"One Cannot Judge When One is Wearing a Neck-Pillow"

First off, it’s March? I’ve been here over a month? Whatttttttt?

A week since I posted last and so much has happened. The weeks here are filled with a variety of things, all of which cause me to reflect a lot. Early Sunday morning we left for an excursion to Bikaner and then Jodhpur.  We started to enter desert territory and we reached a girls school that prepares them for exams. We talked with them, some of the 18 year old girls were married and some were standing by the fact that they wouldn’t get married for a long time. We then played games with them, they got to draw henna on us and we left. We were there for a couple hours.  I’m still not quite sure why we were there…

The desert-ness we were driving through:

Fun fact: there's an antelope on the right side of this picture.

                Day two consisted of visiting an all girl’s college. We broke off into smaller groups and interacted with them. Or at least we tried to. Between their English and our Hindi, the conversation was fairly limited. The big question I was asked was if I had a boyfriend. When I said No, they all giggled and asked me why? I was so beautiful, why was I single. When I shrugged and asked them if they were dating they all immediately said No and that they wanted to stay that way. This bothered me. American culture is portrayed in such a way, that it seems all women have a boyfriend or are in search for one. So it was weird that I was a “Western” woman and was okay with not having a significant other, but for them as an Indian woman, they felt empowered by being single in a patriarchal society.

After that we tried to learn some dance moves that involved far too much coordination for my abilities, taught them the Hokey Pokey (yes, we really did.) Then they took lots and lots of pictures with us, even girls we weren’t talking with wanted their pictures with us.  And then we left…again.  Another strange situation…

We went to a fort after though which was beautiful:

 Casual gold inlay. No big deal.

Gold and jeweled palace room. Again, casual.

                Day three was a visit to a village to do a community mapping and a group discussion them. They were clearly proud of their village and the layout. I was in the group speaking with them about why they migrate to other states during the off season with their crops. (Shout out to Morocco Migration group! I was thinking of you!) We actually had a great conversation and it was really interesting to hear about their day to days lives. We then explored the village and had the children show us around.  This was the first trip that I felt as though I actually learned something and they got something out of it too. They clearly enjoyed showing us their village and they were proud of it. I still felt as though the visit was too short to really get to know anyone or really anything but it was good.

That night was good though for a completely different reason. After a long three days, we went to dinner at the restaurant next store to our hotel. After a group of us sat down, a man comes up and asks us if we want whiskey on the house? We were all shocked, confused, questioning if we were still in India? Turns out, the gentleman was the owner and was checking in on things for the first time in a few months. Whenever he visits, he has a night with everything on the house. So we had drink s and dinner for free. Not only was the food good, but so was the company. It was the perfect way to de-stress as we were getting ready to start driving the next day to Jodhpur.

                We drove alllllllllll day to Jodhpur. When we got to the hotel, I think all of us were speechless. It was five star, with REAL mattresses and a swimming pool. What was left of the afternoon was spent swimming and preparing for our night at “On the Rocks” (another weird club/dance experience with the staff.) We arrive to eat dinner there…and it’s an expensive restaurant (good thing they gave us stipend) and then the herd us into a small little cave like dance floor were we were given forty-five minutes to dance to our hearts content. After our forty-five minutes we were herded out, back onto our tour bus and brought back to the hotel for our reasonable bedtime. We were actually told to go to bed. Weird.

                The next morning we were all up early for an introduction to the NGO that works with Hindu Pakistani refugees. They were people that had fled Pakistan due to religious persecution. After we talked with them, we went to a settlement with these refugees. It was a hard experience for several reasons. One obviously being that these people have been through so much; they had to flee one country to come to India on a visa, let the visa expire so they’re technically illegal and are not recognized as citizens by the Indian government even after fulfilling the requirements. I had a difficult time listening to the distrust of Muslims (who are mistrusted in India and persecuted even though India is technically a secular country.)All in all, their basic needs of food, work and water were being met, but they aren’t officially acknowledged and their basic humanness is denied. Leaving there to go back to our five star hotel was difficult to say the least. All of us struggled with it for different reasons. Luckily, the group is amazing and we were all able to talk about it and kind of help ourselves feel a bit better.

