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. 

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. 

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!