Please Crush Bottle After Use.

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Hello! OK OK I suck (about writing travelblogs when I say I’m going to). We are now in lovely Ongole, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, on the southeastern coast of India. Things are substantially more difficult for us here, which is the reason that I haven’t written anything for awhile. I’ll get the hard stuff out of the way first:

Paul has typhoid! Yikes. We were vaccinated, but I guess it is not 100% coverage, right? Don’t worry - he will be OK. I was concerned for a few days, but his fever is under control and the doctor here says he should be OK within a few days.

Virtually nobody speaks English here. They speak Telugu, a language that appears to have very little in common with Hindi. We definitely don’t speak Telugu. Exciting, you say? So authentic, you say? Well, you may be right, but it’s still hard! We are feeling so tired of not being able to communicate - to get food, to ask for stuff at the hotel. We are trying to coordinate with local officials and engineers and villagers and drivers and hitting our heads against walls over and over again. So that’s hard.

Attitudes towards women here are very different than the rest of India we’ve encountered. Most places we’ve gone so far, even the small towns, are more exposed to the global community and so are adopting these views about women and other things. But Ongole is very isolated and traditional. This is a great situation for us to learn in, but it’s hard for me (Kari). We don’t see too many women walking around or at restaurants or anything. Men do not often look women in the eye, even if you’re talking to them - usually Paul gets responses even when I’m doing the asking. My general impression is that women have to hang out behind the scenes. For instance, a little café that we have gone to a couple times has a partition near the back - there’s a sign and arrow that says “Women and Families”. This is where we have to sit - out of sight. Another place, a nicer restaurant that has a bar, where we went to dinner one night, seated us inside, in a VERY dark room (so dark there was no chance of seeing our food) in the VERY back. The whole room was empty except for one table of men in the front. I have been wearing all Indian-style very loose clothes, but of course still getting gawks. This is probably partially because we are westerners and people are interested in seeing us.

Tangent: I’m starting to understand the life of a celebrity, and I have much more sympathy for their desires to be left alone by paparazzi. It can drive a person crazy to be followed and stared at constantly. I lost my temper a little bit for the first time over this last Sunday. We attempted to go “relax” at the beach, but it took our driver threatening multiple ppl with a stick to give us even a semblance of peace and quiet. Even when we moved down the beach, this one guy moved just to sit near us.

Food = very spicy (this state is known for their spicy food) = Paul and Kari sick = enough said

Power outages - every day

We are finding the engineering project situation we came to do to be quite complicated. We’re not sure exactly how, but somehow someone in our organization dropped the ball in their dealings with the villages here and suffice it to say we are trying to pick up the pieces - without any money to do it. Very few funds have been raised and we don't have any of them yet, so we feel as if our hands are tied to do the construction prep work we came here to do - hire translators, rent a house, rent a vehicle, buy motorcycles, arrange for construction labor and materials…The huge bummer is that there are 45 villages along the coast who were affected by the tsunami - they were promised development help over 2 years ago, and as of yet, only one village has received benefits. This is because someone somewhere over-promised and did not follow through. We are now doing our best to move this forward as much as we can, but it is difficult. We have been focusing on moving design plans forward and obtaining local governmental support.

OK! Now, with all that crankiness out of the way, let’s talk about the good stuff:

We are learning a lot - about engineering, project management, south Indian culture, and the needs of the people here.

We have AC most places - office, hotel, and many restaurants

We found a great food place that has pizza (read: not spicy), ice cream, and delicious Indian sweets, snax, and breads.

We stay in a pretty good hotel that is really helpful to us.

Hate to admit this as a good thing but: We have a TV! Most of the trip we have been glad to be in sparse and even dirty rooms and without a TV to distract us and we don’t have a TV at home in LA, but while here, it’s good to have some comforts of home. There are a few English channels, inc. Nat’l Geo, VH1, one that plays American dramas and sitcoms, and one that has reality-type shows and TV documentaries.

The villagers are amazing: so kind and excited to see us and respectful. The fishing villages are unlike any I’ve seen before. The homes are made out of mud with straw roofs. I went inside one of them and it was very cool and comfortable, although of course small. They even had light bulbs inside.

The president of SDRWC, the local NGO we are working with is awesome! He is fully committed to the cause of this NGO and to the villagers that he helps. He works 7 days a week from 5:30 am to at least 6:00pm, usually later. He also speaks great English and is our lifeline for local culture and how to get around.

Random Stuff:

Women just swim in their clothes here - it was really heavy and funny to do this!

It is virtually impossible to find toilet paper here! I’ve asked at the hotel 6 times (they keep telling me they’ll send it, but haven’t in the past week or so) and when I asked at a shop, the man said I can’t find it on this street - I have to go to a special shop somewhere more downtown. We have used toilet paper sporadically here - sometimes we have it with us, and sometimes we don’t, but usually in a pinch we can get some - but not here. So we are learning the hard way the true Indian methods of using the toilet!

We’re headed back to the states in about a week. First, though, we’ll stop in Chennai for a few days, then it’s off to Amsterdam for 2 days, and then Detroit for a week. Stay tuned! And check out past blogs - new pictures! - I retroactively added some pics from Rishikesh and Kerala, but they're posted by the dates we were in these places.

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