In Kerala

For the Traveler

2010-06-30T02:18:00.000-07:00

"For The Traveler"

Every time you leave home,
Another road takes you
Into a world you were never in.

New strangers on other paths await.
New places that have never seen you
Will startle a little at your entry.
Old places that know you well
Will pretend nothing
Changed since your last visit.

When you travel, you find yourself
Alone in a different way,
More attentive now
To the self you bring along,
Your more subtle eye watching
You abroad; and how what meets you
Touches that part of the heart
That lies low at home...

When you travel
A new silence
Goes with you,
And if you listen,
You will hear
What your heart would
Love to say.

A journey can become a sacred thing:
Make sure before you go,
To take time
To bless your going forth,
To free your heart of ballast
So that the compass of your soul
Might direct you toward
The territories of spirit
Where you will discover
More of your hidden life,
And the urgencies
That deserve to claim you.

May you travel in an awkward way,
Gathered wisely into your inner ground;
That you may not waste the invitations
Which wait along the way to transform you.

May you travel safely, arrive refreshed,
And live your time away to its fullest;
Return home more enriched, and free
To balance the gift of days which call you.

-John O’Donohue

Summer Stories

2010-06-09T21:06:00.000-07:00

May means summer in Kerala. This year summer meant a heat index of 105ºF almost every afternoon. It meant that I was always sweating, even when sitting completely still under a ceiling fan. Summer meant returning to an empty school after our trip to north India, and it meant reaching out for work and relationships outside the school that has been my home and workplace for the last year.

[The courtyard at Nicholson School this summer. Only a handful of teachers, myself and the school's two pet dogs stayed at the school for the summer months.]

I thought I would be lonely during May, living with only five older teachers at Nicholson School and going outside the school everyday for my work. I was wrong. During the summer, I needed the quiet of the empty school because I needed to come home to a quiet place where I could literally stretch out and cool down after spending the day traveling and working in intense tropical heat. (This summer I learned how deep my northern roots go as I longed for one, good, cold Minnesota winter.) I also wasn’t lonely because the relationships I developed through my work outside the school became so rich and important to me. I mostly split my time between two locations: Dharmageri Mandirams, a destitute old-age home, and Bethel Ashram, a community and school administered by monastic sisters of the Church of South India.

Nursery Songs and Wheelchairs

Dharmageri Mandirams is a charity run by the Marthoma Church that offers free geriatric care. There are over 100 people living at Mandirams, and almost all of them are from poverty-stricken families. Some have simply been abandoned by children who do not have the financial means to look after their parents or to send them to one of the nicer (and more expensive) care-giving facilities. At Mandirams I witnessed the impacts that deep poverty can have on a life. One woman’s legs were swelled with Elephantiasis, a disfiguring mosquito-born disease that is completely treatable. Another woman could hardly walk because of the now-permanent curve in her spine caused by hard work always done while bending over. One man’s skull was partially caved in from an accident, and many suffered from partial paralysis and/or loss of sight, hearing or speech. When I visited Mandirams, I could not provide any medical assistance to the residents. I could barely communicate with them in my broken Malayalam, since no one spoke more than a few words of English. But I think, maybe, my presence was enough. Many of the elderly residents do not have any visitors. So, I sat with them. I listened. I held the hands of old women who talked to me in Malayalam about their children, their husbands, and their pain. I smiled and asked them simple questions in their own language. I couldn’t cure their physical, mental, and emotional illnesses, but at least I could be with them for a little while.

Last fall some of the students at Nicholson taught me a Malayalam children’s song about a crow. It’s a nursery song on par with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but it has gotten me a lot of kudos during my time in Kerala. People often get excited that I know any Malayalam, so being able to sing a Malayalam song (even a children’s songs) is an unexpected delight for most people. Plus, it’s funny to watch the adult foreigner sing a baby song with incorrect pronunciation. Of all the times I’ve sung this children’s song, I think the best was this summer at Dharmageri Mandirams.

One day while visiting the sick ward at Mandirams, I started talking about music with one of the women. We ended up singing songs for each other, while the rest of the ward listened and sometimes chimed in for the Malayalam choruses. The last song I sang was inevitably the nursery song about the crow. By the end of the song everyone was laughing. I’m not sure how often these patients in the sick ward laugh, but at least that afternoon, I was happy to be the cause of some happiness (even if it was partly at my expense due to my strange American pronunciation of Malayalam words.) In that moment, in that small sick ward, I felt connected to these elderly women. Bound together for a moment through shared music and laughter.

Hide-and-Seek at the Ashram

Bethel Ashram is a community that includes a small geriatric care ward, a retirement home for monastic sisters of the Church of South India, and a boarding school. During the summer a handful of girls remained at the Ashram, living in the school boarding. Most of them stayed for the summer because they come from poor or broken families who cannot care for them during the summer months. A few are orphans. My time at Bethel Ashram was almost entirely spent with these girls, who ranged in age from 5 to 17. I especially spent time with the youngest girls, who seemed more interested in playing with me and who were in greater need of affection from an adult figure.

We played. Hide-and-seek was usually the game of choice, but we also played catch and Uno and some circle games. We couldn’t talk much. The youngest girls have barely started learning English, so we had to manage with my inadequate Malayalam. They had trouble explaining new games to me, and when I tried to teach them “Duck, duck, goose” it ended in confusion and chaos with many small children literally running in circles around me. Despite the communication problems, everyone still had a great time. I was happy to be with younger children again, and they were happy to have an adult to play games with. Four of the youngest girls were particularly attached to me and would constantly hold my hand and lead me around the Ashram, pulling me into a hiding place during hide-and-seek or onto their low bench and table (much too small for me) where we shared lunch.

One rainy afternoon, when we had finished lunch and exhausted our hide-and-seek quota for the day, I settled down with a group of the girls to watch a Malayalam movie. (It didn’t matter that I can’t understand the dialogue since in most popular Malayalam cinema the action is pretty self-explanatory.) Within the first fifteen minutes of the movie, I had become a human couch. The youngest girl, Manu*, sat on my lap in order to see past the older girls. Then Asha, a quiet nine-year-old, who had shyly watched some of our morning games without really participating, snuggled up under my right arm. She was followed by Rona, who cuddled up on my left side. In no time at all, I had three girls draped across me. Their artless affection was, I think, sweeter and more touching than any other gift I’ve received in Kerala.

*To protect their privacy, I have changed the names of the girls at Bethel Ashram.

Shakespeare and Other Transitions

Two weeks before Nicholson School officially reopened, the 10th and 12th graders, who have government exams next spring, returned for two weeks of extra classes. During those weeks, I taught Shakespeare to the 10th grade class. I was only substituting for their regular English teacher, but I ended up spending two weeks with them teaching The Merchant of Venice. (The class doesn’t actually read Shakespeare’s play. After all, English is their second, sometimes third, language. Instead they read a simple prose story adapted from the play. The goal is for them to be familiar with the characters and story, while also improving their English language skills.)

Teaching The Merchant of Venice (even in its abridged prose form) reminded me why I loved being an English major in college, but it also gave me a good transition into the regular school year. Teaching Shakespeare for one hour a day eased me back into the routine of classes, reminding me how to teach for students for whom English is their second language and how to be authoritative and fun (I hope).

Now the school year has begun in full, and my summer work is complete. I will miss the relationships I built during the hot summer months: the smiles and Malayalam ramblings of my Kerala grandmothers and grandfathers at Mandirams; singing nursery songs and listening to the beautiful rasping voices of the women in the sick ward; the games and laughter and cuddles of the girls at Bethel Ashram.

