Pootentially the best weeks in India so far.

Our Eawag team on one motorbike. We only bottomed out once.

Totally unrelated to India, but I discovered this week that China is piloting gigantic buses where cars can drive underneath the passengers like a tunnel. I will be buying a ticket immediately to see this.

My last couple of weeks in Bangalore went at a slower, more relaxed pace than the past couple of months. I’ve been organizing my audio transcripts from my interviews (trying to cut out the multi-minute detours when baby goats get plopped into my lap or when we take a break for tea) to send for transcription. In this process, I realized that my translator has been introducing me and Alan Davis for the past three months. That’s always positive.

One of the days while leaving work, I was really struggling to find a taxi and all the autos were trying to charge Rs. 400 (I usually can fight it down to Rs. 150). I was on my way to giving up and walking home when a car pulled up and inside were some of the friends I’d made at the Ramadan festival I went to. They took me home, and this time it was a significantly smoother ride, since my friend now had a month of driving experience as opposed to the two days behind the wheel that he’d had the first time he drove me home. It made me realize that India actually has started to feel like home, when you have people that you randomly run into who are good enough friends to drive out of their way to help you. That is something I will really miss.

I had my final interviews at one of the communities on the outskirts of Bangalore. They were a community who at first were a little hesitant to speak with me, I think being wary of strangers who come in and ask questions only to disappear forever. Surprisingly (to me at least), the best method for trust-building with my interviewees has been the sheer volume of questions asked and time spent in their community. I’ve learned that, to them, my persistence to return and ask follow-up question after follow-up question demonstrates that I care about their stories and want to invest in their lives beyond my own project objectives. While there are definitely times where I feel like a giant burden spending so much time in their lives, I have truly loved getting to befriend some of the community members. One of these community members has texted my Whatsapp number every morning for the past three weeks to ask “had your breakfast?” That’s basically the Indian way of saying, “hi, how are you?”

The thing that does feel incrementally helpful is that I have felt like I can be a messenger of information between communities and other agency offices. I try not to promise anything, and wait until my questions have been answered, to capture their authentic perspective and knowledge, before sometimes divulging that I’ll be meeting with the NGO that they haven’t spoken with in four years and could try to see if they have a copy of the MOU, or going to the town panchayat office to ask if it would be possible to have the toilets open for a few more hours each day.

In this one community in Bangalore, the system is managed by five dedicate community members who sacrifice so much time, and very often so much of their personal finances, to keep the community toilets and treatment system running. Recently, they’ve really struggled with the lack of external support, and their system is on the verge of total failure if they don’t receive assistance (financial, managerial, and technical). I think the organization that implemented the project actually had what they thought was a clear, well-thought out exit strategy. The woman I spoke with talked about how they provided more and more trainings for the community over time so that their knowledge would be built to a level in which they could take full management responsibility over the system. She mentioned that the slowly reduced the daily visits to weekly, the weekly to monthly, the monthly to biannually. They even met with the community at the end to emphasize that they would no longer be active in the community, as the community was (theoretically) equipped to be in charge moving forward. Somehow, there was a breakdown in communication and the community was under the impression that the NGO had completely abandoned them. They thought the NGO should still be providing financial support and assistance when repairs were needed. They felt they needed the NGO’s presence in order to have some security in maintaining the land under their control. The power of information and how often I take my instant internet access for granted came to a sharp revelation when they told me that ever since the NGO moved offices, they haven’t been able to speak with them since they don’t know where the new office is. I had Google it earlier that morning, it was so easy for me to find the address and multiple phone numbers for the NGO’s employees, and my friend texted me to say they have a meeting with the NGO in a week. 

The last interview felt like a surreal experience where all of the stress of data collection and accomplishing my goals and navigating a sometimes challenging translator and an always challenging transportation system all of a sudden came to an end. It’s definitely not my last interview, since I’ll be coming back to India again soon, but it was the last of the summer and most likely the last in the communities that I’ve been spending so much time in. My goal was to complete a pilot study of four communities so that we could begin to draw some conclusions and make some adjustments to our strategy before I come back and plunge full force into the rest of the case studies. I was able to “complete” data collection in six communities, but I’m sure that I’ll have so many unanswered questions and “If only I’d asked…” once I return to sort through my data this fall. But overall, it’s been excellent. There have been so many interesting surprises, contradicting stories, triumphs and challenges, and when I look back at my pictures or listen to some of the recordings, I can still feel a bit of the warmth emanating from the communities and people who so kindly welcomed me for a short period into their lives. I think I already feel a large India reflection blog on my horizon.

