Saying Goodbye and Coming Home

Saying Goodbye…

My last day with my students will probably go down as one of the most memorable days of my life. Each girl presented me with a gift (mostly hair clips) and handwritten cards. They insisted on braiding my hair and painting my nails while my translator gave me a henna tattoo.

My Indian makeover

Realizing I have smudged my henna

Afterwards I asked if they would take me and George (the other volunteer) to see all of their houses in their village. They were super excited about this (“Yes ma’am! Yes ma’am! Yes ma’am! I’m going to go tell my parents my Julia ma’am is coming!”). They grabbed our hands and started leading us through the narrow stair alleyways connecting the homes in their village.

Village and random village people

At each house, the girl who lived there would introduce us to her parents and other family members. They always insisted that George and I sit down while they brought us cups filled with orange drink. (The orange drink was pretty gross, and we were so full, and I felt like puking each time a girl brought out more, but we had to keep chugging it down because they always insisted we finish it before moving on to the next house).

Meeting someone's parents, having orange drink

The best part about the tour, to me, was seeing how proud all of the girls were. Their houses were so small, and so bare, and those who didn’t sleep on the floor shared beds with four or five people. And yet, these girls couldn’t have been more proud or happy to have us there.

Sameena, who has always taken a special interest in me, was especially excited for us to visit her home. (All through the tour she kept shouting “My house next! PLEASE my house next!”). When we were finally on our way to her house, she took my hand and said, “My house is small. We don’t have a T.V. Or a fan.” It made my heart melt, the way she said it. I told her that it was okay, that my home is small too.

Her house was the smallest I visited-- one room that she shares with her mom and grandma and brother. And yet, she was by far the proudest. She ran off to the shop to get us orange drink.

Sameena's house and family

As we went from house to house, random people from the village would follow us and join our tour. I don’t know most of the people in the photo below, for example:

The last house we visited was the largest, though still quite small (The house of Nizbeth, who is in the photo above in the bottom right wearing white. She was my youngest, and smartest, student). There was a big open space in her house and the girls kept asking that I teach them dances. So I taught them the Macarena, which we danced while Justin Bieber and Sheila played somewhere in the background and random villagers stood in the house and doorway watching. (I have a video of this, which I will upload later).

I was really touched beyond words that day by their pride, enthusiasm and love, and so sad to leave them. I told them that I wanted to pack them all in my suitcase and take them home to my village (earlier I had shown them a postcard of downtown St. Louis, and they had gasped and said “Wow! That’s your village?”).

It was truly one of the best hours of my life, and one of those rare moments when I felt certain that I was exactly where I was meant to be.

Here are other pictures from the day:

My beautiful student Rizwana, and her peeing baby

My students

Eating chocolate in the room where I taught

Someone’s house

Some students and some children I’ve never seen before

Village boys

Teaching the robot arm

Outside the house where I taught

Coming Home…

I knew I was back in the USA when I heard the women in front of me at the airport McDonalds talking about how they used to buy Happy Meals for their kids just to get the Beanie Baby toys, and would just throw away the food. Oh, America.

While waiting for my final flight from Chicago to St. Louis, I decided I wanted something totally mindless to read. (I had just finished reading the most intense memoir of my life, written by an Indian man whose fiancé was killed in a car accident the day of their engagement. She visited him as a ghost mere minutes before her heart stopped beating to tell him to take care of himself and to thank him for giving her the love of her life. I read these final pages in line at customs while crying into my passport).

Anyway. I bought People Magazine to get my mind off it, and that it did. Within minutes I felt that I had been properly briefed on summer in America. Long nails are in, according to People, as are iphone apps that sense your mood and Chia seeds. Apple martinis, on the other hand, are out (“Nobody orders them anymore!” experts say), as are mini bath products at hotels. Also, “Anything goes this summer for nail colors! Light and dark shades are great for both day and night,” according to Chanel celebrity manicurist. Helpful.

So it’s nice to be home, though I am currently experiencing severe jet lag as well as symptoms of a condition I have termed post-India stress disorder (PISD). It involves waking up panicked in the middle of the night (pretty consistent theme this summer, eh?), convinced that I am trapped in India with no way home. Hopefully this fades fast.

Thanks everyone for taking interest in my adventures and keeping me company this summer. I’m going to keep writing in this blog, so keep checking back if you like. No more gallivanting through the slums of India for this girl, but soon I will be moving to a city I’ve never seen before with a boy, a kitten, no friends, no job, and lots of debt- so that’s bound to be an adventure, too.

Several months ago I was at a Walgreens, getting my visa photo taken and fantasizing about my trip to India.

Yesterday I was standing barefoot on a family of caterpillars, fantasizing about being back at a Walgreens.

