Zach Greenberger says: “I just got back today it gave me a new appreciation for living in a first world nation but, it raised a lot of questions in my mind. Whether it’s possible to help as an outsider it’s a very complex situation?… the US is in an odd position because of how little history it has. Other countries have had to deal with so much more. Their cultures are so fragmented.” it’s hard to know what to protect, and what to do away with so much has been lost already”.
Day One
Let me start by saying that cobras are terrifying. I have no idea how often they actually bite people. Or maybe they just spit poison into our eyes or something. Either way, I feel no shame in posting these pictures where I’m clearly uncomfortable. When I handed back the cobra, one of the Indian onlookers asked me if I’d been drinking. I wonder what he meant by that.
Holding the cobra was the emotional highlight of my first day here in Delhi, but it was a tight race between that, petting an elephant and shaking hands with a monkey. If I’d ridden a tiger, I could head back to the US completely satisfied (not to mention die having lead a full and productive life). The elephant felt amazing. Like an incredibly old shoe. The monkey’s hand felt like sandpaper.
I should say that I’m not a fan of animal servitude. It’s abomination. But it also exposes people to animals they’d never see otherwise, which fosters an appreciation and hopefully inspires us to support conversation. For my part, I give enough to World Wildlife Fund to appease my guilt.
Speaking of WWF, here’s our last tuktuk driver of the day who wanted to talk about American wrestling. I wish my uncle Bill was there. Except then we never would have fit in the tuktuk. They only sit three and there were four of us. That meant that I, apparently the most adventurous (no one else held the cobra) sat up front with the driver. Or rather, half sat, half held onto the roof and leaned back every time a car passed us too close.
Getting around was pretty easy. Tuktuks are plentiful and don’t get bogged down in traffic. The most stressful part is from being unfamiliar with the people and customs. It’s hard to tell those being helpful from those trying to sell you hashish. Some people do both.
Day Two
Digging is hard. I can only do it for about seven minutes with intensity. After that, I have to rest and catch my breath. Maybe for two minutes. Digging was my world over the four and a half hours we were at our work site. The location is a vacant lot agancent to an existing brick house. We were supposed to tear down a thatch shack and replace it with a brick building, but there was some problem with the home-owner’s participation in the project. So we trekked over to another location, through streets of mud and sewage, between throngs of children practicing their Hi’s and Bye’s. I can’t quite wrap my head around what I saw. It’s less heartbreaking than the children begging for money in the street. But these might be the same children. Maybe when I come to them it changes the relationship. I’m no longer a traveller to be propositioned for handouts. I am hired help, digging ditches and moving dirt.
The neighbourhood is an eclectic mix of concrete bunkers, one and two story brick buildings, wooden storefronts, and thatched huts. Families are in and out of all of these: working in the street, playing games, walking goats. Chickens trot around under the ambivalent stares of roosters. Their calls ring out now and then, again and again telling me to wake up.
Again and again I scrape dirt, clay, and trash from our growing trenches. Buried bricks offer a break where I can drop to my knees and dig with my hands. I was not prepared for this. I could use better gloves, and better boots. There must be better shovels. Why hasn’t someone made this easier? Why am I here? Why do I keep going? I slam the shovel into the clay and kick it deeper with my boot. I push down to pull up as much clay as possible. I think about the six hours a day I sit behind a computer screen. I think about the ways I fall short, and how laziness has plagued my life. It’s not so hard to keep going. It only hurts.
Every hour and a half, we walk back to the community centre for a break and a snack. It’s a ten minute walk through a less chaotic part of the slum. A good portion of the walk is along a paved road separating us from a wide expanse of open land. Giant powerlines loom off in the faded distance. The children play in the street that no cars drive. They run out a few meters into the open land for games and hunts. It’s mostly women and children here, a reverse of the city where young men mill about and seem drawn to me; eager to help in hopes of some compensation. The children busy themselves with games of all sorts: badminton with ping pong paddles, rollerblading in skates twice too big with flip-flops for wrist guards. Jump-rope. For every two playing, there are four more watching, subverting. Then one or two orbiting at a distance. Maybe a 2 year old wearning no pants.
The men, who are around, those not working stands selling small pre-packaged junk food, seem of a different type than their neighbours. Their clothes are clean and their hair is brushed. Some ride the alleys on Japanese motorbikes, honking at every cross street just like the Tuktuks saying, “Here I am, watch yourself”. While the children smile through oddly straight teeth shining a brilliant white, these men do not. They don’t quite frown. They don’t pay much attention at all. My imagination sees in their faces a bitter disappointment. Fifteen years ago, these were children chasing after foreigners, laughing and shouting because someone new had come and things were going to change.
