Homecoming

A few months ago on a train in Switzerland I sat down in the wrong compartment. I had been in a different city ever night for the past week and was so tired that I didn’t notice that I was sitting in the first class compartment instead of the second class compartment. Half an hour later the conductor came to collect my ticket and told me to move. Across the aisle a tired looking man in a black suit and yarmulke  looked up. “Where are you going?” he asked me. I told him and then stood up to move my luggage. “It’s alright,” he said, “you can stay.” He paid for the upgrade of my ticket and resumed reviewing his documents.

I have been lucky enough to be the recipient of random acts of kindness all over the world this year. People have given me rides or advice or cups of tea. They’ve let me sleep on their couches, in their tents and in their spare rooms. Some have given me jobs or food or local sim cards. To all of these people I owe a massive thank you- you inspire me to be a better person by your example.

On the eve of my return to the United States the are a few more thank-yous that I need to acknowledge.

First, to Roy Grow and Liz Ciner of Carleton College for helping me design this project and for some of the best advice I have ever received.

Second, to the Watson Foundation for seeing potential in me and giving me the opportunity of a lifetime.

Third, to CEQUIN, SMART, Philisia Abafazi Bethu, Saint Anne’s, the Carter Center, the Women’s Association of Romania, Peace Corps volunteers in Moldova, and Viva Nicaragua for letting me work alongside you.

Fourth, to the amazing new friends I have met all over the world who are happily too numerous to name here. You all are the bright spots in my year.

Fifth, to my family (Crash included) for supporting me through the less glamorous parts of my adventure and for always being there for me.

In five hours I will board a plane for the United States. It is odd to think of a place I haven’t set foot in for a year as home. However, the U.S. is more than home: it’s also my homeland, an important distinction to someone who has spent the past year building homes around the world for herself. What will it be like to slip back into a culture that I once functioned in effortlessly? I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge the trepidation in addition to the excitement I feel about coming home.

However, it doesn’t feel as though the adventure is really over. Having a year to travel and test myself in new places has given me a new way of thinking and functioning.  I feel as though I am at the beginning rather than the end of an adventure because I finally have the tools I didn’t know that I needed. Now it’s time to figure out how to put those tools to use. It’s time to come home.

Here’s to you, Twenty-Two

I will turn 23 on a train crossing the Romanian-Moldovian border on May 6th, the first day of Orthodox Easter for Romanians and Moldovans, a milestone for me, and a meaningless Monday for most of the rest of the world.

The last year has been the most extraordinary year of my life, not only because of the things I have done, the people I have met and the places I have seen, but also because of the possibilities that have opened up in front of me. This last week as I have prepared to leave Bucharest, the capital of Romania and a city that has come to feel like home, I have spent a good deal of time reflecting on the adventures of 22 and contemplating hopes for 23. There are too many memories and moments to record here, and I still have yet to make sense of most of them. Each flashing moment of importance that I remember feels as if it were a piece of a puzzle or mosaic. I hope that once this fellowship year is done the funny and the serious pieces, the easy and the incredibly hard pieces, and the brilliantly clear and confusing pieces will come together in a larger picture, project or testament. However, for now I have only the pieces:

Things I never expected to do while 22:

–  Ice skating in India in the top of a mall in a T-shirt. We arrived at the ice rink in an open air rickshaw.

– Attempting to float a candle down the Ganges. Banana leaf boat capsized the Holy Candle within <2 seconds.

– Making friends with the street girls who stopped me every day on the way home from the Delhi slums. I never gave them money and they never stopped asking, but they were always happy to see me.

– Eating red velvet cake off of real china in Delhi in a coffee shop Martha Stewart’s mother would have wet her pants over. Hello turquoise tiling and cast iron ovens.

– Waltzing in a rooftop apartment to 80s music in an Indian suburb

– Practically crying from ecstasy when an expat offered me a jar of peanut butter in India. God bless you, Jeff.

– Reading the entirety of Long Walk to Freedom in 4 days

– Traveling through townships solo in a public van that could be opened only by sticking one’s arm out the window and pulling the exterior door handle

– Going on a safari and humming ‘Circle of Life’ under my breath the entire time

– Taking up yoga- in South Africa. After living in India for 2 months.

– Holding the 3 day old baby girl of a 19 year old girl I had interviewed the previous week who was abandoned by her boyfriend and her family

– Baking unintentionally pink cucumber bread. Vanilla and red food coloring are packaged in the same bottles in South Africa.

– Living with rats

– Sleeping in a room that formerly housed the Vice President of Liberia with a lovely alcove for bucket showers.

