Update from Delhi

Yesterday night was Mirko's last night in Delhi, so Suraiya, Ankita, Nate, Allison in spirit (she had to work late), Alexis, Mirko, and I went to dinner in Pandara Market. We were joined by Jordi Strom who has been working for the CDC Global Aids project in Chennai.

Being in Delhi for this past week has been wonderful. I am researching governance and primary education, and have had some interesting meetings with people working at the National Institute for Education Planning, the Centre for Equity studies, JNU, and the Delhi School of Economics. I decided to compare education policies in Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, and Punjab, and then visit schools to try to get a sense of the quality of education at the government schools. I only have a month left, and I wish I had more time!

Saturday I went to a government school for girls in a poor community adjacent to the Red fort. I sat in on a grade 12 english class. Most of the girls' parents had not attended more than primary school and almost all came from very large Muslim families. It was impressive that they had made it so far through the system, and planned to continue their studies after grade 12 in order to become teachers. They said that many of their classmates had stopped coming to school because their family thought it was unimportant for them to be so educated.

After interviewing the students, I spoke with a few teachers about their experience at the school, and then went to observe a sixth grade class. The English teacher didn't show up and so Bubbly aunty (a family friend who taught at the school) told me to teach the english lesson. The next teacher also was absent so instead of the substitute teacher, I ended up teaching english for an hour and half to thirty eleven year olds. We read a story about a man named Gopal. Gopal had neighbors who were day dreamers. In particular, the couple dreamed of a day when they would have enough money to buy a cow. Caught up in her dream, the wife bought four pots, one for butter, one for ghee, one for milk, and one to bring milk to her sister. When she told her husband what she had done, he started to shout at her, angry that she had not asked his permission to buy the pots and bring milk to her sister. Gopal heard the shouting and aksed what the trouble was. When his neighbor explained that his wife had not asked permission to bring milk from their cow to her sister, Gopal accused his neighbor of letting his cow ruin his vegetable patch and started to beat him. Then they all realized that Gopal did not have a vegetable patch and the couple did not have a cow. It was supposed to be funny, but it took a while to figure out the joke :). I had to explain vocab words like 'day dream' and 'thrashing' but the girls knew most of the english in the story. It was a lot of fun.

On sunday Suraiya and I went to see Dus, the latest hit Hindi film. We had no idea what the plot was since niether of us spoke very good hindi, so we made it up as we went along. We think the plot centered around members of an Indian anti-terrorist organizaiton that was trying to prevent terrorists from bombing a canadian football stadium. The highlight of our experience was a seemingly endless commercial during intermission where this woman said over and over again that the solution to all life's problems was to 'drink good milk from the carton.'

Mountain views from Marta

Namaste to all!

Well, it was certainly a relief to return to Kalimpong after Darjeeling.
I had not realized how exhausted I was until I finally got to ITTM and
collapsed on my bed! It was so nice to be outside of noisy town again,
surrounded by trees and chickens, with electricity and occasional
moments when the rain let up.

We hired a jeep to take us back because we wanted to stop at a gompa in
the town of Mangpoo on the way. The gompa is special because the
rinpoche who used to run it was a trained allopathic nurse. He had a
hospital in the basement of the gompa to admister to the monks, nuns,
and local villagers, and they combined several different forms of
medicine. You could get an injection in the morning and then be
shuffled up to the gompa itself for healing rituals, and then brought
down again for some herbal healing!

Unfortunately, the rinpoche died 2 years ago at the age of 42 from a
liver infection. So the hospital was closed and the gompa itself was
quite derelict. Running the place is really a one-person show. The
monks we met there were just kind of hanging around--usually they are
serving and being taught by the rinpoche. They didn't even know
Tibetan. Everything has just kind of halted until the rinpoche returns,
i.e. he gets reincarnated and undergoes training again. Even though
they currently have a short-list of possible reincarnations, since these
boys are all under 2 years old, the whole process will take 15-20 years!
So a whole generation of monks at the gompa just spend their time
hanging out (although to be honest, depending on the dedication of the
monks themselves, this can happen even if there is a rinpoche at a
monastery).

This has also been an exciting week because it is the Dalai Lama's 70th
birthday (July 6), and there are 3 days of celebrations at any places
with Tibetan communities. The biggest celebrations are in Dharamsala,
where H.H. (his holiness, an abbreviation I'll just use from now on)
actually lives. Here in Kalimpong, we went to festivities at the local
Tibetan school, Barbara and I wearing chupas/bakus, the traditional
Tibetan women's dress. We brought with us khataks, special scarves that
one presents to someone as an expression of honor and respect. There
was a special throne with an image of H.H. where people would present
khataks and other gifts and prostrate (I did not participate in this,
but it was interesting to see).

After a series of speeches by school officials and local politicians,
which were either in Tebetan or Nepali or really really boring English,
the cultural program began.

This was fantastic. It consisted of 5 hours of traditional song and
dance and theater in traditional costumes (yes, I took photos). It was
all prepared by the students and their teachers but was remarkably well
done. The costumes must have been horribly hot, consisting of colorful
thick fabric, fur, and masks more suited to the Tibetan mountains than
sunny Kalimpong. One girl in the 45 minute theater part was visibly
exhausted under her multicolored headdress. Most dances were only
accompanied by percussion instruments, drums and bells. The dancers
would do amazing weaving motions with their hands and feet. The
audience would cheer every time they started doing a round-house jumping
move. There were several dances where the teachers/women's association
members would stand in a line singing and waving multicolored khataks.
There was also one traditional Nepali dance and one Hindi dance, which
were so energetic and fun! And after each dance, each dancer was
presented with a khatak.

There was a really wonderful sense of community at the gathering. Most
people were sitting on mats on the ground and sharing tea and momos. I
started out sitting in some shaded chairs, but a Tibetan woman invited
me to sit with her and fed me with some milky tea, cookies, and breath
mints. I was the only one from our group to stay until the end of the
festivities, and walked to town with Lamu, who does data entry at ITTM,
and Shentrup (not the correct spelling of his name), a teacher of
Tibetan who was visiting from a town near Calcutta. Lamu invited us to
her house and I had my first experience with traditional Tibetan butter
tea, which was delicious.

The festivities continue today (Thursday) at the school, and tomorrow at
the local temple. I will hopefully attend the latter. THe whole
program is dedicated to the health and long-life of H.H. There are also
free medical clinics where Tibetan medicines are distributed at no cost,
again in his honor. I'm so glad that I am at ITTM because otherwise I
might not have had any idea of all this going on.

Speaking of ITTM, we have 3 new guests: Stefan, an Austrian
Anthropologist, and Marco and Heidi, biodynamic gardeners from Finland.
Last night was Dan's last night here, so we had a little party for
him. He and I, however, missed most of it because we were at O.B. Das's
house for dinner--he wanted to reciprocate our having him over, and this
was really the last night it could happen. And if we didn't go, he
would have been insulted. So we went.

The past two days have been absolutely gorgeous, which everyone here
attributes to H.H.'s rainmakers, who have performed rituals to stop the
monsoon rains. I have taken advantage of the weather to take photos of
ITTM and Kalimpong, so that my family will stop reminding me to show
them where I'm living! I cannot believe how little time I have left
here (2 1/2 weeks), with so much I still want to see and do!

Namaste,
marta