March 30th - Namma Bhoomi

Two blog posts in one week, I must be procrastinating on something....

No, but I really just wanted to tell you all about one of the field visits I went on last weekend since it was probably one of my favorites so far! About an hour and a half away from Manipal University is a campus called Namma Bhoomi. It’s essentially a residential school for children in grade school who community workers recognize as needing an extra hand. The point of the school is not just to assist them with their normal grade school education but to also equip them with life skills and vocational training. They make the most beautiful clothes, rugs, handbags, wallets and other crafts and sell them through the sister organization called Namma Angadi. They can also choose to learn carpentry, computer technology or even cosmetology as a way to support themselves and help their family after graduation. Most of these children would have been working in harsher conditions and schooling might not have been a priority had it not been for Namma Bhoomi.

The larger non-profit organization that owns the Namma Bhoomi campus is The Concerned for the Working Child. The CWC has been working for over 30 years I believe on advocating for children's labor rights and is using some really cool methods to try and increase the voice of children in the community. For instance, one of the teachers we met with at Namma Bhoomi told us about the local Makkala panchayats where children are formed into a kind of mock-democracy and are encouraged to discuss real and prevalent issues that are also being discussed in higher levels of government. The benefits of empowering the children in this way are too many to list here but use your imagination!

One of the best parts about Namma Bhoomi that, to be frank, I wasn't expecting was the eco-friendly aspect. Not only was it one of the best run and truly effective non-profits I've seen but it also took the concept of sustainability very seriously on their campus. The kitchen ran on bio-gas from the dung of the farm animals that made the milk and eggs. The once barren land now is shaded by thousands of trees and is covered in beautiful, pesticide and fertilizer free gardens (which the kids keep up themselves). Even the homes are made by the carpenters using low cost materials.

Oh and did I mention that they are trying to minimize the effects of gender bias and caste discrimination too? No wonder they're up for a Nobel Peace Prize!!! Hopefully I'll be able to work with them again in the future because it really was an awesome place (plus the food was by far the freshest meal I've had in India)!

If you want to learn more here is the link to their website, and I put my name on the mailing list so if any new information comes up I'll post it so you can all see it too. http://workingchild.org/

Pictures -Holi

What? Is there something on my face?

5 minutes later in class for a test...our teacher didn't like us much that day, oops

Happy Holi !

It’s been far too long since I last posted and I apologize, my excuse is that I’m busy having the time of my life :) I realized that I never posted about Holi! It was one of the top things I was looking forward to coming to India during this time. I got a little nervous when I heard that the festival wasn’t really celebrated down south as much (where I am) and then even more nervous when I heard that we had a field visit and a test scheduled on that day. Luckily we found a way to celebrate on campus with a bunch of the public health students that we have class with. We met up with them after they had already started but all day people were flinging pure pigment and died water all over the KMC greens (like a quad or courtyard-type thing) making us look like a bunch of multicolored avatars.

            So for those who don’t know, Holi is a Hindu festival celebrated every March, mostly in Northern India. This year it fell on March 8th and I’ve heard that it has become a big tourist attraction in northern towns and the festivals last all day non-stop.  It is also called the festival of colors and through the pictures you can see why! Originally and historically, Holi marks the end of "winter"  and the beginnig of spring. It is supposed to commemorate the good harvest, the beautiful spring colors and many different religious myths and legends. For us and many of the students with us, the major premise was to throw pure color and pigment at eachother until you are covered and literally spitting greens and purples. They also like to get you with a few buckets of water and dye so we made sure to not wear any clothes that we were particularly fond of. One of our friends who has blond hair normally, still has a full head of pink hair from the dye, and the paint took a good two weeks to fully leave my finger and toenails! But it was totally worth it and I even bought a set of colors to bring back to the US this past weekend! I’m really glad that Manipal has such a diverse group of student and that this festival was brought here with them so that I got to experience it!

            Oh and by the way it is now March 28^th and the Holi color is still on the streets and sidewalks. It’s proof that we haven’t seen a single drop of precipitation since we’ve been here!

