Work in the Time of Monsoon

Work in the time of monsoon: it doesn't happen. At least not for me! We have had continuous rains since last Thursday, and luckily yesterday there was a pause in the downpour that was long enough for me to finish my shopping and other errands. I was also able to focus a little bit on work and not worry so much about whether the trains were operating or whether they had been stopped because water had flooded the tracks…or when the electricity was going to go out again…or whether I would have to wade through at least half of a foot of water again to get to work. Aaah, if only I could adequately convey the pleasures of being drenched to my very bones. I can't remember the last time I was completely dry. On Sunday I went to a restaurant and I was half afraid that they would throw me out because I left a puddle of water around my chair. (They didn't, probably because they were having too much fun laughing at me and my "funny" accent. Someone asked me: "Madam, which village are you from?" implying that I was from a region so backwards that I couldn't even speak Hindi with the proper accent.) I have been at a basal level of dampness for so long that when the rain stopped today I wanted to dance to celebrate finally being dry.

Work at the NIRRH is pretty much the same, rather bland. So I've adopted a fully hedonistic philosophy and have decided to do things that will not only make me happy but enable me to fully understand Mumbai culture. All of you know me well enough (and have read enough of my emails from my year of travel) to know that for me, understanding a culture occurs mostly through my stomach.

Let's start with Bollywood so it doesn't seem as though I'm eating my way through Mumbai. I saw THE best Bollywood movie last Saturday. Very cute, called "Jaane tu…ya Jaane na" (literally, Either you know or you don't). I highly recommend it and will try to get my hands on a (pirated) copy to bring home. It has been the talk of the town since its release three weeks ago and was instantly a huge hit and propelled its cast into eternal fame.

Does paan have any nutritional value? Since I've been eating paan quite frequently, I've decided that the leaf in which all the sweet cocunut and other dried fruits is wrapped in has some nutritional value just because it happens to be green and a leaf. I must justify my addiction somehow! I've also decided to eat off every street cart I come to because they are just so good!!! I've had the best lassi from this tiny shop. I ate an entire pomegranate on the street and didn't even mind the funny looks I was getting. I found this great tea place. These two guys have just set up shop on the sidewalk, and they have a cart from which they sell freshly made ginger flavored chai, and my goodness, that is the best cup of tea I've ever had. I have indulged a little too often in what is fondly known as "the poor man's lunch": vada pav because it's so filling and so cheap (about 8 cents). It consists of potatoes mashed with spices, covered in dough, then fried and stuffed into a bun (pav) that is lathered in spicy sauces. I've had all sorts of snacks from the sidewalk, ranging from caramel and honey covered peanuts to bhel puri, this conglomeration of dried rice and fried bits of bread, onions, and chutney, to freshly made sugar cane juice. The food here is so so good, and people love to eat, which makes me very happy because that is exactly my attitude.

On a serious note, this past weekend in Mumbai was a bit tense. After the multiple bombings in Bangalore and Ahmedabad, all of India was on alert for terrorist attacks, and although thank God nothing has happened in Mumbai, I was a little bit worried this weekend. More people have died in terrorist attacks in India since 2004 than anywhere else in the world except for Iraq, which should give you an idea of how dire the situation is here. Yet I have to admire the people for continuing on with their lives and striving to retain an air of normalcy.

August 6th is my last day of work, and then I fly to Delhi to vacation with my brother, which should be very exciting. I am very much looking forward to next week and then to coming home!

