We've Created a Nan-ster!

    Have spent a lot of time talking about a lot of the big things recently, and kept intending to change that but big things just kept happening.  This trend hasn’t stopped—still going to new villages, could tell long narratives about all that, but it would start getting repetitive.  If it hasn’t already.  So some random thoughts now, in no particular order.
    There are a number of things that I will never again take for granted.  Trashcans come to mind—my third story window just isn’t the same.  Traffic laws, or at least people’s willingness to follow them.  Black coffee.  That any store person should be able to break a $10 dollar bill.  That one is a serious problem.  The ATM’s here spit out 500Rs notes, which is a bit more than ten bucks.  Nobody will take them.  You basically have to be in a decently nice restaurant to use them.  Even hundreds raise eyes.  That’s the equivalent of someone not being able to break a $2 bill, if we still used those.  I got a 1000Rs once.  It literally took me 4 days to find someone to break it.  But the number one thing on my list of things-not-to-be-taken-for-granted is toilette paper.  They just don’t seem to have it here.  Anywhere.  You’re lucky if you get a toilette that actually lets you sit down. (seriously, if its just a hole in the ground I don’t need a special piece of porcelain to show me where to put my feet, I think I could have figured that bit out myself thanks).  To date, I have used a wide variety of things as TP instead of resorting to the favored Indian method, the mechanics of which I have not yet determines, that involves your left hand and a bucket of water.  My own stash of TP.  Kleenex.  Napkins.  Notebook paper.  Leaves.  The cardboard from a finished roll of toilette paper.  Newspaper.  The little paper strip thingy they wrap around the seat cover at fancy hotels to show that has been disinfected.  I’m probably forgetting some.  I always feel a bit like MacGyver when I feel the urge and realize I’ve forgotten my personal roll.
    I am baffled by the quantity of goats here.  They are everywhere.  This normally would not be so strange—if I saw the same number of say chickens, or even cows, I would not thin twice about it (well OK for the cows I would, but only because I would be watching my step a little more diligently), but there are some circumstances that make this puzzling.  Most people here are vegetarian.  Not everyone, but a large majority.  Furthermore, there are no goat milk products.  None.  I asked about it, and they said that nobody drinks the milk, and looked perplexed when I mentioned cheese.  So what the fuck do they use them for?  I mean the things are everywhere, large herds in the fields, stragglers on the streets, even the occasional herd wandering in the middle of the city.  Maybe they are there in lieu of a garbage service (see list of things I will never take for granted again, above), and if so I want to complain to their manager, because they are doing a terrible job.
    It is very difficult to nonverbally say no here.  Nodding still means yes, but shaking your head is not a recognized signal.  In fact, it is very close to a head-wiggle gesture which translates roughly to ‘I understand you’ or ‘this all makes sense so far,’ or, in most cases, ‘yes.’  (It looks like the Whit nod minus the vertical component, or a extremely calmed down version of the Garber Jig isolated in the head, for those of you who know what those things are…)  So to summarize, nodding means yes, and shaking your head also means yes.  If you want to say no, its best to stick to words.
    Having said that, it is also very difficult to verbally say no here.  Rickshaw drivers and street sellers don’t really seem to get the concept.  But my personal favorite is families trying to give you food.  It is a part of Indian hospitality that guests must be offered food and usually tea or something as well, and as we are visiting many households we get given a lot of food.  The best we can usually do is convince them that we will share, and don’t actually need 4 plates of cookies.  I’ve now had 2 meals in families houses in Alakkudi.  These are large scale events, with us seated on the floor eating off banana leaves and them serving food out of absurdly large containers.  If you finish what is on your leaf, this apparently is a signal that you want more.  If you refuse, say that you are full etc, they will withdraw their heaping spoon.  But only temporarily.  As soon as you look away, they swoop in and drop another heaping pile of rice in front of you. 
    Which reminds me—eating with our hands.  Or more accurately, hand.  Because of the customary use of the left hand (see toilette paper rant) South Indian custom (understandably) says that you should only eat with your right hand.  This does not seem to bad in theory, but think about it a little more.  The food we are talking about here is almost entirely rice based.  Doused in watery sauce.  And you are eating off the floor, so you can’t use the tip-bowl-and-shovel technique I usually employ when eating sauced rice with chopsticks. And there aren’t any edges in which one could corner rebellious morsels.  At both of the lunches with rural families that I have been at, the mothers have eventually taken pity on me and scrounged up a fork somewhere.  I feel slightly offended—did it really look like I was struggling that badly?—but mostly just relieved.
    Communication is also very difficult, we have discovered, at restaurants.  Frequently our visits go something like this: the first waiter comes over, and we start telling him what we want.  He leaves abruptly and begins a game I like to call ‘find the coworker who speaks the best English.’  Because it wasn’t obvious when the large group of white people walked in that Tamil probably wasn’t going to be the lingua franca.  Take to on ordering.  Many of the things on the menu are not actually available.  Nobody seems to have pallak paneer, even though it is on every menu in the state of Tamil Nadu.  We get our food.  Usually at least one of the main dishes is wrong, and we always have to engage in high level diplomatic interactions to end up with the right amount of nan and other breadstuffs.  Recently, at a relatively nice restaurant, we asked for 5 orders of nan.  We ended up with three.  We tried to explain the mistake, and ended up getting 5 more nan, and then 3 more from the guy who had actually understood what was going on.  I may or may not have cracked an incredibly terrible pun which gave this post its name, but that doesn’t really sound like me now does it?
    Another strange aspect of eating out in South India is the phenomenon of the AC room.  All of the high class people, and as foreigners we apparently qualify as such, apparently like eating in dark rooms with either no windows at all or windows shoddily boarded up with plywood, different menus (+10Rs per item) and an AC unit.  Apparently they don’t want us “eating with the plebes,” to quote Katherine. 
    There are frequently TV’s in these AC rooms, and this has led to another strange observation.  We have dubbed it the attractiveness differential.  This term describes the inevitable fact that in every single Indian music video—at least all of those that we have seen so far—the girls are significantly more attractive than their male counterparts.  We’re talking tall, young, thin, busty women opposite 35 year old men with mustaches, beer bellies and frequently oddly bulging eyes.  Inexplicable.
    We had our first run in with a pickpocket on a bus back to our hotel.  Jesse was standing, and it was crowded.  She feels something tugging at her bag, which looks deceptively easy to get into, and sees the hand of the woman next to her on the bag, tugging at the opening.  She stares the woman down, and the hand leaves.  Here’s the punch line—the woman in question was using a baby, which she seemed to be breast feeding at the time, for cover.  Starting him early in the ways of a life of crime.
    Finally my favorite/the most cliché of my little anecdotes.  We went into Alakkudi again the other day to do a focus group with 7 college kids in a variety of programs from the town.  We did the interview in a half constructed building on a palm grove, and got some really good insights.  The most interesting info came from them when they weren’t actually answering questions directly but instead joking with each other about the answers.  We then had lunch at one of their houses, off the floor, and that supplied the material for a number of the little blurbs above.  After lunch we were taken next door to admire their neighbors sound system and TV.  Which meant watching 20 minutes of Tamil music videos.  The only interesting part was a video where both the leads, man and woman, ended up at some point being the chief minister (the equivalent of Governor of a US state) of Tamil Nadu, and it was rumored that they had had an affair.  Good to know that the US hardly has a monopoly on absurd political story lines.
    Finally, went to play cricket in the fields with the boys that we had interviewed along with other guys from the village.  Was amazingly fun.  They went easy on us, pitching pretty slow, but it was still really cool.  Learned the basic rules, but also definitely felt the whole ‘sports bringing people of different cultures together’ thing that I always scoff at as being just too pat.  Also tried to explain water polo to them, which was an entertaining challenge.  Also bonded with one of the kids over whistling—he did the two finger whistle, and I surprised him by responding.  As we left, going to catch our train, he would whistle from the field and I would whistle back until the shrill noise faded into the distance.  Thanks mom for that surprisingly random point of cultural connection.  And as an added bonus, I was significantly louder than him too, so good job with the teaching.
    That isn’t nearly all of the little oddities so far, but all that I’ll rant on right now.  We’re almost done with field work for the time being, and will soon be heading back to Chennai (not exactly sure when—solid travel plans, like almost everything else at the IFMR, are rather elusive), where hopefully I will have reliable internet.  For the time being, I will post this whenever I can steal my way onto someone else’s computer.

