Food Challenge (Amelia, you should be proud)

I have always been a pretty competitive person, which for the most part is fine, when indulged at healthy levels. But since coming to India, one of the main ways that trait has exhibited itself is in my treatment of food. Perhaps I am getting a little ahead of myself though, so I'll just start by talking about the food in general. It is absolutely fantastic, though this is coming from a person who already had a pretty lengthy love affair with Indian food going on. Of course, the stuff you get in the States doesn't even compare, so naturally I was just overjoyed when I got here, and began my sampling adventure.
The Indian food that you find in the U.S. is almost exclusively North Indian food, so when I got here I was introduced to a lot of unfamiliar dishes. A traditional Maharashtrian meal will generally consist of a subzi (vegetable dish) or two, chapatis (flat breads), daal (lentil soup), and dahi (yoghurt). There is obviously a lot of variation from there, which is of course what I get so excited about, since I am not one to pass up any opportunity to try something new. I have also gotten to try South Indian and authentic North Indian food, both of which come with their own sets of tradition on which to build variety.

In coming to India there were two elements of the food that I was most excited about- chai and spice. This is where my competitive nature started to come into play, because for the most part it is assumed that I am unfamiliar with both of these things. I have been making my own chai for a while now, trying to get as close as possible to authentic flavours. Of course, it was nothing like the chai that you find here, but it at least gave me a taste for it, making me slightly more familiar with what I could expect. When I got here however, I received a lot of confused looks or surprised laughter when I said I was familiar with masala chai, and even enjoyed it. Even saying that I liked tea in general has earned me some strange looks, as it is assumed that foreigners don't enjoy the stuff, and should they have any it would be strictly black tea. So this little internal sound of protest goes off in me, eager to prove that I do indeed appreciate a good cup of tea.

My need to prove myself is even more apparent when it comes to spicy food, however. As a white visitor to India, it is almost always assumed that any fire should be strictly avoided in your food. But I have been adorning my meals with any peppers or hot sauce I can find for years now, so this obviously isn't the case. Try as I might to be reasonable, it becomes a bit of a challenge for me, when something at the table is dragged away in a well meaning protection of my taste buds. If a waiter suggests we order something else because it will be too hot for me, that is clearly what I must have. In fact, and I don't know if this is subconscious or not, I think I enjoy my food far more if I have just been told that it will be too spicy for me. I find myself full of smiles, makig all sorts of yummy noises, and of course there must be complete ostracism of that water glass. I haven't had anything yet that I found too spicy, but hopefully my need to prove my capabilities in the realm of spicy foods won't get me into trouble anytime soon. For now, I will just continue thoroughly enjoying every food adventure I am presented with.

First Experience at Golden Jubilee School

In my very first week in India, I began volunteering at Golden Jubilee School in Jalna. Just to give a bit of a geographic background, I am staying on the Mahyco research compound in a tiny town called Davalwadi. About a half an hour's drive away is Jalna, a considerably larger town of maybe 400,000 people. Then the largest city near us is Aurangabad, about an hour away and probably about a million people strong.

Anyway, to get to Golden Jubilee School there is a bus that goes directly from the colony into Jalna, as a lot of the kids from around here go to the school. GJS is a really good English medium school, which means slots there are often pretty sought after. The bus isn't your full-sized American school bus or anything, actually its size and shape kind of remind me of the sort of thing that might have followed the Grateful Dead around. Of course, the cheery yellow paint kind of throws that image off. On my very first day, I hopped onto the bus and was greeted by the fairly baffled expressions of ten school children, and the comforting instruction of two teachers who also rode the bus. There weren't really any introductions, my sudden appearance on the bus was just taken at face value. In days to come the kids would get much more bold with me, but for this first day I was welcomed with silent curiosity.
The first day was mainly spent getting acquainted with the school. I started off by observing a Lower Kindergarten class (in India school starts in LKG and then moves to Upper Kindergarten) since I expected I would be working mostly with the younger kids. Right away I was introduced to one of the main differences between the schools here and in the United States- the formality. Anytime I would walk into a room, all of the students would get up from their seats and say "Good morning ma'am" in a chorus of well-practiced respect. This greeting extends to simply passing people in the hallway, where just about every student I see must acknowledge me and refer to me as ma'am. It is a practice that they have all grown up with, but took some getting used to for me as I, a) grew up in an extremely casual schooling environment and b) at age seventeen am not really used to being referred to as ma'am. But eventually I grew accustomed to it, and in fact there is something quite nice about being greeted so many times throughout the day. Walking around the halls here, you never feel ignored or unwelcome.

