2/5

The quarterly meeting for the senior staff is happening today and tomorrow. This means that all of the upper level staff come to DDC and give short presentations on their work over the past three months. There are also educational pieces where government or other important officials come and inform the staff about new schemes, or to teach the staff about working with their organization. The power-points were all in English, which was supremely helpful, because everyone spoke in Bengali. Although when someone is speaking Bengali there are usually quite a few English words interspersed, especially when they are speaking in a professional environment. This means that I can usually understand what the person is talking about, even if I don’t understand the context of that subject.
I came after class, which I ended early, so that Susmita and I wouldn’t be too late for the meeting. Class was uneventful; I spent quite a bit of time with the old vocabulary words, so that the students retain them. The auto ride over was also uneventful, the auto was even pretty empty, only 15 people, which for an auto is unusual. Once arriving at DDC, I listened to two or three morning presentations. Sr. T sat next to Hannah and myself and translated, so that we weren’t too lost. The presentations were only Community Health Systems, Anti-Human Trafficking, and Microfinance/Revovling Fund. They were all very interesting. Hannah and I took a walk around DDC when the Bank Manager got up to speak. He was from the government bank that’s only job was to take money from the government and give it to small banks to loan to people to develop rural and agriculturally areas. Puthumai found us on our walk and told us all about the bank manager and what he was doing. It was nice to have someone explain so directly to us in English what was happening.
On our walk we visited all of the wildlife that lives at DDC. There is a puppy, which I have named Sugar, who is black with a few brown and white spots on his body. This morning one of the pigs had piglets, so there were baby pigs to visit. And yesterday the mommy cow had her calf, who was so white and had such skinny long legs! After visiting the animals, Hannah and I took lunch (after a thorough washing). Lunch was tasty: rice, dal, cabbage with spices, and bananas. The bananas had seeds because they were from the trees outside. The seeds were red and were in the middle. I ate them on accident because I didn’t know that bananas could have seeds. It reminded me of my mother telling me (as a small child) that if I ate watermelon seeds then watermelon plants would grow in my stomach.
Everyone took their lunch just after we finished, so we walked to Mission Moore and snooped around a bit in the shops. We bought these little caramels that Hannah like and some treats for our girl’s night. Because what is a girls night without junk food! ☺
In the afternoon there was a government speaker about non-life insurance. Sr. T was really helpful translating his speech, she translated every sentence for me. It was interesting to hear the different policies, coverages, and premiums. It was also strange to think of a health care system so completely different from America. After his speal we had tea. Hannah and I stumbled into the room where Puthumai and the speak were having tea. They invited us to join, and I was able to ask the man a few questions about his presentation. He was very engaging and had an insightful perspective. Plus the tea was hot and the biscuits were good.
After another visit to the animals, Hannah and I listened to Puthumai’s presentation about Quality Monitoring. I was so excited because his power-point background picture was of the I-5 bridge in Seattle. The majority of the photo was gray clouds and for a few moments my insides ached for rain and overcast dreary clouds! Puthumai’s PP slides were well-written and pretty comprehensive, so I understood quite a bit of his talk. Then we had another break and in the evening we watched Slumdog Millionaire.
Tomorrow the meeting will continue and since today was so behind schedule on presenters we will hear from quite a few people tomorrow. That’s all for now, sending my love.
Oh! And I put commentary on the photo albums in the links below. Hope you enjoy them ☺