But I am tumbling back into the school year with renewed enthusiasm after the richness of my summer. I am happy listening to the shouts and laughter of the children that now fills the halls and dormitories. I’m taking time to rediscover my friendships with the returning students and to create new relationships with the many new students and teachers. And as the cooling monsoon rains break over Kerala, I am finding peace in my regular work again.

Encountering the Sacred

2010-05-05T21:51:00.000-07:00

This week I returned to Kerala after spending the month of April traveling in north India. The 25-day whirlwind tour was both fantastic and exhausting. We saw the Taj Mahal, and the Golden Temple, the holiest temple for Sikhs. We went on a camel safari in the Rajastan dessert where we rode camels over sand dunes and spent the night in the dessert sleeping under the stars. We waded in the Ganges River, hiked in the Himalayan foothills, and saw the place where Gandhi was assassinated. We visited McLeod Gaj where the exiled Tibetan government operates, and we even caught a glimpse of the Dalai Lama. We slept on trains, got food poisoning, and became experts at avoiding overpriced transportation offers. (“Taxi! Only 500 rupees!” Not a chance.) Basically, we had a fabulous time!

One of the half-intended, half-accidental themes of our trip to north India was encountering the sacred in various forms and through diverse religious experiences. India is saturated with holiness. It is the land where the Buddha achieved Enlightenment; it is the place of origin for such major religions as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism; legend has it that St. Thomas the Apostle (a.k.a. “doubting Thomas”) was the first to bring Christianity to India. (He is actually said to have landed in Kerala.) Everywhere you turn you can find temples, mosques, churches, gurdwaras, pagodas. You can see shrines nestled into tree trunks, and you may easily be woken at 5:30am to the hauntingly beautiful Muslim call to prayer, sung from a nearby mosque. During our travels, I encountered many diverse religious experiences: I visited Jain temples and the jamma masjid, the largest mosque in India; I watched Buddhist monks debate philosophy and saw Muslim worshipers praying at ancient monuments. For this blog entry, however, I will limit myself to describing three particular religious experiences from my time in north India: wading in the Ganges River, visiting the Golden Temple, the holiest temple for Sikhism, and spending several days in a Tibetan Buddhist refugee community.

Getting Wet:

Human beings are comprised of over 60% water. Without water we cannot survive. It takes about 9 weeks to die of hunger, but only 3-6 days to die of thirst. Water is life, and many of the world’s major religions recognize the significance of water. Christians are baptized, plunged into water as we are plunged into the Holy Spirit. Baptism recognizes our individual relationship with God, and it also symbolizes our inclusion into the Christian community. Through baptism we are connected to God and to one another through water and through the Holy Spirit.

For Hindus the Ganges River, which originates in the Himalayas, is a sacred body of water. Men, women, and children travel hundreds of miles on pilgrimage just to bathe there, to plunge into the cloudy water of this river. The other volunteers and I went the city that lies at the source of the Ganges, that is, where several rivers merge to form one river. This city, Haridwar, is a major pilgrimage destination for Hindus, and even though we came at the very end of the pilgrimage season, it was still crowded with men, women and children.

Standing knee-deep in the Ganges River, I tried to soak in everything around me: Garlands of marigolds and votive candles floating down the river, offerings to Mother Ganges. Groups of women holding hands as they plunge their heads beneath the cold Himalayan water. Naked children splashing and playing under the watchful eyes of their parents. The chill of the fast-flowing water around my legs, washing away the dust and heat.

Water is life, and it also acts as a means of connecting people, of creating a community. We are connected to one another by the water that flows through our blood, that brings life to our cells. I breathe the same air and water molecules that the person next to me breathes, and we are both sustained by our mingled breaths. I respect the Hindu community for acknowledging the sacredness of water in their reverence of the Ganges River. Although I did not fully bathe in the river, I did feel the pull. The current tugged at my ankles, reminding me of the sacred ties of water, which bind me to this planet and to all living beings who are sustained by water. With the holy water of the Ganges washing my feet, I felt alive and in community with the other pilgrims, connected by the sacredness of water.

Sacred Sounds:

The Golden Temple in Amritsar is the holiest place of worship for Sikhs. Some quick background on Sikhism: Sikhism is a relatively young religion, founded during the second half of the 15th century. Sikh theology is basically monotheistic and is based on the worship of one “formless” infinite Being. Also at the center of Sikhism is the elimination of social segregation. Sikhism attempts to overcome discrimination based on caste, class, gender and even religion. The founder, Guru Nanak, famously emerged from a divine encounter with this revelation: “There is no Hindu; there is no Muslim.” At its best, Sikhism tries to overcome the “us v. them” mentality that so many religions fall prey to.

When I visited the Golden Temple, I was struck by the beauty of the gilded building set in the middle of a man-made pool. Men and women wearing headscarves, turbans or veils – everyone must cover their head when entering the temple complex – sat around the pool talking quietly and enjoying the serenity of this religious space. But even more than the sight of the Golden Temple and the pool that surrounds it, I was touched by the sounds of the temple. Throughout the day singers chant the sacred poetry and teachings that are contained in the Sikh holy book. This singing is broadcast throughout the temple complex so that, as you walk around the pool or sit on its edge, your ears are filled with the gentle chanting of the holy verses.

Just outside the walls that enclose the pool and the temple, are the kitchens. Every Sikh gurdwara serves a free community meal called langar. All are welcome, friend or stranger, regardless of caste, creed or nationality. Men and women, Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, foreigners as well as locals, all can sit together on the floor, eating flatbread and curry prepared in the giant kitchen attached to the temple. As I sat on the floor eating with hundreds of other men and women, I noticed the sounds of food. Ladles scooping curry onto plates. Water poured into drinking bowls. The friendly chatter that accompanies the meeting of strangers over a meal. And over everything else, the clang of metal dishes being washed and restacked nearby. These sounds were just as holy as the chanting of the sacred verses in the Golden Temple. The sounds of a kitchen, of a meal, served for all, that brings people of all walks of life together as equals: that is surely the sound of something holy.

God of Compassion, God of Prayer Wheels and Repetition:

The days we spent in McLeod Gaj, the Tibetan refugee community where the Tibetan government is in exile and where the Dalai Lama lives, where probably my favorite of our entire trip. Buddhism is central to Tibetan identity, and during our stay in McLeod Gaj I was happy to learn about and experiences some of this ancient religion. We visited the main temple of the exiled Tibetan Buddhist community and watched devotees spin lines of prayer wheels, each of which contain prayers and holy mantras that are prayed by being spun. We wandered through the forested, mountain area that surrounds the town, and everywhere we saw Tibetan prayer flags inscribed with prayers and mantras fluttering in the wind. Physical prayers strung colorfully between the trees, blowing prayers of good fortune and compassion across the sky and over the mountains.

Almost everywhere we went in McLeod Gaj, we heard beautiful devotional music that repeated a single mantra over and over again. This mantra is meant to help Buddhists focus their devotion and concentration through repetition. The four-word mantra we heard repeatedly is supposed to be one of the holiest in Tibet and is a mantra of compassion. Compassion is at the heart of Tibetan Buddhism. The religion’s main deity is the Bodhisatva of Compassion, a sort of patron saint of Tibet, who is often depicted with 11 heads and 1000 arms, which represent omnipresence. Buddhism seeks happiness and freedom from suffering for all beings, and compassion, which is the sympathy for the suffering of others with the desire to help them, naturally forms the cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy and practice. As I contemplated Buddhist compassion in McLeod Gaj, I thought about how this kind of compassion is also central to Christianity. The compassion of Jesus who healed the sick and comforted those in distress, who fed the hungry and preached God’s love for all people, is not so different from the compassion central to Tibetan Buddhism.

