Light Amusement: Out of the Mouth of Babes

As a bit of light-hearted fun, two pictures done by the school students that are hanging on a bulletin board downstairs:




 




Above, proof that drinking cheap Indian whiskey caused the extinction of dinosaurs. I don't know if the kid ever saw the classic Far Side cartoon that says the same about smoking or if it's a case of convergent evolution.

Below, a young child's understanding of global warming. The ozone hole gives light so that Mr. Pollution (aka Mr. Satan) can see to put the Earth on a fire, with the logs made of greenhouse gases. The result is that skin cancer and cataracts reduce us all to skeletons. In truth, it's a pretty effective message.

These two would not be out of place in any school hallway in America, so someone's doing a fine job.

Stranger in a Strange Land

I've been trying for some time to write something insightful that captures what it's like to be a foreigner living and working in India, especially village India. It's still not where I want it to be, but there's less than a month left in Bhorugram, so it's time to start posting. Some of you have parallel experiences, most notably Justin & Marjorie, but this is different from the India you'll experience as a tourist. It's also very different from India as I've known her, because most of my experience is in Mumbai with my relatives. Generalizing to India from Mumbai is like generalizing to America from New York City.

Let's take the good first. Number one on that list is improved patience. My ability to handle delay, particularly long car trips or half-hour periods just spent sitting and waiting, has grown dramatically. As you know, in the US five minutes of no activity is sufficient excuse for me to pull out the phone and check my email. Here, there being neither email nor books on tape nor any other distraction, you sit and you watch the shrubbery. It does leave a lot of time for thinking and planning, which is very nice.

A close second is an appreciation for the basics of life -- eating when you want to, sleeping when you want to, not having wildlife right outside your door, and not having effluent everywhere. I'm going to try to do another panorama of main street in Bhorugram, just so you can see the level of shack-itude that exists in the most-cared-for village in this district. You'll see this level of poverty even in the big cities, and you can't help but realize how much we've all won the lottery to have been born in the USA.

On the major downsides of being an expat, the #1 is isolation. I'm learning a little Hindi, but not enough to understand a rapid conversation conducted with use of slang/imperfect grammar. I still can't read Devangari script, either. Combine this with the need to keep at least some distance between me and the staff (see future entry about hierarchies), and it can get really lonely. The availability of Internet and at least the occasional cheap phone call home (neither of which would have been available here five years ago) have helped with this a lot. Nevertheless, if I seem more talkative than usual by blog and/or email, it's because this is a lifeline for me. This is my only chance to communicate about something beyond basic physical needs or my work.

The other big kicker is Indian social mores, which differ in two major ways from what we're used to back home. One, EVERYONE asks you how much your possessions cost and how much you make. It's supposed to be a way of placing you in society. However, the problem is that they translate any dollar figure into rupees, and then assume you can buy as much in the US as you could here with those same rupees. As such, my laptop could probably buy a house. Dodging those is hard without being at least a little rude to your conversant, and people are already nervous about talking with the Doctor sahib as it is.

Interestingly, this contrasts with social weirdness the second: laughing/staring at people is somehow not considered as rude as we would think it. Every time I walk into the mess or into the colony where I stay, I face a wave of giggling. If I dare to actually say something in Hindi, it gets repeated back and forth for ten minutes or more. When there's not giggling, it's goggle-eyed stares from a room full of kids and adults. (Mind you, it's worse for women -- Maggie had people actually following her around and taking pictures.) Could I shout at people? Sure. But I spend my entire day shouting at people as it is, just to get the basic work done. There's only so much angry you can do in a single day.

Finally, privacy. Yes, it's a communal culture and there isn't much of it. This, I know. I did not expect that it extends to someone constantly looking over my shoulder when I'm trying to write emails/blogs/whatever. I have had to dish out some major scoldings to our data entry operators for what were (I think) innocently curious attempts to read personal emails. They look like hurt little puppies afterwards, and I have no way to explain to them the concept of differing cultures.

It's been a good learning experience overall, and with this week's increase in the rate of work, I'm not having as many doubts about my value to the project. I'll still be glad to leave it behind and come back to Jennifer, the comforts of "civilization", and just being ordinary again.

---

Postscript: In between writing this and posting it, a friend sent me a link to her niece's blog from Botswana. Odd how many things are not unique to India...

Pano-rama

Experimenting with trying to do some better pictures of the area, with help form panorama software. Here's sample 1:



Warning: links to 7 MB image. Do not try to download to your phone.