Alakkudi

“Ka-Pe, Ka-Pe, Sa-Mo-Sa-Teeeeeeeeee”
“Ka-Pe, Ka-Pe, Sa-Mo-Sa-Teeeeeeeeee”
    The voices of confectioners combine and echo down the platform, reminiscent of some religious chant, Gregorian perhaps, or something more fittingly eastern.  A hymn of commercialism, selling (we eventually translated, after examining their wares) ‘coffee, coffee, samosas and tea’ to the trains passengers at the Thanjavur station, where we hastily boarded.
    We were off for our first day of real fieldwork in a town called Alakkudi, a name when spoken quickly in an Indian accent is indistinguishable, at least at first, from the English ‘allegory.’  I feel like there should be some poignant conclusion to be drawn from this confusion, but nothing comes to me at the moment.  A ten minute train ride lands us at our destination, seemingly just a strip of concrete, a simple awning and a tree for shade, and a sign declaring the name, and an expanse of fields.  The rest of the town is revealed when the train rolls on.  Not much more is there to be revealed.  As the vibration hum of the train fades the cacophony of birds makes obvious the stillness, the lack of the machine buzz of the urban that even Thanjavur had.  Here, nothing but birds.
    We go to the house of the first family, Dami, Shulpa and I, ducking low to avoid hitting our heads on the beams supporting the roof.  I don’t duck low enough.  This is a pattern to be repeated many times this day.
    The walls are a cool blue, lit by light filtering in the door and a single fluorescent cylinder.  The concrete floors are smooth on our bare feet.  Shoes have been abandoned in the sweltering heat and red dust of the street before passing over the threshold.  We sit in the seats of honor—cheap pink plastic chairs—while members of the family gather round and sit on the floor.  One of the men, himself also in a chair, attempts to give it up to the matron of the family.  He barely ahs time to move before she starts cheerfully yelling at him, scaring him back into the chair with fast gestures and a faster flow of Tamil.  He tries to get a word in edgewise, but eventually concedes defeat and retakes his seat.  She triumphantly and gracefully folds herself onto the floor.  Her daughter and the third generation, and 8 month old baby in nothing but a string around its waist, join her.  We start talking.
    We are here to talk about education and financing, and that is more or less the direction of the conversation.  Shulpa translates, and we occasionally meander off topic but it doesn’t matter.  Their son is in his first year of a masters program in computer science at a local university in Thanjavur, and is hoping to finish the three year program in two, so as to save on tuition costs and start helping the family out sooner.  They say that theirs is one of the few families to send a child to higher education.  The cost of an education is so high—around 2 lacs, or the equivalent of around $4000, or higher in some cases—and jobs are not guaranteed if you don’t do well in school, so many poor families are reluctant to take the risk, even if financing is available.  They would rather have their children start working, contributing to the family’s income as soon as possible.  This family says that they are relatively rare.  Their son always did well in school (a claim supported by the stellar report card they proudly show us after digging around in a back room for a while) and they are willing to take the risk in the hope that their people will not be farmers forever.
    There are long periods of waiting in the conversation for me, as ideas slowly move between languages.  I make friends with the baby in this time, attracting his wide eyed and curious stare, then letting him clutch my finger, then holding him and sitting it on my knee with the approval of his father.  Only a few minutes after I hand him back to his mother, he proceeds to shit all over her sari and the floor.  I knew we invented diapers for a reason.
    We had a while to wait before lunch.  We wandered to the outskirts of town, along dirt roads only distinguishable from goat paths by the motorcycles that occasionally barreled down them, often carrying three or four people, small children in front clutching the handlebars.  We found a large lot shaded by a grove of palm trees and asked the woman working among them if we could sit in her yard.  She sat and talked with us, and served some of the best tea that I’ve ever tasted.  She told us, after hearing that we were researching education, that she had forced her parents to let her stop after 9th standard.  She was much happier just farming.  A bit later laugher broke out and Preethi translated for us—
    “She says that her favorite pass time is berating her husband.”  The woman had a mischievous expression on, and watched our faces during the translation.  She seemed quite happy with her lot in life.
    Lunch in the KGFS office, where small loans are given out backed by family gold and social pressure.  Kids from the school we passed on the way back to the center of town crowded around the gate in the front of the building, looking at the foreign animals on display—a whole crowd of Americans. 
    We had some time before the next appointment.  I spent it wandering through the streets of the town, up and down the gridlike layout, switching between the upper caste residences on one side of the main road and the lower on the other.  Houses of plaster, houses of mud. Hindu temples hidden between houses, families sitting on their front porches stare when they notice me.  Children laugh and follow for a block or so when I pass, asking me in broken English and sign language to take their picture.  From the adults I get different reactions, ranging from illegible expressions to outright suspicion to cheerful smiles and even a childlike request for a picture.   The afternoon sun is golden on the white and blue walls, and reflects off the water that splashes on the streets as people wash themselves, their dishes, their porches using the communal spigot.
    One last interview—ours is with the son of the family that we talked to before, back from classes.  We finish and go to the other interview going on, of a secondary school teacher, one of the richest members of the village.  He invites us in, and we sit listening to his longwinded and circuitous answer for 30 minutes.  Answer singular—I actually never heard a question, he just kept answering one asked before I arrived until we realized that the train was leaving in anywhere from 20 to 5 minutes. 
    Walking to the train station, we heard the trains whistle and saw the light piercing twilight.  We started to run.  No time to get onto the platform, instead we leaped onto the train from the adjacent tracks. Preethi, who bought tickets, only just got on board before it lurched forward, back to Thanjavur.  We had left for the village at 7, and were to arrive at 7:30.  A full day.

