1st day in Madurai

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There are drawings I've been meaning to mention, in front of every doorway. They are done, I think, in chalk, with white chalk for the borders and colored chalk as filled in color decoration. Originally, they were done in rice flour. They were intended to keep bugs out of the house. But as time went on, they became popular more for the decorative aspect.

Today we got on our little tour bus (which we'll be keeping for the duration of our stay away from Chennai) and drove to an NGO. The bus ride was long and many of us fell asleep. I was glad to see a bit of the landscape, outside of cities, outside of expected tourism, and just see everyday life, if only from the window.

The NGO is run by a Catholic priest who was a bit of an activist, but got sick of the Church telling him he couldn't rock the boat, so he started this NGO to create tomorrow's leaders, who themselves will rock the boat. We had thought we were going to see an orphanage, but a lot of the people there, mostly girls, were not orphans, but from a poor family, and this school gave them opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have. They were all of the lowest caste, the Dalits, once called "untouchables" but as the caste system has been morphing and changing and partially becoming obsolete, the Dalits have begun to gather their strength and political power and there is now the equivalent of Affirmative Action, and a certain percentage of all college acceptances MUST be Dalits.

When we first arrived, the priest himself spoke to us at length about his dream for this school. We were served chai, and soon after, a group of girls danced a traditional folk dance for us. One dance was with handkerchiefs, and the other was with large headdresses that looked like jugs balanced on their heads, and they would do all these things and never let the headdresses fall from their heads.

We then saw the recording studio, where many of these girls have recorded traditional music, and apparently this is the best, most sophisticated recording studio in Madurai. Several feature films have asked to use the recording studio, and they have only given permission to films that either are about Dalits, or star Dalits.

We had been given candy to give to the children, and none of us had passed it on to the children yet, so it was getting all warm in our hands. We saw some older children in the computer lab, and so we gave it to them. They played some music, and the girls started dancing again. Rikki made a little friend in a girl who wanted to specifically teach her to dance. Later on, we found out that these "children" that we had given candy to, that we thought were so cute because they wanted to teach us to dance, and had cute big dreams of being an aeronautical engineer, were actually 20 or 21 years old! The moment I found this out, I felt like such an idiot. How condescending I must have seemed! Why were we told they were children in an orphanage? Why were we given candy to give them? Why did they look so young?

After we left, we drove to a Monkey Temple. There were 3 gates decorated in the same multicolored style of many temples, and when we finally got to the top and parked, we took off our shoes and walked up to join the long line of people entering the temple. Since I'm not Hindu, I couldn't enter the inner part where people seemed to have some kind of water ceremony that looked like a baptism equivalent. As we stood, all around us we could see real monkeys. Just like the one I had seen in Chennai with the old lady. I felt cautious about taking too many pictures inside the temple, since it seems so voyeuristic and rude. One man shouted to me, and waved his hand. I wasn't sure if I should respond, because I figured he was going to yell at me. But when I looked over, he vigorously demanded that I take a picture of him.

After we left the temple, we discovered that we could feed the monkeys, so people bought bags of some kind of puffed rice, sold specifically for that purpose. The monkeys are much more in the know than any of us, and once they saw the bags, the bolder ones would attack the bag, which was made simply of newspaper, so it would burst and spill the contents on the ground. I got one to eat from my hand. Some of them were mean. Reflecting later, I realized all of them were mean. Really cute, strangely human, but not friendly.

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