Let me be clear, I do not feel like a saviour. Seeing us, no one could make that mistake. We’re a bunch of westerners come into the slums to dig ditches. Many of these people are day labourers and know how ditches should be dug. I can’t be sure what they think, but they stand and watch. They pull up chairs. At the very least we’re entertainment. The ditches I dig are uneven. The bricks I will lay will be crooked. I cannot impress them with the quality of my work. So I dig harder and show them at least I will entertain.
Day Three
Today was easier in a way. We knew where to go, and we knew what to do. It’s hard being in a new place, but as we get more familiar, we can focus more on our project goals. That easing enables more hours of more efficient back-breaking labour. If yesterday was our introduction to digging, today was our perfection of dirt management. It’s not just about how you move it, but also where. All in, we had to move about 240 cubic feet of dirt. I won’t say that I moved more than my fair share, but I held my own. I figure that’s about 1000 pounds of dirt. I can’t tell if that sounds like a lot, but I can say it took me a solid eight hours of strenuous work to break it up and move. By the end of the day, the mason started laying the base of bricks and raising the rebar columns that will support the front wall of the house. About this time, the home-owner lit some incense, and offered up some sweet treats to the gods by tossing them at the base of each column. The smell alone dramatically changed the tone of setting. It took a smelly worksite, filled with sweaty armatures, and turned it into the scene of home being raised.
Our ride back to the hotel was interrupted by a flat tire. The driver and his helper did an impressive job of swapping the dud out for a dusty spare they pulled from the belly of the bus. He laid a white cloth on the ground, covering some significant mud, and made sure to lay square across it, working the jack flat on his back. The whole operation took about fifteen minutes, which was enough time to walk down the street to a small Hindu temple. It was a fairly industrial building, but with a marble floored courtyard in the centre. I removed my shoes and explored a bit. There was a bell with some colourful streamers tied to the clapper. I asked the proprietor if I should ring it, but he gestured me to an alcove at the back of the temple. My fingers had been up near the streamers and pushed them gently as I walked away. A few dozen flies swarmed from the bell and dispersed. The alcove contained the temple’s main altar. I sat for a few moments at the mat beneath the diorama of some Hindu god whose figure seemed dark and nondescript. I don’t pray, so I sat there taking it all in. I’m open to being caught up in the spirit of a place, but that wasn’t going to happen here. I got up to leave and put 100rp in the donation box (about $2). The proprietor handed me an orange hued sweet sitting on a paper wrapper. This was the same type of sweet offered to the house by our home-owner. One of the other teams had been given them to try, but took our supervisor’s advice and abstained from gift food. One guy gave his to a goat; another gave hers to a little boy. The boy liked it more than the goat. I’m pretty adventurous in what I’ll try, but Delhi is a dirty city, and even if the sweet was prepared with care, it likely sat among the flies for a time.
The rides home seem infinitely longer than those to the work site. Every bump in every road sends waves of discomfort through our tired bodies. The cacophony of horns from Tuktuks darting around us sound more scolding after such a hard day’s work. We start the ride on a high from our exertion, eager to go out at night and explore the city. But two hours later, fatigue has set in; muscles have hardened; turned to stone. Still, after a few hours of milling about, we gather as a group and walk over to the ‘American Themed’ restaurant, Rodeo. The Indian staff is dressed in Black Country garb, complete with chaps and holsters, neckerchiefs and cowboy hats. I find it ironic, this eastern version of cowboys and Indians. I wonder if they know the villains wear black. The space is surprisingly authentic, with heavy black iron hinges on all the doors, including the swinging saloon doors to the rest room. The food is Mexican, all prepared with the Indian supplies at hand. My shrimp were bathed in a chilly sauce so tangy and pungent it made my eyes burn just smelling it.
Every night, I stay up a bit later, and sleep a bit longer. My body is adapting to its position on the planet; adapting to the strain I subject it to. I miss the time I’d spend awake in the early morning, the world still dark and quiet.
Day Four
Out on a limb here, thinking the best way to start any day is by watching a herd (tribe?) of monkeys stampede by your window. There’s this drained swimming pool in back of the hotel, bordered on two sides by tall trees. It looked as if the baboons were descending from the treas, crossing the pool deck, on their way into the city. Sixty million years of evolution. Right before my eyes. If this is a daily occurrence, I’ll get some photos tomorrow. I will start from the window outside my room, and work my way closer as my fears allow. If I go all Good halls and run off with the tribe, give my comic books to Nate.
