Proud to be an American, sort of

I’m on the last leg of my three-flight journey home to Boston. After my time in India and Nepal, I flew to Australia for a month to visit my sister Tali and do some traveling. When I landed in Brisbane, Tali greeted me at the airport with a loaf of gluten-free bread and a sign with my name on it. We didn’t really need the sign, since odds were that we’d recognize each other, and in the end, she greeted me in the airport with a running hug anyway, but having your name on a sign makes you feel nice. Everyone should have their name on a sign at some point.

A nearly empty residential street in Brisbane

Tali took the brunt of my stream of observations as I got familiar with my surroundings that first week, including the ever insightful, “There are barely any people here,” “It’s so quiet,” and “It smells so good!” Australia does run a good ship, from what I can see. Which is sort of funny since the country was basically founded by convicts and sailors. It’s very clean, people don’t jaywalk (which made me crazy, given the lack of cross-walks), and the buses run on time with functional air-conditioning.  I would have filmed traffic on a street corner in Australia, but I didn’t think anyone would be interested in footage of nearly empty streets with cars going around rotaries in the wrong direction.

The thing about traveling in a foreign country, as opposed to living there, is that you spend much more time with other foreigners than with locals. Consequently, most of the people I met were European and Asian.  I met people from Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, England, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Brazil, and China, among other countries. The questions people asked me about quality of life in the US were really fascinating. I played pickup-basketball with some Chinese students at Tali’s school, and afterwards, one asked if I own a gun, because he heard it’s really dangerous in the US. Europeans were particularly interested in our healthcare system and comparing it to how cheap and easy it is for them to get care anywhere in the EU. A Korean asked me about why Obama says that our educational system needs to take cues from schools in Asian countries, which made for a good conversation about the gap we have between available jobs and the skillset of our workforce. We even talked about why there aren’t more women in technology, one of my favorite ever topics! See Tali’s article about this here.

It started to strike me how the geographical isolation of the US (as opposed to a European country) has made Americans much less aware of the rest of the world, not in terms of events, but culturally. Speaking English as a first language is surely a blessing, as English is the language that people use to travel, and sometimes even work, all over the world. But it isn’t really fair that I am able to articulate my thoughts exactly as they’re formed in my head, while anyone for whom English is a second, third, or fourth language may have to drastically simplify an idea in order to express it to me in my language. Beyond this aspect, there is so much more communication behind a spoken sentence than the plain translation of the words. By not speaking other languages, Americans are implicitly telling the rest of the world that we expect them to meet us culturally as well. The gesture of saying “Good morning” or “How are you” in a foreign language seems to be the American feeble attempt at international bridge building, and many of us don’t even do that.

Which brings me to my actual point. American travelers have a pretty bad reputation, and I’ve gotten a few glimpses at the reasons why. Everyone thinks we’re loud and obnoxious, and that’s probably because there are a lot of loud, obnoxious Americans on the travel circuit, fresh out of high school, probably thinking that everyone wants to be American and move to America. I think I was subconsciously under the same impression, and it might have something to do with the number of immigrant families and first generation Americans I know, and the fact that more people want to stay here than the government wants to keep.  Well, newsflash, people like their own countries too. The loud, obnoxious Americans kind of drown out the introverted, low-key Americans, to the point that on a bus tour in Melbourne, after my turn during a round of introductions, the bus driver shouted, “Well I never met a quiet American before!” People like to point out that when someone asks where an American is from, the American will answer with the name of a city and not the name of our country, unlike every other citizen of the world, thus implying that everyone should know what an American sounds like and where all of our cities are located. Add these generalizations to the foreign impression that Americans like to start wars wherever they want and can’t speak any languages but English, and I start to understand why Canadians get offended when they’re mistaken for us.

During my first few weeks in India, I had this new sense of patriotic wonder, thinking to myself, how did I never appreciate all of the freedoms and privileges I had just by growing up in my country? From the clothes I wear, to the education I got, to the different opportunities I was lucky to even entertain, I took a lot for granted. But after this time away, I see that the US has its faults and shortcomings as well, ultimately making it just like any other country. Figures I had to fly to the other side of the world to see that. 

On Passover, Defining Affliction

Although I haven’t yet written about this at all, my friend Rebecca and I have been traveling in Nepal for the past week or so.  While it took a good few weeks to begin to appreciate India, we were surprised at how much we loved Nepal, even on our first day. (Maybe it had something to do with being able to get a visa for $26 at the airport, as compared to negotiating four weeks of Indian bureaucratic nightmare plus over $200. Just saying.)

We found ourselves at the Kathmandu Chabad for lunch on Saturday afternoon, surrounded by an overwhelming number of Israeli travelers, and we experienced the joy of finally hearing a foreign language that we actually understand. The rabbi made some rounds asking for volunteers to give a short talk in honor of the upcoming Passover holiday, and somehow he zeroed in on Rebecca and me. So, here is an expounded-upon version of the mini speech I gave:

Passover is coming up in about a week, which means that we will be limiting the foods we eat in order to “afflict” ourselves, in honor of the biblical Children of Israel fleeing Egypt with nary a loaf of bread. But when you have celiac disease, Passover is actually just an extension of your regularly scheduled diet, and in fact, it is an easier time of year to eat gluten-free. Every kind of product comes out gluten-free on Passover, from cake to matzo balls to marshmallows. So far from feeling more afflicted than usual, I’m actually thrilled when Passover rolls around.

