मुझे अपनी दुकान पसंद है

Empty shells are not just academic

Soft collisions, repetive and cold

Loud blares, scraping and accelerating

Warning signs ignored

Saw a man and woman holding hands today

It was the first I'd seen

Comfortably, easily

It can be here

It all may be here

But how do you find it?

In them of course

But is there 1 in every community?

And how do you recognize them?

The difficulty can be labeled a model

But that's a shell,

Opaque and academically hollow

It's really a wriggling, mass of masses

Shaped by past, present, future

Controlled by laws, structures, culture

The only things constant are nothing,

No matter how deep or inanimate

So how can you hold things constant?

Our territory

Not your type restaurant

They are always causing trouble, not us

Here, clean your sister's poop of with this water

Go scoop the buffaloes poops

And smell, this is where we defecate

Oh we're great we've made such success

And we did this the community will tell you

If it weren't for us and your money, oh what would become of them?

1500 Rupees promised per, where has it gone you see?

He takes the money from the tourists, then takes some his own

The Mughal Heritage Walk, but is it alive or even there?

No not really, but the people are there

Project katum, but the people are there

We'll do great work, just give me the check

Professional outsourcing, lofty words

Expenses best is a must

And 1500 Rs I got per day to help them solve their worst

2500 Rs is good for them, but I'll be the one to deliver it

Such hopeless eyes they look at me

I will struggle on, paying the consultant to write my emails

Big projects I want, whole world to know

Oh we will change the world you see

And my daughter will in the US

And we'll move there to be with her

This is how its structured you see

Without us, who else will fight Casteism

There are no others like us, not untouchably internationally known

My family is very greatest here

Brahmin by name and uplifted by dress

But, I'm effective because I am from that one.

And know those people, but don't use

Oh no

Is this really all there is?

Unment promises, nice office self

Here I benefit, and you'll get some too

Empty shells are seeming pandemic

Easily, walking, hand-in-hand

Deftly scooping, tray-to-head

Numbly cleaning, hand-in-crack

But one happy boy, to short to reach

Another boy keeps his balance

Guiding from behind, contentment on his face

And one calm look, eyes resolved

Laksham Das Dastri-2, just see the Taj and there you'll know

Quietly speaking

Yes I like my store too.

Delhi bahut bariya hai

I have been busy running around lately. First Kolkata - where I had a 2 night journey from hell which rendered me with my first full-blown fever in 5 years. Then back to Agra. Then to Delhi where I am right now.

On the way back from Kolkata I was better prepared. I had a blanket, dinner packed away (thanks to Auntie Swati), 2 jackets, 2 pairs of pants socks and possibly most important - earplugs. This trip was nearly pleasant - and this time I was also carrying 2 50lb airport bags with all my stuff. Thanks to locks that Suprio helped me purchase I chained them up and was able to keep a close enough eye on them to not overworry about them.

Agra for a couple days to check base with SNBS, who is having issues finalizing the rent of the workshop, and then off to Delhi to deal with changing my Visa and finding/droppping off christmas presents with my sister who happens to leave to the US soon.

Tiffany is working with Waste Ventures, a start-up that wants to facilitate and profit (in a nonprofit kinda way?) from composting and recycling in urban-but-not-too-big areas. They offer a holistic service to setting up the infrastructure and organizing the wastepickers to form their own official company. Their office is nice their people are nice and they seem like they've been picking up useful people on their side as they have been developing their team.

Their office in Delhi has comfortable couches and english is all around me, there is a very very nice subway in Delhi and I had lunch at Subways today. I am in a whole new world. People everywhere speak english like its their first language - often to each other and with shopkeepers.

The train ride in from Agra was very early morning and freezing. The cheapest seat is a 67 Rs/$1.5 ticket. I paid the price but never found a seat. The Delhi metro is basically connected with the train route so I just hopped off and went down into a 22nd century subway, leaving my head realing. They have subway cards and track your station in and out to charge you precisely and there are lcd lit trains with nice maps and spotless tracks, everything in English and Hindi, I was stunned. My slums in Agra seemed so distant all the sudden. Even my crammed car in the back of the train seemed anachronistic.

