Bhorugram Arrival

I've been out at Bhorugram for three or four days now, but it's taken a while to write this entry due to an absolute whirlwind of stuff happening (and one or two days of dysentery that was pretty much inevitable). I arrived on a Thursday evening in the company of Amitava, and had basically an evening and a morning to try to understand what was in place as far as the existing REACH project and try to gather some data. At about 2 PM Friday, Dr. Reddy showed up, and I had perhaps five minutes to tell what I'd found before he'd seized on something, made his own plans about the next step in analysis, and corralled the staff into gathering that data.

Saturday, we had again until just after lunch to try to make some useful sense out of very preliminary data, at which point Dr. Ashok and the other Agarwals also showed up. As it turns out, my timing of arrival was either very fortuitous or very much not. Once a year, the entire Agarwal clan, with kids and grandkids, converges on Bhorugram for a family reunion/review of BCT's work. Since that point, it's basically all been a blur of Agarwals. (Dr. Reddy is here by virtue of having been semi-adopted by the Agarwals along the way. I get to sponge off the fruits of his labor.) They seem like very nice people, albeit from a much higher social stratum than I usually get to talk with. It's also really nice to get to know the people for whom I'm technically working.

Bhorugram itself is what you'd expect for a place out in the Indian desert, six hours by car from any major city. Life for most of the villagers does not include electricity or running water, and is spent on the traditional activities: grow crops, dry camel/cow dung for fuel, cook food, wash and clean, and if you get some relaxation time (i.e., if you're a man), smoke hukka and play some cards. All around the village itself, all you see is empty -- a few scrub trees, the fields of chickpeas and mustards, and maybe someone in the fields. The rest is sand.

That's the downside. The bright side is that as a temporary retreat, it's beautiful. Like all Indian villages, wildlife wanders freely anywhere it wants, which means that there are peacocks and peahens strutting and calling right outside my door each morning. At night, the lack of electricity means one of the most incredible views of the stars that I've ever seen. It is definitely lonely, especially if you don't really speak Hindi well, but there are plenty of worse places to be spending two months.