The evening was a bit more relaxing, which was good given the stress of the day. We ventured into the old city for some shopping and dinner. Dinner was at a luxury rooftop restaurant where we could see the fort and the view of the “blue city.” We were in a small group too, so it was refreshing to have a chance to chat with a few people before heading back to the larger group.

                Cue end of excursion number one. Some people went to the desert, some people went to Udaipur and some of us came back to Jaipur to relax and explore the city we’ve been living in. We stopped briefly in Pushkar which is a weird combo of being a Hindu pilgrimage site and a foreign hippy center.  One long bus ride later, we were back. A group of us went to the water palace and explored some shops in the old city. We had lunch at a place where we could actually eat the salads (This is huge) and found a bookstore. We have a week of classes and then we will be heading on our next excursion on Sunday.

Pushkar:

The water palace:

The poor awkward fish that were swimming too close to shore to get bread....

Okay, so it’s been a long blog post, but there are still some things to talk about. A week of long bus rides results in a lot of thinking, because that’s basically all you can do. (Also, I’m convinced that there is something in the air in India that causes serious life-contemplations.)

First things first, I would like to thank the group for being so brilliant and easy to talk with. They all make everything easier when facing serious questions like the ones I was thinking about on the bus, One friend, Jocelyn, made an excellent point that nearly brought me to tears. She was talking about the work she had done last summer in Burma and she is currently trying to get a book published with the stories of the refugees she worked with. It is taking her a bit longer than planned (understandable based on being abroad. And let’s be honest, how many 20 year olds do you know that are getting books published? She’s brilliant.) We were talking about how she can’t be hard on herself. And she made a fabulous point that I need to apply to my life. How can we give full credit to those we worked with in the past, and the people we work with currently if we are running ourselves into the ground? If we are mentally wearing ourselves out and not able to fully appreciate what we did and what we are going to do, we are then taking away from the validity of the people we’ve been lucky enough to work with. Our personal health is important and we need to not weigh ourselves down with more than we can handle. Our personal health, both physically and mentally, will affect those people we are trying to actively be involved with. I know that personally, this is something I need to bring back with me to the United States and here. So many people that I know, myself included, keep pushing ourselves and load things onto our plate that maybe we aren’t ready to handle. I’m noticing here what a hard time I’m having with still processing Morocco, trying to process things here and trying to figure out things for when I get home. I need to take a step back, take a deep breath and know that by weighing myself down with all these thing I’m going to take away from the experiences and people I knew last semester and the people I’m lucky enough to get to know now. Thank you Jocelyn for being able to put into words what I couldn’t and making me realize something that I desperately needed to come to terms with.

This links to the importance of approaching the people you are working with, whether it’s the people in your group, villagers, students, children, etc. that you approach them on the basic level of humanness. It can be easy to get sucked into the mindset of researcher and subject, but this s a power play that should be avoided if possible. It makes things uncomfortable. Like being at the girl’s college, personally I felt that they were getting far more out of me being there than I was simply because they were excited to have American students there. There should be as much equal give take as possible, which is why the village was interesting because they were clearly the ones showing us what they had to offer and were sharing our responses with it. It was a learning experience for both of us.

Let’s lead into Ivan Illich’s “To Hell With Good Intentions” again. (Actually though, if you still haven’t read it, DO IT) I feel like this speech is ALWAYS nagging at the back of my mind (and now I’ve passed it on to Allison…sorry Allison!) What sort of good am I doing by popping myself into these schools or camps for a couple hours and leaving. The people at the refugee camp told us that if we wanted to help, we should help them get citizenship or help them buy land. I’m not an Indian citizen, I don’t have that power; but because of where I come from they assume I do. This is literally a constant struggle in my mind while I’m here.

Well, I suppose I should leave it at this for now. There is still much thinking happening since I’ve been back, but I can only get so much out at once. This is where the blog title comes from, how much time was spent thinking about everything on the bus for so long we would wear our neck-pillows to sleep. During these travels these discussions would happen, and Allison would make sure I understand there would be no judgment happening during any of these talks. India will surely keep the challenges and the good times coming.