Lukas and I threw a seven-month delayed housewarming party for his move into the EcoHouse/going away party for me. I dragged a particularly gracious Uber driver all over the city in search of cheese that didn’t resemble plastic, of tonic water (that didn’t exist), and of the few remaining mangoes lingering from a tragically ending season to make salsa.

Rohit invited Lukas and me to his cousin’s wedding, so Saturday morning we took a series of busses from Bangalore to Madanapalli (in Andra Pradesh, my sixth Indian state!), and from there went with Rohit’s father’s driver to their village. I got to put on my sari for the first time by myself in my hotel room, which increased my usual getting ready time from sub-five minutes to over thirty. Although Rohit had told me there was no dress code (lol—if I had shown up without a sari that would have actually been massively unacceptable), I spontaneously bought a sari two days before the wedding at a sale in our neighborhood and ran around in panic to find a tailor who would be able to custom make a matching blouse in less than 24 hours (since Friday was a Hindu holiday and most tailors would be closed). I found this great gal who spoke excellent English and didn’t laugh too much when I tried the blouse on backwards (who knew the clasps go in the front??). My one mistake was that I didn’t buy a full silk sari, which is the accepted version for weddings. I instead bought this really nice one with cream lace-like cloth and blue flowers that I had to fight to keep in my hands while multiple women tried to convince me to let them buy it instead. Still, that didn’t meet the expectations of a particularly strong-willed grandma, so I was forcibly wrapped into silk for Day 2. More on that later.

Rohit, my sari, & Lukas

After meeting Rohit’s sweet mother and father, he took us to their mango farm, which just was the most gorgeous and peaceful place on earth. Really felt quite silly marching through this farm in a sari, but at least the sunset helped romanticize it a bit. We’ll be returning for camping in hammocks underneath the mango trees the next time I’m in India. 

Andra Pradesh is beautiful, rivaling Tamil Nadu as my favorite parts of India. It has these nice rolling hills with weird piles of rock formations everywhere, which really reminded me of California, but that is probably mostly due to the fact that these were the second set of hills I’ve seen in over three months. The countryside is spotted with hamlets and villages, tiny farmhouses and even smaller temples.

After the tour, we were driven to the wedding venue, which was held at one of the private schools that Rohit’s uncle (and the groom’s father) owns. Literally everyone that Rohit introduced to us was some sort of aunt or uncle or cousin or brother. In India, every relative is given one of these titles, and they only clarify first cousins by saying “my own cousin” and sibling brothers by saying “my own brother.” It makes for a very confusing mental family tree.

The Saturday evening portion of the wedding was almost entirely a photoshoot, where the poor bride and groom had to stand for over four hours and pose for pictures with each and every one of the thousand guests in attendance. That included Lukas and myself, the only two white people in miles, who were dragged up to the front by Rohit’s aunt, uncle, and grandma. The grandma held onto my hand fiercely for half an hour, and by the end of it we (she) had decided that we (she) needed to find me a real silk sari to wear to the wedding the next day. At the end of the night, she dug through her bag (which was full of at least five other saris) and decided on a bright magenta, green and gold sari and strictly instructed me (which my stubborn personality ignored) to find a woman, any woman, to help me put it on in the morning.

The photoshoot is followed by the world’s largest buffet, with the world’s longest buffet lines which we promptly skipped when Rohit’s persistent aunt handed us plates and ushered us to the front of the line. The buffet had easily ten kinds of chutney and sambar, piles of syrup-infused jack fruits (or apples or carrots, depending on who you asked), and endless dishes of rice and vegetables. I couldn’t attend an Indian wedding and not try everything, so I signed myself up to suffer gastrointestinal cramps for the next 48 hours from caloric overload. The rest of the night was spent meeting more aunts and cousins.

Sunday morning I had the opportunity to feel really positive about my body when I tried on two different blouses for my borrowed silk sari, only to discover that neither would cover even half of my chest. The women who loaned them to me were not exactly stick thin and I would have thought I would easily fit into their blouses. I’m convinced that Indian women perform some type of secret magic when they put these things on. Anyway, I decided that wearing my blouse that wasn’t silk and didn’t match the sari perfectly was a much better option than leaving half of each boob exposed, but I still got many comments from all sorts of Indian female strangers who wanted to know why I wasn’t wearing the correct blouse.