The Project

Thought that I'd give some background on where we are and what exactly we are trying to do.  I started my trip by flying into Chennai, marked by B on this map.  That is were the IFMR is based, although they do most of their research/field work, and we have been/will be working, in Thanjavur, marked by A

Here is a map of Chennai.  The office that we are working at is very new--construction is still going on, elevators keep going out, etc.  The office is at A.  For the first week we stayed at the Crescent Park hotel in Nungambakkam, a district in Chennai, marked B on this map.  Google maps tells me that the commute is 12.1 kilometers, which I believe.  It also says that it should take 20 minutes.  This is bullshit. Maybe, just maybe, if you managed to remove all of the other people from the city except for one rickshaw driver and then made sure he had a full tank of gas and new tires, you might be able to do it, but he would probably end up getting lost and/or taking you on a wild goose chase around town so that he could try and charge you more.  An hour later, you would get to the office.

Here is Thanjavur.  As you can see, it is much smaller than Chennai.  Supposedly it has a population of around 200,000, but it definitely doesn't seem that way.  The Indians we work with always laugh when we mention this, reminding us that in India, 200,000 is nothing.  Our guest house is at A, which is a ways from the center of town, but not by much--it is like a 10 minute bus ride from the train station in bad conditions.  Much longer than that if you get on the wrong bus and drive around in circles, but still.

In terms of what we are doing.  Our team is working on developing an educational loan for higher education for the Thanjavur region, mostly focusing on the truly rural areas surrounding the city (town?).  Over this last week we did a pilot project, going around to schools and interviewing people and trying to figure out feasibility and any issues that we are going to have.  We went to high schools, various higher education institutions, a bank, and interacted with some local government officials over the three days we were actually in the field, which I think was pretty damn good.  We stuck to the town more or less during the pilot for timing reasons, so hopefully we will get farther afield in the coming weeks.  My team--me and Katherine and Priyanka, went to an engineering college and some high schools.  We interviewed people and talked about how they get into schools, how they pay for it, etc. Other groups did other high schools, other colleges and universities, etc.

What we found:

From the people that we talked to, the picture seems much less bleak than I was expecting.  Everyone seemed to want to go on to higher education, the government programs were pretty good, and people seemed to be able to finance what they needed.  The biggest issue that there seemed to be is that people in villages either were not interested in higher education, stopped their children from doing it for social reasons (ie married their children off early, etc) or needed them at home for financial reasons, although these were very infrequent given what we heard.  There is also a significant problem in that many of the rural students do not know how to work the system.  Banks here are required by the government to offer everyone in a designated region an education loan, but most of the student do not know this.  So from what we have seen very briefly, it seems like another loan product is not the answer--the banks are forced to operate at a loss, and the advantage that microfinance has is that it has a higher repayment rate so it allows banks to give loans to those who otherwise would have no access to capital at all.  To my eyes it seems like it would be dumb to enter the market where that advantage is wiped out by governmental mandates that traditional banks provide the service, especially since IFMR is trying to be fiscally sustainable and the default rate for student loans in the Thanjavur area is near 50%.  It would be much smarter to just inform the villagers of these programs, and help them take advantage of the programs that already exist.

