Weekend Trip: Ooty!

From October 4^th to 6^th, we went to Ooty, a city in the hill region known as the Nilgris. In fact, Ooty is one of three “hill stations” which were started as summer house/retreat locations for British soldiers during the reign of the British Raj because of the cooler climate found in the mountainous areas. I was really excited to go on the trip because it would be my first cool weather (read: fall) experience since coming to India. I have been really missing the autumn weather. We woke up freaking early just like the Madurai trip and headed out to Ooty, which is luckily a much closer location than Madurai was. Unfortunately, the drive is slightly more treacherous because the roads up and down the mountains consist of many hairpin turns. As in, there are 33 of them and they are literally called “hair pins” and there are signs telling you that you are on “hair pin 17/33” (cue the “REALLY?!?! We have sixteen MORE!?!?” groaning). I have never gotten carsick in my life, but even I wasn’t feeling well during that drive. The plus side was the view. We got to drive along this road that had gorgeous views of the valley and all of these little monkeys sitting on the side of the road. It was so great!

When we got to Ooty, we visited an NGO called Freedom Firm, where they rescue underage girls who are working in the sex industry. In India, it is illegal for girls under the age of 18 to be prostitutes, so if they are in there, it is totally legal to get them out, but removing them is a tricky business because if they don't want to come out there isn't really opportunity to convince them to come. Freedom Firm has men who go into the brothels while hooked up to video cameras and try to find and rescue the underage girls. 
 Unfortunately, due to demand in the sex industry here, it is only possible to purchase about seven minutes at a time with a girl, so the agents who go on these missions must convince a girl to trust them and come with them and call authorities within a seven minute window. It is all very complicated and sounded really stressful! After the girls have been removed from the brothels, they come to headquarters in Ooty where they get some rehabilitation. One of the things they do during this time is make jewelry that is used as an income for Freedom Firm and for themselves. Another part of their rehab is assisting with horse therapy for special needs children; this lets them feel like they are helping others and aren't just the ones being pitied and helped all the time. 


After learning about Freedom Firm, we headed back down the other side of the mountain to a place called “Quiet Corner” which is a retreat center. It really was quiet, too. Quiet Corner is technically within the boundaries of a place called  Mudumalai—a national wildlife reserve. After unpacking our bags, eating lunch, and resting a bit, we headed out on safari! Well, it was really just a drive through the wildlife reserve in the cars that our school already provided. But apparently in India "safari" means a ride through the jungle areas (whereas when I think "safari," I think of the grassy plains where lions prowl and gazelle lope). There are wild elephants and even tigers in Mudumalai. We saw several trained elephants, lots of deer, a few monkeys, a herd of bison, a peacock, and ONE little wild elephant chomping away on some greenery. We didn't see any tigers, unfortunately.

The next morning, we headed back up the mountain to Ooty where we stayed in a guest house run by CSI (the Church of South India). It kind of felt like the Von Trapp family because the style of the house was European lodge-ish and it was on the mountainside looking out over the valley and stuff. We had a class there, a lecture about the history of Christianity in India. We also got a tea break that included CHOCOLATE CAKE! It was glorious.Then, for lunch, we went to a woman name Queenie's house. Queenie was an orphan and was brought up in a group home by a Canadian couple. Her husband was raised in the boys' group home by the same people. So she grew up with a very westernized perspective. And better still, a very Westernized palate! She made us delicious, bland, American food. And she cooked for us for dinner that night and breakfast the next day as well! She made pancakes! We were so excited.

In the afternoon, we visited a tribal group called the Todas. They live in a place that REALLY feels like the Von Trapps would live there-- it's even called "Little Switzerland"! But that's just named such because of the scenery of the mountains, not the way their houses looked. Even still, the mountains and all of the grassy hills reminded me of home. A lot.
The Toda tribe was beautiful. They live in this secluded little area and farm and do enbroidery on these really intricate shawls that are their traditional garment. I wish I could have bought one, but they're ridiculously heavy and cost a couple thousand dollars I think. So that wasn't happening. But the people themselves were just all really beautiful.
There are many different little enclaves of Todas, but the one that we visited is all Christians, converted from their original tribal religion. It was interesting to hear all their different cultural practices though, like the way their marriage works. It's kind of like an arranged marriage, but after the families pick the marriage, the couple has a "trial marriage" for a year and they have to conceive a child within that time. If they do conceive, their marriage takes place in the seventh month of pregnancy. If they don't, it's just back to the drawing board on the marriage front, I guess, and they get to try again. Anyway, my favorite part of that trip was the two beautiful little girls that were there. I drew them each a picture (a peacock and a butterfly) and smiled at them a lot. They didn't know any English and I don't know anything from their tribal language, but I didn't even care. They were so presh.

