A Month Later...

It’s been a while since I’ve hopscotched my way through the trash-infused mud of SM Krishna Nagar. I recall the gutka wrappers, the piles of feces, the animals running wild, and the whole experience feels so close and so distant at the same time.

During my time in Hubli, I was asked repeatedly, “Can you imagine growing up here? In the slums?” My answer hasn’t changed since the beginning: I can’t. I can’t imagine going to school in a uniform that’s been discolored and tattered from overuse. I can’t imagine having a limited supply of water and not being able to bathe whenever I want. I can’t imagine going to school and not having a desk to work at and a chair to sit on.

Looking back on the project, I often feel proud of our team and the work we accomplished. We provided filters to 55 families, we developed an educational curriculum to increase awareness on proper sanitation practices, and, most importantly, we provided a potential solution to a problem the people had assumed to be out of their control. Then I remember the responses to one of our survey questions: “Why don’t you filter you water?” The overwhelming response was “We’ve always used this water. There is no need to change.”

While we may have raised awareness during the two months we were there, creating behavioral change involves a lot more than strangers coming into the community and declaring that change needs to be made. We hope to address this issue through our education workshops. We hope that the children will take the lessons they learn and relay that information to the rest of their families so that notions of bathing in boiled water being the cure-all and sour bore well water being potable are eliminated.

There is much more to growing up in the slums of SM Krishna Nagar than can be addressed by our project. The trash, the practice of open defecation, and the lack of proper clothing all make it painstakingly obvious that we, at best, nicked the tip of the iceberg.

“Successful people replace the words ‘wish’, ‘should’, and ‘try’ with ‘I Will’. Ineffective people don’t.”

That’s what we tried to do. Unfortunately, we were only able to start what we had planned to be a success. Now it’s up to the people of SM Krishna Nagar to do the same and want to make a change – starting with their water. Once they realize the importance of clean water and proper hygiene, maybe their eyes will open to recognize other arenas with room for change; at which point we’ll hopefully have another plan of action ready.

Speaking through Touch

A more responsible me would be packing right now. But I feel like I've left so much unsaid about India on this blog. Its definitely not for a lack of insights and excitement (my blogging absence has been the product of intermittent internet access, project business, and illness). There are a hundred little themes about India I could blog about right now: the food, the noise, the colors, the head-bob, the dogs, the trash, the "What is your country?"s... Anyone who has traveled to India knows each of these Indian tidbits well. But there's another aspect of Indian culture that I've noticed that I haven't heard mentioned much. Combined with my reading of a recent article from the Economist and viewing of the excellent new Pixar film WallE, I'd like to talk about that lost form of human communication: touch.

In India, people are just as fluent in "touch" as they are in the spoken word. Beggars in the street flock to me and any other white people in my company, touching our arms and gently tugging on our sleeves. We watch same-sex friends drape themselves over each other shoulders and interlock fingers and hands in the process. New acquaintances we meet smother our hand shakes in double-fisted hand pumps and warmly throw an arm around our shoulder like they're picking up their son from a tee-ball game.

So what are they all saying? Touch has a wide vocabulary but all of these people are generally saying the same thing: "I want to connect with you."

Touch is a way of building relationships. Harry Harlow's famous study of monkeys separated from their mothers showed that this is indeed one of the primary ways that a baby monkey builds a relationship with its mother (babies separated from their mothers and any other soft touch showed extremely high levels of stress whereas babies whose mothers were replaced by terry cloth towels bonded with the soft touch of the towel just as they would to the soft touch of a mother). The same is true of humans.

Yet the shift to internet communication, the cult of personal space, and homophobia in the US has greatly reduced our fluency in "touch" in America. Sure we still shake hands with new acquaintances and hug old friends but we often seem to do so out of tradition, rather than a genuine desire to embrace. And a touch for the sake of tradition doesn't communicate much. It can also be easy to think that emails, video chat, and text messages can communicate just as much as anything we do or say in person, but the fact is we're still biological creatures with evolved needs.