Street Life

Life in Mumbai happens on the street. Every corner is lined with carts selling bhel puri, samosas, and sandwiches. Juice makers abound in this humid city; when I exit the train station, having pushed and shoved my way through the congested platform and emerged with my person and property intact, although drenched with sweat, there is a luxurious feel to the glass of sugar cane juice that I sip contentedly. The city abounds with the noises of people living: cars honking, rickshaws screeching to a heart-jolting halt, people holding conversations in a variety of tongues, hawkers selling their wares, as diverse a selection as one could find in any Macy’s. The goods range from cell phone holders to Qtips to underwear. Who needs department stores when a gamut of choices approaches you, in the form of a skinny man wearing a Nehru cap? He claims he’s got the best pirated movies in town, but I move away from the temptation of illegal goods and gravitate towards the colorful pyramids of fruit whose price and color cajole me into buying at least a few varieties a day.
My first few days in this metropolis, I didn’t know where to look. The overwhelming sights and sounds (not to mention the smells—fresh cow dung at 8 in the morning is a smell not to be forgotten) made me feel as though I could look and hear forever and still not absorb everything that Mumbai offered to its populace. If I blinked, I felt that I would miss a crucial piece of life happening that would never happen again. I wanted to capture the image of the fisherwoman who was transporting her basket of dead fish on the train and the beautiful six feet long saris that fluttered from every balcony in the city, left out to dry. I wanted to try all the food on the streets, from the coconut water (literally a straw stuck in the middle of a green coconut) to the Mozami (a cross between an orange and a lemon) juice to the real desi lassi.
Each part of the city had something different to offer. When my friends and I explored the area around the Gateway of India, I discovered a Mumbai that I had never imagined: a city with British architecture and an entire train terminal dedicated to Queen Victoria. The days of colonialism were firmly etched onto this city; the English architecture hid the marks of a beauty bought at a price so heinously high that it tore apart a subcontinent and spawned three countries still struggling to define themselves decades after independence.
However, everything is not so picturesque in this city in one of the poorest countries of the world. When I wrote that life in Mumbai happens on the street, I meant that quite literally. One day en route to a train station, I noticed that the entire sidewalk was covered in ramshackle houses made of tarps and plastic signs. The sidewalk had been colonized by the poorest of the poor, who couldn’t even afford to rent a one-room shack in the slums of Mumbai but had been reduced to squatting on the sidewalk. Children ran naked around the houses; women brushed their teeth on the streets and spit into a bucket; men bathed in plain view of all passerby. I was horrified by the indignity of poverty that I witnessed only a few blocks from where I worked amid palm trees and restaurants offering delicious food. People had been reduced to eking out an existence in front of everyone’s eyes. Although they had claimed a part of the public sphere for their homes, they were as marginalized and as ignored as the stray dogs that ran wild through the streets.
There is little I can do to reconcile the posh area around the Gateway, where poverty dare not encroach, to the sidewalks eclipsed by the insistence of the human spirit to survive. I remain horrified by the depth of poverty in this country where 80% of the population subsists on less than $2 per day, but at the same time, I admire the resourcefulness of people so determined to live. It brings to mind a key point in Jeffrey Sachs’ book The End of Poverty: give people a way to reach the bottom rung on the ladder of economic development, and they will climb up. His thesis is based on decades of research and government advising, but I can see its potential even in my limited experience as an observer of human nature here in India. The determination among this populace is so palpable that it will propel them to climb ladders, as long as the basic means of life are guaranteed. Only then will the disparities that have woven themselves into the streets of this city slowly begin to narrow.

The Unstereotypical American

The first day that I reported to work at the National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health in Mumbai, my supervisor stared at me perplexedly.
“I’m Huma Farid, from America,” I hastened to remind her. “I’m supposed to be a summer intern here…” This woman seemed to have no recollection of who I was, despite the barrage of emails we had exchanged prior to my arrival.
“Yes I remember your name,” she responded. “I was confused for a few moments. It’s just that you don’t look like someone from America.”
It didn’t take me long to figure out what she meant. I was wearing shalwar kameez, but that was to be expected, as the dress code at the institute was shalwar kameez. What my supervisor had honed in on was the scarf that was covering my hair. She later told me that she had not expected someone from America to be dressed in a “traditional” manner. I wondered whether she had expected an American woman along the lines of Sex and the City.
A somewhat similar experience had occurred when I visited Karachi when I was thirteen. I went out with a close family friend’s daughter and her friends, who were only three years older than me. They told my parents that it was just going to be a group of girls, but when we reached the restaurant where we were going to have lunch, all the girls’ boyfriends were waiting for them. At that point, I had never even talked to a boy, much less had lunch with one, and I was strictly prohibited from doing so by my parents.
I sat as far away from the boys as possible (I also believed then that boys had cooties), and one of the girls offered me a cigarette. “I don’t smoke!” I gasped, aghast that girls in Pakistan smoked.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” another girl asked me. “Is he white?”
I was at a loss for words. These girls were asking me about things that were completely alien to me and to the way I was raised. “I’m thirteen,” I managed to whisper before shoveling as much food into my mouth as fast as I could so that no one could ask me any more questions.
“Is she really from America?” the girl asked rhetorically.
That experience completely destroyed the idea my parents espoused that Pakistan was a pure and pious land, unlike America. It also exposed me for the first time to the idea that people expected Americans to behave in a certain manner.
Often, the only imagery people have of America is through Hollywood. Thanks to popular movies and shows, people believe that all American women sleep around and wear scandalous clothing. One Indian even asked me if Americans wore any clothing at all. Have they completely lost all family values, another Indian asked me. Sure, America’s 50% divorce rate doesn’t bode well for family values, but neither does the fact that over 37% of married women have experienced domestic violence in India, I wanted to reply.
A decade ago, I had no idea how to respond to Pakistanis who didn’t know what to make of the fact that my parents had raised me so traditionally. Lately in India, I’ve started showing pictures of my friends—all of whom are of different ethnicities and all of whom wear as much clothing as the average Indian woman dressed in a Western style—to people who ask me these questions. They are the average American women, not Sharon Stone or Janet Jackson, I want to show them.
I also want to tell them that I’m the average American born Pakistani woman. Many women of my generation were raised by parents who had emigrated from Pakistan to America in the mid-to-late 1970s, right around the time when General Zia was trying to shape Pakistan into a more religiously conservative country. They carried those values with them to America and imparted a strong emphasis on tradition and culture to their children. In some ways, my generation was raised in the microenvironment of 1970s Pakistan, despite the fact that Pakistan itself has long since moved beyond the 1970s. Many of us still carry the mark of that upbringing, whether we choose to follow it now or not. All of us, myself included, have picked and chosen the parts of our parents’ values that we believe most compatible with our lifestyle in America, but at heart we remain a hybrid generation, neither fully Pakistani nor fully American. However, that’s the point: America has always been a hybrid country, a conglomeration of beliefs, cultures, and ideologies. It’s something that Hollywood can barely express; it remains for those of us who travel abroad to present an alternative view of an American.