 
After leaving the Todas, we visited the botanical gardens in Ooty…which were kind of lame. It was just all these potted plants really. But there were some pretty cool shaped shrubs. Bunnies, swans, peacocks and the like. That night we had a campfire. It was really fun because the air was so crisp and it felt like it was really fall in New England. Our two faculty guides and two drivers had never toasted marshmallows or had s’mores before, so we got marshmallows from the sweet store downtown and set them to work over the fire. They told us that they liked the s’mores, but I couldn’t tell if they were just saying that to be nice. The marshmallows were weird and supersweet and a little bit flavored, anyway, so it wasn’t exactly like American s’mores.

The last day of our trip, we visited a tea estate. All the hills in Ooty are covered with tea plants-- it's crazy. Tea grows in shrub-like bushes and they have lines for the workers to walk along and it looks to me like zen gardens. But they were seriously everywhere. In some places, tea fields were all you could see when you looked out the window of the car. We got to tour a factory where they dry and grind and sift the tea leaves to collect the different types of tea. We also go a demonstration of how tea is harvested in the fields.

On our way out of Ooty, we stopped at another tribal village, the Kurumba Tribe. They were a bit out of sorts because all of the men from the tribe had taken someone to the hospital that day, but it was still cool to spend some time with them. A bunch of us got to dance with the little kids, and after we left we learned from our faculty guide that the song they were singing was about Jesus! It was apparently a song they'd learned when a local church ran a VBS for them.

A Little Bit of Homework.

For one of my classes I have to read Amartya Sen's book Development as Freedom. I don't recommend it. Sen is some super genius economist who works at Harvard and has won the Nobel Prize in economics and the book is really complex and confusing. We're supposed to read different sections of the book, develop a question about the reading and answer it. You don't even have to actually come to a conclusion; it's more about the thought process and attempting to wrestle with the content of the book. I felt like the wrestling I did during the last section was really valuable, so I've copied my paper below for you all to enjoy. Just in case you didn't have enough homework.

In this section of Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen writes extensively about what poverty means to individuals living in their own countries, and how location and median income of that area affect the quality of life those individuals can have. The theory, which seems to be logical, is that even if a person has a greater income than many others in the world, if it is significantly less than the average in their area, that person will probably suffer because the standard and cost of living are higher and they can’t keep up. If this is true, then is emigration based on hope for economic increase or better healthcare or something of the like actually advantageous?

In my personal life experience, through novels and historical trends and the typical American perspective, I have always rather thought that America was the best place to live. Not “best” as in no other place is good, beautiful, or rich in culture and experiences, but “best” as in I have never been excessively hungry, I have a place to sleep, I receive a very good compulsory education, I can drink any water that I want and not worry about getting sick. Even though I know it is a fallacy, deep in my mind I still think that the best way to improve people’s lives is to bring them to America, the land of opportunity! Therefore, tasks like teaching people English are of the utmost importance because their ultimate end goal is to be in America someday, where life is better. This probably sounds really stupid to anyone reading it, but I’m just being honest. Even I take this perspective with a grain of salt; it isn’t as though I have a dream to bring every poor, sick, or starving person to Maine and think that they will all flourish there. But it has always seemed to me that America is the best place to live.

After reading these chapters, as well as having a conversation with someone experienced with refugee work in America, I have started to seriously overhaul this line of thought. If it is true that more important to quality of life and happiness is an individual or family’s economic standing compared with those surrounding them, rather than the world as a whole, then it is most certainly not in a person or family’s best interest to immigrate to America to start life over. Chances are they don’t know anyone in their new area, and apparently even refugees are only given governmental assistance for eight months upon arrival in America. If someone doesn’t speak English, they may have a difficult time finding work, especially within an eight-month time frame. Furthermore, refugees are given less than one thousand dollars with which to start life over completely new. In the scheme of American finances that amount is virtually nothing to survive on. When these people come to America, they are leaving behind a place where they are understood and probably feel comfortable for the hope that they will have a “better” life. But because they are economically disadvantaged by American standards, they will be financially hurting just as they were in their home country and possibly even worse off. This leads me to believe that America isn’t the best solution for everyone. It seems like an obvious answer, but it really did take all that thinking through to come to the conclusion that America isn’t the answer. America is not and never was the Promised Land.

