phase 2 :-)

I am able affectionately refer to my first 10 days in India as phase 1 primarily because I have entered phase 2...

The past few days have been really great. I've had the apartment to myself and have been keeping really busy with work. I'm starting to feel a little more comfortable being here in Bswr, although I still find that it's really hard to get around if you don't have a bike or a scooter. This is mainly because the office/apartment is a 15 min walk to the main road which is the first place you can catch an auto. And even then they like to stay on the main roads.

I took some fabric to a tailor today to be made into a salwar kameez. Here's a picture, although the one I'm getting is green without any fanct gold stuff. The girls wear the scarf (dupatta) usually around their necks so that the flaps are behind them.I've been eating some really great food. I haven't caught on to the names of all the local Oriya favorities, but so far everything I've tried has been great. I had to take a picture of this chicken tikka I had for lunch yesterday - it was so good!
Yeah, I had already eaten half before I thought to take the picture - it was that good!
Here's a picture of the bathroom in the place I was staying in Rourkela for a day. It's a pretty typical bathroom in that there's no tub, and the shower drains straight into a drain in the floor. This means that the entire bathroom gets wet when you shower. I guess it works, but it seemed pretty strange at first - like you're spraying water everywhere.


This next picture I took on the way back from dinner tonight. It was cooler when the sun went down and all the cows decided to relax in the middle of the road. There are cows and goats and dogs literally everywhere you look. Some of the cows are on ropes like someone owns them, but most are just like this. I asked my assistant Deepak if anyone owns those cows and he told me "Yes, of course, they go home every night."
These last pictures are of the office here. I'll only be sleeping here until Saturday. When I get back from Chennai in a few weeks, I'll be staying at a hotel down the street. It seems nice enough and has everything I need (primarily AC and a shelf). But also has a "gym" consisting of a treatmill and some free weights - good enough for me. It also has a buffet restaurant and a Cafe Coffee Day in the lobby...sweet.

This is a picture of the "office" and also where I slept for the first 2 nights we were here. You can see the Centre for Microfinance Sambalpur sign in the back which used to be hanging in their more permanent office before Dan moved up here to Bswr. You can also see some of the stacks of surveys in the far corner and the bags on the floor are full of the malaria tests used for the follow-up surveys. You can't tell it from the picture - but this room is HOT!!! Like a sauna. In fact even looking at the picture makes me hot - ha. Hence the hotel...


Here's the kitchen. It's pretty standard. It's actually pretty high tech because it's got a toaster oven!


This is Anjali's room, and also where I've been staying this week since she's on vacation (notice the AC above the window....mmm...cold air...) I've been sleeping on the blow up mattress on the floor and using her bed as a desk - yeah, I really don't leave this room.

Lastly, a little bit of my work. These are actual surveys with the corresponding malaria tests on top of each survey. It's such a neat little test where you take a couple drops of blood and 2 drops of this solution and it runs up this cotton looking strip. Then you close the book (sealing it), wait 15 minutes, and lines show up on different parts of the strip. All those you can see are negative (the far right result is circled). I am entering these final 15 surveys into the dataset myself because they came in late. They were households that were part of the baseline survey in 2007 but the surveyors couldn't find when they went back. After asking neighbors and town leaders if and where they moved, or repeatedly going back to their house, they finally found them and completed the interview. It's amazing how much work goes into 15 measly observations...


Overall, I'm having a good time here. It's definitely different than being a tourist, and having to work a 9 hour day etc. I mean, I feel like I'm going to have to try pretty hard to seek out the culture of Bswr and Orissa, but it's here. In fact I had dinner last night with a friend of Colette's that she met when she came here last year, and he took me to this Orissa craft market where all of the crafts were so beautiful - I wished I could know the story behind everything.

I'll be heading back to Chennai on Sunday (I'm flying - woohoo!!!) for the Microcredit Conference. I'm really excited about it and am looking forward to being treated like an intern (like being told what to do and where to go and generally just doing what people tell me)...not that I don't like being the boss, but it's pretty stressful making important decisions about stuff you're not sure of!

Next, I'll send an update from Chennai.

until next time...