Unfortunately our employers, or some powerful subset of them, disagree with this.  They really want to supply a product, and dont seem to understand the economic arguments that we are making--not surprising given that the people who disagree with us the most are a psychology researcher and a psych/agriculture major.  Plus it seems that the organization in general is very tied to the prospect of microfinance solving all of the problems which they encounter, whereas I think that our team has a more policy-based background/thinking.  Favorite quote from a recent meeting: "we need to be questioning all of our assumptions.  We know that there is a demand for this product..."  But we will see, we might start to agree with them more once we have gone into the really rural areas, and it does seem that some of the IFMR people were understanding and agreeing with our issues.  

Answer to the dilemma:  More data.  We go back out into the field on Monday or Tuesday, returning to Thanjavur.  More interviews, more banks, more cows and goats and chickens, more spicy spicy indian food, more dust, less cars and internet and office cubicles and horns and toxic fumes that do make the sunsets pretty interesting but otherwise are a pain in the ass.  Altogether a pretty good deal.

Illumination

Thinking back to the ride back from the first day out in the field, returning from a small rural Indian village.  Chennai snuck up on us, growing out of the countryside gradually until fields had been completely replaced by apartments mashed together and disorganized shops.  Darkness had fallen, a true darkness so unlike the false twilight that had accompanied the thunderstorm which had come and passed.

            Busses brought workers back into the city after a days toil in the manufacturing plants.  We had passed by a row of faces each time we barreled past a bus.  Tired men and women searching for comfort amidst the other bodies and the hard plastic seats.  Limp fingers draped out windows, heads resting on shoulders, hard stares bridging the space between the cool, confined artificial air of our van and the wet hot breeze passing through their pane-less windows.

            Our hotel-bound path brings us past one of the more desolate parts of town where some of the busses deposit their breathing cargo for the night.  Workers stand around in the dirt, waiting, presumably, for the next form of transportation, for someone else to take them from this cold place to their homes.  It is dark.  Busses drive away, empty, with the hiss of hydraulic doors and diesel farewells.  Distant bulbs provide just enough light for shadows, textures of darkness.

            One light breaks the monotony.  A spindly food cart illuminated by the single harsh fluorescent bulb that hangs over the confectioner’s head sits in the darkness, taking advantage of the waiting workers.  Its front is lines with warped glass jars full of foods not familiar to me, and packages and fruits hang from the roof , framing the confectioner’s busy form.  He moves back and forth, hands darting in and out of jars, in and out of pockets, in and out of the cold glow of his cart. 

            The workers gather to the lit cart likes moths to a flame.  A cliché metaphor to be sure, but fitting nonetheless.  Clichés become that way because they communicate some recurring idea especially well, and repeated ideas contain something that closely resembles truth.  The workers bring their money, clutching tattered bills and grimy coins and trade them in a brusquely handled exchange for a fleeting moment of human interaction.  They gather around that spot for reassurance, for proof positive of humanity beneath the dark abandoned buildings and concrete monoliths  Man hides from his own creations, seeking the voice of another human being, the bustle of the transaction, the interaction of otherwise unrelated lives.

            All of this seen, or imagined, in the instants it took to drive by, as we rushed to our hotel.  And I saw more of this, as we continued through dimly lit city streets and tried to keep strait in my mind the labyrinth of unintelligible names and symbols.  Shops painted in an incandescent  glow as customers make evening purchases.  Glowing embers shed warm light while simultaneously bringing oil to past its boiling point.   Single candle flames feebly shed photons and reveal shambling houses and squatters’ claimed patches of sidewalk.  Islands of illumination floating in the dark sea of the city, islands of concentrated humanity.  People define their spaces, define their home, and seeks the comfort of human contact and companionship within this space. 

This happens all the time.  In our minds we draw lines and borders, make our home and fill it with our heart, and hopefully in the hearts of others.  It is only at night, when the darkness arouses some primitive fear within us and draws us towards the light, towards other people to share in our emotions and in the trails of our lives, that this becomes visible.  Illuminated by wavering flames, glowing filaments and the nearly imperceptible vibrations of noble, exotic gasses.

We reached our destination and piled out of the van.  We stepped into the pools of light surrounding our hotel and climbed the stairs, wearily returning to our rooms.

There and Back Again

I write this while on the top of three bunks, about six feet by two feet, on a lurching train from Thanjavur to Chennai.  This is the second time in a few days that I have made this train trip, albeit in opposite directions.  You have to love the efficiency.  I will post this as soon as I find myself connected to the internet, and who knows when that will be.  But I should start off with what happened after the last time I posted, and describe what I have been up to.

The weekend.  Those glorious two days when you don’t have to work, or think about work, and in our case when we could pretend that we were just tourists on  vacation.  Because Chennai really, truly is a tourist destination.  It is so much easier to tell lies when you are typing them. 

On Saturday we had a lazy start, bummed around the hotel, and eventually went to the beach.  It was very entertaining, and was actually a relatively nice beach—cleanish sand, the minimal amounts of human fecal matter (see picture…) and loads of interesting people (/monkeys dressed as people) to watch.  I tried to body surf, and met some boys around my age playing in the waves.  We played a game of chicken.  To me it seems that they were trying to get the foreigner sucked out by the riptide for their amusement by challenging him to a game of who-can-swim-out-farther, but that is a game that I have invested far too much time in and was not to be bested by some playful punks in Chennai.  I won, handily.  We went to a nice dinner for Jesse’s 21^st, celebrating her last night of illegal drinking.  The drinking age here is apparently 21, although I have yet to see anyone get even close to being vaguely questioned about the prospect of maybe showing some form of something that resembles an ID. 