– Wearing a floor length bright pink African skirt suit to church, followed by the beach

– Going speed dating on Valentines Day at a restaurant owned by Gaddafi’s former belly dancer

– Visiting a Liberian jail that had only recently received inmate and jailor uniforms, enabling one to tell the difference between inmate and guard

– Singing an Elton John medley around a campfire in West Africa. Followed by a round of Kumbaya and swaying. Rum filled coconuts made the swaying more exuberant.

– Throwing a coin in a wishing well in Dracula’s castle. Looking down and realizing there was no water in the well.

– Hitchhiking for the first time inmy life to the Black Sea and getting picked up by a BMW.

–  Snuggling during a springtime siesta on a ski slope trying not to slide downhill.

– Turning 23 on a train bound for Moldova.

Above all this year has shown me possibilities for my life that I didn’t contemplate. I could teach English in India, learn to wear a sari, and go with the rest of the middle class in the country to watch a Bollywood film every weekend. I could devote my life to international development in Africa and spend years working in obscure and struggling corners of the globe trying to bring health, peace and good governance to poor and disadvantaged women. I could work for an American company in East Europe and, in 20 years, throw my kids in the back of a german car for weekend skiing trips. I could open a hostel on some remote pacific island or work for the foreign service or play my flute on the street corners of a European capital or run for public office. 22 has taught me that the perimeters of my possibilities are defined only by my own perspective and desires. 22 has taught me that this freedom is true of very few people, and that, for now, I am one of the lucky ones.

So here’s to you 22. You’ve been a life-changing, ridiculous, intense and wonderful year. Here’s to the friends, the lessons learned, the really hard parts, the goodbyes, and the quiet triumphs. Here’s to the tears on airplanes and the whoops on mountaintops. Here’s to Minnesota, Boston, Maine, Delhi, Nepal, Cape Town, Monrovia, London, and Bucharest. Here’s to the new opportunities, new perimeters and new horizons. Here’s to 23.

A Young Woman’s Prayer

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. Over the past 8 months I have met many extraordinary women, some of whom have undergone hardships that are almost impossible to describe. I have learned that there is a point where words stop working, where syllables and sounds utterly fail in capturing a story. I have been extraordinarily privileged to hear and in some cases record the stories these women. I have nothing to offer these women in return for their trust except for prayers, love and empathy. I have also learned that violence is not a one-way-street, that the abused often become abusers, that women are perpetrators just like men, and that ideas of ‘blame’ and ‘fault’ can dissolve.

 

So on a day when we shower women with flowers and inspirational quotes and pats on the back it feels appropriate to me to remember the brave women who won’t be getting bouquets, and who have, unquestionably, opened my eyes and changed my life. 

 

A Young Woman’s Prayer

For the one whose son beats her when there’s no bread in the cupboard

For the one who came home and saw him shooting up in front of her baby in the highchair

For the one who couldn’t lose 20 lbs after the breakup but did anyway

For the one whose son stabbed his girlfriend for the second time

For the one who dreaded going home at the end of the school day

For the one forced to clap as they hacked her husband into machete-sized pieces

For the one with her children’s names tattooed on her shoulder, circling the sun

For the one in pearls and heels, trying to play a man’s game

For the one who had her baby in a shelter 3 months short of graduation

For the one who was born again by talking to the prostitutes on the street corner

For the one who won’t let her kids get in the car with him years after he threatened to drive her into a tree

For the one lying in the dirt on the corner while the bike gang revs their engines across the street

For the one who lost her job because she was 4 months pregnant and she took the money

For the one who wants her baby to know his daddy because she never knew hers

For the one who drives 2 blocks to the grocery store because she’s too scared to walk

For the one whose daddy and stepdaddy and cousin all raped her

For the one whose husband uses her skin like an ashtray

For the one who threw her baby against a wall because it wouldn’t, wouldn’t, wouldn’t stop crying

For the one who was raped so that she’d like men again

For the one whose mother and boyfriend and boyfriend’s mother all threw her out of different houses

For the one who ran to the police station in her pajamas and slippers

For the one who sat sobbing at the kitchen table of a shelter writing a letter to herself about all the things she had to live for

For the one who didn’t want a nosy white girl reporter anywhere near her

For the one who rocked her dying child in the slum gutter

For the one who shows her mother where to sign her name 

For the one whose mother sacrificed herself so her daughter wouldn’t be raped

For the one who build a shrine to her father and continued with his work

For the one who uses her grant money to buy the biggest desk in the city and stock her mini fridge with coca-cola

For the one who supports a stay-at-home husband and cut her hair short

For the one who chose not to marry and lives alone in a 2 room apartment

For the one who had her crotch grabbed by a rickshaw driver

For the one who waits in a teeny sequined dress for the white men to come out of the bar on Friday night

For the ones that move beyond asking ‘why?’

