Stephen’s Birthday – 4/2/15

                Stephen’s birthday was very fun, if not a little disorderly.  We had a series of surprises for him that all sort of failed, but it was exciting nonetheless. The first surprise that we tried to pull off was a scavenger hunt. Ben T orchestrated it and made it a good mix of hard and funny. I guess this one didn’t fail, per say, since Ben T did succeed in making a good scavenger hunt, but Stephen never ended up finishing it. This was mostly because Stephen ran out of time to follow the clues since he wanted to be on time for Hindi class. The ironic thing is that Ben T purposefully designed it that way (trying to make Stephen late) so that our group could get prepared for surprise number 3.

The second surprise gone wrong was making brownies. I started making brownies at the program house and made it through the first batch alright. Unfortunately, the electricity went out before the second batch had even baked for a few minutes, so I biked to our Hindi class with a pan full of brownie batter strapped to the back of my bike (the cooked brownies were also in my possession).  Luckily, our Hindi guru-ji has a stovetop oven. Unluckily, it is virtually impossible to control its heat. We did end up making semi-decent brownies, even if they were a little burnt on the outside and gooey on the inside.

                The third failed attempt at a surprise was at Hindi. The original plan was to have everyone get to class early and be waiting for Stephen to come in at which point we would surprise him with brownies and tell him class was actually canceled so that we could take him out to dinner. In classic BYP India 6.0 fashion, however, everyone except me, Alex, and Jenny were late (i.e. came after Stephen arrived). Plus, we couldn’t go into the classroom since the class before us was running late, and the second batch of brownies wasn’t ready yet. In any event, we took him to Ming Garden for dinner and ate some really good (and equally inauthentic) Chinese food.

                Our last try to properly surprise Stephen also ended up not working. At the end of dinner we each left in a few minute intervals, telling Stephen we had to go home for one reason or another. In reality, we all biked to his homestay and set up the cake and present that we got for him. That part of the plan went beautifully and we even remembered to park our bikes around the corner so that he wouldn’t see them. The catch this time, though, was that Stephen’s host father had just come home from dialysis and was too weak to get out of the car. Some of the boys had to help carry him out of the car and into the room where the party was going to be. It was during this time that Stephen came home and saw us all before we could surprise him.

                The party itself was really fun. We danced and sang to music, ate a lot of cake (we accidentally ended up with two cakes because both we and his host family bought cakes), and drank mango juice and soda.  Stephen fed his host family and us cake as per Indian custom and Kushi and Pari (his host nieces) smeared cake on his face. The party had to end a little early because his host dad was getting tired and all of the loud music was quite jarring for his delicate state. He was so weak that the boys had to carry him upstairs to his room afterwards.

                As a present we gave Stephen nice fabric to make a new kurta along with matching thread and fancy buttons. In the end, we had a really enjoyable time and I think Stephen still liked all of the surprises, even if none of them were particularly good.

Monkeys at School – 4/1/15

                I’ve been here for so long that the animals in inappropriate places barely even cross my radar. I bike past cows in the middle of the road without even blinking (although I do sometimes curse the traffic jams that they cause). I don’t think it’s funny or strange when Stephen tells me that he prefers to wash his clothes in the morning so that the monkeys don’t steal his clothes when they’re more active in the evening. I lazily watch the mice in my host family’s kitchen and gaze at the geckos in my room. The pigs eating trash on the corner of the road by the Assi River are mundane and the sweater-donning goats sauntering down the ghats are commonplace. I wouldn’t even think to blog about them if not for talking to my family in the US.  Banaras is the about the closest you can get to an actual concrete jungle. This blog is about a hilariously scary run-in with the dubious monkeys who inhabit Varanasi.