Now let’s talk about swastikas. The symbol is one of the earliest known to mankind, dating back to 5000 BC, with its origins tied to that of the cross symbol. It’s theorized that any basket weaving society would discover the symbol within their craft. The natural progression of a woven basket results in a swastika pattern as the bottom centre of the basket radiates outward. The swastika has been an important symbol in Hinduism since at least 300 AD. Facing right it represents evolution; facing left involution. Its four arms pointing in all four cardinal directions give the symbol a representation of stability. The symbol is ubiquitous within Hindu temples. The blue elephant god Ganesh is often depicted sitting on a lotus flower on a bed of swastikas.
More recently it has been used by western Europeans for other purposes.
I explain all of this so that when I say I spent the entire day hauling bricks, each with the imprint of a swastika, and that I found the work fulfilling, you will understand the context. The irony is not lost on me that I went from digging trenches on the frontlines of poverty, to assembly-line service surrounded by that symbol. Am I a prisoner of war? If I am, my enemy is not the people for whom I work. Most likely it’s western guilt, but maybe it’s also the whole damn system that gives me what I have and these other people, nothing.
All in, I estimate I moved 300 bricks. If you’re ever given the choice between moving bricks and digging ditches, go with the bricks. There’s a clear rhythm to it of pick-up and drop-off, with some time to walk, and some time to rest built in. Digging is incessant, unending. I realize I’m obsessed with quantifying my efforts. I would like to be the sort who works with a detached mind, against no measurements. I get a glimpse of that through my own ignorance of the process. I have no idea how many more bricks I will move today. Our supervisor says ‘more’ and I move more. He tells me ‘deeper’, and I dig deeper. I make little deals with myself that I will take just ten more steps, but when those are behind me, I have to make a new deal. But I still keep vague count of my totals. I stack them up and divide them by the pain in my body. For every five bricks I move, my muscles ache this-much. This is not news to me. I keep track of things. I look deeper. I don’t let things go. Nirvana, the abandonment of self, is not in my future. But that’s alright. I’m doing okay in this world. I’ll leave the next to the Brahmans.
After work today, most everyone else went out to the Bollywood film Paa. It was supposed to be an eastern version of Benjamin Button, but in India that means the little boy had Progeria. So I skipped that and caught up on some photo uploads. I also bought a belt so my pants would stop falling down. It’s funny how things like that become incredibly inconvenient when one is hauling bricks. Finding a US to India power adaptor was a bit more complicated. You cannot walk through the centre of town without attracting the attention of local men, looking to assist foreigners however they can. I’m still not clear on how this whole system works, but it makes me very uncomfortable. I started out fine, asking a few men to leave me alone. I put in my headphones to feign deafness. But after being directed from one shop to another, none having what I needed, I let myself be guided by an older man who spoke formal English and talked about his brother in Colorado. He took me to a shop that looked promising, but still turned up nothing. He told me they would have one in five minutes, brought down from a shop a few streets over. In the meantime, we should go to his shop of Kashmiri handicrafts. I’ve heard such amazing things about Kashmir, a region like Israel that is forever in dispute because of its beauty and long history. I’ve also heard of tourists paying for tours to the region and finding themselves kidnapped having to buy their own freedom. So while I was nervous about it, I followed him down an alley and upstairs to his shop. It was a cramped and winding staircase with display cases lining the walls exhibiting handmade boxes and notepads. The narrow hallway opened into a small room packed with scarves, carpets and jewellery. It was all quite lovely, but I had no confidence the jewellery was worth the price they were asking. There’s no way of knowing, I suppose. I ended up buying a twenty dollar cashmere scarf. Or was it a Kashmir scarf? That barely matters as it was bought out of obligation, so I don’t mind if I overpaid. It also sets off my eyes nicely. I was able to leave without much sleeve pulling, which gave me a good feeling about my guide. But returning to the electronics shop, they had nothing for me. This began a mile long trek from shop to shop looking for my adaptor. We finally ended up in an underground market built off the metro tunnels. This was very similar to Saigon Plaza in Los Angeles, with vendor stalls packed tight together and tighter with cheap merchandise. The second shop we visited had what I was looking for. I bought two. I thanked my guide and let him take me to one more carpet shop in which he had a stake before heading home. On the way, I asked him if I should feel safe in Delhi. I told him how other men had approached me offering hashish, and that made me feel in danger. He agreed it was dangerous, but then asked me if I would like some. I think maybe this is the whole point of the thing. These men, young and old befriend tourists and lead them to hash dens. I don’t know what happens there, but I’m not willing to go so far outside public view as to find out. I’ll pet a cobra any day over that. The next time I am approached with offers of help, I will try my luck at telling them right off the bat that I’m not interested in hash. If that’s the magic opt-out, I’ll consider myself well prepared to wander the city a bit more.
