I would walk 500 miles…

I went to the Plaza de Mayo to see “Las Madres” do their weekly march. Unexpectedly, I got a bit emotional! In the fall through the University of Minnesota Dance program I studied this group of woman, who started a resistance movement in the 70s to protest the disappearances of their children during the “Dirty War”.

In that period, activists or possible revolutionaries “disappeared”; at least 10,000 men and women were taken to concentration camps, abused, and killed by the oppressive government. People were forbidden to gather in public, but the mothers of the “disappeared” young adults became tired of waiting in their homes for their children to return. A few started meeting in the Plaza and they discovered their stories were not isolated incidences. Some of the original Mothers also “disappeared” but the others continued to march, demanding information and justice to those responsible for the killings.

When I went there were close to 1000 people in the plaza, including allied groups and other protests. I kept a distance because protests sometimes incite violence. But I had the thought “sometimes the places most worth being are a little bit dangerous.” It was dangerous for the original Madres, but now, maybe in part because of their movement, these hundreds of Argentineans can meet freely. Right now may not be my time to walk, to stand, for something I value in the face of danger. But learning to love being out of my comfort zone is a big step for the girl who has been scared of small spiders, heights, and skiing fast. And it’s a valuable question to ask, for what would I walk? For me, it’s for the one true God and the things He commands of us, like “Seek justice. Help the oppressed.” And for this I applaud Las Madres.

Speaking of walking, my black Keds have almost seen their last steps. With my quick engineer’s estimate, they have seen me through almost 500 miles of walking to school and within at least six different countries. Now that is how I want to use all my material possessions! As a generalization, Buenos Aires seems materialistic, like most of the United States. There are shoe stores on every block in my neighborhood, and they’re usually busy. I find myself getting pulled into the desires for leather boots, fashionable jackets, etc. I hope these simple shoes can be a reminder that the things I already own can do quite well!

A few of my favorite things

Wow I cannot believe it's been almost 3 weeks already! I've definitely gotten more settled and comfortable, and today the tables have turned: someone asked ME for directions :) AND, I understood, knew the answer, and could say the answer in Spanish. Horray!
Other things that have been "favorites":

Gelato and café. The ice cream shops all have at least a few flavors that don't have milk but still taste creamy and delicious like soft-serve. The coffee here is great, too. One of my favorite things to do is to go to a café and sit and read, journal, or do homework. Generally things here are expensive, but $2 for a coffee also comes with a cookie or two and sparkling water. What's weird is that before this trip I didn't like coffee, but I guess it's because I don't like the watered-down coffee in the US? The coffee here is as strong as espresso in the US, and is deliciously smooth and rich.


I also love the plazas. There are many in Buenos Aires. Although fall is almost over here and we're nearing on winter, during the day it gets hot enough to sit out enjoy the sun's warmth. On the weekends the plazas are all filled with markets and art fairs with occasional musicians or tango dancers.

Last but not least, my favorite day so far was probably Saturday last weekend. I went with a couple other students across the river to Uruguay. We were in Montevideo that day, which is now one of my favorite places in the world. It's a city with lots to do but it also feels very relaxed. Within 24 hours I spontaneously danced Tango with the guy who works at the hostel, went into the famous Teatro Solis, went to a great outdoor antiques market, sat on a park bench and people watched, strolled along the river and had some absolutely delicious steak. There were a couple hundred high school students out and about for the Global Day of Youth Service, and at one point they invited us to join their team building dances/activites in the plaza! Here are some offering "Abrazos Gratis" (free hugs).

So many favorites!! Is there anything I don't like? Well, the pollution in quite bad. It's a bit hazy near certain streets, and also I feel like I inhale about a cigarette's worth of secondhand smoke per day. The other thing that is challenging, of course, is the language barrier. BUT I'm getting better, and that's what I'm here for!

Bs.As. (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

It has begun! I’ve been in Buenos Aires, Argentina for four days now and it’s been quite a whirlwind. My first flight was delayed so I, along with one other student on the program, missed the connection. After being re-routed through Chile we arrived but our luggage didn’t until the next day. Oh well! I arrived at my host family’s flat for a pleasant surprise- I have my own small room with a closet, mini-fridge, desk, internet, and attached half-bath! There are three daughters: Dolo (Dolores) is 25, Belu is 20, and Pili is 18. With mama Ines, papa Carlos, and the dog Galo and it’s a full and lively house. The food is great but I have certainly eaten more beef in the last few days than I did in the last year. Dinner is around 9:30pm and breakfast is tiny; it’s taking time to get used to that!