Fortunately, as any student of a foreign language who has returned to their former study abroad location after years at home, though languages fade fast without practice, they revive themselves in our minds almost as quickly with practice.

So try something this week. Next time you really want to show some gratitude, say it with touch.

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.

"Only In India..."

I came back from dinner today from Ambesh (our favorite restaurant, which, by the way, is entirely vegetarian!) and flipped the switch to my room – only to find that my fan and light weren’t working. I was confused, because all of my neighbors had their lights on. Just to make sure that I wasn’t crazy, I made my way through the dark to the outlet on the wall, and plugged in my power adapter. After flipping the toggle at the outlet and getting the little red light to go on, I realized that my room had power, at least to the outlets, but for some reason the ceiling light and fan just weren’t turning on.

I decided to venture down the hall to ask one of my neighbors why my lights weren’t working. I found one of the rooms where voices were audible from the hallway and gave a nock. There was an indecipherable answer, but I opened the door to a few Indian fellows (in both literal senses of the word, haha…) that were sitting on their respective beds, just chatting, one of them with a laptop perched on their lap. Upon explaining them my situation, one of them smiled at me, bobbled his head back and forth in a manner that you would have to be here or understand Indian culture to picture, and walked me back to my room.

He simply flicked a switch outside of my room, which sent the fan whirring and the ceiling light ablaze. I hadn’t even seen the switch, but apparently they’re installed so that the building supervisors have the ability to turn off your lights and fans (to save power) while you are gone – without having to get keys and enter your room without your permission. All-in-all a good system, but I did not even think that there could be an external power supply to my room. My Indian friend, however, stuck around afterwards just to chat.

When I sat down to take off my shoes, he sat down as well. I’m not sure if he thought I was inviting him to conversation (I wasn’t), or if he was curious and wanted to start one himself (more likely), but we just started talking about each other, school, and our respective involvement with the Deshpande foundation here in Hubli. I still hate how bad I am remembering names, but I cannot remember his… nor those of his five friends that somehow found out that their pal was chatting with the American down the hall.

We spent at least an hour talking about everything from Indian geography, American geography, Indian culture and language groups, the San Diego Zoo, the Kashmir region of India, Yellowstone Park, India-Pakistan relations (a touchy subject), the Golden Gate Bridge, India-China relations (also a touchy subject), Indian nuclear politics, and a good deal more. One of the men that joined me spoke wonderful English (he studies for two years at Missouri University in Kansas City), and another one of the fellows was comparatively talkative. He seemed to have a bit of a speech impediment, but had a wonderful vocabulary and was perhaps the most talkative. The other four talked less than the main two ( I think they knew less English, or were simply less confident), but all knew enough English to get things across, although sometimes they had to help each other pick the right word, or I would have to

I’ve learned a few things about Indian culture – more accurately, some limited observations about a select group of Indians, as well as a couple anecdotes – and I would like to share them with you:

1.) They care about two things – “India, and girls”. That one made me smile.

2.) They are really up to date on current events, politics, and the history of their nation. More so than the average student back in the U.S., even more so than the average USC student. Perhaps a “World Class University” is nothing more than a meaningless saying, because these men needed no appellation of the sort to know what was going on in their country and the World. One of them even taught me something about the history of U.S. geopolitics in the subcontinent, and taught me something about a pending Bill in the U.S. legislature that I hadn’t even heard of.