God of Compassion,
God of Rivers and Kitchens and Community,
God of Prayer Flags and Mountains,
God of Love,
Open my eyes to the holiness that surrounds me
And let me feel your presence in every person,
every tree, and every prayer.
Amen.

Food! Glorious Food!

2010-03-31T21:16:00.000-07:00

I love eating. I love reveling in comfort food as well as trying new and unknown dishes. Eating in Kerala has been amazing. The food here is delicious, and now that I’ve adjusted to the cuisine, I think food is one of the biggest things I will miss about Kerala. So I dedicate this post to food, so that you will better understand what, when, and how I eat in Kerala.

First: We eat with our hands here. To be more specific, we eat with our right hand, neatly scooping fingerfuls of rice into our mouths, without making a mess of our plates or ourselves. This is surprisingly efficient and means fewer dishes to wash after meals.

Meal Times and Dishes:

Breakfast – Around 8am. This is the most interesting meal of the day in my opinion. Here are some common Kerala breakfasts:
• Dosai (pronounced doe-sha) with sambar and/or coconut chutney. Dosai is a soft somewhat sour bread (shaped like a tortilla) made from rice flour, which you dip into sambar, a spicy vegetable curry. (Curries are can range in consistency from soup to thick stew. Sambar is more soup-like.) Alternatively you can dip the dosai in chutney, which is usually a thicker consistency and made with coconut and red or green chilies. The dosai dough can also be shaped into palm-sized ovals, which are called Idli. Idli is also eaten with sambar and chutney for breakfast
• Appaam. Appaam is shaped just like dosai, but the dough is sweeter and contains coconut. It can be eaten with a variety of curries, such as kathala (chickpea) curry – this is one of my favorites! – chicken curry, and egg curry (hardboiled eggs served with an onion, garlic, chili combination).
• Ooppumav. This is another of my favorite dishes. It is basically a cream of wheat dish with onions, chilies, and black pepper. You can eat it with the same curries you eat with appaam, but I think it is best when you mash a banana into it with your fingers. This gives it better consistency and makes it sweeter!
•Pootu. This is basically steamed rice flour with coconut. It’s usually molded in the shape of a log, and then you can break of sections to mix with your breakfast curries. Again I think it’s particularly delicious when eaten with a mashed up banana. Did I mention that I’ve really come to like bananas since I started living in this tropical region that has more banana varieties than I can count?
•Sweet Bread with curry. This is classic Sunday morning fare in Kerala. It’s regular bread, just very sweet. Usually bread is eaten with potato curry or some other vegetable curry.

Lunch - Around noon. Lunch is always rice. Rice forms the center of almost every meal in Kerala. (All the breakfast foods mentioned above are made with rice flour.) So lunch is a heaping plate of rice, with several curries. We have sambar as the main lunch curry almost every day. Side dishes can include:
•Fish curry. Probably my favorite curry in Kerala. Fish pieces are cooked and served in a thin red sauce. It’s made with lots of red chilies and garlic, so it’s very spicy, which is what makes it so good. It is also one of the most prominent Kerala dishes.
•Thoren. This amazing dish can be made with almost any vegetable. The vegetable is cut into small pieces and sautéed with coconut and chilies. It’s fabulous, and as a dry dish it adds great texture to the meal.
•Papadam. Small, salty, chip-like bread. You crush it into your rice and curry mixture, but beware: only crush one bite at a time otherwise it will get soggy sitting in the rice.
•Pickle. This is nothing like what we in the West call a pickle. In Kerala, pickle is a very spicy fruit preparation. Limes, lemons, mangos, etc can all be cut into tiny pieces and pickled with lots of chilies, salt, and vinegar. This is jarred and stored for some time. Then a jar will be opened up, and we’ll be eating lemon pickle with lunch for weeks. When you mix pickle with your rice it will generally overpower any other curry taste on your plate. After getting used to the taste, I’ve discovered that his can actually be a good thing.

[Picture of a Kerala Feast for lunch. Yes, it really is served on a banana leaf. the rice is surrounded by many different curries, banana cips, papadam,pickle etc. My first lunch in Kerala looked like this because we arrived on the day of the biggest festival in the state, Onam. We had lunch at a Hindu temple, where they served this meal to us and to the several thousand other guests at the temple for the festival.]

Tea - 4pm. Tea, or “chaia,” in Kerala means tea with lots of milk and sugar. I think it tastes like sweet milk with a little bit of tea flavor. Although I still prefer black tea, I’ve come to appreciate chaia more and more. With tea we usually eat a snack of some kind. This snack can be biscuits (something very much like Nilla Wafers) or bakery items like sweet buns or samosas or wada (a doughnut shaped bread with onions and chilies). I think the most common snack is banana fry, that is, bananas halved and dipped in appaam batter, then fried. It’s tasty but very oily.

Dinner - Around 8pm. Dinner is often also rice and curry, like at lunch, but it can also have some variation. Here are some other dinner foods:
•Chapatti. These are basically wheat flour tortillas that you tear and eat with different curries.
•Porotta. This rich flat bread is cooked with more oil than a chapatti. It tears in round pieces, and this bread is especially great for soaking up extra curry sauces. However, porotta is more of a special occasion food, whereas chapatti can be an everyday bread.

Although it took me some time to grow accustomed to Kerala’s cuisine, I have now fully embraced the food here. I have already bought a cookbook and am determined to learn to cook at least a few of these dishes before I leave. Because, even though I’ll be happy to eat less rice next year, I’m not sure if I’ll survive the year if I can’t eat fish curry every now and then.

My Searing Bones Light the Way

2010-03-17T20:25:00.000-07:00

“In African language we say ‘a person is a person through other persons.’ I would not know how to be a human being at all except that I learned this from other human beings.”

-Archbishop Desmond Tutu

I think I have been falling in love. And I didn’t even realize it fully. Sometime in the last six months I fell in love with the obnoxious way the fifth graders at Nicholson School would always ask me where I was going; the way they dug through my waste basket and left papers and wrappers scattered on the floor. I fell in love with listening to the teachers in the staff room talk to each other in Malayalam on hot afternoons: incomprehensible, yet comforting. Without knowing it I came to love the hanging lines of school uniforms drying in the sunlight and the broken step near the kitchen where I sometimes trip.

Last week, I had to say a lot of goodbyes. (A foretaste of the grief to come.) The school year in Kerala ends in March, and by last Friday all the students who are not taking government exams (i.e. everyone except grades 10-12) went home. And because classes are over now, most of the teachers who usually stay at the school also went home. Even though the older girls are still here studying for their exams, the school is much quieter, and I miss everyone. The dormitory where I live, which used to be full of laughing children, crumpled paper, and forts made from bed sheets and string, is empty now. It echoes when I walk to my room at night.

I was glad to have the opportunity to see everyone and say goodbye last week. I spent the first week of March in Sri Lanka with the other volunteers getting our visas renewed. We had a fantastic ten-day vacation there. Some of highlights included: swimming in the Indian Ocean where we met two giant sea turtles (see above) visiting some ancient Buddhist temples, and drinking lots of fresh mango juice. But just as good as this brief holiday was my return to Kerala. Coming back to Kerala and to my site at Nicholson School felt like coming home. The way some of the teachers and students faces lit up with smiles when they greeted me filled me with indescribable happiness.