The realization that America isn’t the answer to every third world country’s problems led me to reconsider a few other ideas that I had previously taken for granted. At my internship, on of the potential opportunities for American interns in the future was to teach English lessons. It seemed like such a great idea, something that I am able to do relatively easily and that could be a really valuable investment of my time into the community. But after realizing that America is not the final goal of these people and shouldn’t be their goal, it was a little less clear why the people should all learn English. Yes, English is spoken in this part of India a lot, and it would certainly be beneficial to the overall economy to have a common language, but why does it have to be English? The language of their oppressors for so many year shouldn’t be the language everyone is required to learn to function in society when they already know the language of their cultural heritage. I have come to doubt and wonder whether the skills I, as an outsider, possess can really be that beneficial to the communities here. Help needs to come from within, as World Vision has already realized. Their plan is to work from within the culture, with offices right in the areas they want to improve, employing locals who know what is going on and what can be done, to try to get the underprivileged educated and get them the resources they need to have the same opportunities to fill potential as those around them in India.

It's Just Not the Same...

As one might expect, things in India are a little bit different than things in America. Sometimes the differences are dramatic, like the clothing options, but sometimes the differences are subtle so that you don’t notice them for a while and all of a sudden you realize that it isn’t what you are totally familiar with. Those are the differences that tend to be either shocking in their sudden appearance or else highly entertaining. Here are some examples:

Trash. There is no real system of waste management here. Everyone just throws everything onto the ground. It was really jarring to see one of the most Western acting students still crumple up a piece of paper and throw it over her shoulder. I was horrified. But then I realized that probably the trash that we leave out in little baskets every morning to come and be collected is still ending up on the ground somewhere. There really isn’t a good way to beat the system. And don’t even get me started on recycling. It’s like the concept never even occurred to them.

Traffic. I’ve mentioned this before, but there just aren’t any road rules. They don’t even exist. It’s terrifying.

A silly sign in Ooty.

Language. Not as in I-speak-English-and-everyone-else-speaks-Tamil-or-Hindi (although that is sometimes the case), but the words people use and the pronunciation here are just different. Because there is such an influence of Britain in this country, especially in the education sector, the people who know totally fluent English sometimes come out with words that seem to me to be really sophisticated and random. For instance, in class the words that teachers use are sometimes really surprising to me and even though I know them, I can think of three other easier words that a professor in America would have used. And the pronunciation is really funny, like people pronounce “only” so that it sounds like “one-ly” (which actually kind of makes sense).

Food. Cooked and eaten using mostly your hands. The meat here is totally bone-in. It’s kind of disgusting, especially when you see a big pile of raw meat with all its bones and blood just chilling, waiting to go into a dish. And then you find the pieces of liver and heart and all sorts of nasty in your food. BLECH. Also, the juices here just aren’t the same. They are more like fruit drinks than actually fruit juice even when they tell you they're 100% juice. I can’t wait to get some juice when I go home.

Bathing. Instead of showers, most people take “baths” which we ISPers refer to as bucket baths. As in you fill a large bucket full of water and then you have another cuplike one (think of a large liquid measuring cup) that you use to splash it over yourself. It really helps to conserve water, but they are a pain and a half to do. In our apartment, I usually just take a regular shower.

Henna by torch light (flashlight) during a power cut.

Electricity. As in, there isn’t any half of the time. Coimbatore has power cuts 12-15 hours per day. My apartment runs on a generator, which will power our lights and fans as well as our few outlets, but the water heaters, fridge, and washing machine aren't connected to the generator. Overall, our basic comforts are covered and it still gets annoying for us. The people who can’t afford generators are the ones who really take a hit from the power cuts, and typically use one or two candles (or, if they're lucky and can afford it, some portable lights that you plug in to charge when the power is on) to light their homes.