I’m a bit ashamed to say that on my way home, I stopped at the Park Hotel. It’s a five-star with gourmet restaurant and full service spa facilities. I got a discount group rate for the rest of my team, but couldn’t resist a sixty minute Balinese massage to end my day. There is a pleasure to the complete abandon with which I’ve approached my work and the pain I feel is constant reminder of this. Submitting to this kind of pampering takes much of that pleasure away, but I can live with that. Holding onto my pain is its own form of selfishness, and I was more than happy to give that up; yielding it to oil and pressure. I walked back to my hotel, leaving behind the lush splendour of The Park, taking a bit home with me in my loosened muscles.
Day Five
Remember all that stuff I said about swastikas? It’s all true, and I do take it to heart. But it’s still very satisfying to sit on a giant pile of swastika bricks and smash them to pieces with a hammer. Shattered bricks line the bottom of the septic tank pit, so we spent a solid hour smashing a few hundred bricks. With the right focus, directed in the right spot, one good hit can split the brick into just the right sized pieces. The rest of the day was spent hauling bricks and rocks from one location to another.
First we started carrying them by hand (eight per trip is my comfort zone), but later borrowed a rickshaw to load up a hundred at a time and wheel them over to where the masons needed them. There’s been a natural progression from the base labour where we started to using tools and mechanics to make our work easier. My body had gotten used to the strain, and now that it’s lessened, so has my interest. I’m sure I would have bored of the digging by now also, but I find myself seeking out the more strenuous tasks on site. The brick shards need to be further smashed and levelled once laid in the pit. We do this with a weighted compactor mounted at the bottom of thick bamboo stick. You lift it a few feet off the ground, and then slam it down onto the shards. It’s exhausting and creates blisters almost immediately.
Every day at lunch, we feast on three or four dishes prepared by a local woman who has started her own catering company. These are consistently our best meals in Delhi, cantered around lentils and rice, and then a few (sometimes exotic) vegetable dishes. The saag paneer was the best I’ve had, and there was a carrot stew that was amazing. The carrots here are bright red-orange and taste a bit like sugar beets. The food at the hotel, which is included in our rate, is similar, but not quite as good. Breakfast especially is repetitive, but we have our own supply of local fruit to distract us. Twice now we’ve gone to local Indian restaurants to see what else is out there. I’m invariably drawn to the same lentils and rice I have every meal. Each time it’s different, but always delicious.
Before dinner tonight we stopped by a shop for musical instruments. They sell pianos and guitars, violins and violas. But their main item is the sitar; big ones, little ones, and teensy baby ones. They range from $150 to $1000 dollars, but are all beautiful and works of art unto themselves. We asked to hear one and the proprietor went out to the street and pulled in and old man. He played a slow and solemn song, and sang at times, but only with the do-ray-me-fas of the scale as lyrics. Katrina bought one of the less expensive ones for her brother the musician, and got a massive case that to keep it safe on her travels. I’d love to have one, but the strings are tiny and dig into my fingers, and the rhythm is so far beyond me, I am left behind uncomprehending.
Our last stop of the night was at the chemists, where with the right research you can find some interesting pharmaceuticals available without a prescription. The last time I was here, I rediscovered ambient. This time I got recommendations for some muscle relaxants that nicely take the edge off my aches and pains. As with most things here, medicine is priced for the market and I got a few dozen pills for five dollars. I’m not sure if this pricing is evidence of our victimization at the hands of the drug companies, or evidence of India’s violation of intellectual property laws. Either way, it suggests the world is out of balance. This is the overall theme of any trip like this, where we with so much work side by side with them with so little.
We’ve now passed the halfway mark for workdays on our project. The walls of our house are slowly coming up. Members of our team are slowly dropping down. This one has a stomach illness, that one a flu. One left to return to her sick father. One smashed a finger hauling bricks. I’m getting what I came for in that my enthusiasm for the place is wearing down. Visiting the same site, along the same roads, every day breeds familiarity. Likewise, the slum children are adjusting to our presence, following us with less frequency, more captivated by their games and conflicts than our comings and goings. I feel less like a tourist, and more like an immigrant.
Day Six
Moved bricks. Mixed cement.