While I’m not the kind of person who looks for extra opportunities to deprive myself, I still think that reflections around affliction during Passover are an important part of the Jewish calendar. For the past few years, I’ve been thinking harder about how I can still capture this essence, given that food-wise, I’m not any more limited than usual. Even beyond my personal situation, I think we’d be hard pressed to find a person in this room who is actually truly afflicted by the Passover diet. While the loss of pizza for a week may seem tragic… cry me a river.

Earlier this week, Rebecca and I spent a few days in Chitwan National Park near Kathmandu, where we watched baby elephants play and took in a beautiful sunset, before deciding to splurge the equivalent of $10 on a massage. At the massage studio, we met P, who is twenty years old and one of ten children. He is about to finish his bachelor’s degree in business, and he’s working at the studio part time in order to pay his tuition and rent in Chitwan, as his family of sixteen lives in a one bedroom dwelling in a village a few hours away.

In the middle of the massage, the power went out. While Nepal has the natural resources to generate plenty of hydro-electric power, the existing grid isn’t robust enough to support the amount of electricity it could be generating. Consequently, even modest demand exceeds supply, and the grid “load-sheds”, which causes power outages for anywhere between eight and fourteen hours a day. P and I got to talking about the power situation, and I thought of the flooding in Manhattan during Hurricaine Sandy, how uptown shop owners opened up for stranded New Yorkers to charge their phones, how my sister didn’t have power for six days and everything in her refrigerator went bad as she bounced between her friends’ apartments. P informed me that his family doesn’t have a refrigerator, and that they grow their food and cook everything as needed. Smart-phones are useless in his village, as they can barely hold charge.

We talked about his plans after finishing school, but it wasn’t a very long conversation: jobs are scarce, and he figures he’ll keep working at the massage studio. He needs to pay rent in Chitwan, and in order to open up his own business, he would need a lot of money up front, which he doesn’t have. He’s considered going abroad to do any kind of work, service, labor, anything, and I pondered that idea. Given minimum wage, he wouldn’t be making a whole lot if he were to somehow come to the US. But even if he could scrape pennies together month by month, it would sum up to more than he’d save if he stayed in Nepal. The next day I read a few articles about Nepali men and women leaving for Gulf States to make a little more money for a few years, and how many of them come back physically and emotionally broken. Damned if they stay, damned if they go.

The plight of the kids I taught in Mumbai was hard for me to witness, but meeting P touched me in a new way. I hadn’t yet spent time with someone close to my age who was both so driven to make something of himself, and at the same time, so stuck in an impossible system. The government here is still barely on its feet after years of regime change, and the electricity problem is only one of many challenges. It took us five hours to drive from Kathmandu to Chitwan, a distance of one hundred ten miles. Infrastructure is something I completely take for granted, but the lack of these basic services is crippling a nation of men and women burning to make something of themselves.

This is affliction. It is being limited in a way that is beyond one’s control, that all of the willpower in the world won’t be able to change. My students, P, and people all over the world have obstacles that have nothing to do with the intelligence they possess, their work ethic, or their desire to succeed, and without any intervention, these limitations will necessarily keep them from reaching their aspirations and from ending the cycle of poverty.

The Children of Israel did eventually make it out of Egypt, but there were several pieces that had to fall into place in order for that to happen. They needed Moses, Aaron, Miriam, and Nachshon to inspire them and lead them into redemption, and they needed an opening, a path to follow. If God had provided a path and no leaders had been ready to take those first steps, nothing would have changed. If the community had been ready but there were no openings, no hint of what might lie beyond the world they knew, nothing would have changed.

Here is how I think about what still needs to be done.  If we were created in God’s image, then we are meant to do God’s work as well. If there are people who are ready and willing to follow a path to a better life, then they deserve for that path to be available. My obligation is not to drag people by the nape of the neck into the life that I think is best for them, but to create as many opportunities as possible to whatever extent I can, just as doors were opened for me by my parents, my teachers, and my greater community. Especially today, when we depend on people from around the world to help us achieve the quality of life we desire, we are even more obligated to ensure that everyone in our global community has a fair shot at living a life of hope and dignity.

My Passover wish for myself and for you is that we strive to create opportunities of all kinds for the people around us, so that one day, every afflicted person, if he wishes, can leave his Egypt behind. 

Beauty

For two weeks, I’m traveling around India and Nepal with the girls from my Gabriel Project volunteer group. Our last day in the slums was Monday, and after teaching, we packed up the apartment and hopped on a plane to Kerala, which is India’s southernmost state. We had a busy day, and now we’re sprawled in front of the TV watching Bollywood music videos. Bollywood dance moves are dramatic, rhythmic, and expressive, so it’s really fun to watch. Beyond that, though, we are all entranced by the women who are featured as lead singers or backup dancers. They all have plenty of curves to shake and jiggle, which just isn’t seen on western TV.