2/4

The Internet was so slow today. Trying to get any work done on the Internet felt like slowly drowning in quicksand, unbearable. I wasn’t able to chat much with M&D this morning, which was unfortunate, but there is still hope for tomorrow. I got to try a new breakfast food this morning, Puthumai brought it from the MC sisters house. It is called pootu and is shaped like a Pringles can. It is made out of rice flour, coconut, and cumin. You mush it up with your fingers and then mush a banana in it. There is sugar on top and then (since its breakfast) you get to eat it with a fork. It was really tasty and it was fun to have something new for breakfast. Most of the foods here that are made of rice flour taste similar, it is a taste I had never experienced before, but is quickly growing on me.
Class went well, although I gave the students a short quiz to see if they are retaining their vocabulary. They’re not. Two of my students though patience was an illness. Which, although it made me laugh, is not a good sign. I am going to have to do some more work with the vocabulary if I want it to stick.
This morning we went with Puthumai to the Police Station to register as foreigners. I got in trouble, well no, Puthumai got in trouble because of me. I have been here a month and the police had seen me around. They asked Puthumai why had I been here so long without registering. In the end nothing came of it, and we were joking on the way out, so I know it was too harsh of a scolding. It was also my first encounter with Indian police. They wear, what looks like berets (if that is the correct spelling for the French hats) and carry around sticks. They dress in green and do no smile. They patrol the intersections, making sure everyone follows the light signals, but besides that I haven’t seen them doing much around Raiganj.
In the afternoon I helped Shanawaz with some report working in excel, I was able to learn about the different skill development trainings and the ways in which the trainings are documented. I enjoy helping others with my computer skills. This afternoon Hanna and I went to Chonditola. Regina and Johannes were there, and the four of us had fun playing with the big kids and holding the babies. We all got peed on though, some multiple times. The diapers that the children wear are just triangular pieces of cloth, one size ties tight or loose enough to fit all. But by the end, even if you get peed on, it is worth it to hold these little guys and have them fall asleep in your arms. The older kids are a lot of fun to run around with, and they are the best exercise I have yet to find in Raiganj. I am starting to get attached to the little kiddos, they are so loving, sweet, and they truly are in desperate need. One of the MC sisters explained to me today, that there are only four orphans living there. The others are either sick (TB or other diseases), they have only one parent who does not or cannot take care of them, or they have been brought in as extremely malnourished and are staying there until they fill out again. It break my heart to think of these little guys starving.
I walked home from Chonditola, which was a nice long walk. Then I spent some time writing emails and working on a project that Janet has assigned. I did some reading and pretty soon it was time for dinner. We had a dinner guest who is from CRS Calcutta and has come for a field visit and to attend the quarterly meeting tomorrow. She was really nice, and because she was here, dinner was a little fancier than usual. We had the normal rice, dal, and vegetables with spices, but we also had egg and soup. Everything was very good. Tomorrow is the quarterly meeting, as is Friday. Hannah, Puthumai and I will leave for Calcutta on Saturday night. Until then, I think we have some weekend plans of relaxing and maybe having a girls night at DDC. I am sending my love and missing you all ☺

PS. Funny story. So last night after dinner at Ruchi’s house, I was offered a wet sweet. A wet sweet is a ball of dough that lives in liquid sugar. I picked it up and bit into it, which as anyone who has eaten a wet sweet before knows, if you bite them they release all of their juices. This meant that liquid sugar was dripping all down the front of me. Everyone was laughing, and we had a good time joking about it. Today in my class I asked them to speak about their favorite sweets, and with the story of the previous nights incident so fresh in my mind I though I would share it. I began with; In America we don’t have wet sweets. And then told the story. The students thought it was hilarious and I was laughing along with them. This is another valuable skill I have learned in India, to laugh at myself, and be okay with it.

Photos

Follow these links to find me in India

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2054036&l=646f8&id=32404648

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2054035&l=e7cf7&id=32404648

Hope you enjoy, captions to come soon.

2/3

Today began with a little bit of sleeping in, as an attempt to stay healthy. Then a sykpe chat with M&D. I took a quick breakfast and ran off to class. Class was good, the students are progressing very nicely. Then I spent some time working on my projec,t blogging, emailing, and loading pictures. Then after lunch Barnali took Hannah and I to the tailor to get our new outfits stitched. Then Hannah and I stopped at the sweet shop for a quick snack and then took an auto to Chonditola. The kids were very happy to see us.The babies were as adorable as usual.. I held one for quite a while, I fed him and even got peed on ☺; he was really sweet. Then I helped feed the toddlers, and played around with the older kids. My heart is going to break when its time to leave those kids, they are so loving and it breaks my heart to think of them as orphans. After a while we all left, Regina and Johannes had shown up too, so the four of us had been playing with the kids. And it looks like Regina and Johannes will be in Calcutta on Monday as well, Hannah and my free day, so we planned to get together. We also talked about having a girls night, where we (Regina, Hannah and myself) all stay at DDC one night and watch chick flicks. On my way home from Chonditola I stopped at Ruchi’s house. I just wanted to say hi, and see how her week was going. I ended up staying for tea, and then after a few calls from Puthumai, saying that SWI would be empty for dinner, I stayed for dinner. We had a nice time playing with Trisha, and chatting. For dinner we had mutton and roti (like chipati). Ruchi let me help in the kitchen, which was so nice. It is strange here sometimes, having servants that do everything for me. They make my food, clean up after my food, clean my room, and do my laundry. It was difficult at first to accept, because that is all work that I am used to doing myself. Granted I have no idea how to do most of those things in India, so it has been a great help. But still, it is a strange adjustment to make. After dinner, Jonathon drove me home on his motorbike. I was so tired I went straight to bed. Sorry for the short and direct entry, but at now I am caught up on my days. Hope everyone is well, sending my love. PS. A link to pictures to come soon.