Then the doors opened and I was carried away by a stream of people exiting the subway. Laughing, someone pulled me out and tossed me in with the stream entering. I had my first good laugh in awhile.

The Big and Little Picture

Three people in the last week have asked me to re-explain what it is I was doing in India, so I thought I might as well make it clear - both to you and me.

Why Am I here?

The Big Picture: Design a new model for urban poverty alleviation through facilitation of community design and technology workshops.

What is PANCH about?

Panch stands for People's Action for Clean Hands and it is a more contained version of the Big Picture where the idea is to test and see what the potential of a community design workshop is in the context of real life. How will people respond? What would it take for the community to really value and use a workshop in their community?

There are many questions so I will refrain for now. I'll be putting up a more detailed explanation to get people's thoughts on the big and little picture - but maybe not till i have a picture-taker.

Where I've been

In the slums people often say Jai-Bim instead of Namaste or Normaskar (which is Urdu not hindi i think), to honor Bhim Rao Ambedker, who is viewed as the hero of the dalit community (at least in agra).

Recently, I've had the rare opportunity to take time to not only ask questions that come up on my mind, but also spend more time looking up their answers on a decent internet connection.

What I've found is a lot of information - the internet is crazy when you think of it being such huge volumes of information but all contained in these enduser-managed 'websites' that are not necessarily linked to other websites beyond a certain point. The impact this has on my searching is that it makes it nearly impossible to ever track how much of the available answers out there I have actually accessed. As I look further, I find more information, search different things, and there is more information, and usually I start finding the same information more frequently but in the back of my head I think this is just because i am searching a certain set of words, and the rest of the answers i am looking for are still contained in other sites that are accessible under different logic and definition.

So essentially, here are a couple of sites that I found interesting over the past week or so that either contain something new and cool or a lot of recent compiled information on a given topic. They are all associated with development tech somehow i assume.

The Netherlands somehow has come to be home to people-centered development (cite me). The organizations I've found online give me the impression that they are focused on things that many approaches suffer from: lack of documentation, lack of time, lack of power-dispersion-and-acknowledgement, lack of facilitation. This is interesting as my discussion a few years ago with a a poet-boxer-btselem volunteer dutch-israeli concluded that the Netherlands is very self-centered and high-concept when it comes to development.

KIT SmartHygieneSolutions 2010 useful documentation by category on low-cost tech approaches - mostly for-profit products and distribution and/or local ownership models.

Stichting Connect International

Obama’s Innovator-Advisor’s Blog (this particular article is very accurate, tho I always question someone like this's on-the-ground experience. they understand well conceptually, but they live a nice articulate posh life talking about it and passionate policymaking but how connected is it with the actual real holistic livelihood effects in the end? - this can he understand?)

Think Change India

Kosovo Unicef Innovation Lab This is the only harvard student who i ever met who i liked right away - he will be a part of amazing things because he communicates outside of himself better than most anyone.

Sanitation Updates a simple blog i keep running into

If you ever want to access the center of science on tropical medicine and hygiene

CPU illiteracy a barrier to linkage

I lack the community interaction right now which is my motivation so that has caused me to focus more on researching different stuff at night and helping local ngo learn how to operate their cpu, install printers, and useful software.

The "office boy" as he is called is a freshman in college who has been studying for a couple tests in math and compsci so i've been helping him with that in exchange for an english hindi exchange. People are very computer illiterate around here because electronics are so expensive. This is something i noticed in peru too. The US really sets it up so that they have cheap cpus (and europe maybe i dunno) but big developing countries's populations are really restricted from access very effectively and quietly. I havent researched it much but maybe it has something to do with: immediate buyout by large developed companies of growing tech hardware firms in developing world, high export of electronics and low import of raw materials into us and in turn the other countries face such stiff competition from other developing countries for cheap labor they sign of since they at least get some jobs so they sign off on the deal.

Apparently a decent desktop around here is $1000 and big issue is that noone can fix their own machine so they depend on paying companies to fix any small issues related to their equipment. Printer not working, ok ask the manufacturer what is wrong, they say you should just buy a new one, ok we'll buy a new one. Mansingh (my college friend) is amazed that you can just enter something into google translator and it pops out hindi. Mostly he is mesmerized by the keyboard though, and won't touch it. He says he has no idea how to use it and doesn't want to break it. He said his college (agra university) has no cpus available for use, and if i understood correctly, that most profesors don't have cpus and only a handful of students.) I assume this is not entirely true, but I'm sure its not like the US where a laptop is essentially included in the cost of a freshmen's college education.

