Kochi and Hyderabad

For the first time during our stay in India, Caroline and Aimee parted ways this last weekend for long weekend trips to Hyderabad and Kochi respectfully.  Here are some highlights from those trips.

Hyderabad (Caroline):

While Aimee was off to Kerala I went north to Andrha Pradesh to reconnect with a friend from my life back in Baltimore, Sid. I landed at the Hyderabad airport Friday night around 10pm.  Sid picked me up and promptly went the wrong way on the highway.  No matter.  This is India.  Even if the next exit is 5km away, you can just go back down the on ramp that is just 1/2 a km behind you.  So we did. Lucky for us traffic in Hyderabad is nothing like the chaos of Chennai. The highway only had one other vehicle on it!

That night I met a couple of ex-pats who live in a hotel and ordered mutton biriyani from room service.  Thus the stage was set for me to eat and drink my way through the long weekend.  I spent too much money and ate and drank too much.

Some food highlights.  Saturday's lunch was at Sid's home.  I had dahl, and prawn, and chicken, and some spinach thing that was out of this world.  Sunday's lunch was street food.  Pani puri, which is a hollow crunchy orb filled with spiced water and onions served in a little plastic cup, and chud (?) which is also awesome, but don't ask me what it is.  Monday was the gastro-apex of the trip.  We went out for lunch and I ate deep fried quails and also goat brain. Yep. I did.  And they were amazing!  Lunch on Tuesday was super filling and I felt really bad about leaving so much left over, but a veg thali is a great way to have little bit of everything. On the way to the airport I stopped at Karachi's bakery and picked up some of their world-famous (according to Sid) fruit biscuits.  I haven't sampled those yet.

So aside from eating I did my fair share of nothing and just hanging out. I also went to see the Galconda Fort 122m above the plain and surrounded by concentric circles of walls.  The city is encroaching and there are lots of buildings within the boundaries of the outer walls now. Admission was free in honor of a Hindu festival and all of the steps were painted with red and yellow stripes.  There was also a goat being led in by the ear.  I suspect headed for the dinner table.  I shopped and bartered. Stopped at Hussain Sagar Lake and saw the large Buddha Purnima statue.  Did some drive-by photography of Charminar in the old city and cruised through the Salar Jung museum.  And I had a 2 hour massage.

Mostly, I was made to feel welcome and loved. I was reminded of things I had forgotten about my 20s in Baltimore and I am grateful to have such a good friend. Thank you, Sid!

Kochi: (Aimee)

Michael (my husband) and I had a relaxing and culturally exciting visit to one of India's oldest port cities, Kochi (or Cochin), on the west coast of India.  We stayed on the island area of Fort Kochi, experiencing the monsoon downpours most mornings and late evenings as well as surprising times in between.  This made for pleasant weather when it wasn't raining, but it also meant we had some tropical visitors in our room.  There was a roach we named William Howard Taft due to his size.  You can imagine.

Saturday night we went to the Kerala Kathikali Centre to see the traditional performance art, Kathikali.  It is more than dance; it's an intricate coordination of drum, cymbals, singer, meanings of makeup, hand gestures, facial expressions, and pantomime.  We also saw five other traditional dance forms from South India (Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh).

Sunday we went on a backwaters tour on a punted houseboat, and then through the hand-dug village canals in a punted canoe.  We were served a Keralan lunch on banana leaves at an island in the backwater villages.  One of the most interesting interactions I had was when I unknowingly gave away my G2 Pilot pen to a young village girl.  Apparently pens are highly valued since they are comparatively expensive.  She told me she would use it for her studies, so I think it was a good accidental gift.




Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the absolutely fabulous meal that Michael and I had at Arca Nova.  We had barricuda steak that made Michael blabber about "best meal ever."  We were the only ones in the restaurant and waited on by two very attentive men every minute of the meal.  There was a lamplit-jetty, a pebbled floor, and purple flowers that we'd seen growing in the backwaters.  It was a great 1st anniversary meal, and the trip was a great 1st anniversary experience.  I'm so pleased to have shared this unique part of my India experience with Michael.

Catching Up

To our followers - apologies! The odyssey of buying technology as a foreigner in India is epic, and as we settled into a regular field placement schedule, there was less time to spend on computers in the Social Work department.  But enough with excuses.  Here's a rundown of recent trips and highlights.

July 2-3: We went to Pondicherry, the old French Indian capital. We loved the peaceful quiet and clean streets and being repeatedly blessed by Lakshmi the elephant.  We managed a little drama when Caroline fought with a rickshaw driver in the pouring rain.

July 5: At FLI, one of our regular placements, our day was disrupted by a road accident between a "drunk" motorcycle driver and a young gypsy boy.  Fortunately he was ok.  Though a traumatic event, it was inspiring to see the local gypsy community gather together.  The next day, we were intrigued to learn the community blamed FLI because the boy had failed out of the FLI primary school, and it was on his walk home from the gov't school he now attended that he was struck by the motorcycle.  It was fascinating that the circumstances of how the boy came to be on the road were blamed rather than the driver's recklessness.