I have classes from 9-1:30 with a couple hours of homework each day. I’ve been thrown into classes I don’t feel ready for, but I’m already noticing improvement. I’ve learned 5 new verb tenses in 4 days; information overload! Being in Buenos Aires is sensory overload as well. Every day I cross the Avenue of July 9th, which gets up to 20 lanes wide!

The afternoons have been spent exploring a few historical sites and parks. One of the pics here is of a flower "statue" that is solar-powered and supposedly opens and closes with the sun. The other is not of a church as it might seem, but one of the grandiose tombs of famous and historical people in the Cemetery of Recoleta. More to come...

Home Again

We had a good wrap-up conference back in Chicago and now I am in Minnesota relaxing and preparing for the school year. I haven’t talked much about our actual project, so to summarize:

Our project was titled “Seeds of Knowledge: A Tree Planting Initiative at Rajpura Primary School.” We worked with in a small government school, grades 1 through 5, facilitating daily lessons focused on the environment. Speakers came from the community itself, like one woman who worked at a tree nursery, and also from our NGO, the Foundation for Ecological Security. Then each child got to plant a sapling in the school yard, one of four local species, and take one home to plant near their home. On our follow-up visit we found that all the families had planted the trees. The kids were proud to show us, and many of the family members also got really into it with sturdy thorn fences for protection.

During one of the education days the kids got to color a picture of their tree “all grown up” to motivate them to take care of their sapling so it turns into that large tree. It seemed that most of the kids had only drawn on their small chalkboards before, copying what the teacher had drawn on the board. So they may not have been used to drawing with color, and they certainly weren’t used to having freedom and creativity in their school assignments- most daily activities we observed involved the kids repeating what the teacher said or wrote. At first the kids only copied the tree previously drawn as an example, but as we allowed more time and encouraged them to add things to the drawings, the hesitation dissolved and we ended up with some rainbow-colored trees and full forests.

There’s an unused rainwater harvesting system at the school, so they were able to open that back up again to use for watering the trees. The program was deemed a success both by the school teachers and director, community leaders, and by our NGO, who may do similar programs in other schools. The larger impact of our project, however, lies in the relationships created. Rajpura lies on the border of the wildlife sanctuary that FES is trying to protect, so FES hopes to engage the Rajpura residents in the protection process. In addition to doing the tree project that built trust between FES and Rajpura, we spent four of the seven weeks doing an anthropological study of the lives of the Rajpura people. Both the project and the report we created from what we learned about Rajpura will serve as a basis for FES’s future work there.

Thank you for going along this journey with me! More pictures will be on facebook shortly. It’s been a summer full of learning- not only about community development like I expected but also about food and cooking, politics, religion, healthcare, etc. In our work we talked a lot about sustainability in development and tried to make the benefits of our project directly sustainable, but I think another long lasting thing about this summer will be the relationships I built- with my host family, two good friends from Udaipur, and some of the other interns I got to know.

Stories of Delhi and of trust

On our first day in Delhi all 14 of us rented a bus to hit the main sights. We got a an overview of famous buildings, but not a feel for the city- so the next day three of us went off on our own. After seeing the Lotus Temple and beautiful Lodi gardens, I got to wander around the theater and arts district. From there we went to see the large mosque, and that’s when it got more adventurous.

Our cycle rickshaw dropped us off a block away because the streets were so crowded. After missing the turn we should have taken, we ended up in the “thieves market”, where your shoes will end up if they get stolen while you are in a temple, among various other stolen goods. When we got re-routed towards the mosque we still had to go through a crowded street, where a gang of boys followed us, ready to snatch something from our bags the minute we became distracted by the goods being sold. So as we clutched our bags and made our way through the darkening market street, we saw people selling, yelling, quickly scrutinizing and buying, begging, living, eating, sewing, arguing, scheming, biking, and kids running.

After a glimpse at the mosque we bee-hived to the first well-lit shop we could find on the main street. At this point we were the only foreigners around; we always get stares and unwanted attention but now it was three-fold. As we stood in the entrance of this shoe store, various people would try to come near to talk, stare, beg, or take pictures of us- but the store owner shooed (no pun intended) them all away for us. He even cleared off the bench inside for us to sit on, which we declined because certainly we’d have to tip him. (People will often sweep first or hand you a newspaper first, then after the fact will demand payment.) But 20 minutes later, after we had gotten our bearings and decided on a restaurant and how best to get there, we tried to tip the store owner anyway because he had been so helpful. No matter how much we insisted, he wouldn’t accept it! In a country where my sense of “common courtesy” has little weight and where every rickshaw driver and store owner will try to charge us at least twice the actual price, this simple gesture of kindness to complete strangers meant a lot to us.