So I started some research and found some other options, many of the links from here would not open and it seems many are either not available or only in concept stages. This makes sense as they have not very effectively penetrated world markets - which is no easy task to set up that kind of supply chain. I just started, my search so i am looking for more information on this topic if anyone has any thoughts.

Low-cost computing & Low-cost laptops(2008)

Deepavali

Here is a picture of my first night in Agra, India (Oct 26ish). This is KD Hotel, and it cost me $11 for one night to go to sleep to this. Never stay at KD Hotel, because right nearby is a place called Tourist Rest House that is half the price for much nicer conditions.

Since leaving KD Hotel I've been sleeping on the floor of an NGO's office. Except for the 5 days I was invited to spend Deepavali (India's most important Hindu festival - equivalent of christmas but instead of gifts the men typically just give money to family members and saris and money to people less fortunate who you pay for any work (garbage, employees, maids). Many stories of the fame of Indian Deepavali were told to me before the event, how houses were covered in lights, and fireworks all day and night seem to be wistful memories of how it was before safety regulations have been enacted and somehow enforced to limit homemade gunpowder bombs and such.

The firework intensity was at about 50% Guate City on Guatemala's Christmas-New Year. I attempted to explain this to the family, but they were mostly just shocked that there was a country called Guatemala and that it only had 13 million people in the entire country. But, I assume that other places maybe more and Guatemala is probably behind India on regulations.

Deepavali is 8 days total, and very interesting in its roots. Read about the Lakshmi and her story above. Except for a day break in the middle, it has a nice mix of nuclear family, extended family, and return-to-home traditions. The family I stayed with has a very religious mother, Pooja. Pooja means worship in Hindi, and during the night of Deepavali is a very important nuclear family worship rite that has to be done according to family-specific motions handed down "since the beginning of Hindu religion, before people were around" according to my family here. (They adopted me after 5 days and are now in the process of arranging my marriage).

The Deepavali worship must be done to ensure family protection, happiness, and wealth in the following year by inviting Lakshmi Mata (Mother Lakshmi), a goddess, to come into the home. This is done through placing lights at both doorposts of every door in the house and lighting up the entryway to the doors with many candles (see candles on balcony rail in the pics). Also, they

worship their specific family god by preparing the right food for the Ahvan, which is their typical worship ceremony. Ahvan involves setting up a small fire fed constantly with ghee (Is fat free ghee good for you? India thinks so, but it looks greasy to me. Pooja prepares things with extra ghee and then ladles more ghee onto the rotis (tortilla like) before you eat them. I was turning them over to let the grease settle on plate until they asked me why and I stuttered and they explained that it makes you strong?) and first you burn things that have been taken around the house to collect negative energies, bad eyes, and any other harmful things that have gathered from people with negative energy coming into the house. Then there is a process of feeding the fire (god) certain prepared foods and sweets (their family god likes to eat 5 things, most of which I have never seen before. The only ones I recognized were cococut and raisins). There is also the inclusion of family ancestors who are remembered and prayed to for blessing.

And then you eat all the rest of the food that the gods didnt consume (they eat very little). My family was very kind to let me be a part of their worship. Here some post worship pictures. The little girl, Rose, is very frightened by fireworks and sparklers so after a few attempts the family gave up. Rose's parents say she doesn't like toys, and even in stores has no interest, she prefers small cardboard boxes to tear up and empty bottles and spoons to stuff the bits into.

A few days before a very reputable guru-ji (their holymen) had come by to do an unexpected Ahvan because he felt the gods wanted him to give extra blessing to the NGO office. Coincidentally correlated a short time after I had been staying there, but they say no relation. The guru-ji sat on my bed sheet and I was without one for that night because God was thought to be dwelling there till the next daybreak.

