Dreaming of India

So much has happened since my last post, and I look forward to filling you in, but for now sleep. Sleep and dream. Dream of tali with papadam, of masala dosa, porota and aloo gobi. Dream of palm trees and waves, of seashells and fresh watermelon juice and sweet lime with mint. Dream of oxen with painted horns, of stray dogs, goats and cows. Of honking, honking, honing, brightly painted trucks stuck in traffic, rickshaws full of people, and motorcycles weaving in and out of everything. dream of smiling children playing cricket in the streets, of baskets of marigolds and strings of jasmine and roses in Gerbu Market. Dream of colors, dream of people, dream of sights and smells and warmth, dream of India.

 

Gone experiencing, be back soon.

 

Permanemt

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” –

~Miriam Beard~

 

Holilday Camp

Now that I have a firm understanding of what I am working on here in India I would like to share it with everyone. For the past two weeks we have been working with two remedial schools in the area on creating holiday club. Our sister organization Prime Trust hosts Self Help groups each week that are geared towards educating the women in local slums on things like health, alcohol abuse and domestic violence. The Schools were created for the children of these women to have a place to play and study in the evenings. We are now creating a holiday session for the children that will start next week and run through the summer.

Last week the project was being led by a volunteer here but this week she decided to leave Pondicherry which in turn left the project in Siobhan and my hands.  The difficulty with this is that we will be leaving Pondicherry ourselves in two weeks and heading back to Sweden. We have one other volunteer helping us and today, thank god, we were joined by two more. I don’t know how we would have managed to run a camp at two different schools with only three volunteers. We really want the teachers to take a leading role in the camp so that they can carry on when we leave or cannot be there, so we are meeting with the teachers today to go over the activities and look at future lesson plans. The idea is for this camp to be run every year with or without volunteers so we are writing up as many lesson plans as we can so that the current teachers and future teachers can look at them for ideas. If anyone has some good songs, rhymes or lesson plans they would like to share please feel free to send them my way.

 

India Volunteer Care

India Volunteer care is an organization that doses its best to help local NGOs and initiatives to get the support they need. They organize, and accommodate volunteers and interns from all over the world and set them up with local places to work, teach and learn.

“We aim to identify and place international volunteers where they are most needed: in emerging, small scale, grassroots organizations that lack the necessary means and organization to attract and accommodate international volunteers, but would benefit greatly from outside assistance and knowledge.” (indiavolunteercare.com)

IVC along with their partner organization Prime Trust works with several Self Help groups, daycares, orphanages, including a curative orphanage, a hospital and several afterschool programs for children in slums. All of these local groups are in great need of outside help.

Working in India can be Difficult; the work mentality is very different from that of Europe, North America or other more westernized nations. In becoming an established well oiled company IVC has a long way to go, but the organizations intention is good. Sometimes the lack of organization was infuriating but we found that when we spoke our concerns and gave ideas they were taken seriously and implemented when possible.

Experience has shown that many people want to come to India and help, but numerous local organisations lack the necessary means to attract and manage International volunteers.

 

Cultural

For the most part the people here are used to westerners so we don’t have to act as reserved as we would in other parts of India, but last night we went to a restaurant where they served alcohol and we were the only women in the place. Usually it is not so noticeable, the other alcohol serving places we had been to before were more western and had many women in them, but never Indian women. This restaurant was all Indian men and when the server came to take our order he only spoke to our male friends and would not make eye contact with us. I was expecting this when I first came to India but after a week of open-minded, western influenced Pondicherry, it upset me. I didn’t dare order a drink.

 

Easter weekend

We had a long weekend due to Easter which was nice we really got a chance to get to know the area and people here. On Friday we decided to rent mopeds and go out to the beach, but we had so much fun that we kept them until Monday. A friend of ours is renting a beach house a little ways down the road so we went out to see him and met some really great people from all over the world, friends from Australia, couchsurfers from Canada and France, and students from Holland and Italy. We have been meeting so many wonderful people here, there is a nice international crowd in Pondicherry, it used to be a French colony, and between that, Auroville, and its cleanliness, it is a hub for both international and Indian travelers.

Driving a moped in India is extremely scary and extremely fun and the same time. I loved being able to just explore the city and surroundings. Indians are crazy drivers so it takes a few days to get comfortable driving in the traffic here, really the only thing with the right of way are the cows.

Ate a chocolate bunny, a few days late, but still counts.