I have mixed feelings on standards of beauty here. I absolutely didn’t anticipate it, but being in India has been a refreshing break from the skeletal western ad campaigns I’m so used to at home. I distinctly remember driving by a billboard advertisement for a Bollywood movie, and registering that the actress in the picture was curvy, with a little bit of belly exposed above the waist of her skirt. It struck me as so dramatically different from the airbrushed twig women decorating our highways. I mentioned it aloud, starting my sentence, “You guys probably didn’t notice…” I was wrong; everyone had noticed.

While perhaps there isn’t an obsessive focus on body fat here, there is much attention paid to skin tone. My friend Adina went to a salon, where a woman told her she ought to get exfoliated to remove her ugly tan. Yeah, right.

Even for a white person, I’m pretty white, and plus I wear SPF 85 sunscreen every day. (No surprise that I’ve never been told to exfoliate.) So for the first time in my life, my light skin is causing me to embody a cultural beauty ideal. On top of that, the clothing we wear here is loose and flowy, so I’m less aware of my body that I would be at home. Overall, my body image has probably never been better, and I haven’t even exercised in like six weeks.

I shouldn’t feel any more or less pretty based on who is dancing on TV. I suppose I'm no more or less immune to such things in India than in the US, so it is nice to really understand that beauty public policy is not as objective as American culture would have me think. 

Sad to go

Today we left Thane to embark on a tour of India. I’ll miss it here. I loved how our street is full of people even at 10PM, and that I could go around the corner to buy mini-bananas any day, any time. I loved the fresh pressed sugar cane juice I discovered two days ago by the train station, and the sweet, mild mosambi juice I’ve been chugging for two months.

The Thane synagogue is a fifteen minute walk from the apartment down a busy street. I made the trek pretty regularly in order to teach a Hebrew class for the local Jewish community, one of my favorite parts of the week. Walking down the street meant dodging merchants pushing their wares on carts around torn up potholes, taking care not to stomp on stray dogs napping on the sidewalk, and avoiding autorickshaws creatively weaving through traffic. I would pass small, booth-like businesses and watch employees go about their day’s work: huddling over a sewing machine, tinkering with motorcycle engines, measuring fabric, making photocopies, selling vegetables. Staring idly out at the street from behind a counter, and double-taking at the foreigner staring back. There is something intimate about seeing people do their work. In Thane, on the synagogue street, no one disappears into mysterious, air conditioned sky scrapers, to emerge shivering and squinting eight hours later. Women tend to children, men congregate on the corner where autorickshaws pull over. Life is so visible in a way I’ve never experienced. At home, even our car windows are tinted. We northeasterners notoriously need our space, but now I’m understanding some of what we may be missing, how we can disappear into our spaces in a way that humans aren’t meant to live.

A friend and I decided to do some last minute shopping by the Thane station during our last week here. Thane station is the greatest ever open market, plus no tourists come to Thane, so everything is reasonably priced. We stopped at a stand, its shelves stacked high with sparkling glass bangle bracelets. The shop owner must have pulled fifty bracelets off the shelves for us to try on and admire, and we each bought a few different sets. When we finally chose, he wrapped our selections in newspaper, then motioned for our wrists. We outstretched our arms, and he slid two green bracelets over each of our hands, as a gift. This man probably makes the equivalent of two dollars per customer, max. His gesture represents why I’m feeling so bittersweet about the end of my time here. Everything people say about India is true: people are corrupt, they take advantage, they don’t care about each other. But all of the opposites are true too: they are generous, they always want to help, they are humble. Everyone I’ve ever smiled at here has smiled back. I’ve never heard anyone complain about studio apartments for whole families, or one room metal shacks, for that matter.

If you have a job, you do it well. If you’re the guy down the street who photoshops passport photos, then by god, you will remove every digital forehead blemish you encounter, if it’s the last thing you do. If you’re the guy who stands between the tollbooth and the cars, passing money back and forth, if you’re one of four waiters for the same table, if you’re the woman who delivers my nail polish to the customer service desk at the grocery store so I can literally follow behind to pick it up because that’s how things work at the grocery store, then you do that job, and save up some money, and buy a motorcycle, get an education, and keep doing life. 

India isn't a simple place, but there is clean simplicity in Indian values: being with family, being devout, respecting elders, respecting education. 

I'm excited to see how I'll be different when I'm back home, cause you can't spend time in a place as crazy as this without letting it touch you. I'm really happy I came, and I'm really sad to go. 

Thinking about the end

A short essay:

I cross the railroad tracks into the Kalva slum, just outside Mumbai, India, along with my fellow volunteer teachers, our translator, and a security guard. The reek of garbage and feces hits us immediately, as though we just passed through a scent barrier that separates the slum from the rest of the town of Kalva.

We walk through a clearing covered in a film of fraying cloth, plastic bags, small trash fires, and stray dogs before arriving at our classroom. As soon as the four of us duck into the dark, tin enclosure, twenty children leap to their feet, shouting “Good morning teacher!” They reach out their little hands to yank on our arms and perform fancy handshakes.

