, unlike others I've seen, are actually wild and free, and I'm glad that we weren't quite able to breach that boundary. It was soo cool to see them and their trunks swinging away. I was able to get some pictures, but I'm not sure how they came out yet. During our jungle walk, we each attracted a few leeches, but luckily we had rented some $0.50 leech socks, which are a thick canvas that you wear in your shoes/sandals to keep the leeches away from your feet.

Yesterday, we went to see a local tea plantation and factory, which was SO cool. As far as the eye could see, there were hills covered in tea plants. In the factory, we watched as the fresh tea leaves were thrown down a shredding shoot. Below, they landed on a conveyor belt, which took them through a series of five presses. Then they went through a tumbler to be dried. After that, they transferred to another grinder, and then into a firer. There the leave bits are roasted, and they come out small, very hot, grainy pieces. A sieve conveyor belt separated the grain sizes, and the finest of the fine grained tea was so very fine. The tea is cleaned and then sent nearby to be packaged. It was amazing to see the whole operation. Outside, we walked around the plantation and took in the beautiful sights. We passed many houses of the factory workers and met several children who asked us for pens and candy.

Next we went to a two-acre spice garden, called Abraham's Spice Garden, which was amazing. Abraham runs a garden that his father began in 1952; now the garden, which is completely organic, is producing every Indian fruit/vegetable/herb you can imagine. Abraham led us on a tour through the garden, along the way letting us taste, smell and photograph. One of my favorites to taste was the rose apple, which is a small tree fruit. We had it when it wasn't quite ripe, so it was a bit tart, but I think that's the reason that I loved it! He also let us try two different varieties of bananas that he grows there. We also simply touched our tongues to the inside of some chilly pepper, and still felt the burning effects. It was a wonderful visit, and we all agreed that we'd love to have the life that Abraham does. His father, now quite an older man, tagged along on the tour, occasionally picking leaves and herbs, crushing them, and passing them to me to smell or taste. He didn't speak English, but he treated us so nicely. I loved meeting him as well, to grasp the family lineage of the beautiful garden.

Later, we treated ourselves to one-hour, full-body ayurvedic massages...ooo la la. It's very different than an American massage; less work and pressure on specific areas, but more repetitive rubbing/chopping and lotttts of oils. My masseuse was a very small Indian woman, whose hands were so tiny. Yet she was able to reeeeeally work my muscles! It was a bit awkard at first, what with the nakedness, but once the massage started I was able to relax and enjoy. :)

We met a group of 5 Indian men at our homestay, who were taking a holiday for one of their birthdays. They were very, very nice. They are from Hydrabad in the state of Andra Pradesh, which according to them has the best food in India (and the made sure to tell us that when Bill Clinton visited, he came to Hydrabad and loved their traditional dish, chicken biriyani!). They were unhappy with the local food, so they bought rabbit, fish and chicken from the market and prepared lunch and dinner themselves. They invited us to join, so we spent the evening hanging out with them, which was actually quite fun. They were very respectful of us, but we also had many laughs and jokes together. They taught us a card game that they call Sequence, which I think is pretty much what we call Rummy. So we played that for a while, which was really enjoyable. Then we had the fish and chicken, with rice and paratha bread they bought, and it was deeeeeeeeelicious-- seriously, the best food that I've had while I've been here. It was really spicy, but really good. At midnight, the men brought out a cake for their friend's birthday and we sang happy birthday. The "candle" in the cake was a burning cigarette. They cut the cake and we ate most, but some of it was smeared on the birthday boy's face by his friends. They were a really fun bunch, and they spoke very good English so it was easy to communicate. I'm really glad we had that genuine experience.

This morning, we woke up early to go see, bathe and ride captive elephants. I really was hesitant to go; I feel horrible when I see the elephants with chains around their legs; how can we render such a large, powerful animal so helpless? But I went along with our group, and I'm guess glad that I did. Although I reeeally don't appreciate what the trainers do to the elephants to domesticate them, it was so special to be able to touch and be near this elephant. Her name was Maria. We also saw a mother and baby elephant, and the baby was so adorable. He came towards us and wrapped his trunk around our hands as he smelled us.