Day Seven
Maybe I got addicted to the endorphin rush of so much strenuous exercise, and now that it’s diminished, so has my enthusiasm for the work. We’re still at it four or five hours a day, but now there are breaks and a bit of milling about. Or maybe it’s the context under which we’re working. I know it’s hard to imagine a worse context than incessant digging, but there was a simple satisfaction to that. All we do now is haul bricks and sand and cement and rocks. The masons are busy laying the walls of the septic tank, and soon will cap that and build up the walls of the house. They’ve let us lay a brick here and there, but seem unhappy with our work. So they keep us busy moving building supplies closer and closer to the action. Often, we step on each others’ toes. My sand pile keeps the cement from getting where it needs to go, so it must again be moved. For the last two days we’ve laboured under the scowling eye of a new supervisor. Speaking no English, he still keeps us updated on what a bad job we’re doing. For even the most menial tasks (like shovelling sand into a rickshaw), he’ll pull the tool from our hands to show us how it’s to be done. And when the time comes to direct the load onto the dumping pile, he takes the lead, lest we dump it wrong. There’s a special kind of shame in being deemed too dumb for mindless work.
As the work loses us, we find ways of busying ourselves. I sulk. That’s working well for me. Katrina gets in tighter with the children, learning names and playing games. Their favourite being when she takes their photograph, then they rush her to be the first to see the image played back on the tiny screen. Recently, she’s started chasing them, in a sort of tickle-monster pose, sending them fleeing down the street.
It’s hard to explain, just how distracting the throngs of children and onlookers are to the work. These are narrow alleys, and at any time there might be six adults and twelve children getting between us and our tasks. Mostly they watch. A few brave ones strike up conversations. These consist of saying hello and asking us our names. Sometimes they try to repeat it back to us. Sometimes they get it close. I do no better reproducing their names. We’re just not used to each others’ sounds. One of the home-owner’s sons was having one of these conversations with me, while nearby a handicapped boy flailed around a bit. I think he has muscular dystrophy. He walks with limbs akimbo, and grins wildly, but seems to follow what’s going on pretty well. The son gestures to this boy in a variety of ways, pointing and waggling his fingers. Finally he points and says, “Potato”. Or maybe there’s a Hindi word that sounds similar. Either way, his meaning was clear.
The hours we work make it difficult to take care of our daily needs. We leave and return outside the hours of the hotel’s business centre, so rarely have access to internet. I post these updates through a rube-Goldberg pairing of my cell phone and laptop. We’re often too tired to venture out from the hotel at night. Our rock hard mattresses surprisingly exert a magnetic pull once we come into range. For this reason, along with a few others (I want to contribute to the slum economy; I want to show the locals I’m here to interact with them) I decide to get a slum haircut. Like most small businesses in Bawana, the barbers setup shop on the side of a wider alley. There are no permits, and no rents. I imagine there’s significant pressure to keep out of the way of traffic, and that territories fall under some type of local supervision. Our community centre, laying at the intersection of two larger alleys is lucky enough to have a pair of barbers right on the corner. There’s often a queue of men waiting for a trim and a shave. The barbers, shockingly young, work with deft fingers to cut, and a vigorous lather to shave. Each one takes about twenty minutes. I was lucky to have only one boy ahead of me when I sat to wait my turn. My team members who came out from their lunch break to document the process served to attract even more local attention. By the time I took my seat and received my smock, there were twenty men, women and children around. Our project coordinator stood by, insuring a decent translation for my instructions (“shorter”) and my fears (“make sure he uses a fresh blade to clean up”). If the crowd made him nervous, my barber did not show it. I’ve gotten faster haircuts, but never with just scissors, and never with such precision and care. It took about fifteen minutes. I was curious to try the shave, but I’m more curious to see where my beard will go in another week or two. When he dusted me off with baby powder and took away the smock, I faced the crowd and asked what they thought, “Acha?” (“Okay?”). There were actual applause, and not just a few. This turned out to be one of the most satisfying interactions I’ve had on the site. I’m often working with skilled tradesmen, but as an untrained subordinate. This was a more normalized exchange between a patron and a vendor. Volunteering is one thing, but it felt nice to participate directly in the services of the community I was there to help. Maybe next I will see if I can find a dentist…
This ends our last full day of labour. On Monday, we visit an orphanage in the morning, and Tuesday we tour the work sites and say our goodbyes in the afternoon. The rest of the trip is sightseeing. I have mixed feelings about the work I’ve done. On the one hand, my efforts saved the homeowner from having to hire additional labourers. This expense, while paltry compared to how much I’ve paid to be here, is a major savings for them. On the other hand, I don’t feel like I’ve contributed to any greater good, or made progress towards some grand solution. And the region is desperately in need of one. I’ve felt this way before when donating my time or my money, and I suspect this fear will nag at me through all my charitable endeavours. Perhaps a good measure of an activity’s worth is whether the social good one contributes outweighs the sense of self satisfaction earned by the contributor? It’s hard to be objective about such an evaluation. I tend to be stingy on both fronts.