                After school one day I was working in the library when I heard the terrified shrieks of some teachers in a classroom nearby. “BUNDER UNDER AH GAYE!!!” “MONKEYS HAVE COME INSIDE!!!” It was the sort of high frequency squeal that can shatter glass and burst eardrums. Sure enough, when I peered into the room through a window there was a monkey perched on a desk and just hanging out. A few feet away, two teachers were cowering under desks. I, not wanting to suffer the same fate as Stephen, retrieved the bat that Ben P keeps in the cupboard that we share (he futilely hopes that one day his ninth graders will memorize the poem “Casey at the Bat” and he will reward them with a period of playing baseball out in the field). Ben had already left school to go to Urdu class and I decided that someone might as well be protected from the monkeys (they leave you alone if they think you can hurt them i.e. by wielding a bat). I camped out in a corner and brandished the bat whenever a monkey started getting too close for comfort. It was from this vantage point that I watched the monkeys climb inside the library through the open windows and start scaling bookshelves, grabbing books at random and throwing them on the floor.  A few monkeys even stole books and ran and still others chucked some books at onlookers on the lower story. Finally, some of the groundskeepers arrived with long bamboo sticks and started whacking any monkeys that didn’t leave.

                As the monkeys left, I took a look around to assess the damage. A couple of chairs had been turned over and 30 or so books were not in their right places, but I think it could have been worse. Many of the teachers were still under desks as I walked around and asked me if the monkeys had finally left.

I don’t think monkeys have often been near the top of my list of favorite animals, but if they were before, they certainly are not now.

Holi – 3/6/15

                My first taste of Holi was at school on March 4 when all of the teachers and students played Holi together in the field (which perhaps should not be called the field when there actually isn’t any grass there). The first half of the day I spent giving a 3-hour-long science exam to my 9^th graders, but after lunch was all fun and games. Grades 1 through 8 did poetry recitations and dances about Holi, and even though I heard the same poem about Holi recited by most of the grade levels, it was still cute to see them all give presentations with splashes of color across their faces. After the poetry/dances, it was all out war.

                Before I go too much into describing Holi, however, I should probably go over some of the vernacular and back story. The colorful powders (some chemically colored and others herbal) that you throw/smear on other people are simply called “colors.” Powdered colors that you mix with water to shoot out of water guns and launch with water balloons are called “liquid colors.” Powdered colors are considered cleaner since you can wash them out while liquid colors stain. Getting yourself and others covered with colors is called “playing Holi” and if you don’t really want to play Holi but still want some color on your face you can ask for “bus tika” (bus meaning “only” or “stop” and a tika is a mark placed between the eyebrows and is normally applied using either the thumb or ring finger). Here’s a quick and dirty overview of the story behind Holi (it’s actually a cool story if you want to look it up in more depth). Basically, there was this evil demon king who had a son who he hated. He tried many times to kill his son, but each time the son was saved by Lord Vishnu. The evil demon king was practically invincible – he could be killed neither inside nor outside, neither by a man nor beast, neither during the day nor the night, etc. One day he thought of an ingenious way to kill his son – he would burn his son in a fire. The reason why this was so ingenious was that the demon king had a sister named Holika who possessed a magical blanket that allowed her to touch fire and not be burned. The demon king planned that Holika would sit in a fire with her blanket and the baby son and the son would die while she would survive. When Holika sat on the fire with the boy, however, Lord Vishnu summoned a great wind that swept both the baby and the blanket away. Holika was left to burn and the baby was saved! Sometime later, Lord Vishnu killed the evil demon king in a doorway (avoiding the inside/outside problem) while in the form of a half-man/half-beast creature (avoiding the man nor beast problem), and at precisely a time when it was neither day nor night (I can’t remember if it was dusk or dawn, but in any event he avoided the day/night problem).

                That’s the story of why Holi is celebrated, but the backstory behind all of color business is slightly different. The story goes that Krishna, who was dark skinned, had fallen in love with a fair-skinned girl and thought that the only reason she didn’t like him was because he was black. When he told his mother this, she told him to go and put color on her so that she wouldn’t be fair-skinned anymore. He did so and thus sprouted the tradition of playing Holi.

