4th of july new delhi style

I flew to Delhi over the weekend to visit Colette who is there doing research for a Masters in International Human Rights from DU. We used to work together at Financial Designs in Denver. We would spend so much time together in those days at FDL, and to think that we’re here in India together is just so ironic. We were there slaving over spreadsheets outlining the premium savings we could pass on to some of the richest people in Colorado, and now we’re both in a developing country independently working to make the world a better place for the poorest people here. I can’t help smile at the irony of it and wonder how we ever got paired together.






Anyway, back to Delhi...all in all it was a great weekend, and I think it was as much because I loved Delhi and what we did there as it was just being around a good friend and having someone to do those things with. My first impression was that Delhi is a very nice city, in fact, the cleanest, most organized, most developed city that I’ve been to in India. For instance, on the way from the airport, the road we took was very wide, clean, and manicured with trees planted in the median and on the sides of the road every 10 feet. Colette is staying at a family's house who rents out 3 of the 4 bedrooms as a guest house. It worked out that one of the rooms was empty for the weekend, and that's where I stayed.

Colette and I talked the first night about this feeling of guilt that we have being here and staying in such (relatively) nice conditions. It's a feeling I've had a lot lately coming back to a nice, clean, air-conditioned hotel room in such contrast to the villagers that I'm studying. She feels the same way and even remarked that she feels guilty every day because their work takes them into some of the poorest slums of Dehli and at the end of the day she comes back to this beautiful neighborhood where she pays more than the average slum dweller pays in a month in a night to stay. I can definitely understand her conflict and I feel it in Bhubaneswar too, but honestly to a lesser extent. I mean, I haven’t really gone to the field and I definitely am not in the presence of the poorest of the poor on a daily basis. I think there’s a resolution of hypocrisy that you need to be here. It’s impractical to think that people like Colette and I could handle living for 3 months in slum or village conditions without seriously going insane and needing flee the country. Also, we are genuinely here to help, and I think that those intentions go a long way. We’re not just here to cash-in on the Rupee Dollar exchange rate for a first class vacation (for the most part...) It was really nice being able to relate about this experience to someone who I knew really got it, especially since it's really hard to explain if you haven't been here.

Enough about reflections - what did we even do???


On Friday she took me with her into one of the slums (Jasola) where they were conducting a small follow-up survey. They had interviewed about 100 women and they were going back to about 30 of them, targeting women who had very young children or who were pregnant. This second survey was all about maternal child health and access to health services. I believe they're going to use this data to do an evaluation of the slum-dwellers access to services that they know to be technically available.






That night we went to an amazing Thai restaurant and then for frozen yogurt...yum!












On Saturday we woke up early and went to the gym that's near their house and then did a day of touristy sightseeing. We started at Humayan's tomb. It was built before the Taj Mahal and it's architecture is said to have inspired the design...it makes sense to me.














After that we took the metro the rest of the way to Old Delhi. It’s known for it’s spice market or spice bazaar, so we walked around trying to find it. It was about a half hour walk through the most crazy hectic streets you can imagine. It’s like there were people every square inch and the buildings were so old with little alleys you could look down to see hundreds more little shops in every block. It was quite overwhelming, but the spice section was really neat. Everyone in the streets were coughing or sneezing because of all the spice in the air. It smelled really good though. On the way back to the house, the metro was packed. I’ve never been crunched that close in public transportation before! We were all huddled together like sardines. It was quite an experience.









The next morning we went to a breakfast place where we got REAL American breakfast - waffles, eggs, sausage, real drip espresso coffee drinks. Mmm. After we went to an outdoor market where I bought a few little things, but mainly just watched the chaoticness there. At one point when we were looking at some clothes, the stall owner said "one minute" and it was like an invisible alarm went off and ALL the vendors started frantically gathering all their merchandise that was on racks encroaching on the street and throwing them into their stalls, thereby doubling the width of the road. There was a police truck at one end of the street moving its way towards us and there was a rule that they couldn't have any of their goods coming out into the road. Everything in the entire market packed up within 60 seconds, waited for the police truck to pass, and then set up again. I tried to take a picture, but I realize now that it should've been a video because you really can't capture the frenzy in the air.

It was a fun, but thouroughly exhausting 4th of July…no fireworks, but I think I prefer the Indian way better! Now I'm back in Bhubaneswar. It's exactly half way through my stay here in India and I really can't decide if the time is going by fast or slow. At times it feels like every day inches by, but then I think about how I've already been here over 6 weeks and it seems like I just arrived yesterday. Now that things are generally settled, I'm just trying to enjoy every minute (even the ones spend cleaning data for hours on end)!