Holi

Don't think I ever posted these, so have some entertainment. Back around March 11th, we celebrated Holi, the festival of colors. This being a school, it's a rather safe place with a minimum of mischief, but it's still something worth wearing old clothes for. (or, in my case, clothes bought in bazaars for net of Rs 150). When you're the foreign guest, you're also pretty much a magnet for people wanting to play Holi, so I got colored but good. The full set, including photos of the schoolkids, is here, but here's a taste:

Omphaloskepsis

As a bit of follow-on from that last post, some internal introspection about a question that's been affecting me a lot: "Am I doing anything useful here?" Sure, I'm busy all day. I write emails, I debug computers, I go to these meetings in the field, I tell people to bring this or that here or there, and I occasionally run some queries in the database. But am I doing anything useful? Put another way, is all of this actually increasing the speed at which some kid is going to get the vaccine that'll save her life? Is the work I'm doing worth the extra hassle caused by having this guy around who can't speak the local language and thus is constantly tying up others with his requests?

I know it's being helpful for me. I'm definitely gaining an appreciation for the comforts of civilization and a bit more tolerance for discomfort/boredom. There's also some minor fringe learnings about vaccines, Hindi, SQL, database configuration, and other technical topics. Plus, there's the broader experience of seeing just what it means to be in a village and how the vast majority of the world makes their daily life. It's pretty sobering. You hear the statistic about people living on $2 per day, and in fact, that is what we pay my data entry techs. It's another thing to see what $2 per day and true subsistence farming mean. I take a lot of comfort in the fact that I'm now more in touch with "real India" than my relatives who have spent their whole lives in city luxury.

The trouble is, I'm working on a huge problem, and I'm working on it for two months. The ability to make an impact on something as big as Indian rural poverty is epsilon at best. Moreover, there's that language barrier, which means that anytime I want to meet with someone, I have to haul along an interpreter. I can handle Hindi for "I want some tea", "Has the newspaper come yet?", "Turn left there", and "You're doing a good job." Understanding a complete description of how someone collects data in her village is a bit outside my capacity. (We won't get into the fact that some of the people here don't even use Hindi, but instead use the vaguely related dialect of Marwari.)

On the plus side, I bring a couple things. First is experience with planning, project management, and higher-order thinking. I'm used to having to grasp the big picture quickly, and so my daily actions are informed by something beyond the task at hand. Second, I can cause things to happen. If one of my staff asks for something that costs Rs 3000, he gets hassle/resistance, and it'll take one or more weeks. If I ask for it, it happens ASAP. If it does not happen ASAP, the person concerned is reminded that I have the source of his salary on speed-dial, which generally produces rapid compliance. Furthermore, the Indian culture of semi-slavish respect for "superiors" in class (more on that in a future entry) means that my simple presence in any gathering causes more attention. Basically, I am the local agent of PS Reddy and Ashok Agarwal and have defined my role as doing the same shouting-at-people that they would do.

Net result? Project probably gets up and running a bit faster than otherwise, maybe a month or two earlier. Data will have slightly better quality, although I don't know how well I can put in place measures to prevent them from degrading once I'm gone. How many lives is that really going to change? One? Ten? A hundred? I have no clue, and have to take it on faith that I'm doing something other than low-budget tourism.

A Day in the Life

Thinking further on blog topics after a bit of a breather, one thing I recall being asked is "So what do you do all day?". I have two types, field days and not-field days.

Not-Field Days

• 7:00 AM (ish): Wake up. Caused by combination of light, noise (usually from daily morning power failure and resultant generator start-up), and (usually) someone bringing me a cup of tea, one of precisely three special privileges I've claimed.
  
• 7:30 AM: Shower, shave, etc. Since returning to Bhorugram, I do actually have a genuine shower. With hot water. Didn't request it, but not complaining.
  
• 8:00 AM: Walk 1km to school (not uphill both ways, but fraught with the peril of rogue sheep). Take breakfast in school cafeteria. Generally, I will ignore the breakfast entree of the day in favor of a plate of fruit and a cup of tea. (Second special privilege: daily delivery of breakfast fruit.)
  
• 8:30 AM: Get to office, start day of work. "Work" is variable. There's at least one phone call to someone regarding whatever is going wrong this day, usually some time spent doing queries in the database, debugging of some non-working program, teaching the staff how to do some particular task with the programs, tracking down source of a data entry error one of our techs is having, and meeting with other Bhoruka Charitable Trust staff about whatever it is I need that day.
  