"What about Walgreens were you daydreaming about?" Doug asked when I told him about my fantasy. "All the food you can buy there?"

"Not even that," I said. "Walgreens is just so clean, and I really like the layout."

The growing list of things I find myself missing continues to surprise me.

In other news, today I was drawing a caricature of an old woman who wouldn't sit still because she kept speaking in Hindi and pointing at her mouth. Then she stood up mid-caricature and went back to her room, where I could see her rummaging around in a drawer. I called the translator over to ask what was going on- turns out she was putting in her teeth.

I made quite a fool of myself yesterday. I've been living in a different room this month than the one I was in the first month. But yesterday afternoon I randomly forgot that I had ever moved and went back to my old room- I'll blame the heat . I started slamming my body against the door to get it to open (I have to do this whenever I go to my room, because the door is so stiff). But I couldn't understand why it wouldn't open this time, so I kept throwing myself against it harder and harder. Exactly one second before the guy who currently lives there unlocked and opened the door, I looked up- saw the room number and realized my mistake. "Shit," I said as he stared at me. "I'm so, so sorry."


A while ago I wrote about that day when all of those Indian men materialized from thin air and asked to have their pictures taken with us in varying combinations. Was looking through these photos the other day...

Here's a challenge for you. What's the major difference between Picture 1 and Picture 2? (Hint: it's not the guy's arm on my shoulder). Winner gets a prize!

Picture 1:



Picture 2:

Goa parties way better.

I was using the bathroom by the light of my flashlight this morning due to the power outage. Forgetting the water had shut off too, I tried to flush- at which point the flusher fell off and landed inside the toilet. Just another day at Camp India.

I have always been intrigued by the large building located next to camp. It has a walk-in shark's mouth and children call out at me whenever I walk past. Last night it was blaring American songs and I could see dozens of dancing men.

I've been avoiding the Indian party scene due to my general dislike of clubs and my general distrust of Indian men, but last night I could feel myself being intrinsically pulled toward the sound of American music- anything other than Sheila!

So I went over with some other volunteers. Cars and motorbikes were lined up for miles- pretty surprising, since this is basically the middle of nowhere. Turns out the building is a recreation hall, and that night they were having a "rain dance"- to celebrate the monsoons. A sprinkler above the dance floor was spraying water onto all of the joyous, drunken men (not too many women), even though a real monsoon was pouring down on us anyway. After a couple drinks, we were all singing and dancing in the rain and sprinklers, too.

"Tell me!" an Indian man tapped me on the shoulder and shouted in my ear. "Are USA parties better than Goa parties?"

"No!" I shouted back, dripping wet in my last pair of semi-clean clothes, my money pouch swinging between my legs inside my baggy Indian pants, in the hopes that my phone and rupees would not get totally destroyed. "Goa parties way better!"

Pee-Spraying Babies and Caricatures of the Elderly: My Volunteer Adventures Continue

Imagine the most depressing place you've been, and multiply it by ten. That's the old age home where I work in the mornings.

A lot of the residents aren't even that old- they've just been abandoned by their families and now spend their time sitting on a bench, waiting to die. And they are completely neglected by the staff.

My main job is just to interact with them and try to bring some joy to their days. Which is hard, since so few of them speak English. So last week I had the idea to draw their caricatures. The residents enjoyed that, and it was fun for me too- though also a challenge as an artist. I had to be careful, while drawing, to not make them appear quite as old and sad as they really look.

Overall it was a success, and one man even asked me to draw a caricature of a picture in the newspaper he found particularly amusing- a woman at the market displaying an ungodly long link of sausages. So I did.

The adolescent girls I teach in the afternoons continue to be the highlight of my days. They are so sweet and so eager to learn. And they are beautiful girls- even though they live in a slum that stinks of diseased dogs and rotting garbage, they somehow show up every day in gorgeous outfits and gold jewelry and beautifully braided hair.

Like I mentioned before, one of the girls has a baby who swings from a scarf tied to the middle of the ceiling. As I was on the floor helping the girls with algebraic functions a few days ago, the baby started spraying pee from above. I got wet, and so did a few of the other girls. But they just got up, rubbed some water into their clothes, and returned to work as though nothing had happened.

Every girl in India is obsessed with this song called "Sheila," which is from a recent Bollywood film. The lyrics are mostly in Hindi, but there are at least two lines of English I can make out- "Her name was Sheila" and "I'm too sexy for you." The girls sing it all the time. (While teaching adjectives the other day, one student came up with the sentence "Sheila dances very sexy").

One day a group of us took the younger slum girls to the park. (Eight volunteers and sixteen little girls crammed into one jeep- I cannot emphasize enough how much no one cares about road safety). It was a sight to behold when Sheila came on the radio- these are all Muslim girls, some of whom had everything covered but their eyes, singing along and belting out "I'M TOO SEXY FOR YOU!" clearly their favorite line.