Pictures of Travel Week! (very belated sorry :/)

 Henna Stamps = the one thing I regret NOT buying!!

 Home sweet home for the night on the train!

 One of my favorite parts of the trip! Bike riding through Hampi :)

Sari shopping in Mysore with Ginny

6am Safari, we were sick of eating bugs 

Making pots in Ooty 

My masterpiece 

Panoramic View of Hampi (I made this myself isn't it cool!)

february 24th -March 4th Travel Week!!

We arrived first by airplane in Bangalore, the third largest city in India and Karnataka’s state capital. It once had a reputation for being the Florida of the Northeast; meaning that it’s where everyone wants to be once they retire but recent changes gave me mixed signals as to the current pride the locals take in their city. The weather is beautiful and of course there’s a lot of perks to living in a city including awesome culture, business, shopping and food which we took advantage of while we were there. We stayed at the Bangalore Club which reflecting back was one of my favorites from travel week. After arriving late at night on Friday, we all passed out on the extremely comfy beds pretty quickly. For the next two days we explored, hitting up an Infosys campus (the Microsoft of India), Karnataka’s state assembly building, Lalbagh gardens, Iskcon (international society for Krishna consciousness), a local BJP politician named Chandre Gowda, and then of course the band and dance floor back at the club.

 Late Sunday night, after a wonderful dinner overlooking all of Bangalore, we caught an overnight train to Hampi, the land of ruins and temples galore. The highlight here for me was definitely exploring the untraveled path with Preston and Grantis on our rented bicycles. Although it was probably the hottest day of the whole trip (and the origin of my first Indian sunburn) I really enjoyed getting to be actively enjoying the vastness of the old Vijayanagara Empire we were exploring. The ruins were really cool and allowed you to really use your imagination and picture what it would be like when the elephant stables were full and the Kings palace consisted of more than just the stone walls and an Olympic size swimming pool. Being a UNESCO world heritage site, there were a significant amount of tourists there in Hampi, which in all cases causes its pros and cons. One rickshaw driver we had on the way back from dinner one night (who spoke 7 or 8 languages btw) referenced how the Karnataka state government recently shut down and destroyed over 70% of the shops around Hampi in an effort to clean up the town. While a clean-up was probably necessary, displacing all of those workers and their families will only do more harm than good in the long run.

Another overnight train ride and some masala dosas later, we checked in at the Paradise Hotel (I don’t know if I’d go that far but it was still very nice). This was one of the slower paced days with a visit to King Tipu’s summer palace and some browsing through all of the sandlewood products that Mysore is known for. We even indulged in some eye candy and picked through countless silk saris.

Kabini was next. My memories of its hammocks and sunshine are making me homesick for a place I stayed for only one night. Right outside the Rajivghandi National Park, Kabini is the place to go for a Safari. We actually went on two, one came with a 5:45 wake up call, and the other was just in the afternoon. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see a tiger or leopard but we did see lots of wild elephants, goar, spotted dear, monkeys, peacocks and other pretty birds.

8 hours after we left Kabini, we arrived in the hill station of Ooty in the state of Tamil Nadu. Ooty had my favorite hotel we stayed in by far. Since the nights got chilly up in the hills, a fire was lit in your room at night and the whole place had a cozy atmosphere that made you just want to snuggle up with a good book. During the day I got to put my one semester of ceramics 101 to good use when one of the tribal women we were visiting offered for me to try and make one after she just whipped one out in literally two minutes flat. I didn’t do half bad I don’t think but that didn’t stop the locals from laughing at me hysterically the whole time (the language barrier made it difficult to know whether it was at me or with me). Another highlight was getting to go to an NGO that worked with tribal women, teaching them how to sew the traditional patterns onto a variety of visitor-friendly items including place mats and shoulder bags.