There are four main Hindu holidays that used to be for the four main varnas (castes). Holi was originally for the Shudra caste (the lowest caste that included untouchables) and on the day of Holi everyone is said to be on equal ground, regardless of caste. The way our Hindi guru-ji talked about Holi made it sound like a real-life purge (if you’re confused, I’m referencing a movie that came out sorta recently). On Holi it’s permissible to act like demons, so people (namely young men) will drink lots of alcohol, consume lots of weed in various forms, eat meat (or meaty vegetables), swear like sailors, and generally be unruly. For this reason, girls are not allowed out on the streets before 2 PM on the day of Holi (at 1 PM there is a ceasefire for all crazy activity).

                Anyway, back to playing Holi at school. Most teachers decided to go bus tika, but Ben P, Mallory (a previous Dragons student who came back to India to volunteer at Nirman), and I wanted to get in on all of the fun. Some students were really sweet and would practically caress my cheeks when they smeared color on my face, following that with a tika and touching my feet to show respect. Other students, however, would come up from behind and violently rub my entire head with color before darting off to find another victim. It was an exhausting 20 to 30 minutes of play, but it was also SO FUN. After the kids went home, all of the teachers went to the performance room and had a dance party. It took quite a bit of scrubbing to get all of the colors off when I got home (I basically had to take 2 consecutive baths), but it was still nothing compared to the amount of bathing I had to do after real Holi.

                The day after Holi at school was the day when Holika is burned in effigy on huge bonfires throughout the city. Since a month or so people have been adding wood, garbage, etc. to the piles and some of them in the streets got so large that they obstructed traffic (much to my consternation). Lots of Hindu religious festivals also have some sort of cleaning aspect to them. On Diwali you’re supposed to clean your house or else Lakshmi (the god of wealth) will not come in and bless your family. On Holi, you scrub your body (namely arms, hands, feet, and legs) with a mustard oil scrub and clean off all of the dead skin that you can. Later, you collect the scrub/dead skin leftovers and throw them in the bonfires.

                The first bonfire that we went to that night was a real happening place to be. There was music blasting and a huge crowd of people waiting for all of the festivities to start. Once the fire was lit and the statue of the boy saved from the flames, everyone processed around the bonfire and people started throwing dry color. I wasn’t expecting to play Holi that night and was not wearing old clothes, but hopefully the color will come out when the dhobis wash it. The second fire that we visited, the one on Assi Ghat, was considerably tamer. There wasn’t any loud music playing and people weren’t throwing color like at the other one. When we got back to Dolly-ji’s house we pigged out on Bourboun cookies (amazing fudge cookies), peanut butter, and Nutella before washing up and going to bed.

                The next day we woke up late, had peanut butter sandwiches and bananas for breakfast, and then prepared for wet Holi. All of the girls donned white saris with the exception of Chase who just wore a white salwar kameez and the boys put on their white kurta pyjamas/dhotis. We actually started with just throwing dry color which was fun and considerably less painful, especially since we all had bought herbal colors which don’t taste so bad when they get in your mouth (at South Point’s Holi I had a mouthful of the most disgusting tasting colors ever). Inevitably, though, we started spraying liquid color. We had water balloons, water guns, and buckets as our weapons and more than just each other as targets. We launched water balloons at a nearby roof and were on the lookout for any unsuspecting passersby on the road below to soak with colored water.  We stayed at this stage of Holi for a little while, taking occasional breaks to eat namkeen (salty snacks) and just take a breather in general. We were all pretty much dyed blue, purple, or red at that point, and at least I thought we were going to be finished soon, but instead we were each initiated into what we decided to call Holi hazing. Holi hazing involves one person sitting on the floor while everyone else gets a chance to rub him/her furiously with color. This is probably what made us stay dyed for so long after Holi was finished. The color coating was so intense and so complete that even our teeth were dyed colors. Even though it was fun to be “hazed,” it was also kind of painful and pretty much everyone was finished with Holi after that. We took turns crudely showering off under the cascade of water from a pipe coming off Dolly-ji’s upper roof to her lower one, and gradually people started leaving to take proper showers in their rooms.