I think that maybe girls around the world aren't that different.

You know you're starting to adjust when you're disappointed your shower water isn't colder.

Thailand

I arrived in Thailand a day before Kim and went to our meeting point, a hostel across from the airport where I could sit on the roof and watch planes come and go.

I knew I made the right decision about coming to Thailand when the housekeeper handed me an apple, a mayonnaise sandwich (with just the tiniest sliver of ham) and a carton labeled "25% orange juice" and it felt like I had died and gone to heaven.

After a short nap in my room, which looked and felt like a prison cell, I thought I would take a walk. Until I discovered that I was literally trapped in the hostel. The manager was the only employee, and he works from 6pm - 10am and sleeps the rest of the time. The gates were locked, and I was alone.

I climbed onto the roof where I found the housekeeper, who was napping on the slanted roof boards. (The manager later told me that's where she lives). She spoke no English, but I mimed to her that I was trapped and would like to get out. She led me down to the back gate. It opened onto a stream, where there was a very narrow, wobbly board that led to a sidewalk alongside a river. She crossed the plank first, gesturing to me the right way to place your weight on the right side and hold on to a well-placed tree branch so as not to fall in. I followed and set off on my walk while she lay down on the sidewalk to continue her nap, I guess waiting for my return. I had a nice long walk and passed many large reptiles and swimming dogs. I guess I was gone too long because eventually a man on a motorbike was sent to check on me and bring me back.

Back at the hostel I was wondering how I was going to pass ten more hours, when the manager appeared and asked if I wanted to go with him to 7-11. (People in Thailand seem to have a strange obsession with 7-11. I cannot count the number of 7-11 T-shirts I saw people wearing). We talked as we walked there and he bought me some snacks and some chicken at the market. Later that night he cooked green curry and we ate it as we watched the planes. He was very fatherly.

Afterwards I fell asleep and was awoken at 1am by a knock on my prison cell from my Thai father. Next to him stood Kim, my dear friend of four years ago, which all felt like a strange and wonderful dream.

Kim and I took a taxi into Bangkok the next morning and rented a room on Khao San Road, the main tourist street. It was refreshing to know that white people still exist and are carrying on eating meat, like usual.

We did a lot in Bangkok. We visited many beautiful palaces and saw many Buddhas and ate many delicious Thai meals.

We also got four different massages. The first was a fish massage, where a tankful of tiny fish ate bacteria off our feet. (I figured I could really use this after spending weeks romping barefoot through garbage, though I did feel bad for the fish).

The second was a full-body Thai massage, which involved my full body as well as the masseuse's full body. At one point she was stretching me out by digging her heel into my groin. At another point she was swinging me around by my neck, making my back crack in a thousand different places.

Our last massage was an oil massage. My masseuse kept ordering me to take off more and more clothes until I found myself naked and covered in oil. Let's just say... I need to update what I wrote before about the most intimate I've been with a woman.

At least my woman was young and gentle- Kim's was large and harsh and when I glanced over, she was standing on Kim's shoulders as he cried out in pain. We later nicknamed her "Raging Bull," and she later threw us out for taking too long to drink our complimentary tea.

Great trip overall, and Kim ended it by sharing a final Korean proverb: "When you take a trip, where to go is not important. Who you are with is much more important."

I was nervous as I approached customs back at the airport in India. According to my visa, I technically have to wait 2 months before re-entering India after leaving. I had read some online posts by travelers who said they got away with re-entering, so I'd decided to bring along anything I would need to take home, just in case, and hope for the best.

I intentionally switched to the line of a man whose mouth was formed in the shape of a permanent smile, assuming he'd be my best shot at shrugging off a visa violation. But he actually called me out on it, so I murmured something about the internet, and he murmured something about should have gotten permission, but ultimately he stamped my passport and let me through.

I actually couldn't tell if I was relieved or disappointed. The crisis I'd feared had been averted, and yet I admit that a part of me had kind of hoped to get caught, shipped back to America, and be tucked safely in my own comfy bed within 24 hours.

But when I got back to camp and was informed by another volunteer that my students had been eagerly asking about my return, I felt glad to have made it back to India.

Thailand was awesome. Stocked up on meat and massages and hot showers and bacteria-eating fish. More on that later.

Quick shout-out to my sister, who lost 60 pounds for her wedding. You can see pics and read about it here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/donotlick/5895100544/in/photostream

She outlines a strategy including tips such as eating raw fruit and chewing gum to curb sugar cravings.

I would like to point out that I, too, have discovered my own successful weight loss strategy. And it only involves two things: anxiety and Indian food.