Mango Season

It's getting to be uncomfortably hot, but on the up side, it's now mango season, and there's a type of Indian mango called the Alphonso which is simply unlike any other mango I've tasted. Very sweet and rich, less of a citrus flavor, and not fibrous at all. It almost makes up for all of India's other inconveniences.

Life Before

V. Akka joined a little late on the first day of interviews. She is in her mid-thirties. Her face is handsome and strong; her biceps and forearms adorned with tattoos. She comments that her sisters are older than she, but people always think it's the other way around. V. Akka can neither read nor write. She is one of two illiterate women selected for a leadership position in this project.

She is her husband’s second wife. The first wife had three children. One committed suicide. V. Akka had two children herself, a girl and a boy. The girl died in the tsunami. Unlike other women in our interview group, her husband encouraged her to work – if only so he would have more money to drink. The work she did before the tsunami was extremely hard. She collected shells (to sell to a middleman for Rs. 100-150 (around $3) per day) and fetched prawns. She even fished on a catamaran.

To collect shells, she said, there were two methods. Sometimes she would stand in the sea and drive iron rods into the sand, to which she would attach a net. She lifted up her leg and showed us scars from misguided attempts to control the sharp metal amidst the current. Otherwise, she would stand with other women at the point where the waves break in the ocean, holding a special net under the water to catch the shells. Often times the waves would submerge the women completely.

Fetching prawns is done by hand, at night. I asked V. Akka if she ever got scared, standing out in the ocean at night. She cocked her head a little and looked at me out of the side of her right eye. The right side of her mouth turned upward, slightly. Yes, she said – but her answer was not what I expected. She and the other women with whom she worked, standing in the ocean at night, were scared of ghosts.

The Miracle

(Just for further clarification: I traveled to Tamil Nadu with a co-worker, Veeranka, who doesn’t speak the local language, Tamil, but can understand bits and pieces. Juliet, another co-worker based in Tamil Nadu, is a native of the state, and was our translator for the week. The village we visited is called Pulicut)

We arrived on Monday afternoon, with interviews scheduled to begin the following day. I was sitting on the clay floor of a cozy house in the village when I first heard about the Miracle. Now, from what I could gather, Pulicut is a fervently religious - Christian - place. At 6am every morning, two hours of (rather catchy) hymns to Mother Mary are pumped through a village-wide P.A system at the decibel level of a rock concert. Mass is broadcast every evening at 6pm over the same system, at the same decibel level. On the cast-iron gate outside the house where I stayed are the words: 'Prise The Lord' (though presumably it means Praise The Lord). I could go on. The story of the Miracle, as I heard it, is this:

Pulicut's old church had been demolished to make way for a new one. Proper prayers were not said over the old church before constructing the new one [if anyone knows what these prayers are called, please let me know]. A number of unexplained deaths soon occurred in the village. People began to suspect that Mother Mary was mad at them.

Then, a week before our arrival, a man with a cell phone camera stood outside the new church at night and snapped a picture of the flagpole. He claims that the lights atop the pole were dim at the time. No other lights were visible. Yet, what you see on the right-hand side of my photo is said to have appeared on his camera: two narrow and sinister-looking red/yellow eyes with white 'pupils' below two blinding sources of light (the pairing of that image with Mary came later).

The people in Pulicut called it a miracle. I didn't know what to call it. Any thoughts?

Interviews

In 2005, the organization where I work began a project in tsunami-affected villages of Tamil Nadu (south Indian state). Last week, I had the opportunity to visit one of these villages. The purpose of my trip was to meet and interview four women, from local villages, who work as community facilitators for the project. Their role in the project is to lead children through a process of healing. For three days, a co-worker and I spoke with these women - through a translator - about what their lives were like before the tsunami, what they were searching for after the tsunami, what was being offered, and what wasn't being offered.

The experience was one of the highlights of my 7 months in India. Have a look at some of the pictures I posted in the slide show at the bottom of the page. I'll write a little more about this experience in the coming days.