After probably the eleventh woman giggled in my direction, a sweet girl’s mother offered to take me to a room to help me fix my sari. This meant taking me to a room full of at least fifteen women who got quite the comedy show watching a woman unwrap me and rewrap me like a burrito like modesty was a non-issue. The two tricks that I learned were (1) you cheat by using much bigger pins than the tiny little safety pins I thought everyone used, and (2) you put the pins in vertically so that the pleats stay together better. The largest noticeable difference was that I was no longer self-conscious, feeling like my entire body was about to be exposed any second when the sari fell off. I also noticed that the number of picture requests increased, probably because they would no longer have to pose by a human embarrassment to their culture.

Harika, the girl, came up to me every 30 minutes at the wedding and said goodbye at least six times before actually leaving. Her mother saved my sari two minutes after this picture was take.

The official wedding ceremony began at 9 in the morning, with a procession of the bride and groom into the wedding tent. Why Western weddings choose to play boring songs like the Wedding March instead of having full marching bands is a mystery to me. But then again, maybe that’s why I’m single. Following the Mardi Gras-esque entrance, the ceremony begins and is guided by a Hindu priest and two helpers, with the parents of the bride and groom playing central roles. At one point at the end of the ceremony, the priest takes the bride and groom outside to show them twin stars. Since it was daylight with no visible stars, this is mostly just symbolic. The groom first shows the bride the stars, then the bride shows the groom the stars. The meaning of the twin stars is that unlike most star pairs where one star orbits the other, the twin stars orbit each other, as a couple should in their marriage. I didn’t understand most of rest of the ceremony, so my pictures will do the rest of the talking:

After the ceremony, they served breakfast and a few of the wedding attendants took it upon themselves to ensure that we were again overfed and brought us pile after pile of chutney and sweets and dosa. Rohit gave us the full tour of his school, complete with childhood memories of being a five year old in the dormitory and of snakes disrupting test taking.

We then had another gorgeous tour of the countryside and ended at his parents’ house, where the acquiesced to my begging to see Rohit’s baby pictures. At the end of our stay, his parents over-spoiled us in the most generous way by (1) giving me a gorgeous blue sari to keep, justifying the generosity by saying they don’t have an Indian daughter to spoil; (2) refusing to let us pay them back for the cost of our hotel; and (3) sending us off with homemade tiger rice (rice with peanuts & other spices, not real tiger) in typical Indian tiffin containers so that we wouldn’t have to hunt down dinner when we arrived back in Bangalore late at night. Rohit and their driver Ramesh escorted us on one last drive through the rice fields and rocky hills to the bus stand where we boarded the world’s coldest bus:

Lukas (right), with his full body inside his suit carrying bag, and E.T. (left)

My perfect weekend in India was only potentially upstaged by my last dinner where Lukas (my Swiss colleague) again spoiled me by treating us to authentic Swiss raclette dinner, complete with a candle-powered raclette machine, real live raclette cheese, Swiss wine, and most importantly Swiss music. I don’t know how I’m going to survive the next few months until I come back to India. 

Taj Mahallie

This week’s most important thing is our coffee machine finally arrived. After two months of dreaming, I finally have something that will make me a glorious full cup of coffee that doesn’t involve me filtering coffee grounds through a tea strainer. Game. Changer. Actually I wrote that sentence a full month ago, but it’s still just as important now as it was then.

I have a new roommate! She’s an Israeli American from MIT (like the MIT), and once we got past the fact that my first questions was, oh where is MIT?, we’ve become great friends. She’s an undergrad doing an internship with BORDA for eight weeks, what exactly she’ll be doing is still a mystery to everyone involved, but it’s great to have another EcoHouse resident.

I left at 2:30 am for the airport to fly to Delhi in time for a morning meeting at the U.S. Embassy with USAID (which normally pulling an all-nighter before meeting with your dream future employer wouldn’t be a great idea, but my excitement for it managed to make up for the lack of sleep). I got to meet with the director of the WASH programs at USAID (there are five programs) and one of his project managers, and while they were slightly offended I hadn’t reached out to them to work with them earlier (sorry, didn’t know that was a thing), they were thrilled to hear I was planning to come back to India. I have a skype call in two weeks where I’ll be presenting my work to them and their colleagues at the Embassy. When we left, the U.S. ambassador to India walked past and everyone panicked and quickly stood at attention to pay respects. My reaction may have been to immediately ask when his position was going to be open.