Today we also spice-shopped. This area is a major spice trading center, so pretty much every other store on the street is a spice shop. The man who runs our hotel, Suresh, is very very sweet and helpful in acquainting us with the town, but he also knows how to work us westerners. He took us to a spice supermarket, where afterwards I found out I got majorly ripped off. Suresh had insisted that we go there because the prices are "better," but when I stopped into several shops afterwards, I found the spices were being sold at nearly 50% the price that I had paid. I have one word: commission. I know that this is part of the game, but I was pretty annoyed, and I am going to talk to Suresh about it this evening.

Right now, we are about to go see a kathakali show, which is a traditional south Indian drama. It actually starts in half an hour, so I gotta run!

Tomorrow morning, we set out from Kumily towards another hill town called Kodaikkanal. It's also a wonderful small town. Hopefully I can load some pictures there and post them for you to see.

Thanks for reading!!!

Morattandi temple festival

The local village of Morattandi recently had one of their summer temple festivals, in which Hindus join around the temple to pay homage to the gods in different ways. Sumathi and Chitra, the two primary house-help girls at FERAL for the students, took our group down to see the festival one afternoon. We loaded on SPF 50 sunscreen and set off, bottles of homemade Gatorade and cameras in tow.

When we got down to the temple, after a short hike through the dry sandy landscape from the FERAL property to the Morattandi village, there were many people gathered around the temple. We gaped at the temple that stood before us- it was a fairly modest structure, but it had been dressed up with lights, coconut palms and streamers of flags (the kind we see at American auto dealers).

Inside the temple was a large, unadorned room with a high ceiling. The crowd was making its way towards the back, where a smaller room with a shrine was located. I'm not completely sure what was going on back there, to tell the truth; I didn't want to push my way through. But suddenly a bell rang and out came a man with a flat metal bowl, in it a burning, scented smudge and a swirl of white and red powder. As the man with the bowl passed, each person wafted some of the smudge smoke toward her face and took a pinch of the powders and carefully put in on her forehead. I watched carefully, and with encouragement from Sumathi I took the smoke to my face as he passed.

Back outside, a group of bright-faced, friendly boys -- probably ages 5-8 -- swarmed around us. They practiced their introductory English on us: "Hello, how are you?"; "Name, please?"; "From where are you coming?" When they saw we had cameras, they asked for pictures ("Picture, please."). After I snapped a few photos, they ran to my side to see them on the camera's digital review screen. Their faces beamed as they laughed, pointing to the pictures and spouting exclamations in Tamil. When they'd seen them all, they'd quickly run a few feet away and pose for another photo. So I took more photos, and they'd run back to see them.

It was apparent that it was a treat for these village boys to be photographed and to see photos of themselves. They knew to come look at the pictures on the review screen, so perhaps they'd been photographed by someone with a digital camera before. More likely, though, these boys had heard about digital cameras from friends who had friends who'd been photographed by one.

Our photo shoot was interrupted when Chitra motioned for me to come inside the temple. I went to see what was happening, but I wasn't ready for what I saw. A man was standing up who'd just had limes hung from his face and chest by string tied to needles, which were punctured through his top layer of skin. I was shocked and for a moment wanted to run out of the temple. But because Chitra was at my side, I felt okay, and I stayed. Then, a young boy who looked to be 4 or 5 was approaching the chair. He looked so afraid. His elders plopped him into the chair to be next, and he began to cry. I watched as they pinched his skin, fed him banana and slid the first needles through. I looked at Chitra, motioned to the scene and asked, "Why?" But she didn't quite understand my question or didn't know how to explain, so she just said, "No pain." I looked one last time at the crying boy, and then we left.


On the walk home, Sumathi and I were talking as we brought up the rear. I told her what I had seen and asked why it was done. She explained in broken (but excellently understandable) English that this practice is done to a person after his/her serious sickness has broken; it is an act of gratitude towards the gods. The man and the little boy must've been very sick, but now they are healthy and want to show their devotion to the forces that healed them. Dr. Pelkey later told me that the acts of piety can come in many forms, but usually involve making a pledge to the gods that you will do something -- hang items (such as limes) from your skin, carry rocks on your head for a week, fast, walk backwards, basically anything out of your normal routine. I saw one girl in the temple who was in a squatted position, holding her ankles and moving by wobbling from one foot to the other. This is called the "frog walk," and it's a common manifestation of a pledge.