  
  The list of things that are not working on any given day has included, but is not limited to:
  
  • Lack of electricity to computers or lights
    
  • Wasps building nest on main ventilation duct
    
  • Computer teacher stealing our OS installation CDs and our Oracle CDs in mistaken belief that we are hiding a new version of Oracle
    
  • Tech unplugging the server to charge his mobile phones
    
  • Dustbin in room overflowing with trash due to not being emptied past three/four days
    
  
  
• 10:30 AM (ish): Tea break. Cup #3, for those keeping count. Obtain copy of The Hindu, my preferred English-language daily. (Special privilege #3.)
  
• 10:45 AM onwards: See work above.
  
• 1:30 PM: Lunch. Meals other than breakfast are a fixed menu of roti (bread), chavval (rice), sabzi (vegetable; the potato is considered a vegetable), and dal (lentils, chickpeas on a good day). Pure vegetarian, although they do use ghee.
  
• 2:00 PM onwards: See work above. Follow up on whatever's gone wrong in the morning. Yell at people as needed, feel bad about constantly yelling at people.
  
• 4:00 PM: Optional cup of tea #4.
  
• 6:00 PM (ish): Attempt to finish work and switch over to typing blog entries, reading email, writing Scope & Scalpel, other personal work for day.
  
• 7:30 PM: Dinner, see also lunch. 8 PM is student dinner time; either take dinner early and get hot food, or wait until 9 and get great personal service, but cold food and not much veggie left.
  
• 9:00 to 10:00 PM: Finish up residual work and personal Internet use, head back to quarters (1 km walk back, lovely view of night sky, stray dogs not aggressive).
  
• 10:15 to 11:00 PM: Read book, relax, maybe eat a biscuit or chocolate from the secret stash. Suppress mild craving for glass of Scotch and some ice.
  
• 11:00 to 11:30 PM: Bedtime. Turn on geyser so that hot water will be produced overnight and thus will not be prevented by morning power failure.
  

Field Day

• 7:00 to 9:00 AM: Same.
  
• 9:00 AM: Jeep arrives, with Hanuman the driver. Fill up water bottles, grab lunch from cafeteria (if ordered the night before), start interminable process of getting crap together.
  
• 10:00 AM: Depart Bhorugram. Spend rest of day bumping over sand dunes to sound of various Punjabi, Rajasthani, or Haryani music tapes. (See also, prior post re: roads and lack thereof in most of district.)
  
• 11:00 AM(ish): Arrive first of usually three sites. Spend about an hour sitting with village women looking through their registers, cross-checking their data with our data, and trying to explain to them why exactly it's important that they fill out all these damn forms (in between herding children, cooking all the meals, fetching water, keeping fire going, obtaining clothes/food, and doing every bloody other thing that keeps their families alive).
  
• 1:00 PM(ish): Lunch break. Lunch is eaten by spreading newspaper under the shade of a random tree in the middle of a desert, placing whatever food we've brought on the paper, and sharing as best we can.
  
• 1:15 PM(ish): Back on road, see above.
  
• 4:30 PM(ish): End of final meeting. Pick up one or more health supervisors who need a ride home, shuttle them home, and head for Sardarpur or Rajgarh.
  
• 5:00 PM(ish): Start running what occasionally seem like interminable errands in Rajgarh. Errands can include, but are not limited to:
  
  
  
  • Pick up generator or water pump parts for school
    
  • Collect school/BCT's mail from our Rajgarh mail drop in a little copy center
    
  • Tea, sweets, sugar cane juice, or fried snacks
    
  • Recharge one or more mobile phones
    
  • Collect more REACH data sheets
    
  • Process photos for school/BCT publicity (a nightmarish hour-long task of computer incompetence)
    
  • Pick up random people from various bus drop-off points
    
  • Any other shopping the organization may need done.
    
  
  
• 6:00 PM(ish): Head for home, reach Bhorugram around 6:30. Remainder of program as per non-field day.
  

Sundays are a bit lighter; I generally only work a half/quarter day, and there's usually something special for breakfast. Other than that, this is the pace of life here in Bhorugram. I've gotten pretty used to it, but I'll still be glad to come home.

More about work

Time for status update #2. Basically, since I got back, we've been working double-time, and this is the first night I've even had enough break to write something. My trip back to Bhorugram from Delhi was in the company of our computer guru from Hyderabad, with whom I spent three days trying to install and configure our new server and four new client computers to match it. You'd think this would be easy, but when you're six hours from any serious tech support, nothing is easy. Everything in India is done with pirated OS and pirated software, and hardware is patched together as custom jobs. Net result: we had a hard drive that was wired wrongly into the machine and multiple machines riddled with viruses. With heroic efforts (and not celebrating Holi in the traditional fashion of getting seriously high/drunk), we got it marginally working. Getting it production-level working is still in progress.