The world cup 3^rd place match was that night, and me and Robert wanted some beer for the match, so we could participate in true international style (well, other country international.  Definitely not here)  The bar, if you could call it that, was fascinating.  Bars per say are only allowed to exist in very large hotels.  Alcohol is sold, however, at these government assisted wine shops which seem to sell Kingfisher malt liquor, brandy and whiskey.  We went to one near the hotel, and walked into the Indian equivalent of a biker bar.  The shop had a little dusty yard enclosed in corrugated sheets out front, which was full of inebriated and social Indian men and their motorcycles.  We approached the store itself—essentially the bar, everyone was just hanging around and drinking—and asked the bartender for beers.  He pulled two warm ones out of the non-functional cooler and passed them to us.  An Indian man, better educated than most, sitting near the bar laughed when he saw us feeling the beers’ temperature.

“You’re in Chennai.  They are all warm.”  Cheers to that.  It was a good game.

The next day we wandered the old colonial part of town, went to a history museum etc.  Not very exciting.  But that night we were leaving Chennai.  Heading for the country.

The Indian train experience.  Kind of a cliché really, and certainly interesting.  We had nice seats—or at least the guys did, the girls were shoved into smaller beds so that they could all be in one compartment together.  I’m not sure who decided that they would appreciate that tradeoff, and that person should probably be glad that the girls don’t know who he is.  The train left late at night, and I got yelled at for leaning too far out the door of the train as we whipped by the scenery at 50 miles an hour.  I crashed early, and slept like a rock.  Woke up early in the morning, and spent more time at the open compartment door, watching the land pass by this time bathed in the light of the rising sun.  The Indian countryside makes you realize one of the major differences between there and the states.  Agriculture hasn’t been industrialized here, partially because there are just so many people.  The entire countryside is divided into small plots of land, and there are people pretty much constantly between Chennai and Thanjavur, in concentrations much denser then you would see in rural America.

We arrived at around seven in the morning.  Someone described the change from Chennai to Thanjavur as analogous to traveling from Chicago to Des Moines.  This is accurate.  And Chennai has cows, chickens, goats and (from our observation) at least one vehicular confused pachyderm.  (confused when he saw our vehicle, a tiny rickshaw, heading strait towards his path of motion in the middle of the street). And if that is Chicago, you can imagine what Des Moines must be like.

I like it a lot better.  The roads are dusty.  The air is hot and dry, so much more bearable than the humid and noxious vapor floating over the streets of Chennai.  Fruit stands and street side vendors peddling samosas and small donut-esque fried dough balls dot the rusty unpaved roads and trees are everywhere.  That first day we dove right into the interviews, deciding to visit the closest high school, St Michaels.  We talked to the headmaster, Father Aryoka, about his students—their financial background, what higher education they tend to pursue, how the school helps them prepare for college, etc.  We then toured around the school, causing a general ruckus and disturbing each class as we, the strange and foreign curiosity, were paraded around to each classroom like a prized pet.  Not that we minded.  It was funny seeing the same diagrams that I remember from school, of eukaryotic cells and tables of sin functions and diagrams of the skeletal system painted on wooden plaques above the door and labeled in Tamil. 

That night I went up to the roof of our guest house before going to bed and watched the lightning over the town.  It was odd—you could never see the bolts of bright white themselves, but instead could see the brilliant flash across the clouded skies.  The rumbles that I knew were there were too far away to be heard.

The next day Katherine, Priyanka and I visited a technical college in town.  Fell into a pattern that would become familiar—talked to the principal, got showed around the campus (look I really don’t care about those classrooms, we can really skip them, really is ok why don’t we just…Ok, Ok, fine, I’m going I’m going…) talked to a groups of students through Priyanka’s translations.  Went to leave and realized that there was essentially no transportation from where we were to anywhere until the students got out of class at 6.  So we started walking.  In the blazing Indian sun, across an orange landscape studded with hearty plants that brought to mind Africa more than anything tropical.  The bus stop was a few kilometers away, and Priyanka walks slower than any human being I have ever encountered.  I felt bad about it, but I physically cannot walk that slow—I would walk my normal pace, find a nice shady tree and wait for Priyanka and Katherine (more patient than I) to catch up.

Had an excellent conversation once we got back as we all sat in one of our rooms.  We were hiding from the heat of the day praying for the power to come back on.  It was a few of us Americans and the four researchers from the IFMR who had come with us.  We talked about movies, American politics, why Americans love guns, the caste system, the electoral college, corruption in the Indian government, why George Washington was president before Thomas Jefferson, which books were popular in India and how an American award, no matter how obscure, can bolster popularity here.  It was fascinating.  Have you ever tried explaining the electoral college to someone who has never been exposed to it?  Not easy my friends, not easy at all.  I was sad when the fan started spinning again and the fluorescent lights flickered back on, and people returned to their computers.  That night we went into the heart of town (still much less crowded then Chennai, more like down town Palo Alto but with stray dogs (cute, but potentially rabid) and chickens.  We ate street food, which was delicious.  I had a tomato, uncooked, and have yet to die, which I consider a promising sign.

That night, after returning, I went for a run around time.  Watched lightning in the faraway clouds as I ran.  Ended up at a field of one of the schools that we had visited.  Wandered around, listening to the distant shake of thunder and the barely audible calls of bats that hunted in the empty air over the field.  I could see them as they passed briefly though the islands of light painted by the lampposts. 

Another round of interviews an introductions the next day, this time at high schools.  Nothing new, except for the fact that we were a spectacle, crowds of students gathered around to see what the hell the strange white people were doing.  We headed back that night, again boarding the train and lurching forward towards Chennai.

