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.