This morning we are teaching a lesson on tadpoles, frogs, caterpillars, and butterflies. I sit on the end of a straw mat laid out on the concrete floor next to one of our students. He chatters to me in Hindi and looks perplexed when all I can say back is yes, no, the numbers one through ten, and teacherly requests: pay attention, move back, good job. The kids all imitate us, chirping “Sunoh, baitoh, listen, sit down!” and laugh at our pronunciation.

Our children are beyond eager to please, and they treat our smiles as rare treasures. Kids with dirt-streaked cheeks and non-ironically torn jeans, who don’t go to school, gather in the classroom doorway, and I ruffle their hair and shake their hands as well.

Later, I am seated on the mat next to the same student again, and when asked what baby frogs are called, he shouts “Tadpole!” I raise my hand to give him a high five, and he jerks away. I feel ill when I realize he thought I meant to strike him, and even as he sheepishly offers me his hand while I clutch my chest in apology, horror and misplaced guilt settle over me in a clammy sheen. I know there is much more to our students’ lives than what we see for an hour a day, and the bits I do glimpse can make me catch my breath.

But there are so many sweet surprises as well. I play a nature video on my laptop, and the kids scrunch together on the mats, leaning on each other’s shoulders, each nearly in his neighbor’s lap, in our laps. A little girl with red ribbons braided into her pigtails sits between her two older brothers, the eldest gently stroking her hair. When I grin at her, she smiles back, then at her brother, tickled at our exchange.   

I have been teaching in India for a month, and in a few short weeks, I’ll leave these lovely children and return to lawns, air conditioning, and carpets. I’ll think of them here when monsoon season begins, as a sea of plastic bags and crushed cartons washes down the road, and they settle onto a mat in a classroom where I will no longer be.

Food and bonus rush hour video

Food in India seems to fall into two opposing camps: exactly what you’d expect, and nothing like you’d expect. Every Indian restaurant offers a nearly identical menu listing every common Indian dish, including a “Chinese” section. Indians love Chinese food. I haven’t tried this Indian Chinese food myself, but I hear it’s either really spicy, or really salty. The Indian restaurant dishes fall solidly into the “what you’d expect” category, once you recognize the dishes by name.

On the other hand are dishes named in English, where the name conjures up an image of something an American would understand and be familiar with. Veg sandwich, for example. You’d think you’d know what you were getting, but a friend ordered that and ended up with something kind of pasty on a spongy bread. And it was spicy. Veg soup sounds pretty self-explanatory, but what arrived was a thick, deep brown kind of broth with noodles. A green salad means a plate of sliced vegetables, with no lettuce or leaves of any kind. Ginger honey tea was a slice of dried ginger and a ginger gel, partially dissolved into the hot water.  So weird.  And again, spicy.

One exception to this general rule was a meal at a Mexican restaurant in a really touristy area of Mumbai, near the Taj Mahal hotel. The meal was actually reminiscent of Mexican food, and plus, the staff knew what gluten was. The more dishes they told me I couldn’t have, the more delighted I became. It sounds ridiculous, but I always feel like I’m in good restaurant hands when a waiter is telling me I shouldn’t eat anything. (I got fish.)

Veg Pulav

So, I’ve decided that the safest thing to do is order the common Indian dishes where I know what they’re made of, vehemently gesticulate and repeat, “nehi maida, nehi atta, nehi hing” (no wheat flour, no other word for wheat flour, no spice that often has flour in it), and hope for the best. I’ve basically given up on trying to avoid dairy in restaurants, since ghee just pops up out of nowhere. For the record, I almost always order veg pulav, which is basically rice with cooked vegetables and considered to be on the less spicy side. It still sets my face on fire.

I guess the third category is food we’ve been cooking at home. It’s kind of like a camping diet plus fresh fruits and vegetables. Rice, potatoes, tuna, other canned food, cereal. One of us just graduated from culinary school and has turned out some fantastic meals from the above ingredients.

Recently, two of us attempted to replicate some canned salmon-potato patties our chef had invented a few meals earlier. We mixed together canned salmon, mayonnaise, mashed potatoes, and caramelized onions. Instead of frying them, as she had, we spread the mixture in the bottom of a glass dish and baked it.

Our attempt at dinner

I’ll digress here to mention a story which has become family lore. When my mom was a kid, my grandma prepared a layer cake for dinner. My mom and her brothers were so excited; cake for dinner seemed like such a treat. It was tall with white frosting. When they tasted it, though, they were hugely let down to discover that the layers were tuna salad, salmon salad, and egg salad, and the frosting was sour cream.

So the dish we attempted in our apartment reminded me of what a single layer of that cake must have been like, even down to the taste of disappointment. Our chef roommate got a huge kick out of our attempt, at least. My next couple meals were the ever reliable boiled potatoes and ketchup.

Mosambi juice

Mosambi display

Mosambi juicer

I’ve included some pictures of my favorite exotic juice. Mosambi is kind of like a yellow orange, but it tastes slightly milder. The juice is sweet and tangy, and they sell it fresh squeezed right on the street. I bought some today and sat on the stoop of a store, sipping and taking videos of rush hour in the intersection right down the street from our apartment. I actually laughed out loud a few times. I've included the video for your viewing pleasure. 

