When I decided to resurrect this blog from last summer, the
first thing Google asked me was “Why not blog in Hindi?” I could probably think
of many reasons ‘why not’, the first being I don’t know Hindi, but thanks
Google maybe later. I also am going to preface this by saying, I promise I’ll
update the background to something more interesting once I actually take
pictures that aren’t of trash and snakes here.
 |
| My personal favorite: the cow in central central central Bengaluru that wouldn't mooove. |
I wrote this whole post and then realized that I keep
dropping all these names and terms that maybe less than four people would
actually understand so I’m going to give a quick intro to why I’m blogging from
India:
Most of you probably know that I just finished my first
‘year’ of classes as a PhD student at CU Boulder. I’m studying Civil Systems
(think holistic approach) and Engineering for Developing Communities (EDC). As
part of the EDC program, we get the opportunity to travel during our first
summer to work with a development organization abroad. The program does a nice
job of organizing practicums for us, but I was interested in working in a
context that was more relevant to my research. Through a series of
extraordinarily lucky events, I was able to convince a Swiss research
organization called Eawag to let me join them this summer to help with one of
their current research projects and start some of my own data collection. Eawag
has a project called 4S: Small-Scale Sanitation Scaling Up funded by the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation where they are investigating the state of small
(less than 5,000 served) sanitation systems in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and
potentially Pakistan in order to make recommendations for how to improve the
sustainability and institutional framework that supports such systems. This
stems largely out of a widespread lack of knowledge of how small sanitation
systems compare to centralized, larger systems both in terms of cost and
treatment quality. Many communities are better suited by smaller,
contextualized systems, but India presently doesn’t know how to regulate,
support, and encourage these systems. Presently, the 4S project is run by a
Swiss guy named Lukas and supported by an Indian guy named Rohit. They have 8
field teams from the India Institute of Technology who are primarily master’s
students, and from CDD Society, which is a major implementer of small
sanitation systems here. They are also working with BORDA, which is CDD’s
mother organization that also does tons of sanitation implementation and
research. The 4S project includes a broad investigation of 350 systems in India
and 50 between Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. They are mostly studying the
technical, economic, and institutional aspects of these systems to identify
challenges and places for improvement or governmental support. My research
coincides with the 4S project, as I am also interested in studying what makes
small sanitation systems sustainable in India and what aspects of these systems
need improvement. My research diverges as I am focusing specifically on the
combinations of existing community conditions (community priorities and needs),
implementation strategies (community participation and consultation, training,
decision-making, design, construction, etc.), and technology choices that lead
to success and failure in small sanitation systems. I will compare these
pathways to success and failure between conventional sanitation systems and
those that have resource recovery potential (such as anaerobic digestion
technologies that produce methane gas for cooking fuel or digestate for
fertilizer). I will be joining some of Eawag’s field teams to visit the
community-based sanitation systems and the anaerobic digestion sanitation systems
and then will hopefully select a few of these communities to pilot my full data
collection protocol. More details later.
 |
| The mug I was given at CDD. |
I gave myself three full days of summer vacation and flew to
California to go camping with my best pals in Joshua Tree. All you need to know
is it involved a lot of Bermuda shorts, monochrome outfits, crab cakes
benedict, and a newfound discovery that I enjoy rock climbing. Less than 24
hours later, I moved to India. After 27 hours of travel, I finally arrived to
my apartment in Bangalore (Bengaluru now—the pre-colonial name). Really the
only things to report from the journey are 1) apparently you can survive nine
hours in the middle seat of an airplane, and 2) I love old Indian women. A
large group of them were crowded around the mirror in the bathroom in the
Frankfurt airport meticulously applying their beauty spots, prompting my first
Indian Google Search to be “what do Indian beauty spots mean.”
I arrived at 3 am, so the months I had spent preparing
myself for the shock of ‘there are people everywhere’ were a total waste. We
didn’t hit any traffic, and the largest crowds I saw were piles of dogs laying
in the street. I’m staying in a place called the EcoHouse, it was built by a
Swedish professor who does research in India. The top floor is Lukas’ apartment
(my main contact from Eawag) and I’ll be staying there for two weeks while he
is on vacation. The two floors below are another apartment, which currently
houses two Swedish students, Jasmine and Carolina who are here sort of researching
solid waste management in India. I’ll move into that apartment in two weeks for
the rest of the summer and may or may not share it with the occasional visitor,
one of whom might actually be named Olaf. The basement is an office for BORDA,
one of the sanitation system implementing organizations that I will work with
and may study this summer. It’s an interesting place. It’s supposed to be
environmentally designed with natural lighting and air flow, but I think the
latter of those may not have been as successful as intended. My toilet is a
urine diversion toilet that supposedly recycles the urine to use as fertilizer
on the garden by the lower apartment. Not sure if that’s actually happening.