2/1 & 2/2

Now for my first adventure outside of Raiganj. Puthumai and I left at 4am on Sunday morning, Hannah was planning on accompanying us, but fell sick on Friday night and was not better by Sunday morning. Puthumai had rented a vehicle and we had a driver. Our trip was to Hawazardi (at least that is my closest guess at the name, and then to a place that sounds exactly like Siliguri, but with an Sh in the beginning. The travels took us south, so it was much warmer than Raiganj. I can feel the weather changing here everyday. By mid afternoon it feels like a summer day in Seattle. It is beautiful and the air chills just perfectly at night. I think when the heat arrives I will struggle, but for now, I am thoroughly enjoying the sun. In the first few kilometers (in India they don’t use miles, and Fahrenheit, instead they use kilometers and Celsius, which has often limited my understanding of temperature and distance) we ran into a traffic jam. I know, you are thinking a traffic jam at 4am in rural India, that is certainly unexpected. Well let me tell you, there were what ended up being 50 km (a lot of miles) of bumper to bumper good carriers (the Indian equivalent to the semi-truck) all turned off and lined up on the road. We droved quickly past, until we came to an area with a bus heading towards us. After some very skilful maneuvering on the driver’s part, with Puthumai’s direction, we made it past the bus and past the miles and miles of good carriers. It was quite a sight though. Then the drive began. I slept the first few hours, and woke up just in time to see the Ganges, which is beautiful. It was nice to have time to chat with Puthumai one on one, and hear is thoughts on SWI, my time in India and development in general. We also shared personal stories of growing up and personality quirks, it was a blessing to be able to have so much of Puthumai’s undivided attention (besides the cell phone calls) and to hear so many of his insightful thoughts. We stopped for breakfast (which cost 90 rupees for three people, about 2 dollars) and then our next stop was Hawazardi. It was a really cool area, and there were lots of old British buildings and palaces from kings and queens long past. We took a horse drawn cart, which when you stepped on the back sank a good two/three feet, and were taken around town. There were different sites to look at. The first was a compound area owned by four brothers, they were very wealthy from smuggling. We saw their bath, pond, garden, exquisite home, stage, and temple. The architecture was really cool and the weather was perfect for strolling around. The next stop was a tax collectors house, a middle man for the British. He was an awful man and we heard stories of him torturing and killing people. Then we stopped at a temple for Hindu gods, and finally the burial grounds of the queen who used to reign in the area. Father said she eat babies, thinking it would make her powerful and that when her husband found out he buried her alive. Once we were done with the horse cart ride we checked out the museum, which was the old palace (the place of a thousand gates). First of all, for my admittance into the museum I was charged 20 times more than the average Indian, because I am a foreigner. I don’t mean that they saw my pale skin and tried to cheat me, I mean that the sign was posted with different prices for Indians and foreigners. Once inside the museum we saw tons of really neat artifacts and remnants from the palaces hay day. Then we drove till 5ish (minus a quick stop for lunch and a bathroom break, my first encounter with an Indian toilet). We had dinner at a friend of Fathers home, and she and her family were very welcoming. Plus the dinner was amazing! We were served chicken, chipatis, and vegetables with spices. We also had fried chicken liver as an appetizer. I stand by my prior saying, that anything fried tastes good. The next day we toured the hometown of Indians most famous poet. He won the Nobel Prize and wrote a famous book called Gitanjali. We went to his museum and also toured the university he founded, which his based on the concept that students should learn in nature. It was really interesting to walk though the museum and then tour the university. Then we were off driving, first a quick stop for lunch. Where we ate with a family who was very kind and welcoming. The lunch was good, expect I am pretty sure in my chicken bowl I got chicken body parts that I am not used to eating. I tried them, and they were indeed very different from the chicken I am used to. Then we drove until tea time, when we stopped at a Jesuit house and visited a stone quarry, where many villagers are employed for low wages in working conditions that cause serious health problems. The quarry was impactful in its magnitude and the people were impactful in their suffering. Then we drove straight through to Raiganj, reaching at 11pm. The trip was an huge success, besides a small cough that has taken up residence in my lungs, I was very pleased with the trip.