Field Day

First day in the field.  I want to apologize in advance because this is going to be long.  I realized that I am actually recalling/reflecting in triplicate on these type events, taking pretty extensive notes and pictures while things are happening, then this, then recording it all again in my travel journal.  Which means that I am remembering way more than I maybe should.  And on top of that, a lot of new stuff happened today.   So here it goes, events and then thoughts as they come to me, or as they came to me as this all happened.

           

Today we were going for the first time into the field, out of Chennai by about 100 km, into a rural village where there is a heavy microfinance presence.  The point of the trip is more or less to get us used to the conditions that we will be finding when we actually go into the field, and we were accompanied by some experiences researchers who could translate and tell us when we were flippantly insulting people’s mothers when we thought we were asking where the bathroom was.  We had a long van ride to get there—it was a long ways away, and there was pretty bad traffic getting out of Chennai.

I love driving through the country.  We saw miles and miles of Tamil political signage along the highway, and small shops and towns living off the traffic, and fields of rice and other crops.  And huge manufacturing plants, the result of government incentives and the ‘Specialized Economic Zone” which requires workers to be bussed in from both directions, the city to the East and the farmland across the rest of the compass. 

We got to the closest town to the villages that we were visiting.  Right off the highway, a maze of shops and houses, nothing more than three stories tall.  White adobe-like walls, more bike repair shops than people riding bikes, and cows with painted horns being driven through the streets.  We whizzed past the odd clash of a neon advertisement adorning the top of an ornate, gaudy, Hindu temple.  The buildings grew smaller, and the space between them grew until we were driving through fields.  On roads that were legitimately better than some that I have seen in California.  Three cheers for the budget crisis.

We arrived at our first destination—a village training facility and community organization center—really just a meeting room with a TV, lights, and the necessary blessing of fans to make the room bearable.  Which then promptly stopped working five minutes into our meeting.  We were there to talk to the local Federation, which we were to find out is the group of women from the area who head the Self Help Groups that have formed.  Each of these women was in charge of a number of collective loan groups, and they wanted us to hear their stories.  None of them spoke English, or at least not enough to communicate.  I’m sure their English was better than my Tamil.  So we were working through translators, the researchers from the IFMR who had come with us.  They started to speak.

It was strange, not being able to understand.  We only got translations every couple of minutes, and even then it was not full word-for-word transcripts but rather the sparknotes version.  So other things became much more important.  More important than I realized they could be, as I struggled to find meaning.  Language left a void, and, like a blind person’s hearing and other senses--expressions, gestures, tone of voice, volume, others’ reactions, all were suddenly more meaningful.  The woman speaking first was confident.  She spoke slowly, deliberately.  Her eyes held those of our Preethi, who was asking the questions and would be translating.  She sat comfortably in her chair, not fidgeting like I was, twirling my pen while I watched for more signs.  You could tell she was proud.  A smile would flash over her lips for only a second, but it would stay in her eyes longer.  She was by no means the oldest woman of the group, but none of the others interrupted, and they were all attentive.  That was all before I knew what she had been saying.

Many years before one boy from their village had managed to get into a university and pay for it, and became a doctor.  Instead of going and getting a job, he brought back a suitcase of medicine and set up shop outside the local school, giving it away to those in need.  “The whole organization started out of that suitcase” Preethi translated directly.  That line mattered to the woman.  I remembered a triumphant and fleeting smile and a gesture to the surrounding room.  The doctor then began to teach some of the older girls—8^th graders and the like—to be his assistants, almost like nurses.  That was the woman who was talking.  Her name was Janeki, we found out then.  And the service grew, and turned into a clinic, and then a mobile clinic, and then a training program for women so they could do basic treatments, use herbal remedies available to them, and know when they needed to take someone to the hospital. 

Each of the women talked about something else in turn.  One told us of the interlocking life insurance and scholarship programs that she had set up for the people in her special help groups.  It took us a good while to understand how it worked, and not because it was being explained poorly.  Another told of providing money for surgeries, and for the mentally ill.  Another talked about how the entire federation had set up almost a credit union after having seen the microfinance banks in action.  Her reasoning for this was fascinating.   They didn’t want to be dependent on the bank for a loan in a crisis—instead it was the other women in the village who would decide if you needed more help.

I grimace thinking about what I am about to type.  I hate reading it, and I have been trying to think of a less cheesy, trite way of getting the message across and failing.  Sorry.  These women were empowered.  We could tell—there was something about the look in their eyes, the way they held themselves.  They were no longer thinking “what if” and instead thinking “we can.”  I took that directly from their promotional literature, no joke, they had pamphlets.  

After that we left the community organization center and went to one of the villages.  It was sweltering.  We sat with the village leaders on the ground and had them help Preethi draw a map of their village.  They were working too fast to translate, and I was sitting in back so I couldn’t really see what was going on.  Instead I distracted myself by killing flies.  Personal record—four in one swat.  We were sitting under a Tamarind tree, something that I always associated with India.  Here, we were told, they are associated with two things.  Red ants the size of your thumbnail and evil spirits that will possess you.  Preethi did interpret some of the goings-on for us.  The villagers told her that they were happy with their lives.  They wished that they had better water—Irrigation was from rain, so when it was dry they went without, and their drinking water was contaminated and caused frequent illness.  They wanted better transportation, and a closer hospital so that they wouldn’t have to travel the kilometers that they currently trek whenever something goes wrong.  But beyond that they were content with their lot.  The castes lived separately, with the upper levels on one side of the main road and the lower across the way, but there was no reservations about interactions.  Nor was their conflict between the religious communities—most were Hindus, but a large number of Roman Catholics also lived in the town, along with an American trained father. 