After some time in LKG, I went to the Jubilee Kids room for the remainder of the day. This is the daycare program at the school, for kids ages three and up. For the first week in particular this is where I spent most of my time, and even now any spare time I get I try and spend with these kids. The main goal of Jubilee Kids is to develop language, because at this point they have only been speaking either Hindi or Marathi at home, but will need to speak English if they continue going to GJS. So it is more or less a complete immersion program, the teachers speaking almost exclusively in English through their daily lessons or stories. The kids have gotten pretty good at comprehension, but they haven't gotten to the point where they can speak it yet.

The reason that I keep going back to the Jubilee Kids in particular, is that more than the other classes I have been helping with, it gives me the opportunity to interact with the kids on a more personal level. A three year old doesn't get frustrated if you can't understand their language, because for the most part all it takes is a goofy face or a big smile for them to warm up to you. The kids are always excited to show off what they know, pointing out the letter J with pride, or announcing that the clown's nose is "red colour." The older kids are interested in me, since I am kind of a surprise to show up in their class one day, but I don't get that excitement and general warmth that I do from spending actual personal time with the younger kids. I will write more about some of the other things I have been doing, but no matter how much I bounce around with different tasks at GJS, I can't imagine a better place to have started than with those Jubilee Kids.

Diving In

I think the image of being thrown into a body of water and told to "sink or swim," has been widely unappreciated  and stamped with the demoralizing label of dead metaphor, when really only a small piece of its significance is being taken into account. True, it is often used in reference to swiftly adapting to a new situation, completely out of necessity, but I think some of the more interesting components of this metaphor are being overlooked. This method of swimming acclamation operates under the assumption that everyone has some sort of natural ability to adapt. Maybe it seems a little harsh, but there are plenty of successful classes built around the concept of throwing a newborn into a pool of water and letting them tap into the abilities nature has graced them with. And I think this is the part of the concept that people are overlooking- yes I have been tossed into a brand new situation, but the important part about that is some part of me is equipped with the natural tools to adapt, and those are the exact tools I have been exercising over the past two weeks.

I have never been the type of person who would prefer easing into situations. My comfort zone is not exactly treated with the care and delicacy it should perhaps be afforded. I much prefer sudden challenges; being presented with something big to deal with at my own pace, rather than being given little tid bits of change over a longer period of time. After all, you need a full context in order to properly understand any kind of differences, so that is exactly what I was looking for upon arrival in India.

My first full day in India was spent in Mumbai and was exactly what I was looking for- full cultural immersion, greatly from the role of observer, though not entirely. My day was not filled with your typical tourist obligations (though that is not to say I didn't visit the Gateway of India, for example), but rather I got to have a more day-to-day Mumbai experience. We had a task for the morning of running two pretty simple errands, both of which in Old Bombay. Old Bombay is the original heart of the city located on the main island, and New Bombay (Navi Mumbai) is a sea of suburban apartment complexes, houses, parks, the works.

Anyway, the first thing we had to do in the morning was pick up a transformer from an electronics store in what was so charmingly introduced to me as the "grey market" of Mumbai. We were searching for a tiny shop on Lamington Road, a road comprised almost exclusively of electronics shops. In Old Bombay areas are organized by what they sell, so you have lots of tiny shops that sell a couple of very specific things. Store owners find really cheap sources for one or two products so they will only sell those things, to ensure that you can always find whatever you are looking for at the lowest possible price. All of the stores that sell similar things are blocked together so that if one place doesn't have it, they can just give you the name of another store that might. This way everything is reasonably accessable and, most important of all, cheap.