For the ones who can smile through their tears and the ones who can’t stop crying

For the ones whose fault it wasn’t and the ones whose fault it was

For the ones who are not ones but many

 

Lessons Learned in Liberia

1. Always grip the back of the motorcycle taxi seats with one hand. There is one stoplight in the entire country of Liberia; drivers navigate all the other four-way stops in the nation with a combination of sudden stops, acrobatic swerves and luck.  Invest in an ankle length stretchy skirt in which you are less likely to flash the other side of the street when clambering on and off the vehicle
   
2. Adopt attitude. Liberian women have sass. Thus, when three wandering males catcall you on your way to buy a $5 mobile airtime card, you’re allowed to be pithy. When they greet you with “oh hey baby! how you doin’ today baby?” the only way to save face is to toss your stunningly frizzy ponytail over your sweaty shoulder, respond “I’m not your baby,” and swagger on down the street.
3. Use your contacts. For example, when buying fresh pineapples or paw-paws in the market don’t buy from any turbaned Liberian woman gesturing madly for you to come over. As your friend’s dad suggested, seek out ‘sexy Linda’ known to give fair prices to expats. It’s not hard to find her- she’s the only one on the sidewalk market wearing jeans and a tank top instead of an African suit- the long skirt and tight fitting blouse combo.
4. Always bring Kleenex to lunch. The tissues serve three purposes: first, to wipe the sweat off of every exposed part of your body from the 3 block walk in the midday sun; second, to blow your nose when it starts running from the fiery peppers in every dish from potato greens to fish soup to kidney beans to the aptly named pepper soup; third, to wipe away the film of yellow palm oil that will coat your lips after any Liberian meal.
5. Get used to being unusual. Yes, you’re the only non-Liberian in church, and no, you can’t understand a word of what the preacher is saying between his accent and the squawking sound system. When they ask you to stand up (since you’re new) and applaud you, give your best Princess Kate wave; no need to bury your face in your hymnal afterwards. You’re fine. Or when you’re the only woman on the pitch in a group of men playing Friday afternoon rugby, remember that while most of them may be Marines you were trained by a woman named Reebok and can still scream ‘DON’T DROP THE BABY’ at the 6’4” muscle machine next to you as the ball goes spinning through his fingers. Rugby belongs to women as much as it does to men. You’ll always stand out, but you belong as much as you choose to do so.
6. Go under rather than through waves. When playing wave ball  (volleyball in the breakers without a net) or body surfing at Robertsport, Silver Beach or Myrtle Beach on your Saturday or Sunday afternoons, note where the rip tides are. (They’re where the water is going back OUT to the ocean). Avoid them. Enjoy the enormous waves but unless you care to lose your swimsuit and get treated like a towel in a washing machine stick to the sand under the wave rather than the froth.
7. When consuming alcohol, wipe the top of the bottle with a napkin/Kleenex/cloth of some sort. Bottles can sit on shelves, in crates, in the backs of cars on someone’s stairs for years before being served to you. During this time the cap to the bottle may corrode, causing your beverage to taste of rust. Instead of poisoning your bloodstream twice over, stick to one type of damage and keep your bottlenecks clean. Savana Dry (hard cider made in South Africa) is usually okay, but be extra careful with local Club beer.  Brewed and bottled in a factory brought over from Germany brick by brick, it’s surprisingly tasty. In fact, locals are such big fans that the factory was one of the last buildings touched in the Liberian civil wars because none of the soldiers wanted to lose access to their beer.
8. When going into the ‘interior’ (anywhere that isn’t the capital city of Monrovia) always wear a seatbelt. Obviously this goes without saying in any vehicle; however, it is especially necessary in Liberia (a country the size of Ohio) where getting from the mid-coast of the country to the south east takes 14 hours in a 4×4 vehicle. Roads turn into roller coaster rides that dole out whip lash indiscriminately. It’s a good idea to snag a seat by a window so that you can hang on to the handle you usually use to hang laundry on or get old people (sorry, senior citizens) into the vehicle.

3 more weeks in Liberia. Look for more pearls of wisdom soon…

In transports over transport

 

Last week on my walk to work after I passed Alice, the lunch lady who makes decent roadside plantains and fried chicken, but before I went by the empty lot where barefoot kids kick a deflated soccer ball and climb the lone ragged palm tree, I saw a truck. The truck was your average Liberian truck: an indeterminate brown somewhere between rust and dirt with two bare-chested Liberian men tossing rocks down from the bed of the truck to a crowd of onlookers below. Some members of the crowd helped, but most observed offering suggestions and critiques of the workers’ rock throwing abilities. Like most trucks in Liberia this one had writing on the mud flaps behind its tires. The flaps read, “God is in control.” The parallel parking job attempted by the driver that blocked 60% of the road emphasized the message. 

