Weekend Trip: Madurai!

On September 21^st and 22^nd we took a weekend trip to Madurai. Despite the fact that we had to wake up at four thirty in the morning to start our five hour journey, we were all really excited to be going on our first trip. In previous batches of ISP students, the Madurai trip has been referred to as the “Coimbatore appreciation trip” because of the very different climate in Madurai. Though the actual temperature in the two places is pretty much equal, Coimbatore sits between mountain ranges and catches an excellent breeze, whereas Madurai is humid and gets no breeze whatsoever. The entire weekend it felt like we never stopped sweating.

After stopping for breakfast during our drive, our first stop was at the Gandhi museum. The information was really interesting, with walls filled with the entire story of the Indian independence movement from way before Gandhi’s time, up through specific details about the work during his lifetime.
Unfortunately, much of the area devoted to Gandhi’s personal life and beliefs contained signage exclusively in Tamil. What I really loved about that place was the architecture—the museum was housed in an old exhibition pavilion called the Tamukkam Palace. It was built around 1670 AD, during the Nayak Dynasty. All the windows and arches were gorgeous!
 

We spent the night at the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary (TTS), which was this beautiful oasis right in the middle of the city. I’m not kidding, either. You are literally driving through the middle of the city and you turn down a road that you probably didn’t even realize was a road because it’s right between two buildings and then you drive for a ways and are suddenly on this spacious, coconut tree filled campus with chickens roaming about and plenty of walking paths. All you can hear on the TTS campus are crickets or cicadas or whatever chirping even though five minutes away the city is bustling. It was crazy! We spent the afternoon resting and visiting with the TTS “principal” (as opposed to the American version that would be president). TTS is unique in that they are making a marked effort to help the untouchable caste or dalits. The caste system is still a major detriment to the people and society of India and TTS is attempting to empower the people who are still being abused in this dysfunctional system. Hopefully I’ll have a post exclusively about the caste system and the dalits sometime in the future, but for now just take my word for it that it’s totally messed up and lame.

That night, we went to the Thirumalai Nayak Palace and saw a sound and light show. Which meant that different parts of the palace were lit up with colorful lights and voices narrated much of the history of that place. It was really interesting—if only we’d all been awake enough to truly absorb everything we’d heard!

We spent the night at TTS, but the rooms were so blasted hot that everybody had a hard time sleeping. While the power was on the fans kept us relatively cool, but when the power shut off and the fans stopped, it got positively sweltering in our rooms. I slept pretty well throughout the night, but lots of people had a rough time.

On Saturday, we visited the Sri Meenakshi Temple, which is a huge Hindu temple that gets lots of traffic both from worshippers and also from tourists every day. It really was enormous. And so much of it was beautiful. But at the same time it was weird and a little eerie. Okay, at times a lot eerie. There was an area of the temple that had all these idols on the pillars and people came and prayed to specific ones for specific things (kind of like Catholics with the saints), and one of the idols on the pillar was for something to do with bearing children and they had this cloth tied over it and men aren’t supposed to look at it and it was smeared with goop and it was just really gross and unnerving.

We did get to do sweet things like take pictures with the temple elephant! And inside we found a small stone elephant and took pictures "riding" that too! On the way out, there were all there pigeons on the ground and I ran through them and made them all fly away. It made me feel like a small child, and it was lovely. So basically, my favorite part of that visit was the photo ops...

On our way back from Madurai, we had the opportunity to stop at a “hospice” called Arugalam, which means hope. But a hospice here is not the same thing as hospice care in America. Instead, this hospice was an outreach through TTS that takes care of people, predominantly children, infected with HIV/AIDS. Obviously, the children who have it have mostly gotten it through genetics rather than unsafe choices of their own, which made it seem like a potentially depressing place to visit. But it wasn’t depressing AT ALL. In fact, stopping there was my favorite part of the entire weekend! We got to hear all about how the children receive treatment and are loved and cared for and given an extremely nutritious diet so that their bodies can be as healthy as possible. And best of all was that we got to play with them. Seeing the way those children were loved by their caretakers was absolutely heartwarming, and seeing how they all interacted as siblings was also beautiful.
When our time there was over, none of us wanted to leave! One of the boys reminded me of Jon like crazy except for the fact that he was shorter than I am and is sixteen instead of thirteen. But it seems that all Indians are shorter than Americans for their age and all Indians also look younger than they really are. It can be really confusing to try to figure out a person’s age!

Interning, India Style.