We wandered the town.  They were incredibly proud of the things that they had—the requested that I take a picture of two men working to put up the new transformer, and showed us their temples, and the towns only tractor.  I made friends with one of the village boys when I happened to get a picture of him being pushed into a sand pile by his brother on a bike.  He was a ringleader, and a few of the other boys in the town let him do the talking for them.  They wanted to show me their cow, and the banana tree, making me take pictures.  The rest of the group was shown the front of the old Hindu temple in town.  Afterwards, the boys took me inside, letting in enough light that we could see the bats darting around the inner room.

When we got to the play structures and the government buildings, and an man took my friend aside and talked to him.  I’m assuming it was his father.  The boy came back, and I could tell he was asking me something but could not tell what.  He looked uncomfortable, and was struggling with his English (more the pronunciation than the words themselves, I had realized by that point.  Not that it made it easier to understand).  Preethi came over to help, and the boy shut down.  His assumed father started talking, directly to Preethi.  Asking me for money (we found out later, it all happened in Tamil) through her, saying that the boy was enrolled in a program that they had put the down payment on, but could not afford.  She turned him down—we had been warned that this kind of thing would happen, and that our best bet was to say that we were students, that we were not being paid.

I was conflicted.  I knew that we couldn’t, or that we shouldn’t, or all the arguments about why this one and not the many others who are inevitably going to ask the same question over the next few weeks.  I still looked at this kid and felt bad.  It was clear that he was intelligent.  Not as much in the book smart, memorization way that would be rewarded in the tests and exams which dictate the course of the Indian educational system.  He reminded me of Tom Sawyer, leading his band of happy village children, running around, turning the visiting westerners into a grand entertainment.  He was gregarious and charismatic, and mischievous,  and energetic.  It turned out later that his father had been drunk, and had most certainly put him up to it.  While Preethi talked to the father, Archana, one of the other IFMR researchers, said something to me that I guess mattered a lot in how I have been thinking about this whole thing. 

            “He is almost exactly who you are targeting in your study.  Who you people are trying to help.”  Or something like that.  Same basic idea.  We continued our tour, and the boys, especially my friend, continued to playfully harass me, showing me this or that and demanding “picture? Picture?  Christian church.  Picture?”

The drive back to our hotel was long.  Miles to be covered, traffic, the three researchers had to be dropped off.  Plenty of time to think.  Watching lightning flicker across a sky split between the gold of an late afternoon sun and the steely blue of a coming rain.  The lightning never stayed for long enough for the eye to focus: it was simply a flash in my vision.  But it was enough to keep me watching the clouds, and when enough time had passes between strikes and I had grown bored and went to turn away, inevitably it would flicker again at the edge of my vision right as I turned my head away, holding my wavering focus outside the van and in the countryside of southern India.

There were other thoughts on that ride back.  Of cows and elephant men, of vendors and moths, of wilderness and of the darkness only found in the heart of a city.  Of “Trouble,” and staying “Forever Young,” of a “Heart of Gold.”  But these for another time.  I have rambles long enough already.

The Office

We go out into the field tomorrow, so im sure there will be some good stories to tell then.  For now, here are some pictures of the IMFR office.

We the interns have taken to colonizing conference rooms to do our work in.  This only causes a few problems, including, but not limited to, conflicts when people have actually booked said conference rooms, compound conflicts when it turns out that we had booked said conference room first and actually needed the projector, or when you end up in Rajasthan instead of Kashmir and all of the asian business-men stare at you.  The last part makes considerably more sense when you know that the conference rooms are named after the indian states. This is Jesse and Lucinda in Kashmir.

and this is the rest of the office.  It is really nice, except for the fact that the building is still under construction, it is at the end of a long driveway full of disapproving looking construction workers and cows, and none of the cabbies have ever heard of it.  Which causes problems when, for instance, a cabbie tells you he knows where to go, then ends up taking you on a 30 minute tour of town before 1. stopping in the middle of the city, nowhere near the office, 2. demanding payment, and 3. insisting that this is where you wanted to go.  We were late to give a presentation by about fifteen minutes because of these antics, but that was offset by the fact that the people we were supposed to be presenting to were late (Im not sure if thats the right word... are you late if you are just milling around the building talking to people and drinking coffee?) by about two hours.  Or maybe we got the time wrong.  But anyways, nice digs for an NGO in a developing country.

Surfaces

A lot has happened since my last post.
We finally have some conception of what we are doing, which is nice. We thought coming in to this that we would be just doing interviews and passing off the results to someone else, then going home. Not so. Ideally, we will be designing an entire student loan financial instrument. One of the people we are working for told us (after a couple of beers, to be fair) that if all goes well they might be able to give out tens of thousands of whatever we propose in the next couple years. A little frightening.

Getting to work is interesting. Our hotel is in Nungambakkam, one of the nicer-ish parts of town, but none of the cabbies have ever even heard of our hotel. So we are more or less trying to navigate the streets of Chennai for them, and I hold that the risk of being stranded in a random part of Chennai is an excellent motivator and really improves the memory. The six of us only barely fit into a real cab and it takes far too long for one to arrive (I dont get how this can be, they are everywhere. My only theory is that the guy at the front desk calls some relative of his to get him business, even if the guy is half way across the city) so we have started taking auto-rickshaws. These rides are terrifying, and exhilarating, and at the same time probably the most indian experience I have had so far. The drivers dart around cars and motorcycles, cut people off, only barely miss hitting pedestrians who dont even seem to register the suicidal contraptions. I have literally had to tuck my knee back into the tiny, three person passenger seat to avoid having it removed by the amputative mass of a passing bus.  Last night, coming back from dinner, we decided that we could fit five of us on one rickshaw--i was in front with the driver, trying not to fall out/get in the way of the operation of heavy machinery.  There were four people in the back, one of them sitting on the others lap.  We payed too much, but are getting better at negotiating, and im sure by the time we leave we'll only be paying twice what they would charge a local.