That left me with two days before the big bosses themselves, Drs. Reddy and Agarwal, came to down. So, I decided to implement some of that quality checking, using two time-honored statistical techniques: the convenience sample and the n-of-1 study. Namely, we printed out our data concerning the anganwadi centre located in Bhorugram village, traipsed down there, and started hassling the workers with our questions. Once we'd gone through everything she had written down in her register, we spent two half-days marching around the village (with plenty of people staring at the mini-parade), wandering into houses and investigating vaccination cards, numbers of children, pregnancy dates, and so on. This was clearly quite an event, even for a town that sees plenty of strangers -- we had at least two local children following us at all times, and any entry into a house meant a small crowd of neighbors outside.

Unfortunately, the fieldwork revealed about what I was afraid of -- even with records on over 250,000 people in the database, we are missing a pile of information. We had records on 20 births in 2008. In a pile of papers not a kilometer from our computers, we found records of another 20. We knew of 6 pregnant women; the workers knew of 5 more. Mind you, these are the same workers who fill out the paperwork on which the database is built, and on whom we depend for our monthly updates.

So, what do you do when you've spent a whole lot of time doing a cross-sectional survey of 233 villages, only to find out that it looks like you might be missing a lot of data? That was the topic of discussion with the "attendings". Thankfully, the answer will not be "start the whole dang thing over". It will, however, be "Make some village women do more work." Basically, since we know they've got much of what we need hiding in their registers, we hand them a form and tell them "fill this out, we'll want it back in a week". Not necessarily what I'd have chosen to do (I don't trust their reports, as the forms are printed in English, which most of them don't read), but I'm only the local manager around here. It'll do for a short-term fix, which is all we have time for before I pack up and go in another 1.3 months.


The big question for me right now is how to maximize that 1.3 months. I have a lot of potential focus areas, which I'll try to describe in a future post.
Meanwhile, while I was gone, one of my staff flat-out quit and another accepted a position to begin in two weeks. On the bright side, I got added a really smart statistician. So, I need to figure out how to use these new resources, and how to design something that'll survive this highly unstable environment. "Challenge" is putting this mildly.

Luckily, at least as far as blog entries go, I've got enough pictures and pre-written general posts to keep you entertained for a few weeks. :-)

Tourism photos

As promised, a brief summary of my two weeks' semi-vacation. There are a lot of photos associated with this, and I've provided links to the main photosets and a few excerpts of note.

The whole thing is made possible by the fact that years ago, my father's company decided they wanted to do international joint ventures in steelmaking. One of the places they looked at (because it's got cheap labor and a big demand for materials) is India. They realized that there was exactly one Indian guy in their upper management, and thus began a process that would lead to my dad needing to take yearly trips to India for board meetings. The American Express corporation lent a kindly hand by setting a policy that, whenever a sufficiently high-value cardholder buys a business class international ticket, he gets a free companion ticket. Net result: my dad gets a free trip home every year and can take one person with him.

This year, that one person was Jennifer, my fiancee. So, our goal was to introduce her to the core of the family here in India and give her a taste of the major sights. We thus ended up with a whirlwind tour of India -- 3 days in Mumbai, 2 in Varanasi, 2.5 in Delhi, 2.5 in Jaipur, and another 2 in Mumbai before they headed home and I hopped the train up to Delhi (and a car from there to Bhorugram).

First off, Mumbai, the New York City of India. Big, crowded, insane traffic. Also home to my grandmother, chacha/chachi (grandfather's brother and his wife), and the highly Westernized family of my older aunt. Mostly, we ate, we hugged, we shopped, and we argued over where to eat and shop next. We did get in some tourism, mostly the British-era buildings that have unique architecture. Photos of those here, and here's a sample of us at the Gateway to India:



Next to Varanasi, one of the most important holy cities for Hindus, as it's situated on the banks of the Ganges river. Varanasi also happens to be a central pilgrimage site for Buddhists, particularly the outlying town of Sarnath. Sarnath is where the Buddha preached his first sermon setting out the precepts of what became Buddhism. It is also the site of some very impressive ruins:




The centre-piece of Varanasi, though, is the ghats. These are sets of steps leading down into the Ganges, and most Varanasi tourism involves them. We did tour some other major temples, but photography being not allowed, you mostly get shots of the ghats. Here's one of the nightly worship ceremony at the biggest ghat:





Overall, Varanasi was seriously dirty, but a lot better than my uncle (who can be somewhat fastidious) led us to believe it would be. The Ganges remains badly polluted, but isn't quite the sewer one might fear. Nevertheless, from the gullies, we next headed to Delhi, where my younger aunt lives. It turns out I haven't seen her in about 15 years, so we packed a lot of catching up into a few short days. Delhi is also only a few short hours from Agra, home to some of India's most famous monuments. So, we did Agra, including (of course) the Taj Mahal:





We also hit the Agra fort and Sikandra, burial place of the Mughal emperor Akbar. Those did produce a few nice photos too:






Nevertheless, for beauty, you just can't beat the Taj. Unfortunately, you also can't beat it for sheer hassle factor. The number of touts, pushy souvenir vendors, drink sellers, and people trying to use every conveyance available to take you the 0.5km between parking lot and main gate is beyond belief. It's also got one of the worst "jack up admission price for foreigners" systems I've ever seen. Glad we went, won't be doing it again until the kids are old enough to appreciate it.

The next day was meant to be more touring around Delhi, but got cut short by (A) souvenir shopping and (B) some general exhaustion due to packing too much in the day before. We did see the Red Fort, but that's about it. The rest will happen next visit.

From Delhi, it was on to Jaipur. Not truly my home base, but since my NGO is Rajasthan-based, we had the benefit of some local hospitality (including the use of one of the boss' cars with driver). Aside from the Taj, I'd have to call this the high point of the trip, if only for the forts. I love exploring them, and Rajasthan is full of incredible citadels built during the era of warring princely states. Of those, we only got to do Amber and Jaigarh, but even those were impressive. Amber in particular was a good place for tourists:





Other notable features of Jaipur included wandering around the old Pink City and Jennifer getting a chance to experience local means of transportation:




There's also an amazing astronomical observatory (mainly a collection of very large, very precise, and strangely targeted sundials) called the Jantar Mantar. Almost the Indian version of Stonehenge. Noteable mainly for being one of the few places where you can climb on the art:




And from there, it was a brief tea and snacks with Dr. Ashok Agarwal and his wife, back to Mumbai, packing of the bags, and semi-tearful goodbyes. An entirely enjoyable vacation, and it appears that the Bhorugram folks even got a fair amount of work done while I was gone.

And next up -- something resembling work of my own!

Riding on trains

I've just returned to Bhorugram after taking about two weeks to bop all over the subcontinent visiting family and giving Jennifer a bit of a taste of India. (Sort of a tourism thali, if you will.) Photos of that will be forthcoming shortly, as will some further progress reports. In the meantime, since I made the return journey by train, I thought I'd give a review of the state of Indian rail travel.

There are two disclaimers here. First, I traveled by 2AC, which is "first class light" -- air conditioning, bedding provided, fair amount of space, decent security. (The class system is convoluted, and if you're interested, look here.) Second, I was on a Rajdhani express, one of the fast trains that radiate out from Delhi. Rajdhanis include food as part of the ticket price and thus may have better catering than other trains.

That said, I would do it again, and in fact intend to book a train ticket back to Mumbai as soon as I've got internet access. I found it to be a much more pleasant experience than airplane travel. Major comparison points include:

• Luggage allowance. If you can carry it, you can bring it aboard, no extra fees.
  
• Legroom. The berths have enough room to stretch out even for a six-footer like me.
  
• View. There's a great view of villages, mountains, sunrises, sunsets, and the general Indian countryside.
  
• Peace and quiet. In the AC levels, passengers barely talk, and there's outlets in every compartment. Very easy to relax and even do some work (or at least write some blogs).
  
• Better sleep. It's genuinely dark, you have a full lie-flat berth that's big enough even for a six-footer like me, and the back-forth motion of the train is an excellent hypnotic.
  

Now, with that recommendation that anyone with time to spare give train travel a whirl, I will say that there are a few mild disadvantages:

• The toilets are fragrant, even the Western ones. By American standards, they reek, as does the station itself. By Indian standards and my now-numbed olfactory bulb, I've smelled worse.
  
• Security notwithstanding, you do need to watch your valuables closely. I chained everything down and locked my suitcase. I lost nothing.
  
• That high amount of luggage space does come with a need to make sure your luggage fits under the seat or is otherwise keepable near to you. American suitcases have problems with this.
  
• If you go by AC class, your windows don't open. (Duh.) So, you can get less of a good view of the outside. The remedy is to lock up your stuff, go to the end of the compartment, and hang out the door.
  
• "Time to spare" is key. Mumbai->Delhi flight time is under 2 hours. Mumbai->Delhi train time is 17 hours. Not a disadvantage if, like me, you've time to spare. Might be a problem for tourists on a time crunch.