 

Rooftops

This morning I went to a kresh, which is an Indian daycare center. I was a bit nervous, they only had one motorcycle so Soibhan and I had to be driven spatially and I was dropped off first. The man just showed me in then left me there with 12 children and a teacher who didn’t speak a word of English. I had no idea what to do. A few of the children were shy but most of them crowded around me asking me questions and telling me stories in Tamil, excited by my presence. Not knowing what else to do I gave the all high fives which was a huge success, so much so that my hand was quite painful by the time Siobhan got there.  We sat with them for a while playing games and singing the ABCs, really just entertained by each others company.

In the afternoon we went to ‘Gulbu Market’ the main market in Pondi. It was quite a trip. So many people packed into small areas selling everything.   Fruits and vegetables were laid out on mats beneath a patchwork ceiling of blue tarps and old coffee bags, the sari shops were raised a foot or two from the ground to keep the dirt out. Many of the Indian women wear chains of white and orange flowers in their hair, and at the market you can watch the men and women making them, braiding the small flower stems between longer pieces of string.

We had a really lovely evening with some of the other interns. We have two girls staying with us for the week from Holland. They are teaching at a school in a rural part of India and all they had eaten for two months was rice, so we went out for pizza. After dinner we went to a little open-air bar called La Spase which seems to be the spot to hang out in the evenings, quite a funky atmosphere and good service and alcohol, a rarity for India. One of the nice things about Pondicherry is that everyone goes home by 10pm so when we left the restaurant the streets were dead. There were seven of us getting home so we took two rickshaws, and cheered them on as they race each other through the deserted streets back to the house, where we had a little late night tea party on the roof.

 

First Experiences

So about India, I don’t really know what to say…it’s India. Today I had a busy day, well busy for India that is. I am learning that Indians see time very differently than the wrest of the world. We were going to be taken around at 1030 but didn’t leave till close to 1. It was fun though. I had my first motorcycle ride in India, Krishna and his friend took us to the bank and grocery store on the back of their motorcycles, I thought it would be scarier than it really was. In India women generally ride sidesaddle on the back of motorbikes, in full saris, I wasn’t too comfortable with that so I did it the way I’m used to. Sometimes the women will be carrying children or bags on their laps. I saw one man yesterday sitting on the back of a motorbike with two goats slung across his lap. In the evening we went to one of the remedial schools, which are really afterschool clubs held in the evenings around the city. We arrived around 6pm to a small building with two tiny cinderblock rooms and about thirty smiling faces with wide staring eyes. The children we all mixed ages from about 5 to 14 and one baby that as always on someone’s hip. The children set up chairs for us at the front of the room then they went through the class saying their name, grade and age. Any time we had a question for them they would each stand and on eat a time answer it. Then Danny, one of the volunteers who works there regularly, set them up with a game where they take turns trying to make each other laugh. It was great fun to watch. Tomorrow we are going to visit some of the other schools and orphanages in the area and see where we can be most helpful.

There are several interns working here a few of them are Indians from the local university but most are Dutch. There is one man here called Steve that is 67 who’s quite a character, he’s a retired Waldorf teacher from Manchester and Switzerland, who’s been all over the world. He’s always around for a good story. Today was Ashley, one of the interns’ birthday. We went out to a place called That’s Y Food, one of the most western restaurants in Pondicherry. There they have this dessert called the sizzling brownie. It’s a brownie on a very hot pan with ice cream on top, when they bring it out to you they pour cold chocolate syrup on it which boils as it hits the pan “sizzling”. Its super good, but really rich I am so full I can’t move.

 

A Long Journey

Jarna-Sodertalje-Stockholm-Istanbul-Mumbai-Chennai-Punducherry.

The Journey for the most part was uneventful, that is to say, it was pleasant and went smoothly. When we arrived in Chennai there was a man waiting for us with assign reading “India Volunteer Care Lily & Siobhan.” We were not hard to find in the sea of Indians we stood out. I had not expected the staring but according to one of my housemates its worse other places around India. We got in the car and headed on our way to Pondi, but little did we know we were in for such a ride. Indian roads are a bit like a rollercoaster with out a track. Drivers here have no speed limit and no lanes, well they have them but I don’t think they know what they are for. The rule for the roads here is “every man for himself” you just drive where you fit as fast as you can, and if that means you have to drive on the wrong side of the road, so be it. There are cars, bikes, rickshaws, pedestrians, and mostly motorbikes all on the road together. Honking like mad, honking is a driver’s primary language you see. When we reached Pondi everything came to a screeching stop. It seems when not driving, life in India is slow. We settled in to our rooms and then what? I didn’t really know that to do, I guess that’s what I’m going to find out today. For now I’m just going to enjoy my cornflakes