I skirted the crowd by cutting through one of Monrovia’s many ‘empty’ lots that contained old cement blocks, fading plastic bags and, inevitably, the neighborhood’s informal (and often only) toilet. Continuing down the side of the road, I reflected how pleased I was to be on foot. There are two safe ways to travel in Liberia: one, at least during the daylight hours, is on foot. This method of transportation is safe because you control the stopping, looking, crossing, and avoidance of sleazy men yourself. The other safe way to travel is via United Nations convoy or Presidential motorcade with layers and layers of steel and functioning airbags between you and the rest of the world. Due to my high status as an NGO intern I have been transported many times via the second method, and I can safely say that I vastly prefer the first. In Monrovia, even Presidential motorcades must stop for poorly parked trucks, of which there are many.

I completed my 5 minute commute to the NGO where I work and entered my gloriously cool office. There are two things that I want to pause and be grateful for at this point: 1) air conditioners 2) Toyota Land Cruisers.

The first is fairly self-explanatory. Having spent the last 6 months in sweltering climes, I am grateful for every second of non-perspiration. Knowing that I can stand in front of a cold blast of unnatural mechanical ether at the end of a sweaty night makes my morning. I doubt few readers have ever been as excited to get to work as I have been. 

As for the second, below is a letter I’ve considered writing to Mr. Toyota or whoever runs his business now:

Dear Mr./Ms. Toyota,

            I wish to thank you, from the depths of my now-comfortable heart, for your company’s invention of the Toyota Land Cruiser. It is truly a king among vehicles.

Although my family is, in fact, in possession of a Land Cruiser I had never fully appreciated the awesome power of your vehicle until I arrived in Monrovia, Liberia. There on my first day of arrival a colleague picked me up in his L.C. whilst I wandered the streets of downtown desperately seeking a clothing store since Royal Air Maroc lost my luggage and I owned 1 pair of underwear. Before this exceedingly generous colleague took me to lunch, he had to stop by an office briefly. The gentleman was gentleman enough to leave me in the car with the doors locked and air conditioner running. I sat looking up Broad street watching important men sweat in suits and vendors sell plastic jewelry made in China to women on their lunch break. I eased back into the synthetic upholstery, directed the AC nozzle at my face, and watched the world go by. It was heaven.

You must understand that in South Africa I used trains and minibus taxis for transportation. The former didn’t get me where I needed to go. The latter required one to open the door from the outside via the window as the inside handle was usually broken. It also usually contained twice as many bottoms as seats. In India I commuted via crammed Metro with eau de unwashed underarm or auto rickshaw, ensuring a blast in the face from a bus exhaust pipe. Thus to relax inside your 2004 slightly rusted paragon was one of my most comfortable moments in months.

Thank you, my good sir/madam, and keep up the fine work.

G.O.

South Africa in retrospect

South Africa calls its self the Rainbow Nation, referring to the range of skin colors found within the country. Despite its claim to a population of many hues, I found that this population divided its self along strict racial and cultural lines, with each racial category treated differently. Apartheid’s remnants were not far away.

In my experience South Africans in Capetown divided their world into three separate racial categories: black, colored and white. Note that colored, a derogatory word in the U.S., carries none of the connotations that it does in America. Colored refers to the Afrikaans speaking population descended from both slaves and white Dutch settlers.

I was lucky enough to get a little insight into the treatment and existence of each of these groups. I worked at one shelter in a suburb just south of Capetown that housed predominantly black South African women with children. The women had either been abused or were destitute. I spent the other half of my time working in Lavender Hill (see previous post) a colored community in the Cape Flats area. Under Apartheid black South Africans received the worst treatment of any racial group, with colored South Africans receiving only slightly better treatment. I listened to the stories of women in both organizations for which I worked and what stunned me was not only the treatment that these women received at the hands (usually the fists) of their partners but also the secondary abuse they suffered under the South African government.

In Lavender Hill and the shelter women told me about how the police wouldn’t come when they reported that their partner was hurting them. Social services wouldn’t follow up on cases and children could be left in shelters for months longer than they were supposed to be, or find themselves in abusive foster homes for years without social workers checking in on them. There was only one white woman that I interacted with in the shelter (telling in and of its self) and she told me that when she got kicked out of her boyfriend’s house social workers immediately found her a spot in the shelter and were very helpful.