                I probably showered three consecutive times and brushed my teeth twice and still had a bluish tint. After bathing as best we could, we changed into newly bought clothes, as is traditional on Holi, and went downstairs to enjoy puri and chola (fry bread and chickpea stew). It was interesting to see how well each person had managed to clean up. Some people were significantly more colorful than others (perhaps a sign of who has effective bathing practices and who doesn’t?) and people with blonde hair basically had their hair accidentally dyed – Caleb’s hair is still a strawberry pink and it’s been a few weeks since Holi.

                Finally, we all grabbed boxes of sweets and went our separate ways home. The streets reminded me of what roads look like at 8 am on Christmas morning. All of the stores were closed and only a couple of people were out (in fact, the only people I saw were three men chatting at a paan (chewing tobacco) shop). When I got home, everyone was asleep. Playing Holi is exhausting and it’s customary to take a nap during the time that’s after the 1 pm cease-fire but before going out at night and visiting friends and family with mithai (sweets) and namkeen (salty snacks). Following my family’s example, I passed out for about an hour before Deep woke me up because, as he matter-of-factly said, “The painting lady is here.” Married Indian women have there feet painted with beet juice for all sorts of special events like weddings, holidays, parties, etc. and Holi is an especially auspicious day to get it done. I am neither married nor Indian, but my host mom invited me to also get my feet painted with her. It was a really cool experience and both my host mom and the woman making the designs on my feet thought it was hilarious how ticklish I am.  I was squirming the entire time and tying my best not to suddenly jerk my feet and upset the bowl of beet juice that was situated alarmingly close to me. After my feet were finished and covered in beautiful bright red lace-like designs, I went upstairs to wash my face again (to try to get more purple off still) and look presentable for going out that evening.

                I generally dislike Indian mithai and find them overly sweet, so, as you can imagine, I was ecstatic that on Holi people mostly serve salty, crunchy namkeen to express their hospitality. Madhu and I went out visiting neighboring families with a bag of dry color (the evening of Holi everyone goes bus tika) and we ate various chips, rice crackers, and papad (spicy potato wafer thing). We got home and had puri subji (fry bread and stewed vegetables) for dinner and by then I was so tired I couldn’t even bring myself to bathe one more time before going to bed.

19 Years Old! – 2/17/15

                My birthday happened to coincide with the Hindu holiday of Shivratri, the anniversary of Shiva and Parvarti’s marriage according to Hindu mythology. Because of this, I had off from school and got to spend the whole day celebrating festivities for both my birthday and Sri Shiva.
                I must admit that the beginning part of my day was kind of boring. I cleaned my room and went for a run at BHU (the local university) with Caleb, followed by lunch at Flavours Café (a coffee place with good American food and cakes that are like cakes that you can get in the US). I visited some Shivalingas (shrines to Shiva) to check out Shivratri festivities, but most of the day I had dinner on my mind. You see, I had promised my group that I would make panko chicken for them for my birthday. Panko chicken is basically just fried chicken except you use dried bread crumbs to crust it and it’s really crispy and delicious. In the US it’s easy to go out and buy meat. After all, it’s cleanly packaged in air-tight containers and you can barely imagine how the pristine cuts of meat came from an animal at all. In Banaras, buying meat is a whole other ball game – you go to a butcher shop and order fresh meat.
               Ben P and I biked to the Muslim quarter where meat is readily available (unlike in the Hindu-centric communities where we live) and found a butcher with a chicken coup outside. I asked for 2 kilos of boneless meat and so the guy working there picked out two chickens for me. At this point Ben decided he wouldn’t be able to watch the killing, so he kindly left to go get some ice cream for the two of us. Killing chickens is a lot less traumatizing that I thought it would be. I have always had weird notions of it from the saying “running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” but in practice it wasn’t so dramatic. They drained the blood, feathered, and removed the bones for me, leaving me a plastic bag full of all sorts of different cuts of meat to pick through. After finishing our ice cream and buying 5 eggs from the butcher, we set off to the program house where we were meeting Caleb and Rachel to cook all of the food (Caleb and Rachel had bought the vegetables for the meal).
                The day before my birthday I had gone to the local import store to buy bread crumbs. Instead of having bread crumbs, though, they just had loaves of dried bread. I purchased the one recommended to me by the store owner and didn’t think much of it until the next day when Rachel was crushing the loaf into bread crumbs and decided to try a piece. “It’s sweet!” she exclaimed, and I was surprised. Why was it sweet? We looked at the package and found that the very first ingredient was sugar! How can you even make bread that has more sugar in it than flour??? Panko chicken is a savory dish and definitely should not be sweet, so we had to add spoonfuls of salt to it to make it taste like normal breadcrumbs. In the meantime I had been carefully cutting the meat (still warm from when it had been alive an hour previously) into usable pieces and Caleb had been slicing zucchini and eggplant for the vegetarians among us (namely Rachel and Ben T since Shivratri is a day when Hindus are supposed to fast, eating nothing but milk products and fruit).
                After a few hours of preparing all of the chicken and veggies, we had a feast of panko chicken, panko eggplant/zucchini, and steamed vegetables (it was more epic in real life than how it sounds in writing). Dolly-ji arrived with the cake from Flavours Café and they locked me in the bathroom while they put candles in the cake and brought out my present. When I came out, Chase strapped a Happy Birthday cone-hat to my head and everyone sang. I got a cookbook called Mastering the Art of Indian Cooking from the group and many notes wishing me a happy and fun-filled birthday. My favorite note was from Shiv, Dolly-ji’s son, which was written in broken English but had “I LOVE YOU” written at the end. We even got to cap off the night with a Shivratri parade that was processing through Assi when we left the party!