One of the toilets in the lower apartment is a composting toilet (think
camping) and the girls downstairs said they don’t use it ever since a four inch
cockroach was found sitting on the seat. The funny part about this place is
that literally seven feet from us is a giant makeshift landfill where I was
instructed to dump my trash.
 |
| EcoHouse building |
 |
| View at sunrise from the roof of the EcoHouse |
I got four hours of sleep before it was too hot to
subconsciously survive. Lukas spoiled me by giving me full access to anything
in his cabinets or fridge. This apartment (as well as the one below) have full
kitchens complete with fridge, microwave, and gas stoves. I made coffee and
then immediately put it in my freezer since the thought of drinking something
hot made me want to pass out. I spent the morning chatting with Jasmine and
Carolina.
Rohit, one of the people who works for Eawag on the 4S
project came to pick me up and take me to the CDD office where he and Lukas
work. Shockingly, he was almost an hour early and shattered my expectation that
everything in India happens on a fluid time schedule. We took an Uber to the
CDD office which is about 4.5 miles from the EcoHouse, again no traffic. If it
wasn’t for the cows that live up to all stereotypes and just wander in the
streets, I would think I was mistakenly not in India. The CDD office is a giant
orange building, also right next to a ‘landfill’ full of baby goats eating
trash.
 |
| Goat eating trash. |
This one is actually quite successfully environmentally designed—it has
large open breezeways whose breeze can make you feel cold pretty quickly. My
first day mainly consisted of introductions to the forty or so people who work
in the CDD office. I also received a quick introduction to Indian food and the
practice of eating entirely with my hands. If I thought I was a messy eater
before, this is a whole new level and I’m going to have to practice eating
bowls of rice alone in my apartment with my fingers quick or risk massively
embarrassing myself the whole summer.
When I got back to the EcoHouse, I went downstairs to look
at the BORDA office and found the director of the Asia programs working there.
Apparently I surprised him and he thought I had come for a formal meeting so he
launched into a whole professional explanation of his work and ordered coffee
for us before realizing that I was just there to see what the office looked
like. I also was able to meet the maid, Sushilama or Aka for short, and the
janitor, Rupesh. They’re both employed at the office full time I believe, which
is interesting since there’s maximum one person working at the office and two
people living in the EcoHouse.
Later, Rupesh took me to the store to buy a few things. It
started by me asking where the closest supermarket was and if I could walk, to
which he shook his head all over and said “no, we will take my bike.”
Thankfully, this did not mean a tandem bike or riding in the front basket, as I
feared “bike” could. Unthankfully, it meant, he put on the only helmet and I
clung for dear life to the back and tried not to panic when street dogs would
sniff my ankles as we drove by.
Rupesh then told me he’d wait outside, which apparently
meant he would not wait outside and would instead follow me around the store
with the basket and not allow me to hold an item in my hand for more than a few
seconds. I had originally planned to expand my mental grocery list from
“shampoo and toothpaste” on my walk to the grocery store and obviously hadn’t
gotten the opportunity, so I panicked and ended up with shampoo, pink perfume
soap, toothpaste, two mangoes, seven carrots, toilet paper, and two packages of
instant masala noodles.
Jasmine, Carolina, and I went to dinner at a family
restaurant a half mile from our place. They’ve been hesitant to try any
restaurants that Lukas hasn’t vetted yet and are a little apprehensive of
eating meat or anything unrecognizable in India which mostly meant that I ended
up with all of the leftovers. One of the highlights of the walk over was seeing
one of the largest snakes I’ve ever seen in the ‘wild’. Didn’t expect that from
Bengaluru.
On Day 2, I woke up, ate a mango, and introduced my
neighbors to their first ever white girl on a bike. Felt like a giant idiot
when I didn’t realize the bike seat was a couple inches too tall for me and I
couldn’t get on. But I found a tool, fixed it, and marched along the road to
the CDD office. I spent probably the first 25 minutes of the ride laughing at
myself because I’m sure I looked massively ridiculous. I also started getting
excited since I would frequently pass motorbikes, but that’s probably owing
more to the fact that they had three people on them and slowed down to stare.