I am not trying to say that all South African government employees or social workers are racist, but I am trying to point out the intense segregation and allotment of resources based on race that still occurs in South Africa 20 years after the end of apartheid. Many would say it’s hypocritical of an American to write this. My point is not that racism is a phenomenon unique to South Africa, but that being an outsider in South Africa allowed me to see what I have largely been blind to back home.

Working as a white woman and simply being a white woman in South Africa was an eye opening experience.  I couldn’t ignore my race. Being white dictated how I was treated (or targeted), where I could move during daylight vs. at night, and the extent to which others felt comfortable trusting me, not trusting me, and confiding in me.

I leave South Africa with mixed feelings. I will remember fondly the many friends I made and the crazy times we had, but I have to admit that South Africa has lost much of the rosy glow that it attained in my imagination (and which it holds in many tourists imaginations). For me, Capetown is only partially the nightlife-crazy, foodie-loving, gorgeous city that many people think of. However, it’s also Lavender Hill graffitti and bullet holes and corregated tin huts and rampant drug use and subsequent abuse. It’s hungry kids whose parents spend child support money on drugs and women so depressed after gang rape that they’re suicidal. It’s difficult to reconcile these two worlds, but Capetown is yet another city in a pattern of places in the world that have stripped away my ability to live in ignorant, comfortable and often judgmental bliss. The world is far less beautiful than it appeared 6 months ago when I started this journey, but it is also more real and more understandable. 

Welcome to Lavender Hill

There are 4 gangs that operate here. Identified by their tattoos, they rob, rape and sell drugs to nearby residents. Yesterday a woman who was gang raped and impregnated at 13 told me “they’re evil… But mothers is happy if they’re daughter has a gangster boyfriend because he puts food on the table.” Another women who has several teenage girls living in her house said, “I’m sorry I’m so tired. I was up at 2 this morning- that’s when the gangsters is out on the street- to make sure they don’t come in and hurt the girls. They came in once before and robbed us while we was sleeping. They gassed the house so we slept and when we woke up the police and the neighbors was already in the house. So I’m the night guard now.”

The gangsters bring guns into the community, and the Lavender Hill area has suffered greatly from shootings. “At one point the kids couldn’t go to school or go out on the streets” a community member told me. “It was so hard for them to be inside all day.” The woman who heads the NGO that I work for is herself a survivor of a shooting.

South Africa has a long and convoluted process that any citizen must undergo if he or she wishes to purchase a gun. The process includes background checks, a visit to the premises where the gun will be kept, a competency test and a licensing carried out by the South African police. Often the process takes up to or over 2 years. The guns in Lavender hill are almost all illegal (unlicensed) and stories about the confiscation of illegal guns in police raids and street searches fill the local newspaper. Officially, only 6% of the South African population owns a gun, but the residents of Lavender Hill would tell you that the number is much higher.

When I explained the American gun law to a colleague in India he didn’t believe me at first. I then asked him what the Indian gun law was. He shook his head and informed me that guns are illegal in India unless you’re in the armed forces. He went on to tell me that if people could carry guns in India there would be disaster and bloodshed everywhere due to religious and caste based violence.

Americans consider South Africa and India to be ‘developing’ or ‘3rd world’ countries. However, when it comes to gun laws, these countries are far more developed than the United States. It’s funny to me that we lecture these countries on higher education while students can carry concealed weapons on some American campuses, or that we fund anti-drug and anti-violence campaigns in South Africa when Lavender Hill gangsters carry American-made guns. In our country a man can walk into a school and massacre 28 people, 20 of them children. Or walk into a movie theater with a semi automatic rifle, killing 12 people and injuring 58. Or shoot a Congresswoman and kill her aide at a Safeway. The list goes on: there have been 61 mass murders in the last 30 years. Where does the list stop? How many more children are going to have to die at the hands of gunman before our lawmakers and our pro-gun citizens concede that our interpretation of the 2nd amendment needs some serious amending?

Have you been on the NRAs website recently? Unless we get a different version in South Africa, as of Saturday afternoon there was no statement on the Newtown shooting: only a page quoting a Virginia Commonwealth University Professor about how more guns means less crime. Personally, I found it offensive both to my intelligence and the Newtown community.