Calcutta – 2/16/15

                Wow. It’s hard to express how much fun our trip to Calcutta was. Maybe the trip turned out so great because I wasn’t really expecting much, but in any event we had a grand ol’ time.

                The trip started a bit on a shaky note. Thursday we had work and then I rushed home to pack before rushing to Hindi class, before rushing to Dolly-ji’s house, to rush to the train station. Then, of course, the train was delayed. We found an abandoned ticket office near our platform that looked like a set straight from a zombie apocalypse movie and naturally decided to wait there for the train. It was kind of creepy with bare electrical wires hanging down, half dismantled waiting chairs, walls marked with graffiti, and a single, pale white light to illuminate the room. To kill time we came up with the order in which we would die in a zombie apocalypse and I think it went like this (the first person mentioned is the first to die, the second the second to die, etc.):Stephen, Alex, Chase, Jenny and Ben T (they die simultaneously), Rachel, Caleb, Dolly-ji, Ben P, Evelyn. I was nodding in and out of sleep during this discussion, but from what I remember the story goes that Stephen goes first because he has a history of getting bitten/scratched by animals and wouldn’t have it in him to kill something else. Alex goes next because he’s busy reading a history book to try to figure out how to avoid the zombies when they break in and kill him and then Chase dies helping everyone else escape. Jenny and Ben T then decide to go and find help, but get killed en route. Rachel sacrifices herself to save Caleb, but then Caleb is betrayed by Dolly-ji who first uses him to help climb away from the zombies, but then doesn’t return the favor and leaves him to be eaten. Once Ben and Evelyn realize what Dolly-ji did, however, they stop helping her and she dies. Finally, Ben and Evelyn, connected by the NIRMAN bond, are about to make it to safety when Ben gets bitten on the leg. In the helicopter Ben starts changing into a zombie and Evelyn has to kill him to save herself. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be flattered by my survival or not, but hey I’ll take it if my group thinks I have the stuff to survive a zombie attack. Coming up with the story was a ton of fun, but after a few hours of waiting we were tired and grumpy and group morale was low. We ate Zours (the most amazing candy ever created) and chocolate cookies as a pick-me-up at around 11:30 PM and felt so much better. The train finally came sometime after midnight and we all zonked out as soon as we hit our bunks.

