Sunday, November 9, 2008

Rural dusk



Life at dusk in rural Mysore is incredibly beautiful. So beautiful, that it's easy to completely forget that life here is so far from perfect.

Unfortunately, my amateur attempts at photo-documentation leave much to be desired. You're probably just better off closing your eyes, imagining a warm breeze, women in saris gracefully walking home carrying enormous stacks of firewood on their heads, kids doing their homework in corners, and an ancient woman inviting a foreigner in for tea.

Broken roof, broken foot.


This week I returned to Ekalavyanagar, the village that was the site of our health camp last month. What we found was a broken roof, and a broken foot. Where there had once been at least marginal protection from the sun (if not the rain) over the preschool, there is now an entirely collapsed structure. PHRI had hoped to maybe help the village build a roof one day. But now, without much in the way of walls, or even toothpick-like poles, the task of providing a sturdy structure for preschool seems even more daunting.




And the broken foot is a red, swollen, painful, immobile ankle on a little boy alternately limping around with a stick and being carried by his grandmother. The story is a bit vague, but a month ago it was either stuck in a bicycle, smashed by a rock, or suffered some other calamity. Either way, it's healing remarkably poorly, can bear no weight, and hasn't been able to get this little boy to school.*



At the end of our visit we wandered towards the back of the village. What we discovered was a group of migrant workers even poorer than the rest. For baffling and bureaucratic reasons they haven't even been able to get ration cards, and there isn't enough to eat. Yet, the giggling, scrambling, half dressed kids were just as excited to have their pictures taken as any others.

*Owing to technical difficulties on the part of my aging computer, two weeks have elapsed between the writing and the posting of this entry. In the interim, my intrepid co-worker Sylvia, and the several grams of amoxicillin she brought back to the village after our visit, have gotten this little fellow back on his foot.

Driving in India



Don't tell my Mom, but I have now ridden on the back of several Indian motorcycles. It is a truly terrifying experience. When I first arrived in India I imagined that although the traffic was terribly fierce, maybe it wasn't actually that dangerous. I had hoped that, although it felt like buses were driven with an alarming recklessness, that they were somehow guided to safety by a benevolent spirit. I've since learned that sadly, this isn't the case. India drives 1% of the world's cars and suffers 10% of its motor vehicle fatalities.
The worst part of the newspaper here is the daily list of fatal accidents. The descriptions tend to sound like "In an unfortunate incident between a bus and a cliff, 20 dead, 30 mortally wounded." I remind myself that the only thing worse would be if they didn't write about it.
So why would I keep getting on subcontinental motorcycles? Because they are driven by my friends, who take these risks every day, to get to work and see their families. In the US I live with a security that's hard to even imagine in India. Who would I be to refuse to live, even for a moment, in a world as unpredictable as the one a billion people inhabit here?

Monday, November 3, 2008

Indian wedding

When I was invited to join 999 of my closest friends at the wedding hall next to the Mysore Milk Dairy to celebrate the union of my favorite sari shop owner and his gorgeous bride, I had no idea what to expect. I had absolutely no idea that my first task would be to pose with my co-worker Bhavana's family, the couple du soir, and several assorted other guests. Nor was I in any way prepared to eat a dinner scooped out of buckets onto banana leaves by energetic waiters dressed in matching pink. And who knew that despite the exhausted looks on the faces of the bride and groom, they hadn't even been married yet? The wedding ceremony wasn't actually scheduled until the next morning. Following suit, I wished them the happiest of married lives, enjoyed the music, and pretended that I often spend my weekends wearing a sari, scooping chutney off a banana leaf.