Week 15, India Trip

Yesterday was my last day of work at Shelter Associates, and today I leave on my big India trip. I’m took a taxi to the Mumbai airport to meet my mom tonight at 9:30. Here’s our itinerary for the next two weeks:

• We’re now spending the first night at an airport hotel in Mumbai. On 16 October, we fly to Udaipur, where we spend three nights; Euan is joining us there on the 18th.
  
• On the 19th we take an overnight train to Jaipur, where we will spend 3 more nights.
  
• On the 23rd we’re hiring a driver to take us to Agra via Fatehpur Sikri and we’ll spend only one night in Agra right next to the Taj Mahal.
  
• Then it’s an evening train to Delhi on the 24th. Euan will leave us in Delhi on the 26th,
  
• and then my mom and I take an overnight train to Varanasi on the 27th. We will spend two nights there,
  
• then fly to Pune on the 30th, where we’ll spend 3 nights.
  
• Our last night, on 2 Nov, we’ll spend in Mumbai again. My mom flies out at about 1:00 on 3 Nov and I fly out at 11:00.
  

Since I’ve been working with Google Earth so much, I decided to map it all out.



I’ll try to post updates from each stop along the way; I think we have internet in all our hotels along the way.

Week 15, India is Colorful

When it’s not dirty, India is sooooo colorful, especially all the clothes that women wear. They dress head to toe in every color imaginable. When I was in Sangli shopping for a sari, we went into a material shop where they had petticoats is all colors to match any sari you can find. They also had an even bigger variety of materials for making the blouse for the sari. Here is the wall full of petticoats.


This is in our favorite material shop, called Lunkad Fabrics. We usually go upstairs where they sell sheets, blankets, pillow cases and dress material (for Punjabi suits that you get tailor made). Downstairs they just have loads of material in all different colors that you buy to get blouses and petticoats made for saris, or plain bottoms for the suits.


Before we came to India, Katie, the girl who went on the EWB placement last year, told us about ‘Bangle Alley’. It’s a little side street where all they sell are bangles in every color you can imagine. There are at least 15 little shops all selling the same thing. (It is a common occurrence in India to get all the shops selling a certain item in the same location: all the bangle shops together on one street, all the dress material shops together on one street, all the paper shops together on one street, etc.) I have a favorite bangle shop where they sell plane bangles for 20/- a dozen (that’s about 25p or $0.40). They also sell sparkly ones for 30/- a dozen and fancier ones with gold for about 80/- a dozen. Bangles are traditionally made of glass, but they also come in plastic and metal.

Week 15, Sweets

I’m not a big fan of sweet things and dessert back home, but one of the fun things about India is that all the food is different. We have a favorite sweet shop on MG Road here in Pune that we sometimes stop at on the way home form work. Here are Jenny and Susan buying our usual selection of chocolate and mango barfi, and kaju katri.


My favorite desert is gulab jamun (one of the things we learned to make at Pratima’s house the other weekend). The first time I had it was in my first week here, and I had no idea what it was. They are little fried dough balls made mostly out of milk powder that are soaked in a sugar water syrup… YUM! Here they are before and after cooking.


At home I don’t drink coffee at all, I only drink tea. I love the tea with milk that they drink in England, but I also like herbal tea, which they do better in the US. Here they drink another variety of tea called Chai. (I drink chai tea at the coffee shop formerly known as Beaners in Michigan, but it’s not quite the same.) Here they boil a kind of black tea in milk, and add spices like ginger, cardamom and cinnamon; it’s really good. We get it in the office in the morning and the afternoon, and they always offer it to you whenever you visit someone’s house or other offices. A few times I’ve been given coffee instead, and you have to drink it to be polite; it turns out to be more of a chai-coffee, which isn’t too bad. I could get used to drinking it.

And just to make it seem like we’re not eating only junk food, I decided to include sithaphal (a funny fruit). It looks a little like and artichoke on the outside and is quite gooy inside; it’s made of lots of little cells, each of which contains a black seed.

Week 14, India is Dirty!

One of the things I really don’t like about India is that everything is dirty and smells bad! People are generally clean and take pride in personal hygiene, but they don’t seem to feel the same about the places where they live and work, and they definitely don’t keep spaces outside clean at all. The interior and exterior of buildings are not maintained and look dirty and run down; this is in the Municipal Corporation in Sangli, and some houses in Mumbai.


It’s not uncommon to see piles of trash at the side of the road. There are occasionally skips/ dumpsters, but they are always overflowing, they smell from a long distance away, and they usually have some stray animal (pigs, dogs, cats, birds, etc) eating out of it. I think the only rubbish bin I’ve seen is one shaped like a penguin at a temple in Solapur. I think his stomach says something like ‘use me’, which we did because we had a small bag of trash that we had been carrying around not wanting to throw it in the street like everyone else does.


The most common smell in India is urine. I think one of the saddest things I experienced was at Ellora and Ajanta Caves, where many of the caves smelled like they were used as toilets; it’s really a shame since there were toilets available at both sites.

