Camels, and Monkeys, and Goats-- Oh My!

I looked out the window of the bus to see a camel, hair shaved into ornate designs, pulling a cart full of fruit. Then a huge Reebok billboard met my gaze: the backside of a woman seemingly only wearing bathing suit bottoms and a t-shirt. Our first bus ride in India, from the airport to the IDEX office, felt like a crazy dream to me. After flying all night and sleeping on the cold tile floor of the Mumbai airport during our midnight to 6 am layover, I was a little wiped. I was unable to focus enough to determine whether or not the things I was seeing were actually real, or abstract figments of my exhausted mind. Reaching our destination, IDEX, our partner NGO here, greeted us as their office with chai. The rest of the day was spent lounging around on the cushioned floor and having orientation talks before (surprise!) we met our homestay families around 5.

Here in India, we have homestay partners again. I’m with Hannah and am loving it so far. Our host family lives in Duleshwar Garden, which is in C Scheme (for anyone familiar with Jaipur.) We’re in walking distance to restaurants, two malls, and Central Park. Maddie and McKinley live two blocks away as well. My host mom, Reeta, and host dad, Rakesh, are very nice. We also live with Anant, their son, who I’m guessing is in his late 20s/early 30s. Hannah and I live on the ground floor of the house. Grandma (we don’t know her actual name) and Sujith, the housekeeper, also live down there. Grandma is pretty old and spends most of her time in bed but occasionally will get up and walk past the door to our room. We know she’s coming because we can hear heavy breathing and footsteps (picture Darth Vader in the form of an old, kind Indian woman.) I’m not gonna lie, it’s a little creepy. But she’s actually really sweet and will occasionally pop her head into our room and laugh or smile. Sujith sleeps on a mattress on the floor in the family’s prayer room. When we first got here, Hannah and I didn’t know the appropriate way to act toward him, since the caste system still does exist here. We don’t interact with him much, other than saying hello and thank you as we cross each other’s paths. We want to try to get to know him better, once we find out if it’s okay for us to do that… An outside staircase connects our section of the house to the second floor (where an Italian couple lives,) then to the third floor, which is where the family lives. Their floor is nicer and newer and definitely less dungeon-like than our section of the house. The stair case continues up to the roof, which is a flat, open space that you can fly kites on or do whatever else you choose. It’s so nice to sit up there on a sunny day, like I’m doing right now.

The past few days, I’ve been getting to know the city a little better. Turns out, the sights I saw on our first bus ride were not, in fact, hallucinations. It’s just India. Camels, monkeys, pigs, goats, chickens, and dogs roam the streets. Fruit stands and tuk tuks are everywhere. Brightly-clad women balancing baskets on their heads line the sides of the road. Kites circle and dive above the tops of houses. And then there are the less-appeasing sights, like men peeing on the sides of the road; poor women and children pleading for money, food, anything; piles of dung from all of the wandering animals. I can’t even describe Jaipur—the words that come to mind right now are vibrant chaos. It’s a big change from China, and has taken some adjusting to. For women, clothing is important to pay attention to. We are supposed to wear long pants and cannot wear tank tops or tops cut too low. Even around our homestays they advised us to be careful of wearing capris. For our work, we need to wear traditional Indian dress. So we all went to the market to buy our own traditional Salwar Kamez, a loose tunic-y dress with pants or leggings. They're so comfortable, I think I may start wearing them at home!

In the mornings, Hannah and I wake up and head upstairs to breakfast at 9, which is always followed by a cup of chai. Then we catch a tuk tuk in hopes of getting to our worksite by 10. That doesn't always go as planned though. On our first day, we got a tour of the city (and the slums) when our tuk tuk driver circled us all around and got out at one point to talk to friends and drink chai, and got to work a half an hour late. At our worksite, Go Sew Sangh, they raise cows and use their byproducts for pretty much everything you can think of, besides meat. They milk them; use their manure for compost, which they utilize on their organic farm; water down the dung to make biogas to use in their kitchen and cars; and make naturopathic medicines from the byproducts as well. For the past few days, I’ve been working on biogas. The first day, we hosed water into a pit of cow dung, which then flowed into a holding tank. An anaerobic process ferments the bacteria and a few chemistry lessons later the gas is compressed and available for use. It seems to be a very sustainable process, as they even use the left over dung as fertilizer on their farm. I learned that biogas can even be made with human waste! The problem I noticed is that it seems a bit water-intensive. 25L of water and 25kg of dung are required to make one cubic meter of gas. I’m interested in doing more research into whether or not this method could be successful on a larger scale. The next day, we shoveled fertilizer onto a cart drawn by bulls, which we proceeded to ride over to the field, where we’d unload our pile. The facilitators at Go Sewa are hilarious. Three old men lead our groups around and inform us on the various parts of their farm. My favorite quote by Dr. Bhundary is “age is no boundary, look at the playboy man who marries 25-year-olds!” After work, we always have a cup of chai.

For lunch, we head back to IDEX and eat on their rooftop. After that, we have our seminars or other afternoon activity. Dinner at our homestay is usually around 8. My family is vegetarian, and our lunches are vegetarian as well. So let’s just say I’ve been missing meat. I was searching for non-vegetarian restaurants all week that I could eat at on the weekend, and today I finally got some chicken! Other than the lack of meat though, the food tastes good! And of course, there’s chai. I have at least two cups every day, but I don’t think I’ll get tired of it! I hope not. Fun fact: chai is the hindi word for tea.

The weather has been cooler than we expected. It’s in the high 60s during the day, and gets chillier at night. Our host parents always tell us how freezing it is for them, but I’m just happy that it’s warmer than China! So far at least…

I wish everyone the best of luck in the new year! I spent my New Year’s Eve at the program leaders’ house with everyone else that didn’t have plans with their host families. We played games, watched a movie, and celebrated with poppers and horns at midnight. The next morning after breakfast, we even streamed the ball drop in New York!

I can’t believe it’s only been a week—there’s so much to tell! But I’ll stop here for now.

Namaste!