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?