We are people only through other people.

I hadn’t realized how much I loved everyone here until I had to say goodbye to them for the summer. I will see most of them again in June when next year’s school year begins, but seeing them leave was still very sad.

Love Like the Wild Geese

This week I recalled a poem by Temple Cone that is helping me remember how to plunge into my relationships with other people. To fall in love with everyone and everything without hesitation, regardless of the pain it may cause later.

If you do nothing else with your life
you can do this, you can love like the wild geese.
Because they are simple,
they do not even know what calls them
from the snow-clotted fields in spring,
only that their searing bones
light the way. Because they believe
they are immortal,
they rush over mountains, foothills, meadows
in waves of frightening speed,
since no one wants to live alone forever.

Last week I said goodbye to many people who have taught me how to be a person here in this completely different culture, but now I am starting to seek out and create new friendships that will hopefully grow with me during the summer months:

• Last Monday I visited a nearby boy’s orphanage for the first time. Though I was overwhelmed with meeting almost 50 children all at once, I spent a wonderful afternoon just hanging out with the boys. We went up to the roof where they taught me to play cricket. Using a stick for a bat and large plastic caps for balls, we played until evening fell.

• On Wednesday I sang a Malayalam song with a group of old women at an old age home, which specifically caters to the poor and to elderly people abandoned by their impoverished families. I didn’t know all the words to the song, and we sang in six different keys; but through these women, who were strangers a minute before, I am learning more about what it means to be a human being.

No one wants to live alone forever, and we are only human through our relationships with each another. After the sadness of saying goodbye to everyone for the summer, I am trying once again to plunge into new love and friendship. To rush over mountains and meadows. To let my searing bones lead me. To love deeply and all the time. To learn and relearn what it means to be a person through other persons. To try to love like the wild geese.

Searching for Newness in the Old: Lessons From Tolstoy

2010-02-10T23:37:00.000-08:00

Over the last month as I’ve neared the halfway point of my time in Kerala, I’ve struggled to find newness in my old routine of work and teaching. This was my greatest challenge for the long month of January. After coming back to Nicholson School after the Christmas holidays, it quickly began clear to me that my life at the school had become old news to me and similarly that I had become old news to the school. The novelty of living in a new environment and completely foreign culture had mostly worn off, and I was left with the routine of preparing classes, teaching, and going about my daily activities. I felt like I had lost the freshness.

Some particular examples of how my routine began to feel stale during the last month:
• Some things that used to give me deep delight no longer spark me in the same way. For instance, I no longer get absurdly happy every time I have a moderately successful conversation in Malayalam. But this is because I now regularly have successful conversations; so what used to be an intermittent source of deep delight, is now a daily routine. (Don’t misunderstand me: it’s wonderful that my Malayalam has improved enough that I can have communicate some, but I’ve lost the delight that used to accompany these small successes in language.)
• The fun of teaching classes has faded some as it has become routine both for me and for the students. As I result I feel like my classes have begun to lack the energy and innovation that I used to consciously put into them.
• Some social and cultural differences that I used to be able to tolerate fairly gracefully, really began to irritate me during the last month. In particular I’ve been frustrated with the pressure that the Indian education system places on the 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students. They are constantly pressured to study so that they will have good grades. As a result, they have practically no free time in which to play or rest or relax. And usually they aren’t getting enough sleep because they feel so pressured to study early in the morning and late at night. My frustration with this system came out in helpful and unhelpful ways over the past month. It’s probably good that I’ve told the other teachers that I think the students should sleep more and have more free time. But when I’m so irritated that I can’t properly listen to the students’ personal and academic struggles, my frustration with the system is actually harmful.

I have been working hard during the last month to find newness in my old routine and to overcome my frustrations with the Kerala education system. I did this by adding a few new activities to my routine in January. One of the most rewarding additions has been the yoga class that I teach once a week for 11th and 12th grade students. At first I felt very strange as an American teaching a yoga class in India, the country where yoga originated. But the girls at the school have no one else to teach them, and they want to learn. More than that, I think they need the time to relax their minds and stretch their bodies since they have to spend so much time in the classroom studying. Teaching yoga has become a joy for me, and it is also a constructive way through which I can combat the demanding educational system by giving the girls some much needed time away from their studies.

In my attempt to add new activities to my schedule in January, I also took on a project that turned out to be larger than I anticipated. I directed a play.

Drama at Nicholson

I had never directed a play before this year. Nor had I ever been in charge of auditions or costumes or writing the script. This January, I did all of these things. I adapted Leo Tolstoy’s short story “The Three Questions” into a drama, and in less than two weeks, we put on a play. The nine Middle School students in the cast were wonderful. They worked hard to memorize their lines in a short amount of time, and they were always willing to practice, even at somewhat inconvenient times. But I had no idea how much work it would be to single-handedly organize a play. Even if it was only a one-act school play.

The two weeks that I spent directing and organizing “The Three Questions” were incredibly stressful for me. And as the stress built I caught myself getting easily frustrated with those around me, teachers and students and cast members alike. I had to consciously push my stress and frustration away. After all, Tolstoy’s story – and thus our play – hinges on the lesson of living in the present. A King asks three questions: Who is the most important person? What is the most important time? And what is the most important thing to do? The answers he finally receives constitute the lesson that I was desperately trying to relearn this past month:

- The most important time is now, because it’s the only time in which we have any power.
- The most important person is the one whom you are with.
- The most important this is to do good for that person.

And as I struggled to relearn Tolstoy’s old truth, the students managed to perform a play that included humor, pantomime, a sword fight, tomato-sauce-blood, and a serious moral. When it was all over, I was relieved that it had gone relatively smoothly, that the audience seemed to enjoy it, and that the girls had fun with this chance to perform.

Directing “The Three Questions” was one of my attempts to add “new things” to my old routine, but because of its subject matter, it also fueled a different approach to my attempt at overcome my feelings of frustration and staleness.

Finally, all good things lose their novelty, but I think this loss is mostly due to our inability to see old things with new eyes. I realized that I do not need to find new things to add to my routine in order to make it fresh; instead I need to open my eyes wider. I need to stop and breathe and really look at everything around me. I need to reorient myself to the present moment and to the people whom I am with. And by doing this, I am beginning once again to find new beauty in the everyday: I see it in the excited faces of a group of eighth grade students when they get to go on a field trip to see a waterfall. I feel it in the nervous energy of nine girls waiting offstage before they perform a play. I hear it in voices of fourth graders singing hauntingly in Malayalam.