Midway Reflections

I haven’t written in a long time because I haven’t really had very much to say, or at least not anything that was very positive. I’ve reached the half-way mark of my time in India, and I feel that I have very little to show for it. Mostly, this feeling comes from my dissatisfaction with work.

I’ve been working at the NIRRH for the past 3 weeks, and initially, the project sounded great—it’s important to understand how domestic violence impacts women’s and neonate’s health, and as I read through some of the case studies, I realized how necessary this work was. The problem is getting the work done. I suppose this is the traditional dilemma in any developing country, but it is incredibly frustrating and not something I had counted on. The way we recruit women to interview as our study subjects is through this free government program that offers vaccinations to infants. However, ever since I’ve arrived in India, the vaccine stock has been depleted, and they haven’t gotten new stock from the WHO yet. Talk about bureaucracy. Because there has been no vaccination program, there are very few women with babies 6 months and under that have been attending the clinic in Govandi (the slum area I talked about in my last email). Therefore, we have extremely few study subjects…I did get started interviewing one woman who was experiencing some violence in her home, but before I could really get to know anything about how or why it was happening, she had to leave because her husband (who was perpetrating the violence) was waiting outside the clinic for her.

So in a total time period of 3 weeks, I’ve interviewed 1.5 women. That is it. So I’ve really been frustrated because I feel like I’m getting 0 field experience, which was the primary reason I came to India. I mean, the office work that I do at the NIRRH—summarizing relevant studies on domestic violence, male involvement in family planning, fertility rates in rural India, etc, etc.—I could have done in the comfort of my home in NJ. So it’s not very fulfilling or demanding work, and while initially it was interesting to learn about all these problems in the slums and rural India, now learning about those problems is getting frustrating because I can’t DO anything about them. I feel like a useless cog in a poorly oiled machine.

As a result, for the past few weeks, I’ve been missing home intensely. That’s surprising, not because homesickness is strange, but because I spent all of my gap year traveling to random countries and knowing none of the languages, and here, I blend in pretty decently most of the time, yet my time in India has been marked by intense periods of homesickness and loneliness. For all of you who work, I don’t know how you do it. I much prefer student life to the 9-5 grind. My commute to work is about 1 hour each way, and by the time I get home, I’m so exhausted from pushing and shoving my way onto a train and then a bus that it’s all I can do to do some reading and then just crash until it’s time to wake up the next morning and start the whole uninspiring routine again. I’ve been so busy with work life (work 6 days a week) that yesterday was the first day that I went sightseeing in Mumbai.

That was really fun: I saw Haji Ali, a mosque devoted to a man named Ali who set out to complete Hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca, but ended up drowning en route, and his friends managed to find his body and bury it on the spot overlooking the sea in the direction of Mecca, and people built a mosque on that site. It’s a really interesting building; if the tides come in, the path to the mosque is completely covered by water and no one can reach it, so you have to go during low tide only. I thought the mosque’s name was also really touching: Haji Ali, meaning Ali who was completed Hajj. It’s a nice testament to the importance of intentions in Islam that even though this man wasn’t able to complete the pilgrimage, everyone honored him as though he had because that is what he set out to do.