Both the families of Newtown and Lavender Hill have suffered hugely from the shootings that wracked their respective communities. All the resulting deaths and injuries are tragic twice over: not only because they happened, but also because they were preventable. Preventative measures for South Africa and the United States differ greatly, but one story gives me hope:

One night a couple of months ago the head of my organization received a tip that one of the gangs was going to come and kill her and her family. After weighing her options she got into her car and drove to the house of the head gangster. Standing in his kitchen as he poured a cup of coffee with his gun strapped to his belt, she said “I hear you want to kill me and my family.” Stirring his coffee the head gang member replied “no auntie,” using a term of respect, “we don’t want to kill you.” “Really?” she replied, “because everyone keeps on telling me you want to. Well, here I am- shoot me. Kill me now. If you’re going to do it, do it now; I’m here.” “No, no auntie,” he replied. She walked over to the gangster and put her hand on his gun. “If you ever harm my family or anyone in my organization, I WILL kill you.” And she left.

I am not advocating further violence or threats as a means to ends violence. Working in Lavender Hill has taught me that violence begets violence: a husband who slaps his wife will provoke his wife to slap him back. A woman abused by her mother will abuse her own children. A woman raped will often turn her anger and violence on herself in an attempt to escape and end her own life. Children hit at home hit other children in school. And on. This story gives me hope because one woman at least has stood up to the drugs, the gangs, the rape, the despair, the shooting and said ‘enough!’ and so far it has worked. She has achieved what neither the South African Police Force nor the courts nor other gangs have been able to achieve: safety for herself, her family and her organization- all through her voice.

From the Taj Mahal to Tamu Nagar

Bucket list? CHECK!

You can’t tell it from the picture, but I have goosebumps. I’m not particularly interested in architecture, but I can say that the Taj Mahal is the most stunning building I have ever seen. The Taj Mahal was built between 1632 and 1648 by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan for his recently deceased third wife Mumtaz Mahal. Both she and the Emperor are buried underneath the Taj, in a crypt which is not open to the public. The reality is that wikipedia can tell you a lot more about the Taj than I can, so if you want the history go here. I spent 12 hours in Agra (the city in which the Taj is located) and I couldn’t get tired of looking at the Taj Mahal and photographing it from every possible angle. I spent 4 hours on a rooftop cafe watching the sun set on the Taj while I wrote oodles of postcards and letters and watched a potbellied man in his underwear chase monkeys off his clothesline. There is no such thing as privacy or personal space in India unless you have a lot of money. For example, I arrived in Agra by a train which left Delhi at 6am. As the sun rose I watched as village after village went by my window. In the fields outside of every village next to the train tracks I saw hundreds of Indians pooping. It was astonishing- like the entire rural population had come to the consensus that 6:45am was national defecation time, trains or no trains. Men, women, kids, even cows.

The entrance to Tamu Nagar

My trip to Agra and the Taj Mahal was one of the most stunning examples of the economic inequality I’ve seen here. The day before I went to the Taj Mahal I was in a Muslim Slum in south Delhi called Tamu Nagar, seen in the next few images. There are no toilets in Tamu Nagar and people go to bathroom on the trash heaps behind their houses. As a result there are flies everywhere. There’s no control of water so sometimes the area is flooded and sometimes the only water is that which is brought in on rickety two-wheeled carts by hawkers. Malaria is rampant, and Dengue is beginning to hit the community as it is Dengue season in Delhi now. Kids are almost universally infested with head lice which their mothers patiently pick out during the afternoons, louse by louse and nit by nit. Houses have brick and/or cement walls with corrugated tin roofs. While most of these shacks are connected to electricity, the electricity works only a couple of hours a day. When it does work women have to be extra careful around ceiling fans. The fans are attached to the low ceilings which are forehead height for many women. One woman I met has a jagged scar across her forehead from a time when she got too close to the fan. 

I have spent my time in India (which, incredibly, will end in 8 days) working with women’s microfinance groups in communities like Tamu Nagar. Despite the challenges that they face- most families can afford only 2 meals a day- these women are not only cheerful but working to change their living conditions. Every month they save 200 rupees (4 USD) that goes into their group’s bank account. They can loan money among one another from this general pot of cash with an interest rate of 1 rupee for every 50 rupees loaned. Women take out loans when a member of the family gets sick and they need to buy medication, when their houses need repairs, to pay for weddings (a huge expense in India) or to buy presents for their husbands. The organizations that set up these microfinance groups ideally want women to invest their money in sustainable businesses. So far this has been difficult, if not impossible partially due to a lack of skills training and basic education (virtually all of the women are illiterate) and partially due to the fact that it is culturally unacceptable for the women to leave their communities. They leave very rarely, and always in the company of a man. Below are some of the women with whom I work.

