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.

In India, Shake of the Head Worth 1,000 Words

The colors, the people, the smells, the food, the attitudes around here are just incredibly....Alive. The only way to broadly conceptualize this place is as an incredibly dynamic organic mass that is intermittently woven between strands of chaos (the noise of auto-rickshaws, buses, motorcycles, etc.) and threads of great peace and stillness (the beautiful flowers being sold on the street, the Hindu aesthetics who implore you in broken English to match your academic education with a spiritual one of equal dedication, the generous smiles from complete strangers on the street). The soul of this place is not one which wishes to engage in "cultural exchange" or any sharing of differing lifestyles but instead something completely different - India seems willing to engulf you, in a sense which is both intimidating and liberating, into this all-encompassing mass of life. It is more than ready to look beyond surface diversity and assimilate individuals, even foreigners like myself, into a web of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians living amongst one another.

There is a great little idiosyncracy here that I have come to love and enjoy which illustrates this - the headbob. When in conversation, an Indian will often allow his head to bob from side to side (imagine a bobble-head doll on a plane stretching from shoulder to shoulder) that makes them seem as if some joint in their neck is loose. It is both goofy and disarming at the same time, and the best part is the beautiful ambiguity of its meaning. I've asked four or five people since I've been here exactly what the head-bob means, and I've gotten equally creative and divergent responses every time. To the best of my knowledge, it is simply a catch-all behavior to illustrate a very primal connection between two people - not agreement nor disagreement but unadulterated recognition. My best rationalization of the head-bob is a comparison to the African Zulu philosophy of "Ubuntu" - a word whose English translation roughly equates to "I am because you are" or "a person is a person through other persons". As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has posited the concept:

"A person with Ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed."

At least for myself, this philosophy rings true in a sense which is both very personal and very haunting. Having literally sludged through the muddy poverty at the slum of S.M. Krishna Nagar and talked for hours with its gracious inhabitants, I am both emboldened by their pride (which far exceeds their humble circumstances) and at the same time made weak when witnessing hopes for their children which may outlive their own time here on earth. How can a child become a doctor to heal others if he or she cannot even escape the dangers of contaminated water themselves. How can a child become a teacher if they do not even live long enough to finish their own schooling. I have seen too many portraits of lost sons and daughters on the walls of these small shanties to feel anything but "diminished" myself. S.M. Krishna Nagar is an area that can greatly benefit from small steps towards healthier habits and cleaner water, and in this abstract sense of mutual recognition the least we can do is work our hardest to provide these things. At the very least, we must present the opportunity to attain them. Only then will the promises implicit in the statement "I am because you are" begin to deliver themselves to the community of S.M. Krishna Nagar.

"India Time", Infrastructure, and Democracy

"India Time"

Hinglish (Hindi + English) can be a difficult language to pick up. In addition to accents, one must also deal with more nuanced matters.

Hinglish: Your food will be ready in 10 minutes, sir.
English: Hope you're not that hungry. It'll be about an hour.

Hinglish: Don't worry, the meeting will only take 20 minutes.
English: Cancel your dinner plans. You're not leaving for 2 hours.

Hinglish: Ok. We'll have the budget to you Friday night.
English: Is Wednesday morning ok?

Things just happen a bit slower in India. We have dubbed this phenomenon "India Time" and adjusted accordingly.

But why does it occur? Is it simply a part of Indian culture? Are Indians just procrastinators? It's the easy answer but easy answers are historically (a) racist and (b) wrong.

As a student of physics, I've always been encouraged to never be satisfied with an "it is what it is" answer and to always think one level deeper. So where does "India time" really come from?

Infrastructure

Try cooking Channa Masala for your hungry restaurant patrons when the entire city's water supply has been cut. Try making it to a meeting on time when the dirt roads wash out after the lightest rain and lines of cows grazing on the median create bovine road blocks. Or try writing up a budget in the dark because your power went out as soon as you arrived at the office.

Infrastructure makes up many of the little things that make life run smoothly. It makes sure your lights turn on in the evening, water comes out of your faucet when you want to wash your hands, and your bus arrives on time to take you to work. Its the magic that delivers resources right to your doorstep for cheaper than your ancestors could ever have imagined. It makes life comfortable, predictable, and easy to deal with.

But when its gone, so is the predictability. Its simply impossible to make accurate judgments on how much time something will take you if you can't be sure of what tools will be available.

Poor infrastructure gives rise to "India Time".

But what gives rise to poor infrastructure?

Democracy

*Note: I'm confident of the connection between between "India Time" and poor infrastructure, but this next one is a bit more of a stretch. Feedback welcome.

Thirty years ago, no one considered China and India to be modern nations. Today, that can still be said of India, but two Americans dropped in the middle of Manhattan and Shanghai would have trouble figuring out who'd been deported.

Two poor nations with billion-plus populations. Why such a big difference 30 years later?

Centralized planning.

While India and the rest of the western world were busy praising the freedoms of democracy, China's centralized government was redirecting rivers, building highways, and carefully planning its expanding cities. When you don't have to ask the country for money every time you want to do something, running a nation gets a little easier.