I have yet to find a workshop spot in the slums, but I am hopeful it'll be next week. I have been planning the pilot project slowly, as it is a very different approach to donor-ngo-community relationships that the ngo is used to, so it takes awhile to create understanding. I have spent quite a lot of time introducing the details of the pilot community design for clean hands project (website not fully functional yet) to the NGO director and working out budget and activities for the year long pilot. Then at night I draft up what we've talked about, so I've had some late nights but only because during the day everyone spends a lot of time just talking and drinking tea.

This is mostly due to language barriers, and I am to blame for that. Hindi is going slowly and it is not my priority right now as I have quite a bit of planning to do before starting up the pilot if I want it to be effective.

I have developed a good trusting relationship with the NGO director and office manager/get the director tea twice a day guy. People drink a lot of tea, and they are very amused that coffee is the low-cost drink of the masses and tea is eletist. "We are millionares in India!" (in hindi) is a daily line.

Still No Pictures - Agra

Thurs Oct 28

This weds I got farther on a moped than any day yet. Ravi Rashyap, the head of the Agra-based NGO SNBS, toted my white skin through the streets of Agra on the back of his motorbike. We were visiting potential family-stays.

But that’s the wistful ending si let me back track I wish I could write this blog in Hindi. But I wont ever handle Hindi like I handle English. Unless I do schooling in Hinid and eventhen. Hindi is tough. Everyone here tells me English is easy compared to Hindi. And these are native Hindi speakers…

But that’s an aside so let’s retrn to backtracks. I flew Air India from O’Hare to Frankfurt to Mumbai do Clacutta. If you ever fly Air India and they land in Frankfurt and tell you to deboard and will reboard the same plane 21 hours later and don’t give you a new boarding pass but tell you that this other card will get you through security and then the passport people on the way out confirm it, don’t believe them. Frankfurt is a play it safe airport and Air India doesn’t answer their phons even when it is Airpot secuirty calling. So I was heldup for 45 mins which held up a plane to Mumbai with 200 passengers by 15mins. The plane people at the boarding gate weren’t impressed. Mumbai’s (domestic) airport is nice t spend the night in. And Suprio was waiting @ Dumdum, Calcutta. The trip cost me 2 days of international time but that is short considering I was riding 350 mph (guess) winds.

I caught my breath in Calcutta and spent a few days catching up with the sup and his chlorine dosing project. That project has many dedicated people working on it but from an every-once-and-awhile participant’s perspective it seems to inch along. Given the gift of time, I worked with him to run some experiments and iterate his dosing mechansm. We went shopping for a tank and got a hindi to english dictionary (a g in english on this cpu is a lot like a ‘ha’ character in hindi…). And suprio waited as I got a train ticket for 2 hours.

I’ve never ridden a sleeper train, but the standard that Jodhpur Express set for me is not too high so I’m willing to try again. A 6 ft human could fit just about in a 24 ft^3 box. The sleeper (cheapest option reservable) had 9 person compartments with 3 stacks of 3 foldouts hanging. Approximate volume of this sleeper was 600 ft^3 (6’x6’x10’high), meaning each person has a max (if all space is accesible – like if we were in zero gravity) of 66 ft^3 or less than 3 human-boxes. Acconting for inaccessible ceiling area (gravity), and the fact that the comparments are overbooded ( we had 11 adults ad 2 kids) and a day long journey is…well packed. I have no sense of how the slaves were able to even survive half of their 3 month journeys. Nor the immigrant boats to America, Nana.

If lice are white look like Honey I Shrunk the Grasshoppers then everyone leaving that train has lice(period) And then there are the beggars of every size and decible, and hawkers traversing incessantly pushing each other and passengers along the sole aisle (I would draw you a picture but I supposw you can find one online and my internet is poor. Poor. Poor. So poor and I don’t know how to alleviate it either. These people really have a talent for living in tight conditions. 3 teenagers occupied one bunk a few rows down; a mother nursed 2 children at the same time while lying down in the middle of the day with all this commotion at its peak; and a grandmother found time to toss water on stalks of wheat + burn incense while prayingchanting for at least 30 mins. I was impressed.

