For the Girls

Two nights ago we had our first Jhiri girls' meeting.

Upon finding out that basic women's health topics are rarely discussed here, even between mothers and daughters, I decided to talk to Sumita about putting together meetings for the girls of Jhiri. We had a lengthy conversation about all of the issues that girls in this village face: marriage as young as 15, and babies at 18; lack of access to health information; zero support for the pursuit of higher education; little freedom to make decisions of their own. We quickly put plans for a girls' meeting into action, although it was not so easy. During the days the girls are in school, and as soon as school is over they go home to work in the fields. After dark, which falls around 6:30 now, the girls are not easily allowed out of the house. We were not sure if we could find an appropriate time for the meetings. After convincing parents that we would meet for only an hour, and that only girls would attend, and that Sumita and I would be present the whole time, we were able to schedule bimonthly meetings at 7:30 every other Saturday evening.

This past Saturday during school, we could tell that the girls were eager to meet. I was feeling really excited, and I was so honored that the parents trusted me and Sumita enough to let their girls into our care at night. (We have spent a lot of time with most of these girls' families because each of them is in school with us. I actually stayed with one of these families for six days about a month back. We are even pretty tight with the dads, which is really amazing in such a gender-segregated culture). HKS (our org.) started a small library in an empty space in the village, and so we decided to hold the meeting there. We were happy with the number of girls who came, and even happier with the way the meeting went. It was mostly just chit chat this time, but I could tell that these girls felt comfortable with us, and I look forward to discussing more in depth topics, from health to each girl's family life.

Sumita and I had a conversation amongst ourselves about the best way provide information and support to these girls while still respecting the local culture and its traditional gender roles. In the end, we decided that we will definitely be able to provide information about health, and even about topics like opportunities for higher education, but when it comes to touchy subjects like early marriage, we will do our best to just listen and be supportive in whatever way we can.

It is such an amazing and strong group of girls, and I have so much fun with them everyday. Hopefully these meetings will help strengthen my relationships with them. It seems like everyone, including me, stands to benefit a lot from this new addition to our schedules.

** I want to note that even though girls here face some of the issues I mentioned, they also are trusted with many important responsibilities and roles. The women share an amazing culture in their own sphere here—one that I have been lucky enough to be included in sometimes. No topic is ever completely one sided, so I just want to add this little disclaimer on the topic of gender issues.

PS: We just today sold Rs. 45,000 worth of cloth after I sent some letters and samples out last week! That's a pretty good amount by small hand loom co-op standards :)

Project update, Dushera Festival, and Water Buffalo

As of this week, I dove in head first to my project with the hand loom co-op. In fact, Sudhi Ji told me that from now until the end of the year I will be managing the logistics and marketing of the co-op on my own. After letting this sink in a little, I became extremely excited. With so much work ahead of me, I know I will have no problem finding motivation and renewing enthusiasm for my project. Now that I have spent the past few days sizing up the situation of the hand loom co-op (unorganized, little documentation if any, and only a word of mouth networking history), I have several goals for the next month or so: make a detailed spreadsheet of our inventory, create a few prospectus layouts that we can use to email to prospective clients, and put together a website for the hand loom co-op.

With the older school kids, I initiated a quilting project where we will use scraps from the hand loom co-op to create a quilt. We are only in the planning stages now, and each of the 8^th and 10^thgraders is working on an idea that they want to express in their quilt square (some of the ideas that have been tossed out are Hindu-Muslim tolerance, gender equality, and going to college to become a doctor for Jhiri village). There is a lot going on in school right now, so this will be one of those projects we do in spare time, but hopefully the end product will be inspiring and initiate a dialogue about some of these topics.

Last Sunday Harpreet and I traveled six hours to Kota to see the Dushera Mela. Dushera is a holiday in between Durga Puja and Diwali that celebrates one of India's most beloved stories from the Ramayana. The festival in Kota is one of the largest in India for this specific holiday. The city builds three large statues of Ravan and his brothers (who kidnapped Sita) and then “Ram” shoots an arrow into them, lighting them on fire, burning them to the ground (complete with a massive display of fireworks), and saving Sita. We had a great time exploring the old section of Kota, which boasts beautiful temples as well as a precolonial fort. We also snagged prime seats for watching the Dushera parade, and even made friends with a group of young boys who explained the entire Ramayana story to us. The number of people who attended the festival was astounding, even for a country of 1.2 billion people. We returned to Jhiri on Monday, but most of the kids didn't come back to school until Wednesday. All in all, it was a superb mini-vacation. Now it is back to work, hoping to finish up a lot before I head to Ahmedabad in November for our first workshop/debrief with Indicorps.

In other news, Devendra Ji knew of someone who knew someone who was selling a bhez, or water buffalo. We bought it, and its five-day-old calf, so now we have fresh delicious milk every morning. Their names are Kiran (sunrise) and Prakash (light). They are adorable, but not so bright as their names would lead you to believe. I like to water them, they like it too.

Our water buffalo

Some of my closest friends here

Dushera Mela in Kota

Our fields slowly changing colors

Sleeping on the roof, stars over our heads, waking up with the sun in the morning

Eating roasted mumphali, or peanuts-- the crop of the week

Seasons

Living in a city, you can tell that the seasons are changing in a number of ways. Of course there is the calendar, but there are more subtle changes as well. In the store windows, the clothing displays discreetly morph to showcase the coming season's new styles. Your favorite coffee shop changes the art on their front window from beach balls and ice cream to falling leaves. Leaves fall. School begins, or school lets out. Neighborhood pools open, they close.