It's very hard for me to understand the intricacies of Hinduism, but I'm trying not to judge these demonstrations of Hindu faith by my learned American societal norms. It's just so interesting that these practices are very common here, but I've never heard of them at home. We're literally a world away.

Volli-bhall

I think I'll learn most of my Tamil (the regional Indian language, spoken only in Tamil Nadu and northern Sri Lanka) from the pick-up volleyball games played here every evening on the resident dirt court. The court is a new addition since last summer; I remember mentions of a plan to build a court, but I had taken it as a joke. Well, now it's here, and it's the hot spot to be in the early evenings, about an hour before the sun sets so that it's actually cool enough to move a muscle without breaking a fierce sweat. It's located amidst the exotic acacia trees, which have more or less "become native" to this area because they're so successful as a pioneer species. They grow quickly even in heavily degraded soils and then provide a cover to allow other actual native plant species to take root.

Here's a picture of the court. It was getting dark, so it's a bit hard to see, but try to look closely!:


Anyway, a few of us went down to hop in the game. I touched the ball a couple times, and sometimes it went where it was supposed to go! But most of the time, some guy would jump in front of me to receive the ball, just as it seems most competitive men do worldwide. My feet were covered in dusty orange dirt by the end of it all, but my forearms less so.

Don't you guys have Home Depot?

Yesterday afternoon, Dr. Pelkey and I went on a shopping trip into Pondicherry to pick up several items to use in our research. I was floored by the experience. It's kind of a "duhh" issue, but here there is no Home Depot, Wal-Mart, or other "everything" store; instead, there are streets and streets of small shops specializing in one type of item-- fans, piping, plastics (literally- they just sell random plastic things, like buckets, pencil cases, laundry baskets, deck chairs, soap cases), metal sheets, etc. This means that if you're doing a big project, you'll have to put aside a lot of time to stop by each store, pick out what you want, bargain with the shopkeeper, wait for him to pack up your purchase, watch him meticulously calculate the bill (which involves first determining the fee by writing out the calculation longhand, then with a calculator, then finally in the computer, which is not to be trusted!), and then finally move on to the next store. Of course, even the latter is difficult, as the roads of Pondicherry and most Indian cities are congested with moving cars, bikes, bicyclists and pedestrians, as well as parked cars, bikes, bicycles and sitting/sleeping/loitering pedestrians. If you live in Pondi and shop often, I'm sure that you gather a sense of the best places to shop to get a good price and good quality item. But for westerners Pelkey and me, it was a frustrating afternoon, but of course still an interesting adventure.

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.

Preparing for launch

Hi everyone!
This blog will serve as a means of communication with my loved ones as I spend the summer in India.

On Saturday, May 19, I'm flying to southern India, where I'll spend a month in Pondicherry being a "teacher's assistant" for a sustainable agriculture course I took (and loved) last summer.

Then, it's two weeks of travel with my wonderful boyfriend, Arman, who will be coming over for a 3-week-long sojourn. Details of our trip have yet to be finalized, but we're working on a train ride up through India's midland to the "Golden Triangle" - Dehli, Agra (home of the Taj Mahal), and Jaipur - then we'll make our way back south, stopping in Mumbai and maybe Goa. India is such a huge, diverse country, so we're trying to figure out how we'll tackle it in merely two weeks...

Once back in the Pondicherry area, I'll be a research assistant for my professor, Dr. Pelkey from Juniata, as we test the viability of several alternative fertilizers for organic vegetable gardening. Arman will stick around for one more week, as we put his handyman smarts to work with setting up the plots, etc., and I introduce him to my home there.

My return flight is for July 30, but it may be a bit later if our research needs a little more time.

I'll post when I'm able and when I have interesting things to say. Bookmark me- I'd love to have your comments as I do this blog thing.

Back to you soon, from India!