I can’t believe it’s been nearly two weeks since I last wrote! Maybe I shouldn’t make a career as a blogger. I moved in with my host family a week ago and couldn’t be happier with the placement. My host aai Sulochana (mother, though she prefers us to call her aji, or grandmother) is an angel in disguise. She is in her late 70s and lives alone, as her husband died some years ago. Don’t let her age fool you though; she is more active than most young adults I know. Her son, his wife, and one of her granddaughters, Rutuja (Roo), live directly above her and help out whenever she needs it. As is typical here, the whole family is very close and everyone visits the other’s flat almost daily. It’s more like living in separate floors of the same house rather than “individual” flats.
The view from our flat is spectacular. We are on the 6th floor, well above most of the structures in Pune. The result: to the east is a beautiful view of the sprawling Western Ghats; to the north, south, and west the city breathes beneath you. Each morning I stand on the balcony and gaze out over the slopes, take in the scent of dawn - the sweet mixture of tea brewing and street vendors roasting corn and chapatis over smoking coals. From my perch above I can see dogs playing on the streets, children running to school, the birds flying to and from the coconut trees. And each morning I feel so grateful to be alive, to be in this intoxicatingly beautiful place.
Sulochana is in charge of at least one NGO, and works with various others in areas in and around Pune. The organization she runs goes to villages to teach the women how to sew clothing, make bags, knit, or do other activities that allow them to generate an income and become self-supporting. I went with her last week to a village 25km into the mountains and watched while she talked to them about learning to make paper bags. The government in Maharashtra has banned the use of plastic bags for environmental reasons, so the stores are (theoretically) switching to paper. All the bags are made from old news papers and a few staples. Once she was done explaining the process to them, Su allowed me to ask the women a few questions and acted as translator. I was surprised to learn that half of them have college degrees. Some even knew a bit of broken English (though they weren’t confident enough to use it around me). Yet all are unemployed, live in single room homes, and rarely venture out of the village. Why? There are a few reasons that became quite clear from my very brief encounter.
First are their house duties. There is no one to take care of their children while they are away, which makes it very difficult them to venture out for an hour or two, and impossible to seek any kind of employment that would require them to leave for the entire day. All of the family’s washing, cooking and cleaning falls to them. Secondly, simple things that we take for granted in more developed areas take tremendous amounts of time here. Take access to water for example. Very few of the homes have running water, so the women collect everything they need for drinking, cooking, washing clothes, and bathing daily. Because the local water gets “bought” by big corporations (like Coca-Cola) for next to nothing, they are forced to walk extremely long distances to use unsanitary water supplies. The water only comes for about an hour a day too, so everyone has to stand in line for hours beforehand in the hope that they can fill their buckets. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to return home empty-handed... The price the corporations pay for the water is virtually nothing, but then they turn around and sell their products for enormous profit. All while the villagers struggle to survive.
Third is transportation. The majority of people cannot afford cars or motorbikes (if they happen to have one it is shared by two or three husbands, who form a rather dangerous looking pile of bodies that miraculously makes it to and from the factories they work at unharmed), and they are too far from the city to catch rickshaws. Forth and perhaps most hindering, there are simply no jobs. No jobs for the men, and certainly none for the women. Obtaining work that pays a living wage requires intense specialization in a field of study. Most women don’t have access to resources to afford this, nor will their families allow them to study for such an extended period of time. It is still a common practice to educate the sons before the daughters and, because most families can only afford to send one of their children through school, a large segment of the female population remains uneducated. Those who are lucky enough to make it through college still are not able to find work, in part due to the reasons listed above. It’s a multifaceted problem that lacks a simple solution. The entire system and deeply engrained modes of thought must be altered, which will take time, patience, dedication and understanding.
While all this sounds quite bleak, I must admit the conditions in the village were better than I expected. There is a school for the young children, everyone looked well fed, each family had a simple house, and people seemed to be happy. There was a school that went up to fifth standard and was bustling with activity at 5 in the afternoon. The village itself was nothing close to what I’d pictured before I went. Forget images of mud huts and bullock carts. The people lived right off the main road through the mountains in single-room concrete houses. Every home I saw had electricity and a television, and all the men and teenagers had cell phones. Sanitation was another story all together - funny what we value. I’d read WHO statistics before coming that quoted the percentage of cell-phone users to be MUCH higher than the percentage of the population that has access to sanitation facilities. Everything I’ve observed points to them being correct. Cell phones are cheep, building functioning toilets isn’t.
I’ll be going to the village more with Su soon, both to help with classes and to volunteer in an HIV orphanage just outside. I made friends with a lot of the children in the short time I was there (one little girl, about two years old, screamed and cried when I left, saying she wanted to come with me - so cute!), and I can’t wait to go play with some more. It’s amazing how much can be communicated without words. None of these children spoke English, and I certainly can’t speak Marathi, but we still were able to chase each other around, play on the swings, and get our points across in the one language we had in common - their childhood innocence, openness, and understanding. Play is universal.
I already mentioned one of the other NGOs Su works with briefly - the hostel for HIV+ children up to 18 years old. They provide them with housing, medications, and education. She goes every Saturday, and I’ll go with her when time permits. It ties in loosely with my research for the program: the affect of female literacy on lowering HIV rates within various communities. I meet with my research guide tomorrow, and will have a better idea about exactly how I can collect data and what NGOs I’ll be working with after that.
Briefly, a few other things I’ve been doing... I made friends with a guy from Iran, Hamid, who is studying English at Symbiosis University. He’s only been here for four months, but he speaks fairly fluently. I was amazed. My roommate Jamae, Hamid and I ventured into the hills of the Ghats the other day - it was BEAUTIFUL. There was hardly anyone around, and the light rain that was falling felt glorious. We met one of Hamid’s friends and all got roasted corn on the roadside (One of my favorite foods here, the corn is roasted over hot coals and then has lemon, salt, and chili powder rubbed into it. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. I’ll definitely make it for everyone when I get back). There were cows everywhere too, and the bells around their neck made a peculiar kind of music as they walked by.
Yesterday the whole ACM crew went up to Sinhagad, a fort built over 300 years ago by one of the Mogul kinds (see pic at the top). It lays in ruins on top of one of the mountains. The stairs and archways are carved into the rocks, and look as though they have always been a part of the mountain’s design. It was surreal to be there, standing where kings once stood, envisioning what it would have been like to watch the armies of your foes approach from the valley below. Our giant group attracted quite a bit of attention, and more than once I had clusters of Indian college boys throng around me for question and picture sessions. All in good fun.
Tomorrow it’s back to class! We start our elective courses in a week, after the three week orientation period is over and our semester officially starts. I’ve switched my elective choice from Environmental Perspectives to Indian Literature, mainly because of the professor. R. Raj Roy, who just happens to be one of the leading gay activists in the country, is teaching the literature class. We’ll get to explore political issues since 1947 through the various books we read. Perhaps the most exciting topic (for me, anyway) will be the struggle LGBT rights, examined through Raj’s own book “The Boyfriend.” Homosexuality was just decriminalized last year in India, and the country has a long way to go before gay culture is accepted and it is safe for people to practice homosexuality openly. I cannot believe how lucky I am to have the opportunity to study these issues with someone who has been on the forefront of the action.
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