Story Time

First of all, PSA, if you’re interested in receiving an email every time my blog updates, just submit your email address in the box at the top of the blog, and you should be all set!

Second of all, to lighten things up (even though I'll get serious again afterwards), a story of adding money to my phone here: I went around the corner to the store/booth/street-front room where you can both add money to your phone plan and drop off your dry cleaning. Obvious business plan, why did I never think of that? So I gave the guy my phone and a 100 rupee bill and told him the name of my sim card carrier. He said to me, "100 rupees, 86 rupees of talk time." I said, "Where do the other 14 rupees go?" He drew me a little chart that looked like this:

Paid rupees  Rupees of talk time

80                        80

100                      86

110                      110

Then he said, "So either 80 or 110." I said, "Why?" He said, "I don't know." I said, "That's crazy!" He said, "Yes. So 110?" Naturally. This is just the latest in a series of strange and amusing quirks about India. 

         

This week, we’re running lessons focused loosely around the theme of self-expression, and today’s lesson was about stories and storytelling. First, we explained the difference between fiction and non-fiction and had the kids categorize some stories, including a biography of Ghandi, a movie starring the Indian heartthrob Salman Khan, and Life of Pi (our synopsis: tiger and a boy are trapped on boat, tiger is hungry, tiger doesn’t eat boy, real or not real?).

Next, we read them a picture book that I put together yesterday. I thought it would be a breeze to write a children’s story, but all of the illustrations took forever! Fortunately, I had some help coloring them in. Our plan was to read them the story and translate it line by line, but for each line I read, the translation seemed to turn into a paragraph. So I ended up asking the kids what they thought was going on according to the pictures they saw, and then I added in bits of the plot that they missed. Interactive is definitely the way to go here.

The next part of the plan was to have the kids create a group story, where one student starts with one line, then another student adds another, then another, and so on. In our first class we ran out of time for the activity, but we gave it a shot in the second class. At first, I was really nervous the game would fail. First of all, the class seemed more antsy than usual today, maybe because it’s been getting so hot. Plus every time the train goes by (multiple times per class), the noise is super distracting. Getting them to sit in a circle was a whole to do.  Then, I called on a girl arbitrarily, and she thought I was asking her to tell the story I’d just read to the class. Commence confusion.

After a couple more false starts, a girl who is a frequent and enthusiastic contributor stood up and proceeded to begin a story, that kept going, and going! I don’t remember it exactly, but it involved a boy and a girl drawing in a garden and ending up at a lake. Her younger brother, who is usually very quiet, volunteered to continue the story. He stood at attention with his arms tight at his sides, and in a slight, lilting voice, he told of how the boy was thirsty, and he wanted to drink some water from the lake. The problem was that there was a hungry crocodile swimming in the lake as well. The boy didn’t know what to do, because he wanted to drink some water, but the crocodile was going to eat him.

At this point, the first girl took the story back, saying that the boy decided to trick the crocodile by taking a stick and throwing it in the water. The crocodile couldn’t tell the difference between the stick and the boy, so he ate the stick, and meanwhile, the boy was able to drink some water and get away safely. THE END.

I was so shocked and relieved that this sneaky story came out of our generally rowdy classroom. Even though the kids were messing around while I was trying to explain the instructions (granted, in English), they were engrossed by the tales of their own classmates. I felt like a proud mother!

Running lessons where you aren’t sure you’ll really reach the kids is scary. It’s overwhelming to have to answer to perplexed faces, and failing feels like a waste of the little time we have here to make an impression. But all the same, I’ve been saying to myself that if even two or three kids out of a class of twenty decide to read more stories, write more stories, or read a newspaper instead of play with it, that it counts as a step to success. The lessons that are the hardest to teach might be the most important. 

לא עליך המלאכה לגמור, ולא אתה בן חורין להבטל ממנה.

It isn’t your job to complete the work, but you are not free to ignore it, either.

What We Do Here

What are we trying to do here? What are the most impactful lessons we can give to our students in barely lit tin rooms, in a place where they stumble into the daylight and round the corner to a child crapping on a stoop?  How do we make sure to say the one sentence, do the one experiment, make the one impression that could tip the balance of a kid’s future?

Each of us answers differently. One would argue that singing a playful song and drawing pictures brings about lighthearted joy. Others would say that lessons in the science of our bodies and the world around us teach our students to be curious about how things work and hunger for more knowledge. I might claim that teaching about self-expression and creativity is the most valuable, opening a child’s mind to worlds beyond the one we see.

Because we all disagree, our lessons have been a mix of all of the above. We’ve taught the water cycle, the five senses, exercise, international foods and greetings, how plants grow, parts of the brain, and the Olympics. The cultural and language barriers have been some of the greatest challenges. Every word we say is translated into Marathi, the local language. This leaves some room for miscommunication, but also, the open-ended questions we want to pose often get flattened by the kids’ desire to find the right answer, not just their own answer. We walk a fine line between challenging them and completely missing the mark, evidenced either by triumph or by blank expressions.