The fact that India is so dirty is ironic because everyone has a cleaner. Included in our rent is a cleaner, who is supposed to come in every day and clean the hall, the toilet and the bathroom. I think she sometimes comes in and sweeps the hall, she sometimes soaks the floor of the bathroom, but I don’t think she has ever cleaned the shower. I get the impression that having a cleaner is more of a status symbol than something functional.

We also have a cleaner at work, who smells terrible! She smells like a combination of body odor and the chemicals she uses to clean. She actually comes every day though. She starts by sweeping the whole office. Then she gets a bucket of water with some really bad smelling chemical in it and wipes the whole floor with a dirty rag; I think she just pushes the dirt around with that rag because the floor is no cleaner after she is finished. Then she soaks the floor of the toilet. I don’t understand what they think soaking the floor will accomplish, but both cleaners I’ve met do it. Everyone’s feet are dirty from walking around barefoot, so as soon as we go into the toilet the wet floor becomes a muddy floor. Finally, she does the dishes. I’ve started washing my own tiffin after lunch because when she does it there are always bits of food left and I have to do it again anyway.

I can’t wait to go back home, where the cleaning is done only once a week but it’s done thoroughly, there are trash cans in public places that people use, and where toilets are generally the only acceptable place to urinate. All these things we take for granted.

Week 14, A Trip to Sangli

I spent the last two days in Sangli, which is a small town 3.5 hours south of Pune where Shelter Associates is working on a big project at the moment. Shelter has been working in the slums of Sangli for a long time now, and one of the biggest problems in slums is that people don’t have toilets. One of their first projects there was a community toilet project in Sangalwadi in 2002. Sangalwadi is a slum with about 256 people in 55 houses, and they built a toilet block with facilities for men and women, with living quarters for the caretaker (and family) in between. We only saw the women’s side, which has 4 communal toilets and 4 private toilets.


Next we visited Jatkar Samaj, where Shelter Associates did an individual toilet project in 2006-7. This is the ideal situation, where every house has its own toilet, but it’s too expensive to implement in all slums. Anyway, with Friends of Shelter Associates (http://www. friendsofsa.org/) funding, they built just over 100 toilets for 137 houses in Jatkar Samaj.


Finally, we visited Kolhapur Chawl, where Shelter recently (2008) did another community toilet and water tank project for 135 families. They also built a bio-gas tank next to the toilets that produces enough gas for a hand-full of houses, but only one is connected at the moment. In this toilet block the caretaker (and family) lives in a room above the toilets, so we got a birds-eye view over the slum. You can really see the conditions in which people are living here; the roofs are made of broken tiles, tarpaulin and corrugated sheets; those that have electricity probably steal it from the power line overhead; many houses got running water from the community toilet project, but none have access to a gas line so they cook using wood or coal.


Surprisingly the streets and houses in the slums are clean compared to the rest of India (post about that to come next time). The people don’t have money for basics like proper roofs, toilets, water or electricity, but they still take pride in the place they live. They smile at us when we come to visit, invite us in and offer us tea. We never have time to stay, but even if we did I would feel bad drinking their tea in case they can’t afford to buy more.

This isn’t the India most people see when they come here for vacation or travelling. I knew I was coming to India to work on slums, but you can’t really prepare yourself for seeing it first hand when you come from a place where everyone has so much. Access to a toilet with running water isn’t even an issue you think about back home. You can’t really describe it properly in a blog post, how people live with so little.

Week 14, Rickshaws

Our primary mode of transport here is the auto-rickshaw. As opposed to the old fashioned cycle-rickshaws, which I hear are still more common in the north of India, these ones are more like little three-wheeled motor cycles. The driver sits in the front and controls the vehicle with the handle bars (no steering wheel or pedals), and there’s room for 3 people squeezed in the back. We take one to work every day, and this is the one we hired for the day to go to Ellora.

In some of the larger cities, like Mumbai and Delhi, rickshaws are not allowed in the downtown area so you take a taxi. To be honest they are not that different from rickshaws; they are the same color, they’re cooled by the air flowing around the vehicle, the driver always tries to rip you off, and they are small. Euan and Chris were too tall to sit in the taxi properly when we were in Mumbai.

Week 13, Jenny is Leaving

Jenny is leaving India today to go back to Cambridge because term starts again on Tuesday. It’s kind of weird to think that I was originally booked on the same flight home. I think I was really lucky to have been paired up with Jenny; it would have been very unpleasant to have been stuck with someone I didn’t like for 3 months! I think we worked well together, and we also had a lot of fun. There are a lot of things I would not have done if I were alone and I think I would have been very lonely and home sick (especially at the beginning) if I hadn’t had Jenny to talk to. We already have plans to go to Glastonbury carnival in November when I am back and then hopefully Susan will visit us in the UK on her way back to the US form India in January, so I know I’ll see Jenny again after we leave India.

Now I only have one month left. I have two more weeks with Shelter Associates, and then I am travelling around a little with my mom and Euan. I fly back to the UK on 3 November. It feels like I only just wrote a blog post titled ‘30 days to India’, and now there’s only 30 days until I leave India.