                We arrived in Calcutta the next day around noon and the first thing that hit me was the heat. Not to say it was blistering or anything, but I have a pretty low tolerance for heat despite being from Arizona. We took cabs (yes, bright yellow cabs as found in NYC except maybe in the 1950s or 1960s. I know next to nothing about cars, but these taxis certainly weren’t from this century) and drove to the YWCA Hostel where we were staying. The hostel was pretty bare bones, but its location was hard to beat – it’s on Park Street within walking distance from tons of attractions and right near the metro station. That’s right, a metro station. Calcutta is still undeniably in India, but it’s got a distinctive modern flare that’s lacking in Banaras. We took cabs, buses, auto-rickshaws, trams, and the metro to get around the city, driving on what I would actually be comfortable calling roads and breathing air that was free from noxious burning trash and plumes of dust. Across from the YWCA was a KFC and down the street an Au Bon Pain (both of which were frequented by our group to get our Western food fix). Outside, couples walked freely and there were actually women walking about the streets (even at night!). We all felt more in our comfort zones than we have in months. The funny thing is that I think if we hadn’t been living in Banaras for so long that we would have found Calcutta overwhelming and challenging. I read that Calcutta is the second largest city in India (this might be untrue now since the book I read it in is a few years old) and is a crazy, bustling metropolis. There’s more hubbub in Calcutta than in Banaras just because of its sheer size, but it’s a hubbub that we understand and grasp, unlike a lot of the time in Varanasi. Caleb said that the first time he visited Calcutta a few years ago he found it exhausting, whereas now it was invigorating. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Banaras isn’t like everywhere else in India and going to Calcutta was a nice reminder that there exists a place in India not so terribly different from the cities we come from in the US.

                We did so much in the short time we were in Calcutta I won’t be able to do it all justice in a short blog post, but I’ll list the things we got to see and add anecdotes when I think of them. In no particular order, we visited the Victoria Memorial (outside of which we played on the grass for an hour or two doing handstands, somersaults, playing tag, taking pictures), the New Market (where we found a Jewish bakery and Chase and Jenny got makeovers), BBD Bhag (the old commercial/political district from British colonial times), Khali Ghat (a temple dedicated to Khali, an avatar of the goddess Shakti), the Mother Teresa House, two Jewish synagogues (there used to be quite a few Baghdadi Jews living in Calcutta), an Armenian church, a Portuguese church, Tagore’s House (the house-turned-museum of the writer of the Indian national anthem), Nicco Park (a local amusement park run by a Princeton alum), the flower market, the fish market, and Old China Town. There’s so much I want to say about everything that I hardly know where to begin.

                I guess I’ll start with food since that was a particular highlight of the trip. Bangladesh is famous amongst Indians for its food and sweets and due to Calcutta’s proximity to Bangladesh (the state it’s in is actually called West Bengal), the food there is to die for. In addition to the Western food we got at Au Bon Pain, KFC, and a semi-authentic Italian restaurant called Fire and Ice, we got super tasty Bangladeshi street food and went for dim sum in China Town one morning. The dim sum was SO GOOD. Stephen directed us in what things we should try and verified that the food was almost as good as you could find on a street corner in China. We ate pork buns, dumplings, fish soup, and the Chinese equivalent of mochi, just to name a few. I ate so much and it was the most fully full I’ve felt in months (fully full meaning full of substantial things like meat rather than just carbs). I skipped lunch that day and didn’t even regret it. Even though Bangladeshi food is pretty similar to that of India, there is a certain nuance of flavor that made the food we had a nice break from the mundane dal, subzi, roti (lentils, veggies/potatoes, tortilla-things) that we eat every day in Banaras. Since Bangladesh is predominately a Muslim country, there’s also a lot more meat in their dishes (a definite plus for the meat-eaters on our trip).Bangladeshi sweets are also particularly famous and we stopped for mishtidoi (sweet yogurt) whenever we saw a sweet shop selling it. You can ask anyone in our group and they’ll tell you that I’m not a huge fan of Indian sweets, but the Bangladeshi ones are actually pretty good (even if I would still prefer a piece of cake made by myself or my mom).

