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.