The more lessons we plan, the more my list of “if only” items grows. If only the students were split into classes by age. If only there were space to move around in the room. If only we could introduce them to basic technology. If only they had art, music, library, and gym. If only we could teach them about topics like hygiene and nutrition, without worrying that they don’t even have toothbrushes. If only they grew up having enough, of anything. But these are the lucky kids, who get to spend a whole morning in school. These kids' parents did whatever they had to do to pay for their children to get educated. 

I remind myself that no matter what lessons we teach and no matter whether they sink in, the simple fact of our presence is such a treat to the four classrooms we get to visit every day. High fives, smiles, screaming for no reason, and goofy sounds and expressions make a kid’s day. I waved at a pair of boys as we walked to class the other day, and they grinned in surprise, running away giggling.

If I had one major takeaway during City Year, it was that change comes from within: within a person, within a community. I can’t change the conditions of anyone’s life or the circumstances of a neighborhood, and even if I could, it isn’t my job. What I can do best here is open minds to discovery, to creativity, to realizing that there is more outside of what they know and see. They deeply understand family, loyalty, and camaraderie, and they have just as much raw potential to do something amazing as any kid from the Boston area. What kills me is that the next Picasso, Descartes, Jane Austen, or Ada Lovelace could be hidden among the children of these slums, of all slums, and we may never know. We may never know what the world could have become in the light of their fully nurtured brilliance. 

The Nest They Know

In the morning in the slums
trash heaps down the slope to the railroad tracks
slim pickings for goats among cloth rags, crushed cans, plastic in all forms.
Our tin classroom takes me by surprise every time we come up on its
two concrete steps, a pile of cheap sandals inside the doorway, to a chorus of,
"Welcome teacher, good morning teacher!"
Moony brown eyes and little, rotten teeth
My tooth fairy income could have fed them for a day.

The train clatters toward the big city past the doorless classroom entrance:
Button down shirted call center professionals, students, sari-clad women all,
leaning out compartment doors, pomegranate scarves twisting in the draft,
numb to slum scent. 
It passes and we resume our lesson on international food and music,
wild galloping to American country and slithers to Australian didgeridoo;
we finish with the Indian national anthem.

We are rock stars leaving the classroom,
slum kids too poor for school wave shyly at the white people in sneakers with sweaty feet.
Two boys play under fruit-laden tables with a stray dog, another goat.
Teenagers glance at us, quizzical,
men double-take with no shame, tobacco spit spraying dusty road.

We leave the line for rice and oil rations,
trays of peas drying in the sun,
crowds of school-aged idle boys playing marbles in the street,
mounds of trash in all directions
for the hill-top town of Matheran.

Rising out of Mumbai smog by a road weaving up the mountain,
finally greenery, the drama of valleys, peaks,
nature that isn't polluted, over-sized ponds bordered by lawless intersections,
beauty in India beyond women's garments--
the nation they sang about.
They likely will never see this, 
maybe not even the urban lakes just outside the toxic nest they know.
Only goats, and garbage. 

Train, Holding Hands, and Surprise! I'm liberal.

I've been here almost two weeks, and I've had the chance to discover some unexpectedly lovely parts of India. Mumbai is more than twice as dense as New York city. Obviously it is crowded, but with that comes a sense of communality. Maybe at times, every man is for himself, but I sense togetherness at many turns. The women in my group have traveled from Thane to Mumbai in the all-female compartment of the train, and every time a spot opens up on a bench, our fellow passengers frantically look around for someone who is standing to fill it. Actually, the train-bench-standing choreography seems very intricate, and I don't understand it yet. It involves asking people where they're getting off and shifting up and down benches.  The women are so curious as to what we are doing here, how long we're staying, whether we like it here, and whether the food is too spicy (affirmative). I played tic-tac-toe with a girl sitting next to me, and the surrounding crowd was rapt. She was good, too. She trapped me a couple times.

It is not uncommon to see a man casually draping his arm over another man's shoulders, walking with interlocked elbows, or even hand in hand, sometimes fingers intertwined. It was startling, at first, and now I can't stop myself from smiling whenever I see it. Viraj, our Hindi teacher, said it's something that friends do, a sign of affection, and that it doesn't signify a sexual relationship. While there are aspects of Indian society that are hard for me to swallow, I love the idea of platonic physical expression, especially between men. Alternatively, maybe they hold hands because otherwise, they'd lose each other on the crowded streets.

I mentioned how much I love the hand holding here, and I received mixed enthusiasm from my co-volunteers. So in related news, it turns out I am quite liberal! I've had several fascinating conversations about the role of women in Judaism, and on feminism in general. Having grown up and spent most of my adult life in Massachusetts and in relatively open Jewish communities, I had been taking tenets of my life perspective for granted, at least among other westerners. At home, I was probably the most religious Jew many of my coworkers had ever met, and here, I could be a heretic. Who knew!