                After visiting the Khali temple Saturday morning we went to a flower market where almost all of us bought flowers unnecessarily (but, hey, it was Valentine’s Day). Ben T got flowers for a picture for Amber and all the girls got malas (flower necklaces). Chase even got one of the giant malas that are normally just worn during weddings. After the flower market we visited Nicco Park. It was small, but we got to ride all of the rides for free and on most of them I was so happy that I couldn’t stop laughing giddily. We met the Princeton alum and his two daughters and also got a free meal at the food court there. It was funny to see how much rowdier us Americans are at amusement parks than Indians. That also might have been because we were so excited to be there and hyped up on the thrill of Calcutta.

                There is typically a January slump in India BYP that people experience after coming back from Rajasthan that I think our group mostly missed due to Saurabh’s wedding and Dr. Bermann’s visit. I hope that after Calcutta there won’t be that onset of homesickness since we got a little taste of life back home. In any event, we have lots of things to look forward to like my birthday/Shivratri, Holi, and Stephen and Chase’s birthdays throughout the coming months. It’s hard to believe that we’ll be home in less than four months!

Thoughts on Health – 1/30/15

          I recently started teaching science to class 9 (I know this sounds very vague, right now I guess I’m teaching biology, but I will have to review chemistry and physics before the board exam) and am teaching a unit on “Why We Fall Ill.” I came across a passage in their book which was particularly striking. It said, “Human beings live in societies. Our social environment therefore plays an important part in our individual health. We live in villages, towns, or cities. In such places, our physical environment is decided by our social environment. For example, just think what would happen if there is no agency to ensure that garbage is collected and disposed? What would happen if no one takes responsibility for cleaning the drains to ensure that waste water does not get collected in the streets or open spaces? If there are heaps of garbage and trash littered here and there, or if there is open drain water lying stagnant around where we live, the possibility of poor health increases.”
          Now, I didn’t learn anything new by reading this and I wasn’t wowed by its factual integrity. Rather, I laughed. I laughed because this textbook is being read by kids who don’t even have to imagine living in a place where garbage isn’t collected and sewage water lays putrefying in the streets – these are two day-to-day aspects of Banaras. And here the book is asking students to just think what would happen. If anything, the book should be asking students to just think what would happen if the garbage were actually picked up and the sewage properly disposed of.
           I am constantly baffled by the beliefs behind health in India. Maybe coming from a home where my dad is a doctor and my mom spent 6 years in graduate school studying microbiology lends me to having a deeper understanding of health than most, but STILL (still what? I can’t even begin to tell).
          The past week has been rough on me and my fellow BYPers health-wise. All of us have been hit with some level of sickness or another and almost every Indian person who we encounter attributes it to the changing weather. Actually, every sickness we have ever had has always been attributed to the weather. It’s either too hot for our bodies, too cold, or just the mere fact that the weather is somewhere in between will send our immune systems collapsing. No, it can’t be because of the huge number of feces lying in the street or because of the trash piles that plague every street corner and are happy homes for harmful bacteria. It can’t be because of the sewage water that I bike past (and through when it’s raining). No, it must be the weather and the best prescription is to wear two jackets and a beanie every day until February 15^th (something Ben P is being forced to do on account of his host mother). You know 70 degree weather; it’s a real killer.
          Roli Ma’am (a colleague of mine at South Point School) missed a day of school because she her hand was injured. When she turned up the following day, her right ring finger was incredibly swollen, red, and hot. When Ben and I asked if she had been to the doctor she replied yes, so we asked what had happened to her finger. Her response was priceless. “It’s the cold weather.” Since when has cold weather caused a single finger to swell up immensely and since when have doctors in India been perpetuating the myth that weather is the cause of all illnesses?!?! I really hope that she hadn’t actually gone to see a doctor and is now going to see one. As Chase joked when Ben recounted the story, “You know, I cut myself on this rusty nail yesterday, but my finger is as swollen from this cold and rainy weather.”
          Another factor that many Indians swear leads to bad health is bathing at night. Now, this concept I really don’t understand. Their thought is that if you bathe at night then you will never get warm again and you will be sick the next day. They think this point holds especially true for winter when whether you have warm water or not, taking a bucket bath is rather unpleasant. No matter how fast you bathe, water is always evaporating faster, leaving you shivering in a 50 degree bathroom. How bathing at night will make you sick when you immediately don warm clothes and snuggle under thick blankets is beyond me. If you bathe in the morning then after your bath you have to face the 50 degree weather in just your clothes. So many times students have come up to me shivering in the morning and with icy hands because they just took a bath. If anything, bathing at night is healthier!
          This idea of sickness-inducing nocturnal bathes has been a rough concept to battle for us night-showerers. Stephen’s host parents said he shouldn’t bathe at night because it’s too cold, that he shouldn’t bathe in the morning before coming to the program house because he doesn’t have enough time, and suggested that he just bathe on the weekends. Stephen, understandably, wanted to bathe more regularly than every weekend and had to resort to asking for a bucket of hot water with which to “clean his feet” every night. It wasn’t a total lie since he actually did partially use the water to clean his feet, but he also used it on the rest of his body. Chase and I have met lesser resistance to night-bathing than that, but we both have had the “bathing at night is bad for health” lecture from our host families.
          This paragraph is mostly just a funny, semi-related anecdote from Chase (I am famous for giving semi-related anecdotes). One day she brought home a packet of pasteurized, refrigerated, non-expired milk and had it with dinner. It wasn’t a big deal since she’d been buying packets of this kind of milk and drinking them fairly consistently at the program house. Later that night, however, she got sick and threw up because of a totally unrelated bug that was going around our group. Her host mom and sister swore that it was the milk that made her sick. Now, even months after the event and several successful milk drinking endeavors, every time Chase brings home a packet of milk to drink her host family says, “Chase, you shouldn’t be drinking that milk. Remember what happened last time?” Yes, last time Chase had milk absolutely nothing happened.
          The best thing about this blog post is that I started writing it roughly two hours ago and had initially thought I finished it after only thirty minutes. Every time I got up to do something – go to my dance/Zumba class, eat dinner, bathe, etc. – I found myself remembering more times that I’ve faced ridiculous notions on health in this country. Here I am staring at a rant over 1200 words long and I still know that tomorrow morning when I go to post it I will think of yet another example to throw into the mix.