3.) There is a good deal of animosity towards Pakistan and China here. This may be a taboo subject to talk about, but this may not be evident to everyone reading this. Suffice it to say, that I have made the best attempt here to address the subject with tact and balance. The following is my attempt at a history lesson, in order to better contextualize my previous statement.
In 1947 India and Pakistan (then Pakistan included Bangladesh) were partitioned from Britain, and effectively freed of colonial rule. The countries currently known as Pakistan and Bangladesh were then one Muslim-majority country known as Pakistan. The country we currently know as India was called India, but was led by a group of kings in a quite decentralized government. In 1951 the constitution of India was ratified by all of the states, and the rule of the kings was ended. India now has a President, a parliament, and a Prime Minister (India is a Secular Socialist Democratic Republic). Pakistan is somewhere between a democracy and a theocracy (you can be the judge of that, given recent political developments). There is a region between India and Pakistan called Kashmir that is claimed by both India and Pakistan (India controls 2/3 of the area, Pakistan 1/3), and it has been a source of conflict since 1947.

In 1962, China invaded parts of eastern India, beat up on a bunch of Indian Army units, and then left. We didn’t go much into why, but rest assured that they were “thrashed” (as my friend put it) pretty badly. In 1971, when Pakistan (then Pakistan and Bangladesh) had a civil war when Bangladesh wanted to break away from Pakistan to form its own country, India supported the people of Bangladesh and helped to kick the Pakistani army out of Bangladesh (subsequently leaving and letting Bangladesh establish itself as a sovereign nation). The Indian military also “thrashed” (as my friend put it) Pakistan for good measure.

Add in the fact that India and Pakistan both detonated nuclear test weapons in 1998-99, and the fact that there are suspicions that China gave nuclear weapons to Pakistan, to all of the history in the past two paragraphs, and perhaps you can see why some animosity exists.

4.) They are extremely patriotic. They love their country, and are very proud of it. Multiple times during our conversation the phrase “only in India” would come up, and it was usually very appropriate. For example, India has 26 different states with thousands of languages and many different cultures. Another interesting tidbit is that one of India’s past Prime Ministers did not speak Hindi. During an address to the nation he presented a speech that he had written in Kannada (a regional language), and had been translated into Hindi (the national language), and then back into phonetic Kannada such that he could pronounce the words (which in Hindi he did not understand, but had written the speech in Kannada so he clearly knew the content) in a way that would sound Hindi and be understood by all listening.

For comparison, this would be akin to the United States electing a president that spoke only Spanish. The president would write the State of the Union Address in Spanish, and then a translator would turn the speech into English for the President. Then, the translator would convert that speech back into phonetic Spanish such that the Spanish-speaking President could clearly pronounce the English words that he had no understanding of what they meant (beyond the fact that the original content of his Spanish language speech would be preserved because he, of course, had written it).

If that is too mind-boggling to understand, then join me in saying “Only in India!”

New Friends

To start off, here’s a little peek at the fabulous Deshpande wedding we attended this past weekend. Don't they make a beautiful couple? It was an amazing experience and we made many new friends.

Some of our new friends attend the school right next to the ladies’ hostel where we’re staying. The other day at the canteen, Kimmie met the headmistress, who was kind enough to invite us for a tour. We expected the tour to be no longer than half an hour, but actually ended up staying for an hour and a half. Lalita, the assistant to the headmistress, spoke English well and took us around to just about every classroom. The school has 1,700 students ranging from ages 2½ to 17, and we met all 1,700 of them. We were both a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of kids shouting “Good Morning Madam” and all of their excited attempts to shake our hands, but I think the award for most lasting impression goes to the warmth and generosity that embraced us with each person we met. Kimmie recognized some of the little boys from the Deshpande wedding, and I recognized Aishwarya, a girl we randomly met on the streets of downtown Hubli the day before. Now, every time we pass by the school, all the children wave from their classrooms and run toward us to shouting "Hi! How are you? Fine!" with the biggest smiles on their faces.

It costs 6,000 rupees a year to attend this school, and the headmistress told us that these students come from fairly well off families. Nevertheless, here is a glimpse of their water source:

Just seconds before this picture was taken we saw children taking turns drinking straight from that faucet at the end. Especially after getting to know these kids, we were reminded of our purpose here and are all the more motivated to improve the water conditions here.