Finally, one of our group shared a booklet of thoughts from the former chief rabbi of England, and the whole book is basically a quote-mine. Profound stuff. I especially like this though:

"Hard times remind us what good times tend to make us forget: where we came from, who we are, and why we are here. That's why hard times are the best times to plant the seeds of future happiness." 

--Letters to the Next Generation, Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks

Indian Jewish Wedding

Earlier this week, we were invited to an Indian Jewish wedding.  Having only recently become aware of the still-active Jewish community in India, we didn’t know what to expect. One of our staff married last year, and we asked whether she wore a sari at her wedding.

        “Of course not, I’m a Jewish woman!” Meaning, she wore a white dress. I think it’s hard for us to internalize the fact that Indian Jews are Indian just like American Jews are American. Like us, they dress like the greater community of which they are a part, but their religious traditions are their own.

The wedding took place in a towering light blue synagogue in South Mumbai. This was a love marriage (i.e. non-arranged marriage) of a couple from the Bene Israel community, but they were borrowing this synagogue from the Baghdadi Indian community because it seats hundreds of people. We guess there were about six hundred guests in attendance. Apparently Jewish time is universal, and when you pair it up with Indian time, naturally the wedding ended up starting about an hour late.

        Basically the entire Bene Israel community was invited to this wedding. I’ve never seen so many bright, jeweled saris. Our group coined the phrase “sari-envy.” The ceremony begins with the procession of the groom down the aisle, followed by his entire family. After he stood under the chuppah, there was something of a scramble as the extended family looked for seats.

        Next, the groom sang a poem from shir hashirim about the bride’s beauty as she proceeded down the aisle, followed by her whole side of the family. Apparently the song is something the groom has to learn specifically. It’s very haunting. As she got closer to me, I could see her beaming at him through her veil.

        The rest of the ceremony included the groom chanting the sheva brachot (seven blessings traditionally recited at a Jewish wedding), both the bride and groom signing the ketubah (marriage contract), the rabbi chanting the sheva brachot again, and finally, a procession of the bride and group together around the chuppah as a couple. No seven circles though. Between each step of the ceremony, there was a break for pictures. The whole ceremony took around two hours.

        Here are some pictures, enjoy!

Note the ladies in saris to the left of the bimah, and the Hebrew embroidering on the chuppah

Groom reading the sheva brachot

In general, I don’t really like it here.  I hate not being able to walk around alone. Not that women don't do it at all, but I'm uncomfortable enough that I’ve been wearing sunglasses around just so that my eyes are a little more difficult to find. Plumes of dusty exhaust burn the back of my throat while we’re walking through traffic, and this may seem insignificant, but our apartment ran out of filtered water two days ago, so we’re boiling water instead. It’s really that any one of these things seems like it should be manageable on its own, but when you group them together with the overall culture shock and challenges of living with many people, I wonder how I’m going to make it through the next seven weeks.

I’m down to the last few food items I brought from home to eat on the plane, and I’m disproportionately sad about this. I had a bag of snack bars, but I think they were mistakenly thrown away.  Tali made me a batch of cookies for the plane, and I finished the crumbs out of the baggie with a spoon.

I woke up this morning realizing I’d dreamt about a baked potato with avocado, so that’s my next meal.  I must have been delusional thinking I would be totally good living on rice and cooked vegetables for two months straight, three meals a day. I wasn’t even planning on eating raw vegetables or fruits here, but that insanity ended. Today for lunch I made a salad of chopped cucumber, pear, and hardboiled egg. Kind of weird, and not super filling, but at least it made me a little less thirsty. Celiac is lonely here. At least the two people who are so strictly kosher can meal plan with each other. Maybe this trip will be an exercise in being hungry. I’ve never been long term hungry before. Very fortunately, Leah (who is here for the year kind of coordinating us) is super knowledgeable and sympathetic and said she'd be my cooking buddy.

Today was our first day visiting the students in the slums. We had to cross railroad tracks to get there. Ba dum tshhh. As we made our way towards the slum, a stream of people, mostly men, were passing us in the opposite direction, heading out to work and school. Almost all of them were dressed rather smartly, in clean button-ups and jeans or khakis. They looked like anyone you’d see walking down our street or through the mall, highlighting the fact that the line between living in a slum and in a middle class neighborhood is so, so fine. As one of our staff pointed out, in India, middle class doesn’t mean comfortable, it means living hand-to-mouth and having just enough, with nothing to spare. Anyone with less simply doesn’t have enough.

Our first stop was at a women’s collective, where the women were rolling out chapatis, or flat bread, and cooking them as the mid-day meal for our students. I couldn’t go in because of the flour in the air. Afterwards, we walked through the slum to the first classroom. As soon as we appeared in the doorway, the students hopped up off the floor and chanted together, “Good morning teacher!” with the cutest rolling R. Teach-ehr. In a single classroom, there are around thirty kids from ages five to thirteen. Some of them are pretty good at English. And then several kept trying to speak to me in Marathi. I would just say my name a few times in a row. I’ll have to work on an alternative response. I told them my name means tree, but then they thought my name was Tree. Fail.