I also saw the most important Hindu temple in Mumbai, devoted to Lakshmi, the goddess who is the patroness of Mumbai. That was a bit of a hectic trip: we picked up some devotional items for Lakshmi and then as we walked into the temple, there was a mad rush to give the items to the pundit who would bless them, and so I ended up staying to the side so that my friends, who are Hindu, could ask the pundit to perform the rites. Afterwards, we walked behind the temple, which also faces the sea. We ate amazing street food and drank lassi (yogurt mixed with water or milk—for the sake of my digestive system, I hope it was milk—and sweetened), and then saw Chowpatty Beach. This was the first time I’d seen the sea since my arrival in Mumbai. Andheri, where I live, and Parel, where I work, are pretty far from the seashore so I could have stayed in those areas and never have known that Mumbai had a nice shore! The Arabian Sea at Chowpatty Beach, however, is pretty filthy. The water is a mucky brown color and there are plastic bags littering the shore, so it’s not a place anyone would want to swim in, and indeed, there were no swimmers yesterday.

We also went to the aquarium, which was pretty tiny, but did have some really cute sea turtles and some interesting fish that I had never seen before, such as the tiger fish and the red parrot fish. We also walked along Marine Drive for a little bit, and my friends and I all commented on how if you only saw Marine Drive and the buildings lining it, you would never know that Mumbai was a city that also contained such unimaginable poverty. Our final destination was Gateway of India, an arch constructed in 1911 to welcome King George and Queen Mary to Mumbai. It’s enormous, and faces the Taj Hotel. When I saw the Taj, my mouth fell open. It’s stunningly beautiful, but also, a bit pretentious in this city that contains Dharavi, the largest slum in all of Asia. The area around Gateway is the nicest area of Mumbai; many of the buildings were built by the British, and although some are in a state of decay, the sidewalks are so clean that I couldn’t believe I was in Mumbai (I mean, where did all the street hawkers and beggars go??) and the roads actually have walk signals for pedestrians. We walked past Flora Fountain, also built by the Brits, which, despite its name, has no water, and saw Victoria Terminus, the largest train station in the city and built to commemorate Queen Victoria. Aaaah, colonialism.

And then it was back to the Mumbai I knew, which I oddly found more comforting than these last vestiges of colonialism remaining in the city.

I’m really lucky to have found such amazing co-workers. They were the ones who took me around the city yesterday, and if it weren’t for them, I would probably have spent this entire weekend just sitting around in my PJs as I do every day after work. They have also been really supportive, and we’ve talked about our mutual dissatisfaction with the (lack of) work, and they have been very understanding.

I’ve been trying to keep abreast of the politics here, which are very interesting and distinctly unfriendly (not hostile, just unfriendly) towards Pakistan, which is to be expected, but still a little surprising. For example, the recent bombing in Kabul of the Indian embassy inspired some whispers that Pakistani insurgents were behind it, and just last week, Pakistani and Indian border patrol got into a skirmish which each side blamed on the other for starting. One of the papers in Mumbai said that of course the Pakistanis would claim innocence, and there was a distinct impression that the Pakistanis must have started the skirmish. There is definitely a long way to go in Pakistan/India relations, and the fault lies with the politicians of both countries.

I think the biggest shock for me however has not been being Pakistani in India but covering my hair in India. It’s not as though anyone has said anything offensive to me but people are very surprised that an educated woman would choose to wear hijab, because they view it as an oppressive symbol and the only Muslims they know who do cover their hair or openly identify as practicing Muslims all live in the slums. It’s definitely a symbol associated with a certain class of people, and I break all the stereotypes, so people, even my supervisor at work, have a hard time fitting me in to their standard world scheme. Muslims in Mumbai at least are extraordinarily uneducated, especially Muslim women, who are often pulled out of school by their parents to help with housework/enter a vocation to make money. Just yesterday I met a 14 year old who had been pulled out of school after the 7^th grade to learn how to sew so she could make money for her parents. It’s absolutely criminal; in many ways, the community is condemning itself to poverty by not encouraging the young girls to pursue any educational opportunities. I myself have yet to meet an educated Muslim here. The only Muslims I have met have been rickshaw drivers or the people in the slum communities; I have heard about a few Muslims who work at the NIRRH but have yet to meet them, and also, I’m the only woman who wears hijab at the NIRRH. That makes for very interesting conversations.