Part of my semester through ISP is participating in an internship in an NGO here. I was placed with World Vision India, specifically KADP which is the Area Development Program in Coimbatore (I can't remember what the "K" is for...). All that I knew about World Vision before I came was Operation Christmas Child, a program where people assemble shoeboxes of gifts to send to children in underprivileged areas of the world at Christmas time. As it turns out, World Vision does a lot more than that (I mean, who would have guessed they did more than mail shoeboxes, right?). KADP is present in twenty-six different slums in the Coimbatore area alone, running programs to raise awareness about health, cleanliness, education, and alcoholism, as well as running the child sponsorship program.

The beginning of my internship was kinda rough, mostly because “internship” means something different in India than it does in America. Honestly, I would have been fine just doing desk or office work, running around and alphabetizing files or something. Even better would be doing some actual field work, getting out there and helping people in the slums. But no, the reality is that in India, “internship” often means more like observation by American standards. One of my classmates from ISP told me that at her internship she learned that social work students here in India are required to participate in internships but they are only concerned with getting the required hours to complete their degree, so they aren’t really invested and don’t put much effort or dedication into it. That could be a contributing factor in why we aren’t taken seriously as a potential source of help to our NGOs. Or maybe the NGOs just view us as more work to be supervised and led, and not worth their time. Either way, it was disappointing to sit in the office for the my first two visits to World Vision India with nothing more than reading material about everything from what their area development program has been doing to workbooks from a leadership conference the program manager attended.

It has started to get better though, as we’ve been assigned to do a case study in a specific slum called ELGI (at first, I thought it was LG, like the phone. But nope, it’s a spelled out word). So far, I’ve been to ELGI slum three times. The first time was to attend a distribution of lunchboxes to the sponsor children who live there. The program was to run from five to six, so my fellow ISP intern, our BACAS student guide/translator and I arrived at about 4:45. We spent the time before the program touring around the slum. It was really interesting! In a way, the slum is both beautiful and disgusting, peaceful and disturbing. There is a sense of community there like none I’ve experienced in America. Everybody wanted us to take a picture of them or their children. It was a little strange (especially when somebody thrust a baby with a naked bottom into Ashley’s arms) but it was overall a really beautiful evening. The actual ceremony, which finally started an hour and a half late, was pretty boring except that they started it with two different dances. The first group of dancers were three girls aged about eight to ten, and the second group of dancers was four older girls, probably about fifteen years old. The older girls were much better, but the little ones were still very cute.

My subsequent trips into the slum were intended for gathering research for my case study on it. Even though they were really information heavy and not as much based on interaction, we still got to see and take pictures with some of the kids that we’d met the first time we visited.
One of the girls there even reminds me of my sister! I took a picture with her and tried to communicate to her that I thought she reminded me of Britt, but I’m not sure she really understood. Oh well. What I’ve learned during my research is that the biggest problem that slum faces is the fact that it sits right on the banks of this disgusting body of water which flood during the rainy season. There is a hospital right next to the slum and even the hospital dumps all of its garbage into the water! And so do the slum-dwellers, because they have no garbage bins or anything, and then it all floods up into their houses for a couple of months every year! YUCK.

All this to say that the internship experience I’ve had so far has been unexpected, interesting, and sometimes just boring. But I’ve really enjoyed my time in the slums, learning about the people who live there and having the opportunity to get to know them as people a bit rather than just thinking of them as anonymous statistics. Their world is so different than the world that I grew up in and so different from what I could ever have learned before I went there myself. Four of my ten visits are over at this point and it’s crazy to think that I’m just scratching the surface of implications of slum life and won’t really be able to orchestrate change for the problems that are so blatantly prevalent.

Lesson Three: Use Your Right Hand

In India, there is a very big distinction between which hand you use for what. See, Indians don’t use toilet paper, they use a sprayer-thing and a personal towel to dry themselves with and their left hand. As one of my classmates has labeled it, the left hand here is the “poop hand”. Yet Indians don’t use silver wear, and instead eat all their food (each meal consists mainly of rice and different “gravies” which are actually curry type dishes with different ingredients in them) with their hand. Yes, hand. As in singular. As in only the right hand. Furthermore, the right hand is preferred over the left in almost every situation. On the bus, you hold on with your right hand if at all possible. When reaching out to receive or give something, you use your right hand. I’ve even heard that money should be paid using only the right hand, which I found particularly interesting since in America, money is considered one of the dirtiest things around. When I can remember, I try even to wave to people with my right hand because I'm afraid that they'll be offended if I use my left. It kind of sucks for the left handed people in our group because they have to learn to do all their daily tasks with their right hand. And I always feel like it's a bit awkward for them when they're using their left hand to take notes during class. There are, of course, exceptions to the right hand only rule. Like in cuisine class which requires both appendages and during art when we work with clay and all sorts of things like that. But for the most part it's important to remember that in almost every situation right is right.