We moved out of A'Bad and into a small rural community about two hours away to begin work on our project. The students are doing home stays in three local villages. They're all pretty much celebrities: The main entertainment in town seems to be to take them to different houses to have chai and be stared at by as many as thirty people. Apparently, there was a Peace Corps worker in one village about twenty-five years ago, and people still talk about it. For many of the locals, our students are the first Westerners they've ever met. While this was funny for the first few days, some of the students are badly in need of private time and space. This is particularly difficult for female students trying to read for our seminar. There is a lot of sexism in the village culture, and so some families are incredulous that our students actually need to prepare for class.
The other major hiccup has to do with actually doing sustainable agriculture. The host families are all Brahman, the highest caste. The honor of having foreign guests would naturally fall on these families, and they've been extremely hospitable. However, their wealth means they hire workers for the fields, and don't engage in a lot of the actual practice of farming. Again, the female students get to do a lot of choirs, but mainly around the kitchen, since girls don't typically farm. The boys, well, they play a lot of cricket. We've tried a work around, having the students due interviews on farming practices for a local government outreach center. At the end of this visit, the students will have had once in a lifetime home stays, but probably not too much practical knowledge of sustainable farming techniques.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
My bad? No, A'bad
We left Cambodia for India the day after Christmas. We had a brutal six-hour lay over in Mumbai from midnight to 6 AM. Many of the students slept directly on the tile floor. When we arrived in Ahmadabad, there were a few hundred people in traditional Islamic clothing on their way to Mecca for the Haj. It was very foreign, unexpected, and rather dream like after the long hours of travel. When we stepped outside there were a few hundred more people pushed together, shouting for attention, basically a realistic introduction to India.
Ahmadabad (or A’bad, as the kids say) is in Gujarat, which is in the northeast of India, bordering Pakistan. It’s a monsoon climate, so I was surprised to see camels pulling carts in the traffic. I guess we’re here during the dry winter months, so it works. Although it is majority Hindu state, there is a significant Muslim minority. It’s a dry state, which goes well with our program’s no drinking for students policy. Our food has been almost exclusively vegetarian (a few students found McDonald's- it’s a sixth sense with teenagers). While the veggie diet has lead some students to talk about being tired all the time, this combination means I’m losing some of my baby fat.
Our partner organization planned a pack week for orientation, including unexpected language classes. Our Gujarati teacher, Mr. Shukla is straight out of a Seinfeld episode. I can't tell if it's his English, or a cultural thing, but there is definitely a lot of back and forth to get anything across. For example, he asked what do we want to know how to say in Gujarati. I said "Where is the bathroom?" He says...well, it's down the hall. We asked him how to say "Can you show me?" So he puts up "can you show me the hillside?" Who, you might ask, is asking about the hillside? Well, Mr. Shukla is asking, and don't try to stop him- it'll just take another ten minutes. One student asked how do you say "Why?", so he taught us "Why are you screaming at me?" Actually,that might be a useful phrase based on his personal experience. Last one- someone asked how do you say "Is it far?" He pauses, then asks, "You want me to teach you...in Gujarati?" In any case, it seems like the students learned enough to say a few things to their host families, it's all charades from there.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Holiday in Cambodia
For the enrichment week between China and India, our group went to Cambodia. This meant that we would be having Christmas in a country none of us had ever visited, which was a little daunting considering the level of homesickness some of the students already exhibited.
We landed in Phenom Phen and the next day went to the killing fields. We felt like it would be impossible to visit Cambodia and not talk about the genocide, but we also wanted to give as much distance as possible with the visit and Christmas. When you walk into the site, there is a seven story building for all of the bones taken from mass graves. The bottom two levels are filled with skulls, which helped to give a visceral sense of the magnitude of the killing. Many of the skulls showed where a bullet had penetrated. Perhaps more disturbing was the clothing come up from shallow graves the victims were forced to dig themselves.
The entire process was very sobering, and my co-leader Jess did a great job of debriefing. It seems like the genocide falls into the gray area between current news and history classes, so many of the students hadn't even heard of it.
The next few days were spent at Angkor Wat and surrounding temples, which was a welcome relief. Like Machu Pichu, it was spectacular, but perhaps loved to death by tourists. It was hard to feel any spiritual connection surrounded by a thousand clicking cameras. We did visit one outlying temple in disrepair that the students nicknamed the Indian Jones temple. There were far fewer tourists and it felt much more like what the entire complex must have looked like a hundred years.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
The end of the Tea and Horse caravan
The last week in China we went out to Shaxi, a rural community in the north of Yunnan, close to the Tibetan plateau. On the way to we stopped in Dali, a well touristed town originally famous for marble production.
Shaxi existed as a town because of it's location near a river on the Tea and Horse caravan, a less well known parallel to the Silk Road. It ran to the south, through Burma and on into India. Because of it's climate, it was snow free through the winter, providing an attractive alternative, especially during the winter.
Previous to being incorporated, this part of Yunnan was an independent kingdom. The Tang dynasty had attempted an alliance to prevent Tibetan hegemony of the area, but eventually this kingdom became more of a threat than the Tibetans.
Most people of Shaxi are of the Bai ethnicity (see pictures). They are one of the many non-Han people in the southwest of China. While they tend to be financially less well off, you can feel a real sense of community in Shaxi, which seems to be more important for them.
Our students seemed to enjoy their home stays here more than in the city of Kunming, mostly because the pace of rural life allowed for more interaction and the natural beauty of the area. Two students seemed to have stepped into a family feud. They were housed on opposite sides of a large mansion, owned jointly by feuding brothers. The mansion was in a state of disrepair due to an inability to reach an agreement on how to maintain it. This gave it a Scooby Doo feel to it, including secret compartments in the wall that boarding traders would use to hide their valuables.