And slowly the beauty of the present seeps into me again, filling me with newfound joy and love.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Thank you to everyone who has donated to my fundraising account with PC(USA). I truly appreciate your generosity, which enables me to live out this year of service in Kerala. I am still $3,500 short of my $9000 fundraising goal. If you are interested and able to support me financially this year, you can make a tax-deductible gift by following this link to my account page with PC(USA): http://www.pcusa.org/give/online/projectSelectAction.do?numberString=E210401

A-Hunting We Will Go: The Great Spider Hunt

2010-02-04T00:05:00.001-08:00

I have been terrified of spiders since I was very young. In fact when I was little, if I found a spider I would run from the room and find someone else to kill it before I would venture into that room again. Gradually my fear lessened, and by the time I was in college I could kill some small spiders myself – but only after staring at them in frozen terror for some time with a shoe in my hand poised for the kill. So I’m happy to say that in the last five months I have (mostly) faced and overcome my fear of spiders. Here’s how it happened:

With its beautiful tropical climate, Kerala is home to the Huntsman Spider, a variety of large, though relatively harmless, spiders. (I couldn’t bring myself to post a picture of one here, but you can see it by going to this web address: http://www.westaust.net/wildlife/huntsman_spider.jpg) These beasties are usually about the size of a closed fist . I know that there are bigger, scarier, and more dangerous spiders in the world, tarantulas and black widows for example. However, having grown up in a place where the freezing winters keep anything larger than a wolf spider away, I viewed these spiders as both huge and terrifying. The first time I saw one in my room here I went into a frozen oh-my-God-that’s-a-giant-spider panic and simply stared at it from the other side of my room. It took me about half an hour to work up the courage to get near it and finally chase it out the window with a broom. Since that first sighting though, I’ve become less frightened. I think my fear has abated somewhat because I know that no one else will kill these spiders for me, and I don’t want to go to sleep at night knowing that the spider I couldn’t kill is hanging out in my room with me. So I learned to kill the giant spiders, thereby keeping my room safe from mysterious giant web-weavers.

During the last week of January one of these giant spiders evaded me. It moved into my bathroom, and refused to be killed. I chased it maybe half a dozen times, but it always escaped into a crevice or pipe where I couldn’t reach it. But I knew it hadn’t moved out of my bathroom because it would turn up in the most unfortunate places. Once I caught it hiding behind the bucket I use to shower, and another time (horror of horrors) it was sitting inside the toilet bowl after I had flushed, fulfilling every child’s fear that there is a monster living in the toilet.

On the afternoon of February 1st this persistent spider finally crossed the line. As I flushed the toilet in my bathroom the giant spider leaped out of the toilet bowl at me, and despite my recently lessened fear of spiders, I screamed. In all fairness, I can’t blame it for trying to avoid death by drowning by leaping out of the flushing toilet. If I were the spider, I would have done the same. But it was the last straw. The Great Spider Hunt had begun. For the rest of the day I stalked this spider. I came back to my room at random moments trying to catch it in a vulnerable position on the floor or walls of the bathroom. I finally did catch it that evening, and I’m happy to say that it will not be haunting my bathroom or jumping out of my toilet anymore.

There are many different (and sometimes uncomfortable) things about my life in India that I have accepted fairly easily: Washing my clothes by hand in the sink; showering with a bucket of cold water; having very little control over my diet; substituting water for toilet paper; living with lizards. I needed time at first to adjust to these changes in my lifestyle, but after a short time I easily grew accustom to them. However, I refuse to share my room with giant spiders. Certainly, I will not share my toilet with them.

(More January updates coming soon!)

Carols, Cake, and Coconuts: Christmas in Kerala

2010-01-01T20:55:00.000-08:00

It began with a song.

“Vishwaasikalhe vaa! Thushta-maanasar
Aai vanneeduka, vaa, ningal Bethlahemil.”

“O Come All Ye Faithful” is one of the most popular Christmas carols in Kerala, and so the Tiruvalla Ecumenical Choir began their carol service on December 6^th with this song. I sang alto. We sang the traditional hymn in Malayalam, and I read from an English transliterated version that began, “Vishwaasikalhe vaa…” That first carol service set the stage for a month of Advent and Christmas celebrations that finally left me hoarse from singing, stuffed with a ridiculous amount of cake, and extremely happy.

After that first evening of carols, I sang constantly throughout the month of December. I love Christmas songs, and so it was a joy to teach English Christmas carols to the students at Nicholson School every morning. Equally wonderful for me was learning the Malayalam Christmas songs that the students and other teachers taught me. The school put on two carol programs, and for one of these programs the tenth grade students went caroling. They wore white saris and carried candles down the street singing Malayalam carols to the beat of two drummers. Caroling in 85 degree humid weather was a little surreal for me, but it was also amazingly fun.

Although I attended many carol services in December my favorite was the small gathering I coordinated

with an old-age home located near Nicholson School. A week before Christmas I brought a group of fourteen 11^th grade girls to sing carols for the elderly residents of the home. The girls had practiced several Malayalam songs and had prepared some Bible readings and a skit, but even better than the program they put on (which did go very well), was the way the girls interacted with the residents. The two groups of young and old seemed so at ease with each other and so happy in each other’s company. When it came time for me to leave with the girls, I couldn’t separate the students from their new grandmothers and grandfathers. One woman was showing two girls a picture of her long-deceased husband, while another group talked and laughed over their pieces of Christmas fruit cake. On leaving, the girls exchanged hugs and kisses with the grandfathers and grandmothers. Walking back to the school, I was overflowing with happiness at seeing how this group of young and old had so easily come to love each other.

"Dreaming of a Coconut Christmas…”

In addition to the Malayalam songs and bilingual carol programs that filled the Advent season for me, my Christmas this year also included many new experiences that, as someone who grew up in Northern Minnesota, I would never have associated with the holiday season:

• On Christmas Eve I relaxed with the other volunteers on paddleboats in some beautiful backwaters, and I hung out (literally) in a hammock strung between two coconut trees.

• Instead of eating Christmas cookies, I filled my stomach with Kerala’s traditional Christmas food: plum cake. This is basically a regular cake with some raisins, dates, and nuts thrown in. Delicious, but over the course of the month I probably ate one or two entire cakes, and now I think I’d run away if someone offered me another piece.

• In Kerala everyone decorates their homes with multi-colored paper stars. They place light bulbs inside the stars so they glow at night. They’re beautiful, and I loved seeing homes and stores brightly decorated with them this Christmas season.

• While I was traveling with the other volunteers a few days before Christmas, we randomly stopped and grabbed some coconuts from a street vendor. We drank the coconut water with straws, and then the vendor cut the coconuts in half so we could eat the sweet, white meat.

• On Christmas morning I awoke at 5am to the chanting of the call to prayer from a nearby mosque.

• At the carol service at Tyler’s site, the four volunteers were asked to participate in a four-part harmony singing of “Silent Night.” Only eight people were singing the song, and although Sarah, Tyler, Cameron and I can usually hold a melody (and sometimes a harmony) we’re not spectacular singers. Somehow the eight of us managed to butcher “Silent Night” by singing in eight different keys. Luckily our audience, made up mostly of the elderly residents at Tyler’s site, didn’t seem to notice. But that night we welcomed Christmas by making a joyful noise.

It ended with a song.

After spending my Christmas holiday with Thomas John Achen, his family, and the other volunteers, I returned to my site. I got off the crowded train at the Tiruvalla station on December 27th, heading back to Nicholson School where we would begin class the following day. As I walked the 2 km back to the school, I listened to the now-familiar sounds around me: The birds and crickets, the traffic on the road, the intermittent music from a church or temple, a radio playing from the back of a fruit stand, the crunch of gravel under my feet, the bus conductors calling out their destinations at each stop: the joyful music of life and creation that surrounded me this Christmas.

Joy to the world!
The Savior reigns;
Let all their songs employ.
While fields and floods,
Rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy
Repeat, Repeat, the sounding joy!

The Ways I Forget Geography and Then Remember Again

2009-12-12T01:01:00.000-08:00

I have been living in Kerala long enough that I now sometimes forget where I am. Let me explain: My life has normalized into daily and weekly routines. I eat the same foods and sleep in the same bed and see the same coconut trees every day. So sometimes I forget that I’m living my life on the opposite side of the world from where I grew up. And then I remember. Sometimes I will simply look at the trees with fresh eyes, or maybe I’ll eat some new, previously unknown, and delicious fruit. And in re-sensing the world that surrounds me here, I remember: “Oh yeah! I’m in India!”