Dance (and other IEA’s) – 1/18/15

                I fully plan on finishing my blogs from Rajasthan, but for now I am going to go in bit of an anachronic order.

                We finally got to start our Independent Enrichment Activities (IEA’s) this week! In addition to group cooking lessons on the weekend, everyone got to choose one extracurricular activity to do in India. Everyone’s activities are as follows:

Alex: Joining both the Congress and BJP Youth Groups at Banaras Hindu University (Congress and BJP are both political parties that could be somewhat likened to Democrats and Republicans in the US)

Ben P: Urdu language study (kind of a cross between Arabic and Hindi)

Ben T: Tabla (a type of Indian drum)

Chase: Aruvedic massage (possible yoga theory?)

Evelyn: Bollywood dance and classical Indian Kathak dance

Jenny: Sitar

Stephen: Tailoring

             One day a week I go to a local workout center and have a Bollywood/Zumba dance/workout class with other Indian women and on Sundays I bike to the other side of the city in the Muslim quarter for Kathak dance lessons (even though my teacher is Hindu). The modern dance class is so much fun and an awesome way to work out while still being culturally appropriate (and not having to be the only girl in a gym full of 20-year-old Indian men). Kathak is a very rhythmic dance in which you wear bells on your ankles and stomp in time with the accompanying tabla. My guru-ji has an incredible ability to stomp his bare feet as loudly as I can clap my hands. I honestly don’t know how he does it, but I guess I’ll learn in due course since it’s an integral part of the dancing. The steps are split into phrases that are 16 beats long (four measures with four beats in each). We had my guru-ji come and give us a concert with his family (his son dances with him, his other one plays that tabla, his cousin plays harmonium, etc.) and I was just blown away by his skill. What we’ve been learning in class is so simple (obviously) and less impressive, but hopefully by the end of 3 months I will have some improvement to show for.