Group Shots and New Year's Eve

This first photo is taken by a canal that goes under a tributary river leading to the Ganges.
The second photo is our project group of girls and our favorite driver, Rash Kumar.
This third photo is the whole group in our traditional Indian clothing on New Year's Eve.
The fourth photo is the group on a bridge over the Ganges, the life force for much of India.
The final picture is the group back at Mewat district.

Eggplants

One of my best experiences was at an extremely isolate, tiny village where we were to look at a large check dam. The check dams were built to help recharge the fresh groundwater pockets, by trapping rainwater in an area to hold it long enough to permeate deep below the surface and refill the natural underground “tank”.

As with each village we stopped at, we were soon surrounded by the village boys and men, with women watching us standing at a distance. This village turned out to be particularly friendly and one of the men invited us down to the housing area for a demonstration of the cow patty fires (I’ll explain in a different post) and to show us some of their crops. We were lead to a field of plentiful purple eggplants—as you can see one of the boys showing us proudly.

This village was not only friendly, but also more advanced and well-kept than many of the others we visited. I think this is in large part due to the check dam which supplied them with appropriate water, resulting in betting living conditions overall and those beautiful fields of eggplants. Additionally, two of the teenage boys had cell phones and started asking for and taking pictures of us. This resulted in hundreds of photo exchanges between our two groups, us taking picture of the villagers alone and with them, and vice-versa. I had learned earlier that day that often the people in these friendlier villages loved for you to show them pictures of them on your camera, right after you’d snap one, and this village was certainly no different.

When it was time to leave, there was quite a large crowd around us, maybe 40 villagers (again, mostly boys and men, but in this group a few little girls too) and I turned to snap one last shot of a group of boys who were following me as I walked back to the vehicle. Of course I showed them the picture, and we were all smiling at each other and I was starting to say good-bye, when the boy who had picked the eggplant in the field handed me the vegetable, giggling nervously. Shocked and amazed by this sweet gesture, I immediately turned bright red feeling incredibly guilty about taking something that could have provided a nutritious meal for one of these kids. But I also remembered how devastating I had felt the previous day when a little girl refused to take the banana I had saved from my lunch to offer her—so of course I took the eggplant. I said thank you to the boy, and the men standing with him, and many of them immediately said “Tank you! Tank you! Tank you!” back to me and too each other laughing and beaming with pride at their new American words. I sat back down in the car feeling overwhelmed by the experience, and just wishing I was able to use that beautiful eggplant to cook something delicious.

Head Scarves & Women

As requested, here’s a shot of the women wearing our head scarves. While we definitely do not blend in with the villagers, we absolutely feel an eerie sense of camaraderie with the women in the Mewat district villages. Being forced to cover your head, wear long sleeves and pants in warm, sunny weather—while your fellow male classmates are walking around in T-shirts, is unsettling to say the least.

One of the most fascinating things to see at these villages was that the women were the only ones working, and I’m seriously not exaggerating. When you drive through these primitive and poverty stricken areas you see many hard to comprehend sights—like bare bottomed children squatting to urinate in the streets that are lined with animal manure and many other forms of waste—but nothing as consistent as the continual sights of women carrying containers on their heads, kneeling beside water washing clothes, carrying babies and leading cattle, working in the fields, sorting vegetables, cutting sticks, or gathering cow patties for their cooking fires.** Yet every male you’ll see will be sitting in a group of other men, playing cards, talking, laughing, and probably smoking. Our instructor even asked one of our guides about this, saying something to the effect of: “why don’t all these men that are sitting around get hired to work for IRRAD, or the government to maintain these dams and wells [to help the water shortage issue plaguing these villages]?” He responded by explaining that most of them just don’t work, it’s not in their culture. The women do all of the household and “living” work, while about 70% of the men will never have a real job but instead will just “hang out” their whole lives.*

*Please note there is even a government sponsored program to ensure employment for at least one season per year for every person in the rural areas of India, yet the majority of these men just do not participate in the program.

**It's culturally taboo to take photos of women, unless they explicitly give you permission, so not only do I not have very many photos of women, many that I do have are taken from inside our vehicle as we're moving. My interaction with the woman shown below was one of he highlights of our second day in Mewat. We are fairly certain she was the wife of the principle of the school we were touring, because at one point she opened up the principle's office (where she, her husband, and kids also slept) and even showed us some of the school children's work books. She and I made fast friends after we kept exchanging smiles because I couldn't stop admiring her baby. Several other people in our group snapped pictures of me with her (I'll try to get one of those pictures to post) because she immediately allowed me to photograph her and her baby--I think in large part because she is one of the lucky women who has more access to education through her position as principle's wife therefore less afraid and more excited about our presence. She also showed Meagan and I the new bathroom facilities that were built at that school, explicitly so that more girls were allowed to attend school longer.