Don't get me wrong. Electing politicians and voting on everything is wonderful, but its extremely difficult to run a democracy in a poor nation. Democracies rely on educated voters and honest, concerned officials. But when voters are too busy working to make money to survive, they prioritize jobs over schooling, and, similarly, when politicians are barely paid a living wage, they prioritize their own families over the rest of their states and graft and corruption ensue.

This entire line of argument, however, reeks of first-world privilege, as in "We here in America are ready for democracy but you simply can't handle it" so let me make an important clarification.

Democracy in its current form doesn't work in poorer nations. The Western world (read: Britain and the US) continually promote Western forms of democracy in not-so-Western countries, but what developing nations really need is developing-nation-democracy.

Now what exactly constitutes developing-nation-democracy, I'm not quite sure. It's not an issue I've taken a great amount of time to consider, and I won't devalue the issue by offering something I made up on the spot.

But the issue is surely an important one, and I'm sure many people have studied it a great deal deeper than I.

What features should developing-nation-democracy have? How should it be set up? Or is there a form of government entirely different from democracy that would be better suited to the task?

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.

Nanda's arrival, health surveys and water testing...

Hello Everyone,
David and I arrived in Hubli airport after a grueling 23 hour flight journey where we were welcomed by a man carrying a placard of Deshpande Foundation. We squeezed in all the baggage in a small hatchback car and after asking around for the BVB Engineering hostel to a few autorickshaw drivers and watchmen at the BVB College of Engineering, we finally reached an apartment block which is currently under construction. We were so happy to meet up with the rest of the team. After a brief unpacking session, we headed off to the famous Ambesh hotel for our dinner to discuss the project details and future goals. I ended up spending the first 15 mins to half hour giving a detailed explanation of all the varied and exotic Indian dishes that were offered by Ambesh. The questions ranged from, “what is the difference between Dal Fry, Dal Palak and Dal Tadka?” to “What makes masala chai so tasty?” and “Can you ask the waiter to put less oil in my Veg. Kadai?”.... the questions were infinite and I was glad that I could answer most of them. I guess this trip so far has also been a learning experience for me as far as the Indian culture is concerned.
My notion of Hubli was a hot and arid place but it was just the opposite, it was nice and cool with light showers in the evening and so far mosquitoes have been a minimum compared to Honduras. The very next day we (David and I ) were on a mission (in fact every day has been one so far) to visit the Rajiv Gandhi Primary School at S. M. Krishna Nagar with Kim to get a feel of how to do the surveys. The majority of the people at Krishna Nagar are Muslims so they can speak fluent Urdu than Kannada, which made it easy for me to interact well with them. We were introduced to Mr. Mulla, the President of the Rajiv Gandhi School Trust and Mrs. Nirmala, Principal of the Primary School, they were very warm and welcoming. After this, we were taken by Irfan, a sixth grade student who is very active and chirpy with endless questions about America and about our project. I had fun talking to him in Urdu and he took us to another student's house where we did an extensive health survey to address the health and water issues they were facing. The two main problems that I was able to deduce from the surveys were:
The availability of water was scarce because only two out of the six bore wells were in working condition and the water comes to the houses once in every 5 to 6 days. Apart from this, the water that is sent by HDMC (Hubli-Dharwad Municipal Corporation) through the water trucks comes in every 8 or 9 days.
Due to the lack of water, the families in this area tend to store buckets of water over a period of time in their living room which was not more than 5ft by 3ft in area. The storage of stagnant water in these buckets and the lack of hygeine in their houses was a clear indication that bacterial contamination was present in their so called “potable water source”.
In the little time that we were there at their house, the family was very hospitable and offered us with coffee in small stainless steel cups. The coffee was delicious and milky. After our survey, I wanted to test the water quality by sending samples of water to the testing facility in Dharwad. The next day Kim and I headed to Dharwad with Mr. Jabashetti from Water Literacy Foundation to the laboratory to collect sterilized glass bottles and 2 litre plastic bottles for bacteriological test and testing of 14 parameters ( some of which include water's alkalinity, hardness, chloride, nitrate, phosphate levels etc) respectively. The bus ride from Hubli to Dharwad costs Rs. 8 and takes roughly 45 minutes. If you are lucky you might get a seat to sit otherwise its a bumpy ride with shoulders rubbing with six other people and head constantly hitting the roof of the bus as the Indian buses are not designed for people over the height of 6ft 2 inches. We traveled to Krishna Nagar and collected three samples of water:
Water that is supplied from the bore well to the school's roof top water tank.
Water that was stored in buckets in a nearby family's household where the water was initially collected from the Corporation's water truck.
Water from a very dirty and murky stream which runs around the side of Krishna Nagar.
The stream which is referred to as a “naala” by the locals is black in color with a pungent rotten smell of decaying organic matter. The stream is used by the local people at Krishna Nagar to wash their buffaloes and we found children playing nearby this “toxic” water. In order to collect the water, I forced myself to carefully walk my way through piles of garbage, human and dog feces which stunk so bad that my sense of olfaction was a little numb by the time I reached the banks of the black stream. I then closed my eyes and immersed my bare hands into the toxic water to collect samples for testing. As I got back, Kim had kept a tonne of hand sanitizer ready for me. We then rushed back to Dharwad and returned the samples of glass and plastic bottles to the lab. The tests would take three to four days to be ready and we had asked them to expedite the process so that we can collect results on the following Monday.
Yesterday, I went to Dharwad to collect the results and the following conclusions were drawn from the results:
School water contained 6 counts of bacteriological contamination whereas the maximum count that is permissible is 10. However, since we only did one sample to test, it is likely that this number could vary from time to time. Therefore, it is important to incorporate water filtration techniques to the school water to remove this contamination.
House water was shockingly at 58 counts of bacteriological contamination which clearly indicated that the particular household is consuming unhealthy water. This result does not help us to conclude that the water provided by the Corporation trucks are contaminated because it could be that the containers which the family used to store the water might have been the source of contamination. Nevertheless, the families are drinking unhealthy water which is highly prone to water borne diseases caused by pathogenic microorganisms.
Stream or “naala” water was obviously super toxic with over 1800 counts of bacteria....suggesting that even touching that water might cause mutation...I hope that I don't see some mutated growth on my right hand !
We discussed with Mr. Mulla and Mr. Sudhir (the Vice President of the School) about the results and they suggested to do one more test of the water that directly comes out of the water truck. We plan to do this on Monday...
I have lots more to tell but I have to leave to get some surveys tabulated in Excel...and organize a meeting with the Commissioner of HDMC, and plan out a Cleaning Camp event with the corporation, school and locals at Krishna Nagar...and of course get some dinner. It's been super busy here and that's exactly how I like it...
Thank you for reading my first post...I will upload some photos and I want to tell you all about our inauguration function at the School....till then good bye...
Cheers, Nanda