We tried playing a rhythmic clapping name game, and the rhythm didn’t really translate, but the kids had fun. They have the best smiles. I was sitting next to three siblings, and the sister kept hiding her face in her brother’s stomach. In the next class a little girl wouldn’t let go of my arm. The last classroom was tiny and dark, and they were the only group of kids who had never worked with a group like ours before. They were more reserved, but they counted to one hundred, sang happy birthday, and recited a rough version of “one, two, buckle my shoe.” Not too shabby.

To those of you who were in touch earlier this week, it was so nice to hear from you. Keep sending me love and happy vibes! Hope to write more in a couple days.

Most sincerely,

Tree

I arrived in India on January 28^th to volunteer with Gabriel Project Mumbai, through JDC Entwine, teaching English to kids from the Kalwa slums and working with the Indian Jewish community in Thane, a suburb south of Mumbai, where about forty percent of Indian Jews reside.

When I was first learning about the program, I was told we’d be living in a quiet suburb outside the big, crazy city. I think in my head I imagined something a little bit like Brooklyn neighborhoods: still urban, but running at a lower key than Manhattan. When we arrived, I couldn’t believe what it means for a town here to be considered a “quiet suburb.” Here in Thane, there are stores and people lining our street all the time, late into the night. Not to mention the assortment of vehicles trundling back and forth, honking indiscriminately. Crossing the street is a skill I thought I had mastered, especially as a freely jay-walking Bostonian, but I clearly still have more to learn. Auto-rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians and trucks all share our little “suburban” street. People walk in the street because the sidewalks are too full of merchants and stray dogs. It’s a crazy place.

The businesses here don’t always make sense to me. For example, not too far from our apartment is a sign for a practice that specializes in both brain surgery and cosmetic surgery. So if you want to have brain surgery and liposuction on the same day, I guess that’s the place to be. Another treats dermatological maladies, and counsels on weight loss. Totally bizarre.

It is hot here. It feels like Boston in August, and it’ll only get hotter. I’ve been wearing a pair of stretchy yoga pants around, but today, I bought my first Indian clothes. Four loose shirts and two pairs of leggings, one turquoise!  A woman at the store helped me pick them out. One of the shirts I tried on had some gold thread detail, and she thought it would be nice to pair it with some metallic sparkly gold leggings, like straight out of a disco. I told her I was still getting used to it here and maybe I’d reconsider in a couple weeks.

Today we also visited the Synagogue in Thane. It is decorated with Jewish stars, and is basically set up like a Sephardic shul inside, with a podium kind of bima in the middle and benches surrounding, with a women’s section above. There’s a mikvah behind the sanctuary, and they also prepare kosher meat there. The history of Jews in India is really fascinating, I’ll write about it more later. They get about 70 people in shul on Shabbat. You know, on second thought, I guess they don’t call it shul. Right across the street from the synagogue is an apartment building, also decorated with Jewish stars… and a few swastikas. The swastika doesn’t have the same connotations here as elsewhere in the Jewish world, as it actually represents good fortune. It is still incredibly unnerving to see them.

Yesterday we had our first Hindi lesson with a student named Viraj (I keep mistakenly calling him Vijay), who is studying economics. We learned how to say things like, my name is Ilana, I live in Boston, and I am 27 years old. On special request, he also taught us how to ask, is there wheat in this? I wish I knew how to say that a couple nights ago. We went out to eat at a restaurant in the mall (the mall! A whole topic in and of itself!) and it was quite overwhelming. There were about as many waiters waiting on us as diners at our table, and they went around dolling portions of various sauces, croquets, and pita-like bread onto our massive oblong plates. I have to watch out for use of a seasoning called hing, also known as asafoetida, because it often contains wheat as a filler. I asked over and over if everything contained wheat or hing, but still a couple of the breads ended up on my plate. I just sectioned that part of the plate off as a danger zone.

Right now we’re making a group Shabbat dinner. It’s very complicated here with everyone’s food restrictions. Most people keep kosher, but two are much more strict, and then plus there’s my gluten issues. So we have the regular kitchen dishes, a couple of my own dishes, and then some of the extra kosher dishes. Plus actual food preferences, like two of us don’t like cilantro, one almond allergy, some of us don’t like rice, and I’m sure more I don’t know about yet.  We’re making do so far, but with seven people using one small apartment kitchen, it’s a challenge.

It’s very weird to go from living on my own in a city where I can freely walk around in weather-appropriate clothing, to having six roommates and being so physically close to people all of the time, in and out of the apartment. Everyone volunteering with me is great, but it’s a big, big change. I guess my camp days were longer ago than I realized.

Sorry about the haphazard appearance of my blog. I wanted to get everything down before I forgot it, and while I can build a kickass website, aesthetic has never been my strong suit. I’ll make it nicer in a few days, when I actually take some pictures. As for my blog URL: I might change it, but it currently summarizes our group’s main topic of conversation. Everyone brought a ton of diarrhea medicine, but people are far more constipated than anything else. I basically ONLY brought constipation medicine, so I am making fast friends. TMI? Sorry. Now you know, for your own future trips to India. You’re welcome.

I miss everyone at home so much, and I’m excited to hear about what’s going on with everybody. So send me an update whenever you have the chance!