I’ll be honest- I hope that the juxtaposition of these images disturbs you. How is it possible that there is so much extreme beauty and money and yet so much extreme poverty and misery in the same place? I live in a world of comparative extravagance and luxury here, and yet I work in some of the poorer areas (nope they’re not even the poorest) in Delhi. My daily commute makes my head spin. And the icky part of it is the relief I feel when I arrive back in my apartment at the end of the day with my fresh fruit and clean shower and wifi connection that occasionally works. Had fate or God or chance worked differently I could be the one living in Tamu Nagar scraping together $4 in savings every month dreaming of a better life. Instead, I leave India in 8 days. I’ll travel to Nepal for 5 days and then on to Cape Town, South Africa for 3 months.

I will miss Delhi and India- I have made some amazing friends here and met so many extraordinary people, especially the women with whom I have been so privileged to work. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for sharing so much with me and opening my eyes and heart to so much.You have taught me that there can be dignity even in poverty, hope even in illness, and peace even in crowds of thousands. You have taught me to examine where I am and not where I am going. You have shattered my expectations and shown me a reality far more extraordinary than anything I could have ever imagined.

The Kindness of Strangers… And Granola Bars

Upon re-reading my journal this week I came across this sentence and probably woke my neighbors up with my hysterics:

It’s 4am, I can’t sleep, and I feel nauseous. I just ate my last Trader Joe’s Granola Bar. It feels like I just lost my last bit of home. This is absurd. I’m getting sentimental over a granola bar.

For some reason I didn’t expect it to be terribly difficult to pick up and move from my easy, comfortable life in the States to India. Challenging? Sure. But I could handle it. What a joke!

When I landed in this country I did not know a single person in the city. Professors, friends and family had introduced me via email to a few contacts which was all I had to go on. I realized very quickly how naive and unprepared I was (read: Delhi hit me like a Minnesotan lady rugger- hard.) To the newcomer, specifically the white female American newcomer, this city feels hostile, and often it can be. However, I have been stunned and humbled by the help, friendship and generosity of complete strangers. People who had no idea who I was met with me, gave me advice, food, tea, professional contacts, even the use of their laundry machine! If the pre-Watson me had been in their position I doubt that I would have been as kind and generous as they have been.

Moving to a city where I knew no one, did not speak the local language, had no support structure, and understood little about local culture and customs was often overwhelming, confusing and frustrating in addition to amazing, stupefying, and rewarding- it still is. It may sound melodramatic, but whenever I get too jaded or Delhi becomes too much to handle I recite a list of names comprised of all the people who have helped me, who are kind enough to care about me and compassionate enough to help me navigate the strange new world in which I have found myself. I did not realize the true value of family and friends until I suddenly found myself in a city with neither. And I never appreciated the power of kindness until I found myself desperately in need of it. It’s a humbling experience, and a wonderful one since I have found so many extraordinary people here willing to help me. I have never before had to depend on the kindness of strangers for so much, and I am so grateful to all who have helped and continue to help me.

A friend of mine on a different fellowship sent me the quote below recently. It’s Matisse describing Gustave Moreau (or, for the art illiterate, one dead French painter describing his teacher, another dead French painter):

He did not put us on the right road. He put us off the roads. He disturbed our complacency.

The aren’t many better ways to describe my trip so far. This experience disturbs my complacency on multiple levels. Working in incredibly impoverished areas of Delhi destroys my comfort with how I live both in the United States and here in India. My own flawed and unfortunate reactions to difficult situations disturbs my conception of the type of person I am. And throwing myself into a completely unknown world has upended my value system and made me realize the importance of so much of what I take for granted while simultaneously revealing the irrelevance of so much of what I commonly hold to be important. When you spend the afternoon sitting next to an illiterate woman whose 6 year old son will never walk again it makes you re-examine your priorities. Suddenly, spending the evening chatting with a friend over coffee in a city where you can count the number of friends you have on your fingers becomes important, special, and far more meaningful than it has ever been before.

Before I left for India I had a conversation with someone I admire deeply who told me ‘life is cheap in India’ meaning that life is valued less in India than in the United States because there are so many lives here and it is so easy to die. I disagree. Life is not cheap here- it is precious. Every day I see people fighting for their lives- for food, for work, for survival- in a way that I have never seen in the United States. The edge seems so much closer here, and there are so many people so much closer to it than in America. If anything, life in the United States is cheap because it requires so much less effort to stay alive. If you’re in the States and reading this be thankful that the air you breathe is clean, that you can drink water out of the tap, that you have functioning electricity 24 hours a day and that, as much as we complain about it, we have a government that actually provides social services.

Oh, and someone eat a Trader Joe’s granola bar for me please.