So in this post, I felt the need to re-document my geography. To remind myself (and maybe you too) of where I am in the world. So here is a map of India with Kerala highlighted. The capital of the state is Thiruvananthapuram (or Trivandrum for short), but I live in Pathanamthitta District (see second map), and the other three YAV volunteers live in Kottayam District.

The language here, as I’ve already mentioned, is Malayalam. I am surrounded by this language and am still struggling to learn it. The letters are especially beautiful when written, curving and arching in some confusing, graceful dance. Click here to see what Malayalam script looks like.

So yes: I am in India! Although I forget my geography sometimes, little things help me remember:

- When the lights go out, I love it. The electricity fails here pretty often, but in the evenings when the power goes out, I can’t stop smiling. In the dark, the students and teachers laugh more, are more free with each other. There must be something about being in the dark that makes people more open. In the dark we can’t stop laughing and smiling because, when we can’t see each other’s faces everything is somehow funny, wonderful, and shared.

- When I walk outside of my room I’m immediately surrounded by some 15 or 20 11- and 12-year-old girls who live in the dormitory where my room is. They all run up to me, happy to talk with me in their broken English, which they’re still learning. This happens at least three times every day.

- I have eaten several fruits here in whose existence I still do not believe. The most recent example is a custard apple. The texture is a little like custard, but it has nothing to do with an apple. Opening the grenade shaped (and textured) fruit, exposes a bunch of fleshy white pieces, each with a large seed inside the white fleshy fruit. This white flesh has a sort of custardy consistency. It’s sweet and good, but it tastes like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, so I can’t even draw an appropriate comparison. I’m sure this fruit cannot exist. But I’ve eaten it. Twice.

- Last week I almost died crossing the street. Traffic here is insane, and being a pedestrian sometimes feel suicidal. In most places in Tiruvalla there is just one wide-laned road with traffic speeding along in both directions and cars illegally passing, weaving in and out of fast, oncoming traffic. It’s pretty frightening. What is maybe more frightening, is that I’m now almost completely desensitized to this way of driving. But I forgot for a moment that I was in India, and last week I tried to cross the street without checking for cars illegally passing in the wrong lane. One such vehicle narrowly braked in time and I touched the hood of the car as I dodged around it. [Readers, please do not think that I am in too much danger of dying on the roads. Think of all our U.S. traffic accidents. I’m truly just as safe here as I would be driving in the U.S.]

- When there’s no water – that is, when the pipes are empty and the faucets don’t work – I go to the school’s giant well and pull up a bucket full of clean, drinking water that I can pour directly into my water bottle.

- When I had lunch with an older friend of mine here, she offered me a fork for the first time since September. (Everyone in India eats with their right hand, a surprisingly efficient way of eating once you get used to it. There are also fewer dishes to wash.) Anyway, I had to refuse the fork because I don’t know how to eat Kerala cuisine with anything but my hands.

- It is “winter” in Kerala and many people dress for the “cold” by donning sweaters and wrapping shawls and blankets around their shoulders in the morning. I think it’s finally comfortable at a balmy 75 degrees F.

- One night I stopped at the door of my room and stared out at the night. The full moon was a brilliant yellow/orange color and shone through the branches of the coconut tree near my bedroom window. The tree was silhouetted against the fullness of the bright moon, and the beauty of the scene was stunning.

Oh.
Wow.
I’m in India!

Work and Play

2009-11-28T04:45:00.000-08:00

“She worked hard, and she played hard.” Although many people truly enjoy their jobs, most, I believe, still think of work and play as separate. Play might be going out to dinner with friends or playing games with your children or going to a movie with your spouse, but it’s almost certainly different than the work you do for your job from 9 to 5. I’ve always though that work and play should share more common ground, that they should overlap more. But in high school and in college I often had to rigorously separate play from work. Here it’s different.

I do have “work” as a YAV in Kerala. Teaching spoken English classes and music at Nicholson School is definitely work (and hard work!), as is the editing and clerical work that I do for the Tiruvalla Ecumenical Charitable Trust (the progressive social justice organization where I work once a week). But I’m gradually discovering that the time I spend playing with the girls at the school probably constitutes the most important work I do here. So for me, work and play are overlapping in wonderful, glorious ways. Let me give you some examples.

Halloween

I hosted a Halloween celebration at the school for all the boarding students and teachers. It was a blast! Halloween isn’t celebrated here and most of the children had never heard of it. So I asked the school principal to explain the holiday to the children in the morning assembly (in Malayalam so the younger ones would understand). Then I carved a jack-o-lantern and invited all 400-some boarding students to come to room between 8:00 and 9:30 that evening to trick-or-treat. As you might expect, it was chaos. But it was fun chaos. The girls came up with some really creative costumes especially considering that their only resources were the few clothes and toiletries the keep in boarding. Some came as ghosts or vampires with white talc powder on their faces. One group of tenth graders even put together a scary dance and song that they performed in front of my door! I was delighted that the teachers (who also board at the school) came trick-or-treating too. When they knocked on my door and yelled “boo,” I was indescribably happy. Most of them had also never experienced Halloween, and I was so glad that they wanted to participate in the holiday because it meant that they were also engaged in the cross-cultural celebration. It also seemed to me like an affirmation of the friendship that I’m building with them.

The Halloween celebration was a lot of fun for everyone, but it was also a teaching moment. The children got to learn about an important Western holiday, how it’s celebrated, and what it means. It was also a chance for them to use their creativity in creating costumes and (in some cases) songs and dances. Much of the schoolwork that the girls do does not nourish creative thinking or imagination, so opportunities to be creative are in short supply for the students. I also think the celebration gave them an opportunity to escape the strict rules of the boarding school and to simply play for a few hours. I believe (at least I hope) that the holiday escape from study and routine gave them a much-needed chance to learn by playing.

“Singin’ in the Rain”

Last week Nicholson School had a huge Exhibition as part of the school’s celebration of it’s centennial, which will occur this coming February. The Exhibition was a lot of work but it was also very fun. The school invited lots of different organizations to come and set up stalls. So, for example, ISRO – the Indian Space Research Organization, i.e. India’s version of NASA, – filled our auditorium with models of rockets and satellites and a Kerala-based Marine Fishing Organization brought aquariums full of dragon fish and clown fish with anemones. The students also made hundreds of models, charts, and experiments as projects to display. Picture the a huge high school science fair/art show, then add aquariums, rockets, and locally produced honey and you pretty much have it.

So for this grand Exhibition, I worked with some seventh grade girls to build a model solar system. You know, painted plastic balls with planet-name-tags on wire circles suspended from the ceiling. It was actually pretty cool when we finished. But that’s not the point. We were working on this model one afternoon, when it began to pour. We’re currently in the last stages of the NE monsoon season, and that afternoon, the skies opened and rain came down in sheets, flooding the school courtyard in minutes. The girls and I rushed out of the classroom where we’d been working to watch the downpour. I love rain, and I especially love big storms. So we stood on the balcony overlooking the flooded courtyard laughing at the beauty of the rain. Holding out our hands to catch the clean rainwater in our palms. Then I started singing the beginning of “Singin’ in the Rain,” which led to an impromptu teaching of the song to the girls. Then I taught them some basic swing dance steps, and we reveled in the rain with song and dance. The girls, in turn, showed me some classical Indian dance steps. (One student says she will teach me, so maybe by the time I leave Kerala I will have learned classical Indian dance!) Singing and dancing in the rainstorm the girls and I rediscovered the magic of playing, of finding impromptu fun so spontaneously.

