New Photos

With my computer back and mostly working, I've posted some new photos at the bottom of the page. Mostly pictures of children. I've caught some of them being 'awwwe cute', and others being downright goofy (or as Vani put it when I inquired about the kids on the way to training: They're not kids, they're thunderstorms). One picture makes me laugh out loud - can you guess which?

As the slideshow moves along, you can click a photo to read the caption. Some captions are too long to fit the page, and for that you can thank my partial-understanding of how this technology works. Speaking of which, more writing is on the way as soon as I can navigate my new hard drive's 30-day trial version of MS Office, which, inexplicably, is all in Italian.

Dance Off!

Last week I spent three days at a child support group training session. The location was a rather idyllic perch, tucked between fields of banana trees on the banks of the mammoth river Krishna, right at the point where the river bends back towards Vijayawada and evenly splits two sloping granite hills on its way to the Bay of Bengal.

Roughly 100 street children have been taken to live at this 'resort' full time. They're given food, an education, a home - and by default - a peer group. One boy, Ganesh, sat on my lap the first evening as we watched the movie Lagaan. Like all the other residents, he's an orphan and I knew that. I tried not to bring it up, but he wasn't shy. He asked about my family - Mom? Dad? Brothers? Sisters?. I gave him minimal details, and thinking where I could go from there, chanced it that perhaps he had a sibling. Nope. Then he offered this with a hesitant smile: "Mother no. Father no. You my father." I put my arm around him. It seems cliche but when you're there, it hurts.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, there were 40 other children who had travelled various distances to attend this training session - which ran the gammut from communication skills to art to child rights. One of the highlights was the nightly 'cultural activities' session. The video below pretty much says it all. The first boy you see is Koti. You have to say it with a hard TEE, or else it means monkey in Telegu. The second boy is one of the street kids who wouldn't leave us alone. He seemed to be born for the stage. He was HILARIOUS. Check it out...

Slouching Towards Bangalore

Sizing up its Indian surroundings and thinking, perhaps - What better place than here? What better time than now? - my sleek white macbook took a last look towards Bangalore, froze up, went black, and crashed.

I tried computer first aid (I’m not making this up) as detailed in the Everything Mac handbook, page 42. But it was too late. By the time my (local) call reached the Apple Support Center, she was a goner.

And in between bouts of panic, denial, and reminders that only a day before I’d met a women’s disaster-relief task force whose members frequently have their entire livelihoods ripped from them by the winds and rain of a cyclone. So came a touch of liberation and an ounce of excitement, even, at the thought of reading on paper and writing by hand.

So until I cart it up to Hyderbad on the overnight train, leave it, return six hours to Vijayawada, wait 7-10 business days, take another six-hour sleeper to Hyd., pick it up, return back, plug it in, sift through the ashes of my previous hard drive, and try to reverse upload the pictures that (by no conscious precaution of my own) automatically synced to my iPod, I won’t be posting anymore photos, or using Skype, or making the girl who brings us afternoon tea laugh (or cringe) by turning on the iSight’s ‘twist’ feature and letting her see herself through the perspective of a mirror-cum-soft-serve-swirl.

There’s Celebrex on my desk-bed (it’s both) that I bought when I thought I might be having a hernia relapse. I didn’t take it after I read that a potential side-effect is internal bleeding. Was it Robin Williams who says – that’s not a side effect; that’s an effect. Sort of like that effect that’s rumored to rarely come (though the doctor never told me this) from the Japanese Encephalitis vaccine –anaphylactic shock. So it goes. There are plenty of other ways to get sick here – the food, the water, the air pollution, fecal-oral, oral-oral, feline-oral, lightning, the gods; the list just keeps going and going. And I sleep under a bed-net in an air-conditioned room with white marble floors, with a plug-in mosquito repellent, a permerthrin-dipped wardrobe, and facilities to take a hot bucket-shower twice a day. I have boiled drinking water, cyclone-resistant walls, malaria pills, multi-vitamins, a change of clothes, and freedom from the various and oft-warranted fears for safety & discrimination, harassment or abuse – both latent and real – that I’d face were I not who I am, but rather, a woman, living as I do.

Why the stream-of-conscious rant? Maybe it’s a question of perspective, fear, loss, and appreciation. Sorting out what matters from what doesn’t; what can be changed from what cannot; what’s in my control, what’s not. Who, where, and how I am – and how to share, conceal, question, express it – experience it. Just the other day I meant to write a post explaining how things just ain’t all that different ‘round here than they is back home. But hell, by the time I started describing how I prepare coffee – using milk from the water buffalo that live outside the kitchen door – I realized the post was doomed.

The street I walk outside the compound – while dusty to the point it appears foggy, and heavy with the smell of sulfur - brings the most curious glances and delightful moments of joy. Such as the schoolkids who yell at once, in groups of eight or more, in English, What is YOUR name? and I smile and I tell them even though I know I’ll never hear, much less remember, theirs. I ask and they shout back all at once. So I go on and return and suddenly a critical mass has formed in the schools along the street and it’s as if their high excitable voices harmonize from balconies, cricket fields, or passing bicycles along the road, and I hear them when I’m jogging or walking back from buying vitamins, and with a hand waving and white teeth that deserve a cleaner school uniform, they’ll shout or smile or whisper nervously one at a time from behind a tree or looking up from the roadside whenever they see me: ADAM!