And the other side of the coin is that the slums of Bawana are a thriving, functioning community. The children seem happy, the mothers seem busy, and the goats wear sweaters. Yes there is disease and poverty and hunger, (and to be clear, I am against those things), but when you see it every day, and accept it as the status quo, then all your hopes and dreams start from there. And there is opportunity for escape. The children study computers at the community centre; the women manage micro loans for small businesses; the men work their trade. I don’t believe there’s a thing I can do to speed the development of Bawana into something I would find more civilized, but I also don’t believe that’s a tragedy. It’s just life.
Day Eight
Today was our first day off after six of working on the site. Normally projects go four days on, one day off for two weeks. But we’re saving our R&R for two days of tours at the end. I didn’t mind the longer work week, but this rest would have been more satisfying if we’d ended on a high note. As it was, we agreed that it’s been anti-climactic, with the work petering out near the end. A day of rest after day-two would have felt like heaven. The day was further sullied by the nasty cold I came down with last night. I don’t want to dwell on it, as it’s very common for being so far from home in these conditions. At least half of us have it. But to get an accurate impression of my day, picture all of this with me snotty and wobbly.
There’s been a bit of grumbling about the food. Most of it has been excellent, but I hear talk of cravings for pizza and pasta; staples of western life. For me, it’s been great. I could eat lentils and rice day and night. But to add some variety to our diet, we walked over to the Park Hotel. This has become our getaway when we need a bit of a five-star recharge (tomorrow we’re taking a yoga class there). The buffet was pretty great, with lots of fresh fruit and the breakfast staples you’d expect. There was also a nice selection of international foods, mostly non-Indian. I had some steamed fish with vegetables that was a nice change of pace. My tastes may put me out of touch with the rest of my team, but it was a joy to see them so happy with their dumplings and juices.
At noon, we boarded the bus for a team trip to a handicraft bazaar. While most markets are an organic collection of stalls and shops, grown up over the grime of the city, this was a curate assembly of artisans and more of a craft fair than a shopping mall. We’ve all been accosted by merchants while trying to sneak glances at their wares through open doorways. They’ll chase us down the street, trying to entice us inside. The few times I’ve gone along, I’ve been bombarded with endless presentations of rugs and scarves, necklaces and paintings. I don’t mind so much, but it’s fairly high-pressure and a bit tricky to get out of without emptying your wallet. The most recent time, I was sitting through a series of ‘ancient’ karma sutra paintings, overlaid on pages from ‘ancient’ manuscripts. I was considering a particularly naughty one, when I noticed the back of the page had an illustration of a man talking on the telephone. “An ancient telephone”, I was assured. When the shopkeeper started crooning to me the purported lyrics written on the page, I bid a hasty retreat. This bazaar was a nice change of pace from things like that. All the staples of the tourist trade were there, but in a more relaxed atmosphere. There was still a lot of haggling to be done, but it struck me as commerce in captivity. A good rule of thumb I found is to refuse to pay more than one third the original asking price. I’m sure that’s still a coup for the vendor, but at least we feel we put up a good fight. I picked up a few gifts (stay tuned people, if you’ve been good you’ll get one) and saw some neat stuff. The most impressive was some carved sandalwood that I can best compare to a transformer. One was a large model of a pockewatch that split open like a ladybug’s wings to reveal tiny, detailed models of the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort. Each of those split further to reveal their inner workings. There were numerous other details that sprung forth behind hidden doors and latches. There were similar models of a sitar and an India bride, each with their collection of secret compartments and intricate dioramas hidden within. No I didn’t buy any of them, though I fear I could not have resisted a sandalwood Optimus Prime. Maybe he would have transformed into Gandhi? Best. Ever.
Everyone seemed pleased with their purchases. Some were most happy with the price they won, others the find they found. My roommate, Patrick, picked up some amazing umbrellas and a thin carpet, embroidered with all sorts of Indian flare. The only thing I got for myself were some linen handkerchiefs to keep from wiping my nose on my wrist. They make me feel like a snotty old man in a rather pleasing way.
Tonight I heard talk of Dominos Pizza and massage circles to prepare us for our work tomorrow, but I am more than content here in my room. Now properly medicated, I’ve got a nice taste of freedom from my symptoms. I’ll read for a bit, and they head off to sleep. In the morning we visit the children’s home that houses an orphanage and hospital. I expect it to be sobering, but I want to see it. The children here have been such a source of joy and optimism and I hope a glimmer of that can be seen even amongst these least fortunate.
