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Published: September 17th 2008
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Well. I have been thrown out into the sea of Foreigner-in-India Sickness, thrashed around, caught in the undertow, slammed against the rocks, swept ashore, pulled back in again, and at last have straggled onto dry land, weak but, finally, healthy. It began with a slight stomach problem. This escalated very rapidly into a full-out fever, although I couldn't quite get a precise temperature because, after feeling my neck and forearm (not the forehead!), my family announced the presence of fever, and resisted my attempts to ascertain just how bad it was. That was clearly an unnecessary step. (By the way, it's pretty unpleasant to have a bad fever in unrelenting 90-degree weather.) No sooner did the fever recede (with the help of advil) then a whopping monster cold set in, followed by a complete loss of voice. And after a few days of squawking my way through all my classes and quite a few awkward cross-cultural encounters, when all seemed like it was getting better, I was blindsided by a few days of intense stomach pain and a rather intimate relationship with the toilet. Now I am left, inexplicably, with a shallow cough in my lungs that makes it rather difficult
to breathe - a bit like altitude sickness, except, I'm at sea level. SO.
Anyway, that's mostly done now. The worst thing that happened was that I was too ill to go on the SITA scavenger hunt. I spoke to our program assistant the morning of, and she said, "You know, Leah, it's probably not such a good idea for you to go. I mean, it'll be running around in the sun, and hopping on buses, and deciphering clues, and there'll be time limits, and talking to strangers, and map reading, and things you have to take photos of... So I think we can agree you're not well enough for this just yet." Which, if you know me at all, was the absolute WORST thing she could say to me, since I was sick enough to not go, but not sick enough to not realize that she was basically describing everything I love to do.
But despite all this, lots of great things continue to happen. Recently we had SITA's Ganesh puja! Ganesh is a fun-loving elephant god, and to celebrate his birthday, you fashion a Ganesh out of clay, re-creating the story of his birth. It was
Breaking open the coconut
This is Ramesh, who works at the SITA Center. a lot of fun (despite my poor sculpting skills) and everyone had a great time. After doing the puja, everyone eats food that Ganesh likes - which are lots of sweets! (If you can make it out, I had my Ganesh holding laddoo, an Indian treat. I figured he would like that.) We have also been visiting local religious sites, and a few of us also went to a Bharata Natyam debut, which is the first large-scale public performance for a girl who has been studying classical Indian dance.
I just spent last weekend in Pondicherry with my Environmental Issues class. It was a very interesting although exhausting experience. After an overnight train (where we got less than five hours of sleep), we spent the day with an Environmental Research NGO called "FERAL." If you're interested in this kind of thing, I highly recommend you look them up - www.feralindia.org. In many ways South India is still recovering from the tsunami, but a lot of the tsunami recovery efforts are misdirected or misunderstood. On the one hand, a lot of attention went out to these impoverished fishing communities, and a lot of infrastructure developments were made because of the
Jain Hill
This is a holy spot for Jains close to Madurai that my "Myth, Religion, and Art" class visited. huge amount of international aid that came pouring into India at the time. Of course, a lot of this money was earmarked for certain projects and certain time frames, not all of which were practical or even appropriate for what was needed. The Indian government is currently spending a lot of money building trees to prevent against more tsunami devastation, except there's no indication there will be another tsunami of that scale anytime soon - maybe not for hundreds of years - and it's really sand dunes that provide protection, not trees. Like I said, very interesting stuff! FERAL is doing a lot of research to provide the government and other organizations with the information to make better decisions. They accept undergraduate apprentices all the time. You get to stay in these elevated thatch huts, and do research in their field sites.
We also visited organic farmers in Auroville, which is an intentional community based on the teachings of the Mother, a disciple of the guru Sri Aurobindo. The community is like a little slice of the West, in a rather disconcerting way. It calls itself the "City the Earth Needs" - an egalitarian, sustainable, spiritual, utopian community. But
it is so far removed from the India that surrounds it that you instantly feel transported, and based on some conversations we had, it definitely seems designed to ennable Westerners to live there without having to 'deal' with India. Honestly, when we were in the visitors' center eating lunch, you could have told me that we were in a nice resort in Florida and I would have believed you. Because to join you need to work there for a year without pay while supporting yourself entirely, only someone with a certain degree of financial comfort can join at all. At the same time, I do find it a very fascinating place and there are a lot of people who are doing very interesting and well-intentioned work there. It is also a major tourist attraction and we went to a French-run cafe by the seashore and went swimming in the Bay of Bengal. Most of the tourists were European or Israeli and in total bikini/western swimming attire. Meanwhile we were there following complete rules of South Indian modesty; in other words, we went swimming dressed in our salwar kameez or in shorts and t-shirts. In many ways, it made me feel
Mahavira
Sage, founder of Jainism privileged to be experiencing India in another way, and it was almost a relief to get back to the dirt and dust and disorder and traffic and poverty and trash that is all within a ten minutes drive from Auroville.
That said, it was lovely being in Pondicherry! It is still in many ways a French city, so there was some opportunity for me to speak and read in French. It's a little cleaner and quieter than Madurai, and resembles a European city more. We spent the weekend gorging on the western food we missed - cheese and pasta! - and we went shopping at a few nice Indian clothing stores. A few of us went to an outdoor market which was pretty crowded and chaotic. We found some beautiful patterned sheets and I found a DVD of The Holiday which my host sister has been asking me to get for a few weeks now. Because there is a lot of tourism in Pondicherry, we attracted far less stares than we do in Madurai, where we are the only white people around. I think visiting another city in Tamil Nadu really made me realize how at home I feel
in Madurai.
Funny experience: My ballot arrived! I got really excited, until I realized it was for the state election on September 16. Then I realized that only one race was uncontested, so sending my ballot back to the states was really just a symbolic activity. But I decided to do it anyway! So I voted with the handy enclosed pencil, put my ballot in the addressed envelope, put on the correct amount of postage, and sent it off. Here's what happened: it got to the Indian post office, and they stamped it, but then they apparently could not figure out which was the sending address and which was the return address. So, without realizing that the stamps were Indian stamps, and so it could not have been sent from the US, they decided that the return address was the sending address, and sent it RIGHT BACK TO THE SITA CENTER. At this point, I have given up. John Kerry is just not getting my vote. I hope he managed to defeat that other guy from Gloucester without me. I hope everyone else in Massachusetts made sure they voted, because I'm sure he needed your help.
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Theresa
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Nice Ganesh!
Hi, Leah!!!! Nice Ganesh! Love the ladoo he's holding -- I'm sure it made him very happy! So sorry to hear about you getting sick -- sounded like quite an ordeal, it also sounded similar to what I went through a few days after leaving India -- I remember being miserable for a while in Malaysia. You look BEAUTIFUL in your sari -- WOW!! and salwar kameez. very nice. Glad to hear you're beginning to feel at home in Madurai, head bob and all. Haha Makes me want to be there even more ... Lots of love, Theresa