Height & White (Random Ramblings)

Hi. How are you?

My third week (out of eight) in India has come to a close and it was also the first week of proper volunteering. The week started out with a bang, teaching 9th and 10th graders at two different schools. Overall, the students seemed receptive to what we had to say and even enjoyed themselves. Sometimes we have to do a bit of crowd control but I've discovered that my low voice has the power to pipe kids down.

All over India, but especially in the schools, I attract an awful lot of attention because of my size. I thought that I stuck out a lot in the US but my stature has practically made me an instant celebrity with these kids. I found my fifteen minutes of fame and it exists at Indian primary schools!

Our teaching was canceled on Wednesday - one of the teachers at the school died the night before so the students stayed home. We took advantage of our free time and a couple of us went to Shelter House, the orphanage for HIV infected children (see this post for pictures). Starting about two weeks ago, they can no longer pump the waste water out of the house and the kids are already starting to get rashes on their bodies. They can no longer take showers every day and the standing water in the backyard is making breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Needless to say, it's imperative that this problem gets fixed immediately. We spent a few hours at Shelter identifying everything that needed to be done and we've set up a meeting on Monday with contractors and such. I'll keep you posted and I'll probably ask you for donations, too.

Thursday morning, at dawn, we headed out to a fishing village about 100 kilometers from Chennai for two days to speak to fishermen and some community groups, which was a little discouraging as there were few people that were interested in the information that we had to give. Still, there were the small handful of people that really valued what we had too say and that made it worthwhile to me. Falling asleep on a straw mat under the Indian sky, I was quite grateful.

Today, after a pleasant wake-up call from a friend back home, I got some much-needed alone time. Currently, I'm at a coffee/hookah bar and it looks like this:




That's all I have for now. Here's a slew of random pictures for you...


Sheema, hooking it up with mango...


Poobendhan chopping up some durian...


Ronak: coconut master...


Pray before you go to bed...


Straight up gangsta Tulika...


Fishing boats...


Tar...


Carrom...


Beast of burden...


I really like eating without utensils...


I jus' don't give a fuck...

Ooty, where have you been all my life?

Last weekend my team charted a bus to haul us to Ooty, Tamil Nadu. After the ten hour overnight ride, we arrived to find a beautiful town situated among tea-covered mountains with a cool climate and quiet pace that offered a welcome change of pace from the horns and heat of Chennai. It looks something like this...








The late Mitch Hedgerg was wrong about something... dust bunnies are not the cutest infestation ever, monkeys are! In Ooty, you can't throw a stone without hitting a monkey and these cute little devils love to break into hotel rooms and steal shit. Luckily, our hotel was happy to warn us about them...






I don't believe in Heaven but if there was one, it would probably smell like the tea factory we visited. Along with divine aromas, I had the pleasure of drinking (and buying) what was, easily, the best tea that I've had in my life. If you come to my house I'll make you some...






We visited the botanical gardens...












We walked around, saw things, ate food...














We went on a hike...












And I wished you were there with me...

Cruel world

A few days ago we visited one of our partner NGOs that operates in one of Chennai's slums. Located on the bank of a filthy river the slum is about a quarter of a square mile and packed with about 1,500 homes. I don't have any pictures of the slum itself because it would have been too disrespectful to take pictures of these people when I was, very obviously, a rich visitor.

Before we entered the slum we were greeted by a throng of slum kids. These interactions, like those with the children at the HIV orpanages, are both beautiful and heartbreaking and have left my heart heavy and overwhelmed. The complexity of the emotions that I have felt is not something that I can aptly describe, but it leaves me anxious to start working with both groups of kids (slums and orphanage) on my own time outside of the education work that my team is doing.

I could ramble on for a long time about my thoughts on these beautiful children and hand that life has dealt them but pictures will probably do a better job.

Good kids & bad grown-ups

Things, things, stuff and things.

I had my first Indian movie experience... no, not Bollywood - Kollywood! While the two India-woods share a lot of common traits, Bollywood movies are in Hindi and based out of Mumbai while Kollywood is based here in Chennai and the movies are in Tamil. My volunteer team, along with our CPs, went to see Ayan. This is the poster:



This epic movie has it all: musical numbers, a love story for the ages, slo-mo fights, hairy fingers, dramatic close-ups, and it walked an awkward line of being super-sexy while simultaneously upholding cultural dedication and devotion to the almighty concept of virginity. Fantastic!

The crown jewel of India, thus far, was hanging out with some incredible kids while we visited our local NGO partners. The children, infected and/or affected by HIV (affected in that they have lost their parents to the disease), welcomed us into their homes, sang and danced before we horsed around for an hour or two...














And a couple shots from around town...






I had more pictures that I wanted to upload, but I apparently didn't put all of them on my flash drive before I came to the internet cafe. Oh well.

In other news, I turned a quarter-century old today. So I guess my car insurance premium goes down but more importantly, I now have a fully developed frontal lobe which is kind of depressing, knowing that my chances of mastering the art of balancing work and reward are slim to none. I feel like the passing of a milstone age warrants well-developed thoughts and reflections, but alone-time has been few and far between since arriving in India so my thoughts are scattered at best, and mostly negative. (Que self-indulgent examples of said scattered thoughts.) I've been "okay" for about three years, meaning that I've actually been able to operate in the real world in a way that resembles productivity and good mental health; I can't help but wonder what I would be like, today, if I had gotten my shit together when it seems like everyone else did. I've been at least four different people in my life, very few of my relationships withstanding the transformations; again, kind of sad. I'm discouraged that it will, now, be a lot harder to mold my brain into what I want it to be. I wish I had decided to go to college before I was 21. And I still don't feel like a *real* person.

I probably sound like I'm bummed out but I'm actually in a very good mood, if only because I'm in India doing something "real," whatever that means.

I need to get back to the hostel - a couple of us watched the first episode of a TV show called Dexter and it's quite morbid and lovely, so we're going to get back to that before going out to dinner and a club. Yeh-yah!

Be well out there, good people!