Day Nine
We got to sleep in a bit today as we skipped the work site this morning and went on a tour of a nearby children’s home. This is a private facility supported by donors for caring for a variety of needy children. The home was founded in the seventies to house children who’d been abandoned. Many of these children have developmental or physical handicaps so the home includes orthopaedic services and other forms of medical care. I prepared myself for the worst, assuming it would be even more heartbreaking than the children living in the squalor of the slums. But what I found was a storybook facility designed for children at every turn. The first thing you see as you’re about to enter is a bassinet nestled in an alcove in the property’s guarding wall. It’s not exactly inviting, but the message is clear. All children are welcome and no questions will be asked. As we posed for pictures next to it, we were warned not to touch it as it’s attached to a sensor (and monitored by a guard through a small window in the back of the alcove). Walking through the gate, we entered a courtyard, lush by Delhi standards. On each side, little buildings make up a compound, connected by paths. To the side of a large lawn is a nice garden that was built by a British team as part of some reality TV series that sounds a lot like “While You Were Out”. We toured the whole facility, but only a few of the daycare rooms were in use. The children sat on the carpet in a loose circle and recited little poems for us, under prompting from their teachers. It was adorable. There were a fair number of toys and games stacked on shelves and arranged on the floor, but mostly the children sat quietly, eyes agog at us. The behaviour here was a stark contrast to that at the slums. There, we’re treated like exotic visitors to be touched and queried, whereas here I felt like an intruder disturbing their quiet little world.
We walked from one building to the next and saw where the babies and infants are kept in cribs. We saw the bunk beds for the older children. We saw the handicapped children laid out on blankets in the sparse sunlight, under the watchful eyes of a few nurses. The children live here from the time they arrive until they’re twelve or thirteen when they have to be handed over to a government run institution. During that time, the hope is that they will receive enough of an education, or treatment for their disability that they can survive in the harsher environment. Ideally, they are adopted (and thousands of children have been). Priority goes to Indian parents living in India, but many children are taken in by parents from Europe. We were lucky enough to see a couple taking home an Indian boy who looked about two. I think they were British.
It’s all a little confusing. Here’s a situation by all accounts horrible. Children abandoned by their families because they are too poor to feed them. That means these families are worse off than the ones in Bawana. Yet through private donation (and a pittance from the government) this organization is giving these children a better life and a chance for a future. It must be a situation where the small minority that’s horrendously needy is cared for at an acceptable level, while the great throngs of people who are only horribly needy are left to fend for themselves. It makes sense on some level, but is frustrating on others.
Bawana was founded as a colony about ten years ago when the government passed some new initiative to clean up Delhi. That meant finding homes for the squatters living by the river in makeshift communities. To ease the effort of moving so many people who have so little to lose, the government sold them tiny plots of land in Bawana for a quarter of their value. The whole thing reminds me of “District 9”. I would assume the film was based on this if I didn’t suspect this sort of thing happens to undesirables all over the world, and all throughout time (Trail of Tears, anyone?). Ten years later, we have Bawana: a hodgepodge of buildings loosely tied together with various forms of infrastructure. We’ve got open sewers; electricity strung randomly from house to house, goats in sweaters. It’s chaos. I think back on my time in Irvine, California (the largest planned community in the world) and feel that somewhere these two extremes must meet in the middle and offer a picture of what success looks like. If we know what it takes to make a community work, and we recognize the overall economic benefit of avoiding slums and all the problems and costs they bring, how can we miss an opportunity to start from scratch with something more likely to succeed than Bawana? Basically, Habitat is subsidizing the shortcuts made by the Indian government when they relocated these people in order to clean up Delhi.
With such productive thoughts in mind, I head back to the worksite. It’s become clear we’re not contributing to the build as much as the labourers. Maryann partnered up with the mason and laid a significant amount of brick, but the rest of us stood around and sometimes passed bricks into the house. That was pretty fun. I wish I knew some assembly line songs. It’s our second to last day, so I’m not surprised there’s less for us to do. We knew the project would continue on without us when we left, so there can’t be work left over that they’re counting on us for. Habitat is big on insuring no reliance on our help is fostered in the community. We’re here to lend a hand and contribute as a partner, not to take over and fix things.
After our bus ride back to the hotel, my team and I head over to the Park Hotel to take a yoga class. I wish we’d found out about these before. They begin just after our work day ends, and while I’m too sore to do a good job, trying to hit my poses feels great on my tired muscles. The setting is ideal. We’re on the third story of the hotel, on a tiered sundeck overlooking the swimming pool. Cushy yoga mats are all laid out for us in the dimly lit darkness. The instructor has a strict lilt to his voice and he begins the class rushing us through a dozen sun salutations. I’m winded as we go the mat and he pushes us into ever advancing poses. When he realizes that my teammate Katrina is insanely flexible and well practiced, the rest of the class is about him seeing how contorted he can get her. The rest of us struggle to keep up, coming nowhere close. When she stood on her own head, I knew I was out of my league. Halfway through the class, I looked over to another part of the hotel and saw a few monkeys sitting, watching us perform for them. A staffer quickly chased them off. I wonder if he had not, would they have joined in.