Here in Jhiri, the season has changed. The temperature feels the same—it is still 96 degrees right now, in the shade, at 4pm—but the season has definitely changed. I realized this when my not-so-healthy knee began to hurt a little. At home this happens when it gets cold in the winter. Here it happened because the earth that I walk on everyday went from being nice and squishy from the monsoon rains to rock hard and cracked. I looked around and realized that the hills were yellow, like in Marin. The lush hariali, which translates literally to “greenery,” had disappeared, been devoured by all of the water buffalo it seemed and replaced by scratchy twigs. Come to think of it, after a month of super sweet roasted corn every day, I had not eaten a single ear in a week. It had all been harvested, consumed, and stored, along with the peanuts, the sesame, the chawli, and the other monsoon crops. In an Indian farming village, seasons are marked by the food you eat and the number of new mosquito bites you can count at the end of each day.

Along with the subsistence crops that have been harvested, everyone cut down the only cash crop here: soy beans. All the work has meant that many of our kids have been missing school the past week. On the bright side, families here will be paid soon. For their soy beans, they are paid once a year. On average families get 20,000 rupees. That is 465 dollars. Some do business on the side—carpentry, pottery, etc—and some sell small amounts of buffalo milk for extra cash, but most just spend their money very slowly until they are paid again. There will be another few weeks of hard work in the fields and then everyone will take a bit of break as the Indian version of Christmas fever, Diwali, approaches.

Cultural Note on Names

One of the students I work with here--Mangilal, who is 12 or so (no one knows their exact age here)--told me recently that his parents are changing his name to Chandrasekar. Their reason for changing their child's name to that of a famous Indian freedom fighter is that "mangi" means "one who asks for things, or wants things too much." They are afraid that such a name will give those grading the national 10th grade exam a bad first impression of their son from the start.

--Further background: 10th grade here is sort of like 12th grade in the states. After you finish 10th standard, you take a test that will determine not only whether or not you can advance to 11th and 12th standards, but also what you will be able to study: business, engineering and science, or the arts. So this test is a massive deal and is unfair in all sorts of ways that I will not get into here.--

So, Mangilal's parents changed his name. However, there are many other Mangilals in the surrounding villages, so we set out to find out why it is such a popular name if its connotations are supposedly bad. What we found out fascinated me. If someone's child falls ill as an infant, which happens frequently here, parents will change the infant's name to Mangi (for a girl) or Mangilal (for a boy) in express to the gods the extent to which they want to keep their child.

For the time being, we are calling Mangilal Mangilal, until someone tells us to do otherwise. Incidentally, he is an amazing kid, with a voice like an angel. We are all making him teach us this beautiful Hindi folk song about Radha and Krishna. Maybe I will sing it for you sometime.

Link to Picasa Photos

http://picasaweb.google.com/racheltrip/IndiaI?authkey=Gv1sRgCNGqj7DaubamOg&feat=directlink

A few photos to start...

Past due update pt. 2

Here is a breakdown of my typical day. 6am wake up, lie in bed for a while, yoga on the roof. 7am chai time with the 12 students who board at the hostel, Rambilas (our “cook” and general best friend, he's a couple years older than us, has the two cutest kids in the world, and is basically the man), and my two cofellows, Sumita and Harpreet. 8am school starts for the kids and I work with the handloom coop. 10am breakfast, then my classes start. I teach 1st, 4th, and 5th standards, and then do some projects with the kids in 8th and 10th. 1:30pm school ends, we eat porridge, and our afternoon begins. For the rest of the day, we engage in any number of activities, usually with the hostel kids. Here have been a few of my favorites:

1. Swimming in the kua. Our kua, or well, is 60 feet deep. Right now the water is about 25 feet down, making it the perfect swimming hole to jump into. The kids love this. I am trying to convince them to flip (yes Gabe, flip!) but no one will do it...yet. Most of the kids here, and all of the adults except for Rambilas, cannot swim. So there are about eight of us who participate in this activity almost daily (thermometer reads 98 right now, and this is considerably cooler weather than before).

2. Working in our garden. Sumita, Harpreet, and I knew from the start we wanted to get a garden going here. This may seem silly in a place surrounded by farms, but we wanted something small and manageable that we could use to teach the kids science and also plant whatever we wanted to eat. Lucky for us, there were remnants of an old garden, although it was in very bad shape. We have weeded it back to life, and dug irrigation trenches (watering the old fashioned way!). Currently we have eggplant and peppers growing, but will plant a variety of other vegetables tomorrow. The kids also love this.

3. Going into Jhiri village. Our organization's campus/office area is a 15 minute walk out of Jhiri. As most households are on the farm during the day, the best time for us to visit people is in the evening, and most evenings we are working. However, one of our favorite things to do is spend our evenings jumping from house to house in the village, so we make time for it. Every family is so welcoming and wants us to stay all night, but we always politely decline and move on to the house of the next child begging us to come. I love spending time with the families of the kids I teach. Usually we walk back to HKS (our org) around eight or so, in time for dinner, but filled to the brim with chai.

So that basically fills in the general gaps of the past 25 days here. I am going to try to start a Picassa web album, so I'll post the link when I get that started.