July 7: We offered a module on Self-Care for the 1st year Social Work students and enjoyed a discussion of the barriers Indian Culture erects to such practices.

July 8: During our time with I.C.W.O., our cheek muscles maxed out from the endless pictures we took with the female sex workers.  Cell phone after cell phone and grouping after grouping, it was clearly an expression of affection, but ouch!

July 9: This day was sponsored by Tom Hanks.  We saw Forrest Gump at the U.S. Consulate (for free!) and Larry Crowne at Skywalk.  It would have been nice to have a third movie to watch in the non A/C, 2 hour ride home.  Lesson learned: don't go into Chennai on Saturday night.

July 13:
Work with Jefrin, a child with special needs in lower KG at MCC Campus School
3rd std. - begin work on "The Gifts of Wali Dad," a Indian/Pakistani readers' theater story
7th std. - riddles
5th std. - cultural comparisons (1.8 - average number of TVs/household, 1.86 - average number of        children/household
Meet Davidson faculty and receive invitation to dinner
6th std. - riddles
Dinner at IGH with Davidson and MCC faculty and staff
Michael Voth Siebert, Rachel Voth Schrag and Samuel Voth Schrag arrive in Chennai!

July 15:
Michael, Rachel and Sam joined us at I.C.W.O. Chrompet, where we were taken to visit a government hospital that partners with the organization.  Michael became the first among us to ride a motorcycle through Chennai traffic - hard core.  After lunch, on the way to St. Thomas Mount (site of disciple's martyrdom), the following poem was prompted:

Upon the stairs at Chrompet Station

A sleeping man caused consternation

He wore no undies 'neath his dhoti

And his scrotum he did show me     

July 16-17: 

Michael, Rachel, Sam, Razlyn, and Whitney came with us for a lovely weekend in Mamallapuram.  We visited the World Heritage Monuments Shore Temple and the Five Rathas, dipped our feet in the Bay of Bengal (or her entire skirt if you're Aimee), saw a dead puffer fish washed ashore, and got pretty well sunburned for the first time.  We were treated to a scrumptious, home-cooked meal of crab and prawns thanks to Sir Hariharan of I.C.W.O.  We also wrote the following ode to a diligent stone merchant:

We fled down the street of Five Rathas

A stone carver on motorcycle caught us

We bartered and haggled

Till all were bedraggled

But up to our guest house he sought us.

July 18:

We missed opening weekend, but Rachel, Sam, Michael and Aimee were determined to get to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 before Rachel and Sam left for Andhra Pradesh.  So we dared a cross-Chennai cab ride in the hopes that AGS Cinema in Villivakkam would have four tickets left.  The nerdish hopes were rewarded and the movie was great!

And now, July 19, we have internet!!!  Our schedule is still quite packed, but we'll do our best to better about regular postings from now on.

Honoring guests

From Aimee - 

When we arrived at Madras Christian College's rural extension Family Life Institute, the elementary school children there were waiting for us.  The girls in pink are in 2nd and 3rd std., and they placed a beaded necklace around each visitor's neck, standing with us as we watched the morning assembly.  These girls and others in the 5th std. had also prepared traditional dances to perform for us.  We have a video of the performance that we would have liked to post here, but it would have taken all day to load.

When we visited MCCSS, an organization that both offers microloans to self-help groups and shelters women and girls who have been rescued from commercial sex work, the community greeted us with flowers, sandalwood paste and traditional Hindu blessings.  The rescued children had also prepared dance performances, and we were even invited to dance with them.

At MCC Campus school where we teach classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, we are given chocolates whenever it is a child's birthday.

The wife of one of our placement supervisors bought us each a sari.

And in day-to-day interactions, using just a hint of butchered Tamil thrills our hosts immensely.

We have felt blessed to receive such hospitality, and it has made me consider difference between this hospitality we receive as Americans, compared to the hospitality we give foreigners in the United States.  Would American elementary schools really invite groups of ordinary foreigners to tour the premises, take pictures, and would they prepare special assembly performances?  Do we regularly greet groups of foreigners with gifts, simple but generous from the standpoint of having relatively little to offer?  Are we thrilled when visitors speak our native English?

Likely the answer is generally no.  It's easy to point to anti-immigration movements and the difficulty foreigners experience trying to get a visa.  There are surely exceptions to this, but generosity seems very ubiquitous here.

For one thing, we have been amazed by the number of people who speak English, and how easy that makes it for us to exist here.  Given how little Americans are encouraged to learn foreign languages, it's not as easy for foreigners in our land.

We have felt like honored guests here, and that is different than just being a guest.