Two funny stories to end this on a more positive note:

Yesterday, I was really missing home, and as I was walking to the bus stop, I thought maybe if I close my eyes and wish it hard enough, I’ll end up in America. Too bad I didn’t have red shoes to click. Anyways, I closed my eyes for a few seconds (which was probably a bad idea, as I could have gotten killed by all the traffic) and wished as hard as I could to be back home, and when I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was a rickshaw driver peeing into the open gutter along the sidewalk. Well, I am definitely still in India, I thought to myself, and then I looked objectively at the situation and just started laughing.

Earlier, I was talking about how I blend in pretty well. Well, sometimes, not well enough. One evening after work, I was walking around the market near where I live, when I just started craving a gulab jamun. For all those of you who have not been blessed with the good fortune to have eaten a gulab jamun, it’s this amazing ball of gooey, sweet goodness that is fried (of course) and then coated with sugary syrup. So I walked up to this sweets store that looked quite popular and asked, in Hindi/Urdu, for a gulab jamun. I must have spoken about 10 words, but the man looked at me and immediately asked me where I was from. I started laughing and asked him how he knew I wasn’t from Mumbai and he told me my accent was funny. Well, he gave me the gulab jamun and in the meantime told me his entire family history (people here are very friendly, especially the merchants) and I ended up telling him what I was doing in Mumbai and ate that gulab jamun with a lot of relish right on the street corner with everyone doing their shopping around me. Yum.

The Quandary of the Good Samaritan

The first thing I noticed in India before the plane had even landed was the slums. As the plane descended towards the runway, at first I thought what I was seeing was the debris of recent construction, because the houses were so small and low and were constructed from random collections of construction material: bricks, plywood, and roofs of tarp, or if the inhabitants were lucky, of corrugated tin and shingles. The structures seemed resigned to permanence despite their inherent instability.
The landing afforded me a closer view of the congested slums that clustered around the airport, but by the time I reached the house where I would be living for the next seven weeks, I had conveniently forgotten about them, until the family friend with whom I was staying showed me the view of the streets of Mumbai from one of her windows. I walked to the window directly opposite and noticed that the complex of apartments with names like “Mahal” attached to them was surrounded by a colony of slums. The back of the slums faced us, but the front of the colony mingled with stores selling granite and marble; the building blocks of the rich were a constant reminder to the colony of the things it could never afford.
I was reminded of the first time I had seen this type of poverty, a poverty so unmitigated that people devised desperate measures to ensure their meager survival. I was thirteen and was staying in a relatively posh area of Karachi. My room had a heavy floor-to-ceiling curtain that completely eclipsed the window, and it was only a few weeks into my stay in Karachi that I became sufficiently curious to ask what sort of view was behind the curtain. My cousin had nonchalantly responded that it wasn’t any sort of view that I wanted to see, but I drew back the curtains and saw a street—or rather, a muddy thoroughfare encrusted with donkey dung and debris. Rickety houses made of cardboard, tin, in fact, any material that people could get their hands on, leaned against one another in a haphazard fashion.
Facing that slum in Karachi, I felt that I had never been so close nor so far from poverty. I was secure in my nice flat with running water and Western toilets in a gated colony, while the people living across from me were starving. At the same time, though, I was just beginning to understand that poverty in a developing country was very different from poverty in a developed country. I was also beginning to recognize how incredibly sheltered I was from the realities of life.
That experience left in an indelible memory, one that was recalled when I saw the slums in Mumbai. Witnessing the depths of poverty from an outsider’s perspective in both Karachi and Mumbai made me question what my responsibility was towards members of society who most needed aid. It also made me extremely uncomfortable, because I will always remain an outsider. I will never fully understand this type of poverty, because no matter how much I work within these communities, I will always be in a more privileged position because I was born in America, was educated at an Ivy League institution, and will have a steady job with sufficient pay.
Before I arrived in Mumbai to work on a project sponsored by my medical school, my friend and I had talked about the quandary of international work. She had commented that work in the field of global health was appealing to many people and had mused that a part of the draw of global health was its glamour. When privileged people educated and brought up in wealthy countries sacrifice all these privileges to work in destitute areas of the world, one cannot help but be in awe of them. These people do deserve respect because they have contributed so much to the societies in which they work. Their unique privileges—an excellent education, connections to wealthy societies—have enabled them to do great work abroad but also set them apart from those among whom they work. Sometimes it even feels to me that by working internationally, I am propagating a benign form of colonialism. The message I am afraid of sending is that I come from a society that has been so successful at solving its problems that now I’ve come to your country to solve yours.
Of course, America hasn’t been successful at solving its problems, and the intentions which inspire people to work in global health are generally noble. Yet the uncomfortable disparities between those who work internationally and the people among whom they work persist and should be acknowledged. Global health is a necessary field, but the future lies in not just ameliorating the consequences of poverty but addressing its roots.