Exiting My Bubble to Understand the Realities of Poverty

While survey questions can become monotonous, each interviewee has a different story to tell. Within these stories there are new lesson to be learned…
The translator and I were asked to sit in chairs while the head of the household sat on the tiled floor. He was a strong, nice looking man who has four children and rents his home for 300 rupees/month ($7/month). I could tell he was a hard workingman as shown by the mud under his nails and dirt on his face; he is as a lacage worker (it is someone who collects piles of plastic bags for 1 rupee a sack). His wife works in the recycled paper industry, as there were two heaps of shredded papers in the corner of the small room. Their eldest son is 22 years old and is mentally disabled; the other children are 20, 18, and 13 years old.
During the interview I was relaxed until the one question which I personally dread asking arose…
Translator: “I am sorry to ask this question, we are just trying to learn about health problems in Hubli. Please forgive me, but has this family lost any children due to illness?”
I looked down at the sheet; the pen in my hand ready to slid over to check the “No” box. But I didn’t hear anyone speaking Kannada. I looked up to meet the eyes of the strong, large man; the base of them had filled up with water. He glanced down, fumbled with the wood chip in his fingers and drew it in a pattern on the floor…he then mumbled the answer.
Interviewee (translated): “Yes, he was 5 years old. Very ill, long time. I don’t know what it was.”
Under his breath the translator quickly directed me to move on, as he did not believe the interviewee would not be able to continue with the question.
I tried to keep myself together as I held my breath in the silent moment. The toddler who had been periodically coughing onto my forearm as she curiously played with my elbow had rested her fingers on my arm, she had seemingly understood that there was a change in the atmosphere. In the seconds of the small moment, I grew up. As a 22 year old myself, and despite being far from motherhood, I was hit with the reality of raising children in inescapable poverty with little access to health care.
I looked across the room at his mentally challenged son, then to his beautiful teenage daughter and thought to myself how fortunate they had a least been with her. But that didn’t help settle my feelings of injustice for this family, for their lack of rights to access adequate medical attention.
I swallowed my emotion and proceeded with the interview but my thoughts held onto the questions in my own mind of how undeserving this man is and the pain he has gone through in life with his family. He continued to answer the survey questions through the fog in his mind, now filled with the memories of his son.
For the rest of the survey the translator did his best to bring the interviewee back into the present moment. I continued transcriptions but was caught in understanding the complex realities of poverty brought forth from seeing the water swell in the stranger’s eyes.
In my mind I could not find the answer for why I have been so blessed in life and others have not. This man’s daily stresses in life are nothing compared to those of us who live inside a bubble of wealth, good health, and fortune.
While no human can possibly plan out how to spend his last day spent on earth, I must argue that for the thousands of people living in the underdeveloped world their chances of spending one more day on earth are much less than those of us living in the Western hemisphere. It is heart-wrenching to find that many of these parents cannot even afford to take the steps necessary to improve their child’s chances of survival.
I became uncomfortable sitting in his home, knowing that I will walk away never having to experience much of what he experiences on a daily basis. While he is tied down by the bindings of poverty, I have access to great health care, bountiful food, and incredible opportunities to further myself to make a substantial living. This man must take what he is given, continue to pick up plastic bags, and go home each day to find joy through the smiles of his relationships not his personal bought luxuries.
After I exited his home I had a very unsettling feeling within myself and in deep thought I laced up my Nikes and walked away from a world I am far removed from.