About 30 minutes in, my first big India adventure happened when a nice little
white car (Mom, Grandma, stop reading please) plowed into my bike and sent me
flying. Everyone kept telling me later to be careful, but I honestly don’t know
what I could have done since the car literally just turned into my bike. Going
to preface the rest of this with, I’m totally fine. The biggest bummer about
this whole thing is that my best, most favorite pair of travel pants are
totally covered in blood and ripped mostly to pieces (the sweet cleaning lady
Retna kept coming by the whole rest of the day to pout at my pants), and Lukas’
bike has a flat tire—hopefully someone can help me find tire supplies ASAP.
Anyway, once I recovered from the shock that my glorious morning ride full of
laughter and sweat rapidly turned into intimacy with the road, I picked my bike
up and moved to the side of the road. I think I just kind of stood there for a
few minutes not really sure what to do. The car did stop and the man got out to
apologize, but I hadn’t quite had time to research ‘accident protocol’ in India
and figured there probably wasn’t a whole lot I could do there so I think I
just mostly stared at him trying to figure out what to do next. I poured a
little water on my hands and knees, fixed the chain on the bike, and got back
on in front of an audience of probably at least 30 males who just literally
stared at me the whole time. I don’t blame them, I’m sure I looked like the
giantest idiot. I biked the remaining 2 kilometers to the office and
immediately ran into Molly, who is one of the admin assistants. She kind of
panicked upon seeing me and told me she’d take care of me. Then I waited for
ten minutes while she finished feeding her street dogs, one of whose legs are
in basically a dog walker with wheels. I definitely agree they were the
priority. We then went to the office where no less than eight people, including
the CDD CEO and the Dean (of what I’m not sure, or maybe his name is just ‘Dean’),
hovered over me. They wanted to chop my pant legs off, but I didn’t want to
crush my dreams for Indian patches that quickly, so instead we opted for a nice
bath of hydrogen peroxide and what I think was antibiotic ointment in red form.
I tried not to pass out as all eight people doused their cotton swabs and poked
at my wounds. They taped bandages on me, and literally each person applied a
piece of tape and taping strategy proved to be a prolonged group discussion.
I’m most afraid now of taking them off since I have at least four pieces of
tape wrapped around my wrist and I’m afraid of how much hair loss that means.
Anyway, survived my first accident, but this will give me an excuse to go buy
some Indian clothes as two remaining pairs of pants may not get me through the
next 3.5 months. I’m up to date on tetanus boosters and don’t think a hospital
visit is necessary at all, but since everyone kept asking about tetanus I
thought I’d look up the symptoms just in case. Unfortunately, sweating is one
of the major symptoms, so I’m not sure how I’ll differentiate tetanus sweating
from the constant sweating that happens in the heat and humidity.
Following that story, I should probably reinforce that I’m
fine, I’m being spoiled by how kind and helpful everyone is and by the sheer
number of people who have been awaiting my arrival, and I can’t help but think
I could live here forever. Everyone I’ve met knows me as the PhD student who is
coming and are thrilled with how the Eawag team has grown immensely, from a
whole two to three people!
Most of my work so far is what Iyesha, a recent hire at CDD,
calls ‘experiential learning.’ We have quite different definitions of ‘experiential’,
since I would not consider reading through reports and literature and preparing
for interviews to be as ‘experiential’ as other activities I can imagine. On my
third day, an engineer named Ravan (which means ‘breeze’) gave me a tour of CDD’s
knowledge sharing center. Basically that means that they have several rooms of
educational exhibitions related to sanitation and solid waste management. You
follow a sanitation system around the halls from toilet to discharge, and it’s
an excellent display of their work and the idealized system in India. They have
all of these models of different treatment technologies and examples of how
they have implemented the systems at hospitals, schools, and communities. They
also have a history room that details the evolution of sanitation from the
beginning of time. I had no idea that sewers existed as early as Mesopotamia.