We then rode in an Embassy car, where I literally had to sign a waiver to get inside, to the CURE office (Center for Urban and Regional Excellence, an Indian NGO that does water, sanitation, and solid waste management projects in slum settlements). I got to be a little fly on the wall for a partnership development meeting between USAID, CURE, and WaterHealth (another Indian NGO that builds small RO (reverse osmosis) water treatment plants in slums that transport water to ATMs, where slum dwellers can pay a tiny fee to collect drinking water).

Later in the day, I made my way to the WASH Institute, another NGO that does research, curriculum development, capacity building, and sanitation implementations across India. Many of these organizations are funded to support the efforts of India’s Swacch Bharat Mission, or “My Clean India”, a central government-led initiative to improve sanitation in the country. The SBM has allocated a lot of funding and resources to the sanitation sector, largely focused on ending open defecation by 2019 and improving the government’s technical and managerial capacity for sanitation projects. I’ve skyped with the WASH Institute people before, and they are just these really generous and lovely people who were willing to sit down with me and discuss how they think the government has influenced (positively and negatively) sanitation in the past couple decades.

Another thing I was able to do was visit one of CURE’s slum projects. They have three sanitation projects in slum communities in Delhi and Agra and were able to arrange for me to visit one of them. In this particular community, CURE (being largely a group of urban planners) has addressed all types of infrastructure projects. They have 800 families participating in a solid waste segregation and collection program, where the wet waste is composted and sold by one individual. They have several rainwater harvesting systems, with carbon and sand filtration. They recently constructed a sanitation project, that they call a CST, or cluster septic tank, although it’s much more comprehensive than that. Household toilets are connected to little individual collection tanks that feed into a simplified sewer system. The sewer empties into a large improved septic tank and then a planted gravel filter. The community wants to reuse the treated water, but is unable to do so since the treatment system does not provide high enough nutrient removal for this to be possible. The really interesting thing about this system is that only half the number of the intended households are actually connected. The rest of the households in the community have pit latrines underneath their concrete houses, making it very difficult to change the plumbing and add a connection to the sewer line. Some households want to connect by physically or financially cannot. Others constructed pit latrines after the system was implemented, since they didn’t trust that the treatment system would be effective, and they didn’t trust that the system would remain functional after CURE leaves the community. Like in many communities I’ve worked with, the system is managed by a group of twelve community members who have formed an operation and maintenance committee. Again, it is mostly women as the men in the community are either busy with day labor jobs or equally busy with gambling addictions.

On the way back from the site visit, I asked them to drop me off in Chandni Chowk, the market sector in Old Delhi. I don’t think I’ve been living in India until now. Old Delhi was exactly what I expected all of India to be like. When people told me that I would come to India and be overwhelmed by the traffic, the noise, the amount of people, the trash, and the sewage in the streets, I was surprised by not having this happen immediately. But when I walked into Old Delhi for the first time it was a complete sensory overload. There were men pushing handcarts full of trash or onions or piles of cloth. Others were carrying hundreds of pounds of spices in burlap sacks on their shoulders or heads. Others were driving bicycle rickshaws through the nearly stationary clumps of traffic. On both sides of the street and down the middle, there were people camped out to sell flowers, vegetables, fruit, phone chargers, men’s pants, jewelry, everything. I got out of our car and into the drizzling rain and headed in search of the spice bazaar. Google led me to believe that the spice bazaar was a network of small streets in a square area, kind of like the spice bazaar in Istanbul. This was not the case, as I found out after walking down three or four different alleys only to find that I was staring into the back of the spice shops and was actually in the loading and unloading (and male loitering) zone. Potentially my most dangerous decision (but I don’t know for sure) was buying 250 grams of yellow raisins from one stall and some completely random, semi-fried wrap thing with tomato and paneer and sweet, spicy sauce from street vendors. I ate these as I spent the next three hours slowly walking through the market stalls and looking at the saris I would never wear and the jewelry I’d never buy. I ended at the Red Fort, which is a massive structure in the center of Delhi, that would probably an hour to walk around the perimeter completely. 