Chennai itself is interesting.  The sky is thankfully overcast most days, trying and failing to slow down the emotions of the city.  There are people everywhere.  A few doors down from our hotel is a shoddily constructed simple house that a family lives in.  At night, when we drive by, the fluorescent lights inside paint the glassless windows as images of these people's lives visible from the street.  Blue walls and hard floors.  An elderly man asleep on the floor, only his leather tough feet visible from the outside world.  The entire family gathered around the distorted image on the tiny TV set placed in front of the otherwise bear walls, huddling to capture that small image in their sight.  I wish I could capture it in pictures, but I doubt that I will.
All around the city chickens wander free, their unsettlingly long legs picking through the rubbish on the street.  One of the expats in the office talked at dinner about how the chickens here were all free range, and I just laughed.  I guess I cant contend with this categorization; the chickens are indeed free to live off of rotting scraps on the street, breath in the fumes of the auto-rickshaws, and live their lives in terror of being run over by an overly ambitious cabbie trying to pass some slower moving car.
The array of people is impressive.  They range from the young men dressed for european clubs and cafes, to business people in cheap but starched collared shirts, to women "of a certain age and build" wrapped conservatively in bright saris with their midriffs hanging out for the world to see, to men wearing nothing but a kilt-like strip of cloth around their wastes and between their legs.  It is a sea of humanity completely unlike anything in the states.  Sensory overflow, too much data, all the time.

Arrival, Urban Solitaire

Finally arrived, and with Internet access. Hard to express at this point how big of a deal that second part is.

Lots of hours in planes and airports. 25 consecutive, in fact, and I cant sleep on planes. Was next to a mother with three children (yes, that's right, four people in a 3-seat row) on the first flight, which made things nice and loud. The worst part was that it wasnt even the baby who was crying--that I could understand. No, the little guy sat there with huge eyes just looking around while his sister tantrummed her face off for 2 hours. Not a happy camper.

The second flight was better, largely due to the inherent superiority of personal entertainment systems. I have to say it because its the fourth of july--Im an American goddamnit, and I love me my freedom.  Invictus and How to Train Your Dragon are both excellent movies. I also read all of Anthem, by Ayn Rand, which was excellent, if similar to Brave New World. Thank you Mr. Sunde.

Since arriving--

I was picked up at the airport by a cabbie, and I was told that he would know where I was going to be staying. He didnt. So I gave him the address of my best guess, which was the place that the IFMR told us we would "probably" be staying at, as of around 2 months ago. That place had no record of me, but I stayed there anyways. It turned out that the place that I should have been was owned by the same person, so they figured it out and I am now where I am supposed to be. I think.

Today I wandered around a bit, trying my best not to get lost. Lots of people, very few buildings over 4 stories high. The city just sprawls for miles, frequently dotted with trees and empty lots. The people are helpful if difficult to understand and hard to explain things to. I got frequent hellos and "where are you from?"'s as I walked the streets, which I guess shouldnt surprise me, as I have not seen another white person since I left the airport. Braved a small street side restaurant (generous labeling), and was heavily rewarded. Great chicken, great veg curries, and significantly more food than I could eat for about $3.50.  We'll see if I agree with the assessment that I was rewarded once it manages to get through my system.

It has been incredibly strange being here alone. I have mostly traveled with my parents, which supplies a lot of support in a strange place and at least gives me someone to talk to. When I have been away from parents, I was always going with other people, or to a place where there were people that I knew there. That was completely not the case coming to Chennai. I new nobody, I was traveling with nobody, I had no means of communication with anybody that I knew. Today is sunday, so the office I will be working at is closed. Literally the closest person that I know, to my knowledge, is in China. It shook me, walking off the plane into a country of a billion people, knowing that there literally wasnt even a one in a billion chance of bumping into someone I knew. I never knew what being alone really was like until now. Any self imposed solitude is false, it pales in comparison. You go off into the woods knowing that at most a couple hours away you can reach the familiar, probably even the familial. Even when among people you dont know there is so much that you have in common, culturally and especially language. You know that you easily could talk to them, meet them, get to know them. Each person I meet here, each name that slides into my brain and slides out only minutes later, each face I try and memorize and each hand I shake is merely a rotating representative of the billion. My communications have been superficial, and after their completion both of us know that there is no reason for the other to be remembered--the chances are so small that I will feature at all prominently in any of these people's lives, or that they will in mine. It makes me question my definition of home. Had I been asked before today, I would have undoubtedly described some structure, 1560 Arbor Ave or, to the distress of my mother, 163 Twain Hall. That view lacks perspective. Home is any place where you have no fear of getting lost.

Irony is a bitch. While I was writing that last bit, the people staying across the hall from me came back, and I went outside to investigate the noise. It was the students from MIT and Harvard who are going to be working at the IFMR, not on the same projects with us but still. With that, the discovery of Internet (finally a link back to home) and the knowledge that some of my fellow Stanfordians have landed in Chennai and are probably on their way here (unless their cabbie also has no clue and they use the same address I did) has ended my little game of solitaire.

Visa=Voy Viernes

Finally got my visa.
I think the worst part of it for me was that I was out of the loop. Once things started going weird with the consulate, the people over at stanford took over. And I lost my direct connection to the process. Ever couple of days I would send an email asking what the status was, and get nothing. Or at least nothing new. As I got closer and closer to leaving--or not, as the case might have been--I started also asking what plan B was if things didnt work out in time. I legitimately wanted to know what I could be doing if I didnt end up in India.
I ended up getting emails that, instead of telling me what my options would be, contained helpful little messages like "stay positive," and "you should still be hopeful." So apparently I seemed stressed out enough that I needed emotional counseling, but really from my end I just wanted to know what was going on.
Not that I can complain any more, seeing how it ended up.
And with a whole day to spare, too.