Our local host and partner, Sam Mitchel commented frequently that Shaxi was a lot like Dali had been fifteen years ago, so the question of what increased tourism will do to this town remains an open one.
Shaxi existed as a town because of it's location near a river on the Tea and Horse caravan, a less well known parallel to the Silk Road. It ran to the south, through Burma and on into India. Because of it's climate, it was snow free through the winter, providing an attractive alternative, especially during the winter.
Previous to being incorporated, this part of Yunnan was an independent kingdom. The Tang dynasty had attempted an alliance to prevent Tibetan hegemony of the area, but eventually this kingdom became more of a threat than the Tibetans.
Most people of Shaxi are of the Bai ethnicity (see pictures). They are one of the many non-Han people in the southwest of China. While they tend to be financially less well off, you can feel a real sense of community in Shaxi, which seems to be more important for them.
Our students seemed to enjoy their home stays here more than in the city of Kunming, mostly because the pace of rural life allowed for more interaction and the natural beauty of the area. Two students seemed to have stepped into a family feud. They were housed on opposite sides of a large mansion, owned jointly by feuding brothers. The mansion was in a state of disrepair due to an inability to reach an agreement on how to maintain it. This gave it a Scooby Doo feel to it, including secret compartments in the wall that boarding traders would use to hide their valuables.
Our local host and partner, Sam Mitchel commented frequently that Shaxi was a lot like Dali had been fifteen years ago, so the question of what increased tourism will do to this town remains an open one.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Little Trouble in Big China
To get from Cuzco, Peru to Kunming, China only required about 54 hours of travel and five airplanes. Being a little sleepy, one of the students left a computer on board the airplane. I quickly realized that my basic Chinese was not really up to the situation. Fortunately, the airport had a translator and we got the computer back in lost and found. I'm not sure we'd have been so lucky in most countries.
Our first few days were in Tonghai, a small town outside of Kunming. We used this time for orientation, a few seminars and Chinese classes. We also visited a local temple, which seemed to double as a senior center. On any given day retirees play maj jong, play musical instruments or just sip tea. I found out later that Kunming has become a favorite spot for retiring Chinese, it's also one of the most touristed cities in China.
Kunming is in Yunnan in the southwest of China, which is definitely my favorite part of the country. There are over fifty minority groups, who often wear traditional dress around town. We stayed in the Yunnan Minorities University (Minzu Dashue), which had been set up to promote education of ethnic minorities. It wasn't until about 1300 during the Yuan (Mongolian) dynasty that Yunnan even became part of China, so it still has a wild west feel to it, especially outside of the city where minorities maintain their traditional cultures. They have a saying here that "the mountains are high and the emperor is far", so there isn't the sense of government authoritarianism that I felt on the east coast.
Yunnan borders Schezuan to the north, so the food is spicy, sometimes ridiculously so. I like it, but neither of my co-leaders cared much for it. One of my favorite dishes, even from Yantai five years ago, is Ma La Tofu. I never actually knew what the name meant. It turns out, it's spicy spicy tofu. The La is Yunnan style spice, which is straight heat you'd recognize in most peppers. The Ma is the lip numbing spice, which I had never noticed before.
My only complaint with Kunming was that it was so cold. It snowed for the first time in five years while we were there. We didn't have any indoor heating, so I'd go days on end feeling cold. The good news was there are plenty of western style cafes and restaurants with pretty good heating and coffee (rare in China), so I could always go hang out there to warm up. The locals prefer hot pot, which is boiling water you use to cook your own meat and veggies.it is also usually very spicy, so has been known to have consequences and repercussions later in the night.
Our first few days were in Tonghai, a small town outside of Kunming. We used this time for orientation, a few seminars and Chinese classes. We also visited a local temple, which seemed to double as a senior center. On any given day retirees play maj jong, play musical instruments or just sip tea. I found out later that Kunming has become a favorite spot for retiring Chinese, it's also one of the most touristed cities in China.
Kunming is in Yunnan in the southwest of China, which is definitely my favorite part of the country. There are over fifty minority groups, who often wear traditional dress around town. We stayed in the Yunnan Minorities University (Minzu Dashue), which had been set up to promote education of ethnic minorities. It wasn't until about 1300 during the Yuan (Mongolian) dynasty that Yunnan even became part of China, so it still has a wild west feel to it, especially outside of the city where minorities maintain their traditional cultures. They have a saying here that "the mountains are high and the emperor is far", so there isn't the sense of government authoritarianism that I felt on the east coast.
Yunnan borders Schezuan to the north, so the food is spicy, sometimes ridiculously so. I like it, but neither of my co-leaders cared much for it. One of my favorite dishes, even from Yantai five years ago, is Ma La Tofu. I never actually knew what the name meant. It turns out, it's spicy spicy tofu. The La is Yunnan style spice, which is straight heat you'd recognize in most peppers. The Ma is the lip numbing spice, which I had never noticed before.
My only complaint with Kunming was that it was so cold. It snowed for the first time in five years while we were there. We didn't have any indoor heating, so I'd go days on end feeling cold. The good news was there are plenty of western style cafes and restaurants with pretty good heating and coffee (rare in China), so I could always go hang out there to warm up. The locals prefer hot pot, which is boiling water you use to cook your own meat and veggies.it is also usually very spicy, so has been known to have consequences and repercussions later in the night.
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