Alas, the next day reminded us that we should not expect this same courtesy from everyone. After our train to Agra was delayed two hours, our single day there was already shortened. So we spent two hours walking around the Taj Mahal and just sitting and enjoying the view. We then told our auto-rickshaw drivers, who we had hired for the day, that we had limited time and wanted to go to an inexpensive restaurant. They didn’t take us to the one we requested, but a different one. Even though we knew they’d probably get commission for taking us to their friend’s business we decided to give it a try; they had been very friendly and helpful to us. Unfortunately, after ordering it took two hours (in an empty restaurant) before we even received our lukewarm and tasteless food. Our time was up in Agra. We were bummed that we didn’t see anything other than the Taj and disappointed in our drivers who we had come to trust, but of course it was still well worth the trip to see the Taj. Can you imagine someone building all that splendor for one woman?

As anywhere, there are people to trust and those to be wary of; perhaps I’m just more aware of it here because I’m not familiar with the cultural codes and norms that dictate relationship. Our taxi driver yesterday got stopped and a little beat up by men from another car who thought that our driver was trying to race them and that he intentionally tried to block their way. Although it was at first terrifying to me, people who live here understood immediately why that would have happened and didn’t think it was a big deal. (I’ll now be more thankful for the cops who dot the US Highways…) But overall, I have met amazing people. A young woman I met on a bus and one I met in the Kathak dance classes I’ve been taking (I got to teach a little ballet and jazz to the students, too!) have both made me feel like a part of their entire family. The church here has been a family to me and of course my host family too. As I wrap up my time here I am excited to see family and friends back home, but it’s hard to realize that spending time with my friends and “family” here will no longer be possible.

Expectations

A few more altered expectations:

-First I was surprised by the villager’s lack knowledge of the outside world, but then having made that conclusion I am surprised as we discover various people for whom that is not the case. One boy who attends school in the nearby town asked me in his beginner’s English if Obama is a good president, and how he compares to Bush.

-I thought I would hate bucket showers (you dip a cup into a bucket of water and then pour it over yourself) but in the India heat the cool water is kind of nice, and I can take my time but only use 3 or 4 gallons. To put this in perspective, some showerheads use 10 gal/min. Similarly, I’ve found that given the choice between a western toilet that is equally dirty as a nearby squat toilet, I actually prefer the squat one because there’s no contact required.

-While in the U.S. we were told that our host families are not guaranteed to have electricity or running water, so I expected to be roughing it. Contrarily, mine is an upper-caste and well-to-do family who sometimes uses a microwave to make chai, whose dad speaks a little Spanish, and who’s son wears his aviators to go to the gym in his red jeep. Even among such modernity there are things that surprise me: minimal interaction outside the house for women, prejudice towards Muslims and “backwards” people (a term I loathe, used for lower castes), and misconceptions about America like that all white people are Christian or that all Americans eat meat.

At one point my host family said that I could see the “real India,” implying that their lifestyle is not part of that reality. Yes, there is poverty; just outside our apartment a little boy, wearing only part of a burlap sack for clothes, comes in the morning to search through trash, hoping that it’s not too picked over by the resident family of pigs. There is extreme poverty, but on the same block there is wealth, and these are both part of the real India?

Off to Delhi

Today we (14 of the interns) are leaving for two days in Delhi and one day in Agra. My group leaves, thank goodness, having our project finalized. We will are doing a combination of tree-planting and rainwater harvesting, at a school that has an unused rainwater system, a large schoolyard with not much shade, and 26 enthusiastic kids. In a community that has a multitude of uses for and knowledge of various tree species, we are really excited to involve many of them in this initiative where kids will get to actually plant their own trees!

At this halfway point of our trip, I've come to think about many of the expectations that have been created and also destroyed throughout:

-It turns out, Indian food is not just curry. I've actually only had something called "curry" once since being here! While I do miss the many food choices offered in the US, Indian food really does have an enormous variety.

-"Tribal villages" although the first time I heard about the Adivassi's/Tribals, as they are called here, it was in the context of a violence, I have well moved beyond that as my understanding. Thank goodness! When I looked into this more, the Adivassis are the original inhabitors of India who have shaped its culture, and violence is not at all representative of their existence throughout India.

And many more I will have to share when we get back from our trip!