Bollywood and Bicycle Rickshaws

In the United States cinemas are democratic. You go to the movies, queue, buy a ticket and hustle off to find the best seats you can with a large bag of popcorn and frighteningly proportioned slurpee of some unnatural color. Not so in India. On Tuesday night I went to see The Joker  which now competes with Chasing Liberty for the worst movie I ever paid to watch (although the former experience was hugely enjoyable, unlike the latter). The adventure begins at the box office where the consumer gets to pick between 4 ticket prices, ranging from the cheapest seats where one’s eyeballs practically brush the screen to VIP boxes with fans. Since we were the only women waiting to watch the movie, I and my two friends opted for the VIP box ($2 dollars per seat) in the hopes that we would be harassed less with some solid marble between us and the rest of the theater. (This worked admirably well until a man started quizzing my French friend on the capitals of the various countries of the world and she started responding. Who knew ‘What is the capital of Finland’ could work as a pickup line?) We walked through a metal detector, got patted down by a woman to ensure we were carrying no knives, guns, explosives and had our bags searched for food items. The cigarette packets in my friends’ purses elicited two ‘Oh My God Ma’am!’s from the women scrounging through our belongings (it’s taboo for Indian women to smoke, although many men smoke.)

I will spare you the details of The Joker- think E.T. meets Bollywood with a lot of melodramatic homecoming scenes and a spineless heroine. I’ll simply add that I found the movie shockingly easy to understand despite the lack of subtitles and English. Indians have  commonly described the cinema to me as an escape from reality for most, hence its hugely popular draw, and The Joker was certainly an escape from reality.

Unlike most travelers in Delhi, I have not spent my time sightseeing or eating in expensive restaurants known to give even the most cautious traveler fits of Delhi belly. Instead, I have been seeking out women’s organizations with which I can conduct my research, and two of them have taken me on several eye-opening trips already. One organization runs a community radio station in Mewat, a district in Haryana, the state to the north of Delhi. I have visited Haryana twice; once I remained in the radio station and met local reporters, but the other time I went to a local school and visited a village. The school, considered a ‘private’ school by U.S. standards because students must pay to attend, runs from 7am until 2pm and consists of a series of concrete rooms in which students sit cross-legged on the floor chanting their lessons back at their teachers. The school consists almost entirely of boys as girls do not usually attend school in Haryana; most young girls stay home, help cook/clean/wash and spend the rest of their days looking after siblings, collecting fodder for cattle, and wandering around the village ‘doing nothing’ as one social worker described it to me. When I asked her what was needed to get the girls into schools she said that the schools must be nicer than the girls homes, there must be toilets for girls (often there are not), and their families must be willing to excuse them from helping with the household chores. One of the striking things I noticed walking around the village was the children’s teeth- not only crooked or missing, but rotting, stained and broken. The social worker explained to me that although cows abound in Haryana, villagers are too poor to drink the milk themselves and must sell it to supplement their incomes.

India is the worst G20 Country for women– it ranks below Saudi Arabia in terms of women’s rights. While Indian women might seem to have excellent rights nominally- for example Indian women aren’t supposed to be married legally before they are 21- in reality the laws on paper rarely get enforced; 45% of Indian women are married before they are 18 years old. Another organization that I am working with runs a women’s resource center in a poor Muslim community in Southeast Delhi. Today, the organization held a large event in which the Minister for the Environment donated an electrically powered ‘green’ autorickshaw to a woman driver. It was a huge event and drew lots of press and locals to the scene. When the tent first started filling up women sat on one side of the main aisle, men sat on the other and children sat on the floor in front of the stage. However, as more and more men and male members of the press corps started showing up, women got kicked out of their seats and had to join the children on the floor. As the minister presented the keys to the green rickshaw to the woman driver, there were only 3 women remaining in over 100 chairs in the entire tent, and this at an event to celebrate the empowerment and economic independence gained by one woman in the same community.

Consistently I run into seemingly small occurrences like the above that stop me in the middle of my tasks and make me remember the enormity of the struggles that poor women here face daily. However, I also witness moments of extraordinary progress and hope. For example, while observing the meeting of a ‘self help group’- a microfinance group comprised entirely of women- I saw an illiterate woman trying to figure out where the records keeper had printed her name on a document. Her daughter leaned over her shoulder and pointed to the line where she should place her signature. The other women asked for the daughter’s help, and one by one she pointed to the spots on the document next to their respective names where they needed to affix their signatures.

India is a country of breath-taking contradictions like daughters showing their mothers where to place their signatures and herders driving cows along the streets of IT cities that house GE, Toyota, Ernst & Young and Samsung. I myself am a walking contradiction right now- an American woman dressed in khakis and a kurta, the long Indian tunic that most women wear in summer months here, which has become my daily wear. It’s confusing, often frustrating, and always exhilarating.