The last exciting thing that happened on travel week could have ended badly but fortunately now its just a cool story. So, about 30 minutes before we reach the train station for our final train home, I notice our program directors getting a little worried. We pull over at a checkpoint where our driver was supposed to document our travel over a state border but instead we see him get back on the bus and quickly start maneuvering the bus out of the crowded checkpoint in a obviously illegal manner and start hightailing down the highway so that we wouldn’t miss our train (apparently he was sick of us by then). So 30 minutes go by and we pull up to the station 5 minutes late with our backpacks on ready to sprint, one of the girls has a hurt leg though so we couldn’t go that fast. And luckily we see the train still there…but our cabin isn’t until the very end. So we start booking down the terminal trying to get close to our cabin when the train starts to move. I look behind me and the others were bottlenecking into one door so I go to the one up ahead thinking it would be quicker, only to find it locked. So starting to panic a teensy bit, I sprint to the next one where a good Samaritan helps me hop on a moving train that had gained sufficient speed before I was left by myself in an Indian train station with a dead cell phone and the worst sense of direction God ever gave a human being.

Anyways that’s all. If you read all of it I really appreciate it but if you didn’t I completely understand. Today was Holi, I’ll probably post some pics of that soon as well as pics from the trip! But now its dinna time so ill get to that later. J

Pictures February 21st

 My new Indian Family. No but seriously, I don't know them, they just wanted to take my picture.

 View of the very large temple in Murudeshwar

 On the beach in Gokarna

Immunizing the children

Ceremonial stuffing of the birthday girls' face.

February 21st

Another week has flown by. I honestly cannot believe how fast the time is passing here. I can feel myself starting to think and act more like I belong too. When I get into a rickshaw I tell them how much I will pay instead of asking, I now pick and choose which breakfasts to get in the mess hall depending on the day (Tomorrow is banana buns! My personal fave), and most notably, every time I see another white person on campus I automatically ask myself ‘what are they doing here?’ and I find myself staring for no reason at all. I quickly realize that I am doing exactly what I wished others would stop doing to me but I’m realizing it’s very hard not to be a little bit curious

                Classes last week were pretty time consuming. Between my 5 classes here, one online course for Arcadia, our Hindi lessons, our Bharatnatym dance class, and our 6:30 am yoga, our days are always full and the homework piles up quickly. Other than a typical student complaint about homework, I can’t say a bad thing about anything pertaining to the program so far. Well, there are a total of 9 mosquito bites on my right arm alone but I take my malaria meds daily so they should be fine… right?? :/

                Yesterday (Sunday), was a national polio eradication day here in India. We got to visit a lot of the vaccination sites that were set up all over each town. The program is primarily sponsored by WHO (world health organization) and the Gates foundation (as in Bill Gates of Microsoft). It has proven to be really effective and last year was the first year since it began that there were absolutely no new cases of polio recorded in India! woohoo :) It was nice to hear that it really was making a difference since it’s a fact that most projects and public health missions in India only receive $.15 out of every dollar given. There is a lot of corruption and bribing that goes on behind the scenes in India so a lot of programs don’t receive half of the money that has been given to them. Anyways,  I got to immunize some of the children so that was really cool and surprisingly really easy.  All it consists of is two drops from a vile containing about 20 full doses of polio boosters. The booths were set up in bus stands, in health centers, even in half of a store that the owner donated for the day. The next day after almost every family came on their own to get their children vaccinated, were door to door checking to see if the families had received the service.

And today marked the beginning of my birthday celebrations! Tonight we went out to a Hookah Bar and had some delicious Oreo milkshakes and Pan Masala Hookah. My roommate and her friends came and surprised me with a birthday cake that read “happy birthday Tmily”. Apparently Priyanka’s Es look more like Ts. Fun fact about birthdays in India: when they buy you a cake, they expect you to eat most of it… like half of the whole freakin’ cake. Everyone takes turns feeding the birthday girl/boy and most times smearing it all over their face (I avoided this part very tactfully). And then later on when back in the hostel. A few of the girls came in and gave me some birthday bumps which is when you’re grabbed by your legs and arms and hurled in the air the same number as how old you are turning. I can definitely say I had a typical Indian Birthday though and that makes me happy. We were invited last minute to go onto Manipal’s Chancellor’s personal boat tomorrow night so that will be a very fun end to my birthday I believe and will keep my mind off of the fact that I miss everyone back home terribly and I wish I could have them all here with me.