Agra is an ethereal place, and I have no sense of it yet. I happened to be sitting on the step of the open (I was ready to bolt and didn’t want to miss my stop) train exit as we clanked into Agra Fort Station. As you cross over the Yamuna Bridge from the west, you soon see the big Red Fort built by Shah Jahan in 1648 looming high above, and I swear just as my eyes had found their way to the top of its (very red) walls, a 4thofJulyesque firework lit up the sky above it.

Luckily there were ready made meals as I exited the train station. Unluckily there was the persistant tuk-tuk driver who was bent taking advantage of clueless out-of-towners. I had found a cheap place close by and it was about 1.5 kms aways. My new ‘friend’ cleamied it was 3 km and impossibly dangerous of a walk, but he would take for 45 Rs. I laughed and mentioned I’d paid 15 Rs. For a 5 km trip in Juanuary, and by the end of our conversation (there weren’t any other targets so white) he agreed that 15 was ok, meaning I was getting robbed. He would be my friend and take me to all the sites in Agra he said as he called me his brother. How long you here? Two, three days? I take you everywhere, 40 Rs an hour….

The hotel was very close but full. Tourist season they said. Never go to the hotel that your driver suggests. But it was 11pm and so we went a little farther and went in and they said how long. I said 2 nights, hoping I would find other arrangements by then. They said 750 Rs. I asked why there sign on the door had 250 rooms listed and him and the driver said in unison “tourist season”. I left, but on the way out the price dropped to 500 and I filled out duplicate paperwork. That is 12 dollars for 2 nights, which wa about what I was finding online for cheapest. And then the driver didn’t have change and noone else did so he ran off with 20 Rs instead of 15 – but I was trying my best to get rid of him so it was worth it.

The next day as I walked along headed in the opposite direction of all tourist destinations, (they are all along the river), aI assumed the identtiy of a Spanidar from Milan (I know). Turns out the rickshaw drivers don’t speak much espanyol, but they still insisted on knowing where are you going, where are you going? I gave up on spaniard and turned deaf.

I had a a general idea of where I was going from looking online and being to the NGO SNBS’s office a few months ago. But it was too early…

Oh wait, I missed the best part. After the train ride I was ready for anice bucket bath and so I got all lathered up in soap. As I was rinising off I noticed that the soap wasn’t coming off. The more water I added the more sticky my skin got and matted my hair became. With no other alternative I wiped as much soap-dirt as I could with my 3 ft^2 towel and settled for dirt particles in new places, now bonded to soap which had an interesting cemennting effect between any hair follicles. For the first time in my life my hair could be formed into any shape (bright side) I so choose, and 30 mins later, after it had dried, this rare cosmetice super power remained.

As I was playing with my hair a young boy kncked on my door and brought in a try with tea and a plte of mound of 20 (something inedibly ridiculous) biscuits. Speakin in Hindi and smiling he gestured to try it. I aksed him how much? I tried in Bengali (one of the few phrases I know from Calcutta). No luck. Broken Hindi illicited a cognitive synapse from the boy but I didn’t know what it was in English. Finally he showed me on his fingers = 40 Rs! (That may only be a dollar, but I know that tea ubiquitous on the street is 5 Rs for biggest size and I don’t like biscuits. And my meal last night was 30 Rs and rice with various sides) No thank you took a long time to produce the desired results but after realizing that I didn’t even want to pay 15 Rs. before he took the mound a way. (By the end of that same day I had had 4 cups of tea and eaten 6 biscuits out of polite forcings of guesthood)

Anyways since it was early I walked around taking things in, trying to let my mind absorb rather than analyze, because that’s gatta be a sign of preconceived notions governing my experience. Wandering a bit, and asking a shopkeeper I saw a good bit including the experience of walking through what turns out to be one of Agra’s more downtrodden slums. For 500 metres after that point I was followed by small children saying “Monie” and “Dolor” and “Paisa” with smiling faces and outstretched hands. Michael Jackson was somewhere else when he made his skinchange.

Knowing that Ravi the director @ SNBS had limited English, and the Hindi speakers that I know have been unresponsive, I had resorted to google translator to (clearly? Who knows..) lay out why I was in Agra and how I would like to spend the next 3 weeks getting to know Agra, the slums, the NGO, the officials and leaders, tetc before choosing whether to make camp permanently in Agra or Calcutta. Not speaking Hindi, I figure the only way to learn about the actual reality is to observie it. Google seemed to come through and Ravilike the idea of a a workshop and said that hand washing was a huge need since everywhere in the slums the people were wiping w/ hands and only wash w/ water @ best.

