Welcome to India...

After one week in India, I feel thoroughly immersed and engaged within a culture that I could have planned for, but could never have been fully prepared for. Hubli is a town which, as my team member Nanda keenly expressed on our second day in India, seems to encompass small parts of the entirety of the country. It is neither completely urban nor completely rural, and I would argue that a great part of its character is drawn from this metropolitan ambiguity. The outskirts -where the college that we are stationed at is located - are still marked by the incessant heartbeat of rickshaw and bus horns that denote the audible identity of the city, but these horns are less frequent and can't overpower the lush vegetation or the smells of streetside "hotels" (restaurants) and their daily edibles. As one travels deeper into the heart of Hubli, that which was green and still and organic surrenders to pavement, dirt, and an overwhelming storm of constant human motion. Downtown Hubli is another creature indeed, and the density of people often forces one to wander into the street and brave the ballet of three-wheeled rickshaws as they dive precariously between the occasional car or bus. I've loved the opportunity to slip between these two worlds and am beginning to understand the inability of a word such as "developing" to describe a nation such as India. In one place the country may be changing and building at a blinding pace and yet in others the the people and community remain remarkably stagnant and unhurried. To be honest, I have not yet decided which of these is preferable (if there is such a preferance to be had). As a fascinating 70-year-old man on the plane from Mumbai to Hubli told me, "Development is a false God of the West...Before India started 'developing', all the answers its people needed were found in the villages, in the temples, and in one's own family." It was a blunt but resonant challenge to many of the preconceived notions that I had been fostering regarding my purpose on this trip, and perhaps one which I am unfit to either refute or cede to anytime soon. The best I can do is to take his words as an impromtu hypothesis to be tested with vigor and dedication, and hope that our work here with public health awareness and advanced water filtration can provide some legitimate bridges between both the new and the old.