First Impression: Mumbai

I arrived safe and sound in Mumbai about a week and a half ago. The first few days were spent in getting over my jetlag and getting situated. Mumbai is such a crazy, crowded, bustling city! It’s also really noisy; the sound of horns honking, people shouting, vendors hawking their wares, is sometimes overpowering. My first few days here, when I would walk down the street, I wouldn’t know where to look first, because there were so many interesting things to look at! People set up shop on the sidewalks and sell all sorts of fruits and vegetables, nuts, juice, umbrellas (for the monsoon season!), Ziploc bags, even underwear (although why anyone would want to haggle for undies in public is beyond me).

I started work last Monday and really like it at the National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health (from now on known as NIRRH, as I am too lazy to type it all out). I’ve been added to the so-called “Violence Team” because our project deals with domestic violence. My co-workers are amazing! They are such nice people, and I’ve become especially close to two women who work with me, Shruti and Meghna. We have been working on developing a survey for women with young children to explore how domestic violence affects maternal and child health, and we do research in the office 4 days a week and do field work 2-3 times per week. The field work requires going to the slums in Mumbai, in an area called Govandi, and doing in-depth interviews with women who live in the surrounding slums.

So far, I haven’t done any interviews, but I have been reading through the interviews that were done recently, and it’s so shocking to see the things that these women, who are so incredibly vulnerable, have been put through. One woman had been forced into prostitution by her husband, and others were beaten before, during, and after pregnancy...others were beaten by their mothers-in-law, others wanted to leave home and improve their lives. It’s worse because these women are so young. The one who was forced into prostitution was only 22, and had 3 kids already, the oldest of whom was 9, so imagine at what age this woman was married.

I’ve been to Govandi twice, and on Saturday, we left the clinic and walked around the community and talked to people who lived there. The main streets of the slums aren’t terrible; they are what you would expect of a developing country, but the inner paths leading into the houses—if they can be called that—are terrible: cramped, barely 3 feet across, houses perched on top of each other. Most of the houses are just one room that is probably just 10 x 14 feet, if that much, and as many as 8-10 people can live in that one cramped room that contains a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bed. There’s no sewage system, just open gutters filled with putrid, periwinkle colored, sluggishly flowing water with garbage floating on top. All the flies of the world seem to have settled here. Garbage collection occurs infrequently, and most of the time, it’s just a redistribution of garbage: garbage from one heap is added to another heap a little farther away. The basic needs of people are not being met at all in the slums.

The poverty in the slums has really shocked me. 80% of the people in India subsist on less than $2/day, and in Govandi, it’s very obvious. Kids run around the streets barely clothed, people can’t afford fees for public schools, lines at clinics are long. What’s most depressing is the fact that people are born in the slums, spend their entire lives there, and then die there as well. There’s no means for them to leave because a good education is practically unattainable.

A part of me was awed by the sheer tenacity of the human spirit to persevere through such immense adversity.

All in all, I’ve had a good experience here so far. I haven’t been able to photograph as much as I would have liked to, but I’m planning on taking more photographs soon. I’ve attached a few of the clinic in Govandi where we work, and of the surrounding area of slums. I also haven’t done any sightseeing, because things have been so hectic at work, and I only have one day free, so I don’t have much free time. The food here is really good! There is so much regional variety and the food from one part of India is so distinct from food in other parts of India that I feel like I’ve been experiencing all sort s of new things.

I’ve been traveling primarily via trains, and that has been an experience in and of itself. There are all women’s compartments in the train, and at first I was lulled into thinking that those wouldn’t be that bad. Ha! My friends, imagine yourself squished on every side between very amply built Indian aunties, whose already admirable girth is further enhanced by yards and yards of sari and you will understand my predicament. These women also know how to shove. Two days ago I almost couldn’t get off at my stop because a quite stout auntie was trying to get into the train, and she was barring the door as she was shoving her way onto the train, and I was being pushed back by the sheer mass of her ONTO the train I wanted to leave, and then to top it all off, she’s screaming at *me* to move. Luckily, an Indian woman took pity on me and grabbed my hand and pulled me off the train. That’s Indian trains in a nutshell. Be prepared to shove and push your way onto and off of compartments.