Hindi Radio Appreciation

During the beginning of November, I accompanied a group of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students on a field trip to Kochi (on of the biggest cities in Kerala). I was partly there as a guest to see the tourist sites that the girls would visit, but I was also implicitly there to help keep an eye on the children. The other teachers and I obviously needed to keep the girls from getting lost, pulling each other’s hair out, or, I don’t know, sticking their hands in stray bee-hives. So I was there partially to help supervise the trip.

The field trip was a lot of fun, and all the sites we saw in the city were great. However, the best moment of the day took place on the bus. On our way to the city in the morning the driver turned on a radio station that was playing popular Hindi music. The girls were so excited about being on a field trip that they were nearly jumping out of their seats talking to each other and singing along to the songs. Then one of the other teachers and I stood up and started dancing in the aisle of the bus. (Traffic and roads in India would merit a separate and very long explanation. For the moment just accept that while this wasn’t exactly a safe action, it’s not uncommon or illegal.) Within seconds most of the girls were on their feet dancing and falling over in the aisle of the bus as we went over bumps and bridges. All the while we sang to the upbeat, rhythmic melodies of the Hindi radio station. At least, the students sang. I don’t know Hindi and didn’t understand the words of the songs, so I just danced and encouraged the girls to embrace the moment of fun. The chance to be free and play with the students gave them a great opportunity to overcome their shyness of me. When I danced with the girls to their favorite Hindi songs, I wasn’t their classroom teacher; instead I was a friend or maybe a little like an older sister. Such icebreaking moments are really important for my relationship with these young girls, many of whom live at the boarding school far away from their homes and families. Dancing and playing with them has made them more comfortable around me, and now some of them are comfortable approaching me with problems with their friends or family or with their own feelings of homesickness. I need to play with the students because it’s through play that we can truly become closer.

Through all these moments of play, I’m learning to break through the shyness that some of the students still have around me. And this is my real work. Because when the students overcome their shyness and nervousness around me, they talk more with me. Simply by becoming comfortable talking with me, they improve their English speaking skills (which is, after all, what I’m supposed to be teaching.) More importantly, some of them are now comfortable telling me about their worries or their homesickness, and then I can try to offer them emotional support. So for me, play is work. Right now in order to do my work as I understand it, that is, to be a mentor for the girls and help them with their English at the same time, I need to play with them. Finally, work and play for me are one and the same.

A Day in the Life

2009-10-23T23:13:00.000-07:00

Photo of the four volunteers on our way to attend a wedding. Sarah and I had to wear saris for the first time in honor of the occasion. (Left to Right: Cameron, Sarah, Tyler, Me).

I wore a sari for my first Indian wedding last month, but that was a special occaison. After almost two months in Kerala, my life has begun to take on a regular routine. My work at the Nicholson Girls’ Higher Secondary School and in the nearby town of Tiruvalla has finally settled into a pattern that I can now share with you. Here is a breakdown of my average day:

• 7:00 – Wake up. All the girls at the school are already up by this time. They get up sometime between 4:30 and 6:30, depending on their age. In the morning some of the older girls study, and all the younger girls do exercise drills.
• 8:00 – Breakfast.
• 8:30 – Read the daily South Indian newspaper.
• 9:30-10:00 – Teach Christmas carols to one of the classes. In December the school will perform a carol service, and I’m in charge of teaching the girls English Christmas carols for them to sing at the program. These songs include traditional hymns like “Away in a Manger” and “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” as well as some less common songs that are personal favorites of mine, such as “Do You Hear What I Hear?” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”
• 10:00-12:30 – Morning classes. I teach a few conversational English classes every morning. The purpose of these classes is to get the girls’ comfortable speaking in English because in Kerala everyone speaks to each other using their native language, which is Malayalam. I teach a wide variety of ages: preschool (where they are just learning the English alphabet) through eighth grade (where some are fluent in English).
• 1:00 – Lunch.
• 2:00-4:30 – Afternoon classes. Twice a week I teach afternoon classes at Nicholson. The rest of the week, I spend my afternoons in Tiruvalla doing other work. For example, I’m helping a local ecumenical organization that explores progressive perspectives on contemporary social issues in India. These issues can include concerns over identity politics, poverty, homosexuality, social discrimination based on caste, etc. It’s a great opportunity for me to get out of the close environment of the boarding school and engage more actively with relevant issues of social justice in Kerala.
• 4:30 – Afternoon tea. This is a necessary part of everyone’s day in Kerala. I have my afternoon tea and snack with the students. It’s a great time to sit and talk casually with them as we munch on sweet rolls, bananas, or vegetable-filled croissants.
• 5:00-6:00 – Free time/ Recess. I often spend this time playing games with the students. Basketball, badminton, duck-duck-goose, jump-rope, Uno, etc. The exception is on Mondays, when I teach a class at an evening school hosted by a local church. This evening school is particularly for children from poorer families who can’t go to regular school or who need extra help with their homework.
• 6:30-7:30 – Malayalam lesson. I have a fabulous Malayalam teacher at Nicholson who tutors me every night, as I struggle to learn the local language.
• 8:00 – Dinner.
• 8:30-11:00 – Me time. In the evening I get time to myself when I can read, write in my journal, build the next days lesson plans, etc.

Daily Joys and Challenges

My days here are filled with major and minor joys and challenges. Everyday something fills me with delight, but everyday I also face problems and challenges with which I seriously struggle.

One of the greatest challenges for me is the language barrier. English is one of the official languages of India, but in Kerala, no one really speaks in English. I learned when I arrived here that India is broken into fourteen different states. The divisions of these states are based on language. So, each of the fourteen states has its own language (and its own unique culture too), which everyone speaks there but which isn’t spoken in any other state in India. That’s why everyone has to learn English and Hindi in school. In Kerala, the language is Malayalam, and although every student learns English in school and college lectures and admission exams are in English, all daily conversation in Kerala is conducted in Malayalam. And, of course, since people don’t regularly speak in English, many of the students and teachers aren’t completely comfortable speaking English. So I have to work through this language barrier everyday in the classes I teach and in my relationships with the students and teachers at the school.

So, of course, I’m very motivated to learn Malayalam because I want to understand people when they speak and I want to strengthen my relationships with improved communication. I study with a tutor every night, and slowly, I am learning. But Malayalam is supposedly the second most difficult language in the world, after Mandarin Chinese. There are 56 letters in the Malayalam alphabet, but since all the vowels have a separate symbol that is used in the middle of words and some letters contract to form new letters, I think there are closer to 100 letters in Malayalam. And some of the letters represent sounds that I can’t pronounce correctly no matter how I try. Hopefully, this gives you some idea of how much of a struggle Malayalam is for me. But as I said, I am learning. I know the alphabet. I can count to 100 and say the colors. I know 20-some verbs, and I can say that “I have one older brother; his name is Benjamin.” But it’s very difficult. And I can’t express complicated ideas in Malayalam, and sometimes, even in English, abstract concepts are lost in translation. So at the school, it’s often difficult to talk about my opinions on climate change, or the unequal distribution of wealth in India, or gender and racial discrimination. I should point out that this is not always the case. I’ve had some wonderful conversations with people both at Nicholson and outside of the school, but the language barrier is always present in some way, shape, or form, and deep, meaningful communication is sometimes a challenge.