They also have this horrible display of the Ganga (Ganges to the West) River
contaminants. It’s a cubic meter box that has different sized balls inside to
show how many different types of contaminants and of what amounts are present
in a m3 of Ganga River water. It’s horrible because it is so
polluted, and this is the river that is revered in the Hindu faith as holy,
because it represents the Hindu goddess Ganga. It’s the most sacred river in
their faith, causing millions of people to pilgrimage to bathe in the river
every year. Unfortunately, it also is the fifth most polluted river in the
world. One of the interesting things that Ravan told me is that many Indians
are aware of the need to separate their trash into trash, recycling, compost,
etc. and to stop the practice of open defecation, but since the masses have a
large inertia for actually making these changes, nothing happens, except for a
tragedy of the commons.You see this everywhere--by my apartment every day I've seen people dumping trash and openly defecating, and this is the same plot of land where I was told to dump my trash. There are so many juxtaposed examples of environmental management and degradation, wealth and poverty, equality and lack thereof. India, everyone.
Because of jet lag, I keep waking up at 6 am, unable to
sleep. Unfortunately this means that my morning mango breakfast is over by 6:20
and lunch isn’t until 1:30 at the very earliest. The CDD office does have an
espresso machine and a constant supply of homemade chai, which usually tides me
over. Retna refuses to let me try her chai without sugar though—I’m positive
I’m the only one who drinks it with sugar. Maybe because she met me when blood
was pouring out of my knee and she thinks I can use every break I can get.
Anyway, today at lunch Rohit told me I am allowed to use a spoon. I think the
fact that it took me three times as long to eat my bowl of rice as he did
prompted that comment. Still, I’m determined to become good at eating with my
hands, and I’m not about to let my bottle of Indian Purell go to waste on using
a spoon.
 |
| The Palace we suddenly drove past in Bengaluru |
Saturday, Jasmine, Carolina, and I splurged on an Uber (taxi
service, Gram) and spent $4.50 to go 48 minutes to the center of Bengaluru. It
was only 14 or so kilometers from where we live, but takes way longer due to
the calmly chaotic driving tactics and the occasional section of road that
someone forgot to pave. The cows don’t really help with traffic flow, and
neither does the practice of turning right across four ‘lanes’ of traffic from
the farthest left ‘lane’. My nightmare would be having to make my living
driving in Bengaluru. My other nightmare I think is attempting to cross a
street in Central Bengaluru. Omg. You can either choose to play Frogger, which
is the fastest option. Or you can find the few intersections that have
crosswalks (some even have crossing guards) and wait four or five minutes for
the light cycle to change. That’s not a sure-fire solution though, because
every time a brave group of motorbikes decides they’re bored of waiting at the
light, they plow forward into traffic and change who gets to go through. It’s a
cheap thrill, but the key is to make sure you’ve got at least five people on
either side of you as a buffer just in case.
Jasmine and Carolina had a few things they wanted to buy
that are more expensive in Sweden (like Converse shoes), which normally wouldn’t
have been my favorite activity except it meant that every thirty seconds I got
to go to a new air conditioned store and exhaust my joke of asking the owner
how much for his air conditioner (no one would give me a price. I don’t know
why they thought I wasn’t serious). Another plus was the one book I wanted to
read about India was half a million dollars in the U.S., but when I went into a
used bookstore here, the owner called a friend who could bring it across town
for me that afternoon for only $2. Freedom
at Midnight, here I come.
Eventually we made our way to Commercial Street,
which was more like five large streets and even more tiny alleys filled with
shops and street carts selling everything from brightly colored and slightly
rotting fruit to saris to pashmina scarves to little drums. We spent almost
four hours weaving our way through the maze of people, animals, and colored
cloth—I could happily have spent days at Commercial Street. I walked away with
four Indian shirts and two colored leggings, both to supplement my recent loss
of a cherished pair of pants and to hopefully alleviate some of the unbearable
sweating that even my most trusted sweat-wicking shirts have failed to do. Since
I don’t have a phone yet here, we couldn’t book a cab back and no actual car
taxis exist outside of phone applications. Hour long rides in tuk-tuks are
going to have to wait until I can bend my knee again without bleeding
everywhere, so we kind of just stood on the street corner and practiced looking
white, lost, and hopeless. Two sweet women talked down the tuk-tuk driver who
was unwilling to except my ‘no thanks’ for an answer and called us an Olataxi
(like Uber). Another $4 and 45 minutes later, we were home.
Next week, we are having the field teams from CDD and IIT (India Institute of Technology in Chennai, Tamil Nadu)
here for training and then hopefully this will mean I get to start going with
them to visit communities and sanitation systems! More later.