It was in this first task that I encountered the sort of leisure that I noticed throughout the city, and in India in general for that matter. Bombay is a huge city so on the surface it appears to never be at rest- so many moving individual parts initially give it an overwhelming and hectic feel. But no single part is actually in any particular hurry to get things done. On the car ride over we passed people wandering from place to place, stopping to stand and enjoy a cup of chai, or just to have a conversation on the side of the road. When we got to the shop (after a considerable amount of confusion and stumbling through tiny streets in our search) we discovered that they didn't actually open until just before noon. It is simply understood that things are going to get done, so why rush around to get there?

After a stop at a store in a different area that sold almost exclusively pasta, cookies, and cheese (it isn't a guarentee that the specific items will have any semblance of a connection), we headed to Colaba for lunch. This is the area of the city that your average tourist would probably be spending time in, so I didn't receive quite as many qiuizical stares in response to my wandering about. We ate at a Chinese restaurant, where I was first exposed to the Indianization of various cuisines. I had never really thought about it, but since Americans tend to pull foreign foods in their own comfortable directions, it stands to reason that other countries do the same. So I got my first taste of an Indian rendition on ethnic food, and I must say it was pretty great. Probably truer to the actual flavours than Asian-American food, but the spice is gloriously cranked up.

That more or less concluded my day in Mumbai. There was a bit more wandering around, but for the most part the rest of the evening was fairly relaxed. All in all, I think it was exactly what I needed for my first day- glimpses of the types of things I had in store (though of course urban and rural India are two very different things) that allowed me to start building a basis of the cultural understanding I should always be looking for. It let me start to formulate questions and impressions that would act as a framework for the weeks to come.

Introduction

I should probably begin this blog with a brief explanation of the title- Saamne, the Hindi phrase for "in front." I had some trouble coming up with a title, so I started off by thinking about the themes of my experience here. Language was one of the first things that came to mind, as it is probably the most noticeable difference one is confronted with in any new country. So I began thinking about Hindi, or at least the little that I know of this brand new and seemingly impossibly complex language, and I remembered something Ben told me when I first started struggling though pronunciations. Unlike the choking, back-of-the-throat sounds of French, which I think the language component of my brain is tempted to default to, Hindi sounds should all come from the front of your mouth, very delicate, very fluid. In my clumsy western mouth the constant rolling tongue (or attempts at least) and puffs of air tend towards harshness, but when spoken well Hindi is meant to be very light, leaving nothing of its composition to hide.

While I have only been here for two weeks, I think this idea of keeping things in front has already cropped up a lot in my daily life. One of the first things I was warned about when I came here was not to expect privacy, and it is true, that is not a concept that exists the way we Westerners are used to it. It takes getting used to, but you don't lead two lives here, a public and a private one, rather everything is done in front of the public eye. There is this extreme openness that you would never find with the incredibly restrictive nature of Western social guidelines. There is no feeling of obligation to "entertain guests," because the idea that they are in "your space" doesn't exist. People drift from room to room, pop into conversations without hesitation, and speak their mind without second-guessing themselves. Much like the language, there is a perpetual fluidity to Indian social life.

In the last week or so, this phrase has taken on a third meaning for me, as I began volunteering at school. It is one thing to talk about it, but another entirely to experience the almost surreal feeling of standing in front of a class, speaking to a group of more than twenty Indian school children, who understand only a fraction of what you are saying to them. I have been working at Golden Jubilee School (oh yes, quite the feel good name) in Jalna, a town about thirty minutes from my home on the Mahyco compound. It is an English medium school, so I am not entirely out of place, but I have been spending most of my time with the younger kids, who haven't learned English yet. So here I am, a very strange center of attention for a group of kids that are only just now starting to catch on to my mantra of Samaj mein nahi ai, English bolthi. But to my delight this language barrier results in not dismissal, but the loving understanding that only a child could provide. They continue chattering away to me in Hindi, steadily feeding my mental list of vocabulary words, and occasionally pausing to point out with a glow of pride the words they know in my language.


So there you go, perhaps an unnecessarily cryptic title, but I think an apt representation of my three roles here- language student, social butterfly (or perhaps more of a caterpillar at this point), and teacher (once again, at this point perhaps more of a playmate/novelty). More blog posts to come soon I hope, I do have two very busy weeks to catch up on after all. And hopefully I will get some pictures up here soon too, as well as new background, believe me this one isn't permanent.