In between my meetings, I was able to also run (sometimes literally) to my long list of temples and tombs to see in Delhi. My favorite one, the Akshardan temple, was also the only one that wouldn’t allow cameras or phones inside the grounds, but that also created a more relaxed and intentional atmosphere. Here are some pictures of the ones I was able to document:

 

 

Qutub Minar, the tallest tower in Delhi (slightly lower than the Taj Mahal)

The mosque next to Qutub Minar.

This is an actual pile of poop in the street. Delhi had piles of manure everywhere. Maybe in an attempt to collect the cow manure in one spot and make the rest cleaner?

Completely God-ordained, my solo travel came to an end exactly eleven hours before I got massively sick. Tchelet (the BORDA intern from MIT I mentioned in my last post) and her friend Malte were both in Delhi the same weekend I was, so we made plans to go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal together. We were adamant about arriving in time to see the sunrise (and avoid the crowds) so we piled into a hired car and entrusted our lives to a poor man who had to stay awake for the four hour night drive to Agra. I unfortunately got zero sleep in the car because about one hour into our drive, there was a sudden screeching of tires and burning of breaks followed by a loud metallic noise, as our car ran over some pile of metal in the road. No damage done physically to anyone or the car, but significant damage to my sleeping future. I swear our driver said we ran over a dog, but when I looked back to verify I could only see a crumpled pile of metal in the road. We arrived in plenty of time for sunrise, and somehow our hired driver came with a free guide, who I accidentally completed ignored in my excitement and didn’t even notice when he was no longer guiding us. We were the first people in line and had to spend the most tortuous fifteen minutes waiting for the armed guards to open the gates. If they hadn’t had guns I probably would have run through the tiny munchkin door that was open at the bottom of the gate. We then spent another painful, painful five minutes going through security and five steps after that I caught my first glimpse of the top of the Taj Mahal, and may or may not have audibly squealed with unquenchable excitement. Anyway, I basically immediately started running and we arrived at that picturesque spot at the front of the gardens where you can see the whole structure mirrored in the garden pools. Literally not a human being in sight (besides the crowds swarming in behind us). Thankfully, we were able to take our fill of solo pictures with the Taj and then proceeded to explore the rest of the grounds at our leisure. The great surprise was I ran into my friend Laura Kohler, who just graduated with her PhD in May from CU and now works for CAWST, a Canadian NGO that is doing some capacity-building research and collaboration with organizations here in India. We’d been trying to meet up for dinner while I was in Delhi but typical India prevented this from happening, and instead chose to facilitate a surprise encounter at 5:45 am at the Taj Mahal. Within one minute of us leaving the Taj Mahal itself, I started feeling terrible and successfully threw up in a second Wonder of the World (re: Machu Picchu circa 2013). We managed to make it to a hotel, whose terrace restaurant overlooked the Taj Mahal, and I survived a full four minutes on the roof before deciding to pay everything to book a room for four hours to lie down and wait until we returned to Delhi. I’m positive this is the seediest, lowest quality hotel I’ve ever stayed in, including even that one bungalow I once stayed in in Thailand with a 4 foot hole underneath the bed…The bed itself was very damp because the roof was leaking and so the tiled floor was also soaked. The AC unit didn’t work, which was sometimes a God-send to my fever and sometimes hellish torture. The toilet also didn’t flush, which really was more of an unfortunate circumstance for whoever had to then observe my stomach’s deposits. But, it also saved my life since it meant I got to be horizontal for a bit. Also has anyone ever had their hands levitate? I probably was completely hallucinating in my sick, delirious state, but at one point my hands were just rising in the air and I couldn’t stop them with all of my feeble efforts. So strange. Anyway, Malte ended up being a true savior and came back to the hotel with fever breaking meds that I could take on an empty stomach and force-fed me weird electrolyte mixtures highly reminiscent of public pool flavor. We made it back half-alive to Delhi where I lay horizontal for another hour before piling myself into a cab and then onto a plane back to Bangalore. I successfully made it home to Bangalore and recovered after another full day in bed. Our sweet cleaning lady Aka was so shocked to see me still laying in bed at eleven in the morning and then stayed to watch an episode of Friends with me, mostly I think because she was fascinated by seeing people speaking in English emanating from my phone.

Overall, really successful first trip to Delhi.