1/31

This morning I slept an hour later than usual. It was actually difficult for my body to stay in bed that long, but I wanted to at least try and get some extra rest. Breakfast went as usual this morning and I spent most of the rest of the morning lounging around the Internet, checking email, posting pictures, etc. The wireless was working decently well, and I had a lot of pictures that I wanted to post. I was having some difficulty with facebook, so I will write captions and post the links to the albums in my blog within the next few days. There are so many people that I would like to write very long emails to, but there just aren’t enough hours in the day. I hope that everyone who is reading this feel as though it is written especially for them, because it is!
The best news of all though, is that this morning there was no fog!! It was clear and the sky were blue (well as blue as the pollution allows them to be). I was so happy when I opened my door and say the sunshine. I sat outside this morning just to bask in the sunlight. It was beautiful.
In the afternoon Regina and Johannes came by, and the four of us and Puthumai went to a to a local street market and to a dress shop. The street market was so cool. There were people sitting on the ground with their fruits and vegetables displayed on tarps on the ground. There were so many vegetables that I had never seen before! It was really neat. Then we went to the dress shop. The shop was closed, but because Puthumai is a special customer they opened just for us. The saree and salvar material was gorgeous. We sat on the floor and they brought out one after another for us to see. I found a gorgeous turquoise saree made out of synthetic material that looks like silk. It has a beautiful design on it and it was roughly 200 ruppes which is 4 US dollars. I also bought material for a few more salvars (daily Indian dress) because I think that as it gets warmer that is going to be more comfortable than my Western dress. I will take it all to the tailor on Tuesday, which is sort of the best part. All of the clothes here are made especially to fit you. So if you like a material you can make it into anything, in any size.
Then for lunch we ordered onion (insert a long word that I can’t pronounce). It is a South Indian dish. They were like pizza’s but not. There was a dough bottom part and they were round, but the dough part was made out of rice power. Then there were onions on top (I picked off a few, but was able to eat most of them) and I am sure there was more that I can’t properly identify. There were also two sauces, one white and one brown. The white sauce was really good, and the dough part unlike anything I have tasted before. Overall a very enjoyable culinary experience ☺!
Then in the afternoon Hannah and I went to Ruchi’s. We missed the puja, but from what I can gather it is not a very communal kind of event. Anywho, there was the statue of the Saraswati goddess with flowers and other gifts around her. In the community field area there was also a community lunch. Shortly after we arrived, Ruchi and her neighbor (who teaches at St. Xavier and is very nice) Daisy helped Hannah and I put our sarees on. It is quite a process, and even after watching them put it on, I wouldn’t have the slightest clue as to how to reproduce the look. Hopefully I will learn as time goes on. Then we went and ate. The entire community commented on how nice we looked, and they were all very happy that I was sitting on the ground eating off a leaf plate with my fingers in a saree! Hannah was sick last night after the food from the picnic, so she didn’t eat today. I think the food was too spicy for her stomach, She needs some more time to adjust to the foods here.
I noticed today that I am gaining the ability to make conversation with lots of different people. I am becoming quite the competent extrovert. It is like my Grandpa Hewitt, he can sit down on a bench and five minutes later he will have 10 new friends. It is a quality that I thought I didn’t possess, but maybe Grandpa passed it on to me, I just needed some time to grow into it!
After lunch we went back to Ruchi’s house and a few of the neighborhood girls followed. Daisy’s older daughter Neha, is 15 and very sweet. So there was Neha, her younger sister Nidi, and about 6 of their friends. They all are very kind to me and were so happy to see my in a saree. More then once they commented on how nice I looked. Then after sitting a chatting for a few minutes the younger ones decided we should all dance. So Jonathan turned on some music and everyone (about 10 of us) started dancing! There was all kinds of different music, from popular Hindi songs, to Hip Hop to Elivis. We were doing all varieties of dancing and everyone was having a great time. Let me tell you, it is quite an experience to dance to Elvis in a saree! Then we had some tea and conversaion and Hannah and I were on our way. We traveled by rickshaw today, mostly to avoid the stares. Because I will tell you there is only one thing that attracts more attention that a white girl in Raiganj, a white girl in a saree in Raiganj.
After arriving at SWI, we showcased our sarees for the Fathers, and received more compliments. Then we (Puthumai, Father Herman, Hannah and I) went to Susmita’s home for some snacks and conversation. Her house is very close by and we were served fried rice, cheese curds, fried brinjol, and a wet sweet. We had an enjoyable time, and she gave me a bindi, which is the red dot for your forehead. Susmita was very complimentary of my saree. Which was surprisingly comfortable.
Then Puthumai and I went the market to pick up some snacks for tomorrows journey (we are going somewhere, but don’t ask me where, because I can’t pronounce it). We will leave early tomorrow (3am) and then drive all day. We will have a picnic and see some historical places. We will stay in a hotel and then come back Monday. It will be fun so see a little more of India, but to be honest; I have become quite content with Raiganj. There is so much life here, and I think that even after three months there will still be many things I haven’t seen or begun to understand.
Dinner was uneventful. No one ate much because we were all full. I will not write for a few days, because of the trip. But don’t worry! I’ll be back soon. Loving and missing everyone.
PS. Ally I hope your enjoying Mexico, miss you and I hope you know I am there with you, whenever you need me ☺