bbbrie

An old post that is long overdue. Hope you guys enjoy. I will try to update more this week while the memories are still fresh in my mind. :) Home in a week!!! By the way. The reason Smruti and I started to refer to each other as cousins is because when we would go shopping in the old city, she would always bargain for me because she speaks hindi. The shop keepers would always say "No, no, no we should charge you double because it is for a foreigner" and she would shoot back in Hindi "This is my cousin, I am buying her a gift." They would look at us so skeptically but we played it up so well. I am her cousin from Canada, I have come to visit, now she is leaving ... read more

Kotra Diaries In order to complete my project I have been on three trips into the field. When I go into the field it is to a place called the Kotra block. It is 2.5 – 3 hours from Udaipur. I usually get a ride in a Seva Mandir jeep. Take it from me when I say it sucks being 4 people sitting in the trunk of a jeep. There are benches to sit on (no seatbelts), and with luggage it is a pain in the- well you know what I mean. Not to mention how much taller I am than most Indian guys I hang around with and my legs cramp up so much in the trunk. The road there is half highway and half one way road. The funny thing about the ... read more

Bathroom humour I am not sure how inappropriate it would be for me to write a blog on this subject but it was something that affected me mentally upon my arrival in Udaipur. I feel as though it was a subject that seemed important when I was preparing to leave for my internship but there was never a lot of information on the subject in the community blog and I did not know the interns well enough to get into the nitty gritty details. So this one is for future interns and hopefully you will feel more comfortable to face the bathroom (and all sorts of other situations) during your internship. I have been to overnight camps in the woods and gone camping many times. Leaving Canada, I felt prepared for whatever toilet situation ... read more

Mautana My project with Seva Mandir is to create the first booklet, in English, on Mautana. Mautana is a tradition where the victims family to receive a settlement when one of their own passes away. Mautana was first established with good intentions. The main idea was to protect women who were being married and moved to live with husbands in villages that were far from their birthplace. Mautana was supposed to act as an incentive for husbands to treat their wives well. Should the wives be killed at the hands of their husbands, the husbands immediate family, village and their sub-caste (‘gotre’) are responsible for paying a settlement to the victims family and their sub-caste. The settlement is decided by a third party belonging to other villages and sub-castes, who act as negotiators between the two ... read more

Namaste! It is surely time for me to post another blog before I head out into the field for a few days. I arrived in Delhi after a 14.5 hour train ride. A driver picked us up from the station and took us to our NGO, Seva Mandir. Seva Mandir is located in Old Fatehpura, a district of Udaipur. The campus has a library, canteen, dorms and the offices are across the street. The library is open to the public, although the second and third floors are reserved for volunteers and employees only. Our dorms are located in the same building as the education department. We share a kitchen with the boys dorm. We have a fridge but Emilie and I don’t think it is at 4 degrees like it says on the fridge itself. I ... read more

Namaste! I am writing this while on the train to Udaipur from Delhi. The ride will last twelve hours so I figured I should make the most of this opportunity to write a blog post before I spend the next two days getting to know my new hometown. From the hotel, our driver helped us find the right platform and train car. We came prepared with a dinner packed by the hotel and I loaded my bag with ‘western’ snacks from a gas station (Lays sour cream and onion chips, sour skittles, skittles, Gatorade, and two kinds of Gobstoppers). We are riding in second class, which means there are two beds on each wall, three sets of beds per compartment and my favorite part; air conditioning! There are no rats thank god. The interns who went ... read more

Hello followers The last time I posted I was on the airplane heading to Delhi so I have a lot to catch you guys up on. Wow New Delhi is amazing! For those of you who don’t already know, New Delhi is the capital of India and it is in the state of Delhi. When we landed we collected our bags and got picked up at the airport by Gannesh, who gave us a cell phone to share and we were off to the hotel! At the entrance of the airport there were a few families sleeping on the sidewalks. The cars drive on the left side of the road, and I quickly figured out that the lines on the street for cars are optional. Actually I think that as soon as you drive something smaller ... read more

May 6, 2012 Namaste..well not quite yet! I am traveling to Delhi with seven other students from Ottawa University. Everyone gets a long really well so far; probably because we are all a little bit crazy to be going to live and work in India for three months. Traveling to Delhi has not been without its challenges. Most of us only slept a few hours before our flight to Toronto in anticipation of sleeping on our flight at 2:30 p.m from Toronto to Delhi (which would put us on Delhi time as our flight would have been during night time Delhi time…if that made sense). I was particularly hungover and, have yet to gain my appetite back but maybe I am just nervous. As the universe would have it, the flight was delayed not by two ... read more

I cannot wait to leave on my trip. I woke up this morning extremely hung over and I am not looking forward to trying to keep the second dose of dukoral down until my flight at 10 a.m. Thanks to my mom, dad, and everyone else who helped me prepare for the internship in India this summer- I am going to miss you guys. I fly out from Ottawa to Toronto at 10 am and then from Toronto to Delhi at 2:45p.m. See you in India, Brianne... read more