But despite the challenges, my life here is also full of joy. Every day holds something that delights me. Often these joys come from simple, small things, like a successful Malayalam conversation with one of the kitchen workers or eating my favorite Kerala food for breakfast. Here are some of the other daily joys that fill by new life here in Kerala:

• The smiles of the students when they tell me about their family or their favorite foods.
• The way some of the teachers will take my hand or touch my arm when they say hello as a sign of my inclusion in the sorority that exists among women here.
• Being greeted by people on the street who recognize me from one place or another.
• The many different kinds of bananas that I am always sampling. I’ve had at least seven or eight different kinds since coming to Kerala, and they’re wonderful. Most are miniature bananas and are sweeter and smoother than the one kind of banana we have in the States.
• The way the fifth grade girls, in whose dormitory my room is located, will sometimes knock on my door in the evening, just to say goodnight.
• The lingering smell of sandalwood soap after I bathe.
• The openness of the girls who bring me the stories and poems that they write in English so that I can help them with their creative writing.
• The sweet-sour taste of passion fruit.
• The practice of 4pm tea and the opportunity it provides for relaxation.
• The peace of sitting quietly in my room in the evening as I reflect on the past day.
• The joy of recognizing, of truly seeing, all the beauty that surrounds me here.

Adjusting to India

2009-09-23T01:47:00.001-07:00

Me with the three other volunteers in Kerala and Father Thomas John, our site coordinator. (Left to right: Sarah, Cynthia, Cameron, Father Thomas John, Tyler)

It was raining at 3am when our flight arrived in India on September 2. As I stepped outside the airport, Kerala hit me like a wave. The heat, the smells, the people, the car horns (even at 3am). The rain. September and October are the months that end the rainy season in Kerala. It doesn’t rain every day, but more than once I’ve had the pleasure of falling asleep to heavy rain or thunderstorms. It has now been three weeks since I arrived in Kerala, and I am amazed at how quickly I’ve adjusted to my new life here.

Food:
The food in Kerala is wonderful. I know many Americans (including myself) who say, “I love Indian food.” As I’ve learned over the past few weeks, there is no such thing as “Indian” food. The food I ate at Indian restaurants in the U.S. is very different from the food I’m eating here. This is Kerala cuisine. The staple food in Kerala (and in most Asian countries) is rice. I think I’ve eaten more rice in the last three weeks than I have in the 22 years that came before. But I’ve also tasted rice in a greater variety of forms than I ever knew existed. Rice paddies, rice noodles, flat rice bread, raised rice bread, rice I sweet drinks, rice with curry, boiled rice, baked rice, etc. Each rice dish has it’s own distinct flavor and texture, and I’m only now beginning to differentiate between some of the dishes.

I admit that, although the food here is excellent, I’ve had many moments in the last three weeks when I’ve longed for cold cereal for breakfast or a plate of spaghetti for dinner instead of another unknown and very spicy curry. I’ve caught myself missing all the familiar comfort foods, like peanut butter or brownies or minestrone soup. It has certainly taken time for me to get used to the spicy, rice-heavy foods in Kerala. But I think I have (mostly) adjusted to the new cuisine. This past week I’ve been excited about certain foods here that I know I like: packed rice noodles and coconut for breakfast, potato curry and flat rice bread for dinner. I’m pleased to say that Kerala’s cuisine has welcomed me with open arms and that, after three weeks, I’m happy to embrace it back.

Clothing:
After our first week in Kerala, Sarah (the other female volunteer) and I adopted Indian clothing. Now in public I almost always wear a churidhar. Churidhars are the outfits traditionally worn by young women, although they are becoming more common among women of all ages because they’re more comfortable than saris. A churidhar consists of full-length baggy pants, a short-sleeve tunic that falls approximately to the knees, and a scarf that drapes back off the shoulders. The whole ensemble is a little tricky to put on because the tunic is tailor-made to fit your body. I also find the outfit a bit stifling in Kerala’s hot, humid climate. If I were in this climate back home, I would be wearing shorts and a tank top. But, of course here, showing that much skin would be inappropriate. As I adjust to wearing the churidar, I have discovered that they are actually very comfortable, and because they include less fabric than a traditional sari, they’re probably also cooler. More importantly I’ve found that when I’m wearing a churidhar, everyone is more welcoming and friendly with me. That’s not to say that people in Kerala aren’t normally friendly, but it’s somehow different when I’m wearing Indian clothing. The women in particular seem to appreciate my (rather clumsy) attempt to take part in this aspect of their culture, as though my clothing were an acknowledgement of the value and beauty of Indian culture, which, I guess, it is. Churidhars, like saris, are beautiful, and they seem to me all the more beautiful because they are expressions of the culture from whence they come. With coordinated colors and patterns, they act as paint brushes on the streets, lighting up the towns and the countryside of Kerala. And when I wear my churidhar, I feel included and welcomed into this colorful solidarity of Indian women and their culture.

Weather:
Kerala is too hot for me. Perhaps that’s because I grew up in northern Minnesota where winter lasts about six months and “summer” only two. Yet, September in Kerala, which feels like an unusually hot Minnesota summer, isn’t even one of the hot months here. Summer comes in March, April, and May, and then it will really be too hot for me. I think it’s the humidity more than anything else. The air is heavy and damp with about 80% humidity every day and 100% on the days when it rains. Slowly, I’m adjusting to the hot, sticky weather. Now, when I walk into an air-conditioned building, the cold air is shocking to me, and I’m actually glad that most places, including houses and schools, do not have AC. Living in this climate will be a continuous challenge for me, but I think it’s a challenge that I can meet.

Since my early morning arrival in India on the September 2, I’ve been trying to discern and describe the air here and particularly the smell of the air. Of course, I’m not in a large Indian city like Delhi or Calcutta, which are full of smells of people. All I can say for certain is that the air in Kerala smells different than the air at home. It’s not the stereotype of Indian air that smells of spices (unless you’re near the kitchen). I think the air is sweeter and dustier here than it is in Minnesota. It is full of life. Like the air in a sports stadium full of people is alive, but also like the scent of a greenhouse, full of the smell of green growing things. But maybe it’s just the humidity. The texture of the air. It presses against you, hugging you as though to welcome you.

New Beginnings

2009-08-12T09:18:00.000-07:00

In a few weeks, I will begin a new chapter in my life. On August 31 I will leave the country and fly to Kerala, the southwestern-most district of India. I will spend the next year there serving as a Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) through the Presbyterian Church (USA).

I’m excited about the joys and challenges that this next year will bring. I will be keeping this blog as a way of charting my experiences over the next year both for myself and for any family and friends who are interested in hearing about my time as a YAV. Although I won’t have much to post here until I’ve been in India for a little while, I can, for now, give you an overview of the work I will probably be doing next year.

I will be living and working at the Nicholson Syrian Girls’ School in Tiruvalla, a boarding school for girls with the equivalent of grades K-12. I will be teaching spoken English classes to a variety of age groups and maybe a literature class or two for the older students. I will also probably be leading the school choir and helping students with creative writing exercises, such as writing poetry and short stories. If you want to learn more about the Nicholson School, you can visit the school’s website at www.nicholsonsyriangirlsschool.com.

Look for some updates on my experiences in India (after I actually get there) in September and October!

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow if I can.
-J.R.R. Tolkien