After some lengthy showers under the endless hot water afforded by the hotel, we hiked over to a pan Asian restaurant called Q-ba and ate an eclectic mix of foods we’d been missing (I had lentils again). We sat outside and looked out on the Delhi night. A single firework went off over the presidential palace and kept us waiting for another. We got back to the hotel around 10:30 making this one of the latest nights I’d been able to keep awake for since arriving in India.
Day Ten
For our last day on site, Amit arranged for us all to move to a new location and assist in the pouring of a cement roof. A big effort is made to frame our work here as a complete project, so I know he worked hard to give us this experience. Considering the nature of our work to date, I was happy to try something different. The project site was a brick house in the same style as the ones on which we worked, but the exterior walls were complete. The stairs had not yet been built, and the roof was supported by a network of bamboo poles wedged in place with bricks and two by fours. This extra support was to hold up the wet cement while it dried and could then support itself. Since a lot of cement was required, the homeowners rented a cement mixer to keep a constant flow at the ready. To mix that much cement by hand as we did for the brick mortar would have taken more time than we had. The mixer was an old diesel model that coughed out a cloud of pollution as it sprung to life. I was standing in the worst possible place and felt enveloped.
The idea was to form an assembly line from the mixer on the ground up to the masons on the roof. A few guys traded off shovelling the fresh cement into shallow bowls. Those were handed up a chain of people where it was spread out from the back to the front of the roof. Negotiating between the bamboo supports was a bit tricky and because there were no stairs, labourers had to perch on platforms connected by ramps of rebar to get the bowls lifted up each level. Up on the roof, we passed the bowls to the mason who tossed the cement out from the bowl into thick blobs that coated a rebar frame. We had about six bowls going at any one time. They’d be passed down empty as fresh bowls were passed up. It felt like we made quick work of it. About halfway through, we hoisted up some type of device with a long hose attached. It looked like an iron shopvac. Other people seemed to know what it was, but I’d never seen this before. After pull starting the motor with a cord that had to be hand wound after each attempt, the whole contraption vibrated. The hose was submerged into the choppy cement where it seemed to bubble a bit. In an instant, the rocky and uneven cement into smoother, soup-like cement. A nice and level roof. After a few more square feet of roof was covered, I moved down to the ground floor and helped with the shovelling. And a bit later we were done.
I accept that our presence saves the homeowners the cost of a few labourers. I also appreciate the fact that Habitat caters to its donors and lets them see where their money is being invested. But there’s no way around the fact that our biggest contribution to the Bawana community is our mere presence, and our committed interest in helping in whatever way we can. Amit explains to the home owners that the money Habitat contributes towards their homes comes from us, and that because of our wealth, we are allowed to assist in the build. There’s more truth in that, than if he were to tell them we were donating our time to help them build. Our lack of skill would make that a poor gift. Whatever the homeowners think of our physical contribution, I do believe they appreciate our interest and our intent. The sadness I feel on leaving the site is only partially from my desire to keep contributing, and to see things change. A big part is also from guilt that I get to leave while everyone else has to stay. We are tourists here, and will take these memories home to our western lives and feed off them when we’re feeling materialistic. But maybe our biggest contribution lays somewhere in there as well. By far, our presence was most appreciated by the children. I’ve written of how novel they found us, and what amusement we brought. Our departure might raise some question about where we came from, and where we go back to. In the same way the visiting circus fills children’s’ heads with thoughts of escape to a larger world, maybe our visit plants a seed of the trees that lay beyond Bawana. The optimist in me hopes that’s the case and gives me something I can hang my hat on when I think about what I really contributed here.
The rest of our day was filled with closing activities. We met with each of the homeowners and gave them a gift of kitchenware for their new homes. We received our certificates of completion and commemorative t-shirts. We had a team dinner, feasting on mugal cuisine from recipes passed down by the chefs of the foreign kinds of India. It was exactly the sort of commencement one would expect, with speeches of appreciation from the program leaders and our team leader. When I think of the complexities of hosting so many people, so far from home, I’m surprised these projects go off at all. It’s impressive that Habitat has worked out a methodology for so quickly integrating us into these very far off places. While it is a form of tourism, it offers a unique view into foreign life unavailable even to most locals. Time will tell if I’ve caught Habitat Fever, or will return to more traditional travel. Regardless, this is an experience that will stay with me.