There are now 510 slums in Agra that SNBS has censused, up from 393 as of this January. He comiserated a Bill Gates Foundation donation of 250 crores (~$50million) for Agra’s NGO’s that has been entrusted into the hands of FHI’s “upper-caste” Indian chapter, and only funding has been going to other NGOs of the same caste. Since Ravi is from the untouchable class his proposals for part of the funding have ignored, as have his letters, and even phone calles. It would be interesting to know more sides and follow the story up – what is actually going on ? Ravi claims it will go into NGOs from Delhi who will come in and write reports and sprinkle holy water on themselves after exiting any slums that they do visit to take pictu4res. Some of these NGOs have offered higher paying positions to his staff already and over the the past months he has gone from over 100 trained staff to 25 staff. He won’t give he said. He’ll never close his office doors even if it means he goes hungry. His NGO is named after grandpa who was a doctor who gave away his salary to the poor in Agra.

Ravi doesn’t think I should stay in the slum. He is “very tense” as he says it. After stopping by a couple with him,and some discussion, I think he has been convinced that Africa has bigger mosquitos, I enjoy all food, and find the floor comfortable. Besides, the slum I will likely be staying at has brick houses mostly and is pretty tranquil. Its on the southern edge of town and is much less congested than others. The family I might stay with seems relatively well off. The mother is a vilunteer organizer w snbs and is an elected municipal official representative. She looks young energetic, and strong-willed. She has 6 kids, the oldest of which is near the end of college at Agra Univerity studying Polisci.

I’m moving in tomorrow. Ravi says he knows someone who might be able to tutor me in hindi. The office has internet access, and ravi will let me use his cpu which should have internt but is broken now.

Saturday 11pm oct 30.

I actually don’t know if that’s the date, bc this cpu says its feb 28, 2002, and my cell phone tells me it is tue 24, 12pm everytime I turn it back on. (the internet doesn’t work for more than a couple minutes – before forcing me to restart the cpu every time…- at a time so I am prewriting this). The 30th is closish.

So my “family” has a 16 year old daughter and they don’t trust the Englishman staying in their place. After hanging out in SNBS office for a couple days and studying Hindi on my own (noone really comes in and out of the office much since they work in the field, and the one person here is busy), I’ve decided its time to spend time during the day just hanging out in the slums and not pushing the living there thing.

It makes sense that the people don’t trust me – why should they? And even though Ravi says I’m trustworthy, he says they have never had any request like this and they are all asking why? He has tried others and my favorite response is that they are worried police might come from britain and accuse them of kidnapping! Funny, but true, and I assume most people are just having a healthy trust quandry that everyone has. We decided to not push things and we’ll see ho w it plays out.

For now I sleep on the office floor and graze on the oily street foods within a 15 minute walk radius. And as I was returning my key to my hotel a couple days back, the guy demanded 500 rupees for the 2nd day. I had thought it was 500 for both nights, and explained this and assumed half was commission for the rickshaw driver…anyways we went throught the books and I guess everyone is just paying high prices for terrible rooms.

And it is true – the water here and the soap I brought don’t mesh. I bathed at the SNBS bathroom and same issue with the matting hair. I took a shower with their handsoap tho which was fine. I guess its just different types of hard/soft water going on…the water tastes a bit salty too, and absolutely terrible (vaccine), but it comes from some wastewater plant apparently.

Sorry no pictures, I just don’t have interesting things around me when I’m ok taking a camera out, and don’t want to otherwise cuz it doest feel right.

I also may not be blogging very regularly as I have yet to find an internet cafe in Agra. True they xist in tourst areas but I have not been around there, and it would be out of my may by bike. We'll see but no high expectations please. I am fine, and happy, and taking care of myself as only myself best can. No Hindi tutor yet though.

OFF TO INDIA

Here you can best follow adam's progress in India. Pictures may be scarce as i will not be touring. Sorry.

My flight leaves on Tuesday the 19th and does not arrive in till Thursday the 21st.