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