Spangolofrenglish

We'll be spending four weeks living with host families in Dakar. I can already tell that mine is likely to make for a fascinating and fun experience...

My seven-year-old host sister is trying to teach me words in the Wolof tribal language but she only speaks French so she has to ask her aunt for help.

Sometimes I can understand her aunt because what she says sounds like the (very limited) Haitian Creole that I learned last semester; sometimes she can understand me when I try to speak to her in Spanish because she grew up with a creolized form of Portuguese spoken in her grandmother's country, Cape Verte.

But if all else fails, then I can turn to my host dad and ask him to translate with the English that he knows, or turn to my host mom with Spanish because she studied it in school. The latter is especially helpful when my words then get translated into Serer, the tribal language of the maid who stays here during the week.

There are technically seven languages going on here (eight, if you count the Italian than an uncle throws in to try to understand my Spanish), but four of them are the most dominant: Spanish, Wolof, French, and English. Or as we like to say on IHP, Spangolofrenglish.

I came here on a mission to be able to hold a conversation in Wolof after five weeks. This was the dominant language, I had heard, and it would be a fun challenge to throw myself in off the deep end and try to master a new language in a month - before departing for the comfortable Spanish of Argentina. But the reality of Dakar's linguistic complexities is making me chill out with that particular ambition, and work with seven languages simultaneously instead.

Dakar makes it easy enough to chill out. It's always in the 70's or 80's here, and during the dry season there's almost never a cloud in the sky. The city rests on a peninsula so the scent of the sea and the cool breeze it creates always surround you. And everything is bright - bright from the long, sunny days; bright from the white sand that covers every inch of unpaved city; bright from the buildings painted either white or pastel.

So it's a nice place to be, and an interesting one too: French colonization, a deeply tribal history, rapid urbanization, a long history of migration from nearby African countries, constant European tourism, and a proliferation of American study abroad programs are all apparent, even in just one conversation around the dinner table.

I don't have any photos of Spangolofrenglish so here are some other photos of things to look forward to in the coming weeks instead:

The gorgeous, hand-painted pirogue shipping boats of Dakar

Seth learning to grind millet

Seth mastering the clap in between smashes of millet

Seth feeling more humble about his clapping skills

 

India is Different.

One of the things that's always amazed me about travel is how fundamentally similar people are all around the world. We have our different languages and foods and gestures and expectations and ways of being - but some things will seem universal in very comforting ways. Like laughter. An ability to bond over food. Or, as I'm finding out with my independent research project, the way that we are all drawn to rooftops for the fresh air and the stunning views.

But in some ways (mostly political ways that seem more relevant in my classes than on the street), India really is a fundamentally different place. Here are three reasons why:

Informality. We keep hearing the statistic that 92% of India's labor force is employed in the informal sector. These are street vendors and waste pickers, construction workers and clothes washers, the men who drive around vans offering cheaper fare than the city buses and the ones who will cut your hair on the side of the street for less than a dollar.

Informality makes India cheap. It creates an environment of vibrant, organized chaos that varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. It gives us some of the best examples of how people are endlessly creative and resilient in the face of adversity, and just how precarious it can be to live without a steady salary, a safety net, or a set of benefits. And informality defies any attempts to impose a systematic Master Plan from above - but that doesn't stop local governments from trying.

Ahmedabad's Master Plan (never mind the tens of thousands of people living where those red high-rises are planned)

We see a slum and for a lot of us, our instinct is to feel uncomfortable with the bamboo-and-plastic tents and the children with too little space to play and no way to get to school. So our impulse is to clear the slum, until we realize that half the city lives like this and it could smarter and cheaper and more humane to just get water and schools and toilets and land titles to slum-dwellers instead.

Or, we see cows wandering the streets eating potatoes and celery from the baskets of row upon row of fruit stands, and we start to miss the hygienic standards and the English labels of American supermarkets. Then we realize that families get fed and communities get built because those stands are out there every day. And we start to realize that whatever master plans we might dream up in our own heads about fighting social inequities and making a place good to live in...will have to take informality into account. India's got a history and it's different from ours, and you can't just ignore that.

Speaking of which...

History. Or maybe a better word would be "age." The US as it exists today is a pretty young country with a very young history (that might be different if American colonization hadn't wiped out the people who had thousands of years of history beforehand, but that's another conversation...). India is a very old country with a very, very young history - just 62 years, in fact. But 6,000 years of history have left marks that you can still see.

You see it in two hundred-year-old buildings that developers have added two, three, even four stories directly on top of. You see it in the seven hundred-year-old temples and mosques that you can't just move around with zoning - but you certainly can latch a storefront onto one side, or run a gutter or phone wire along its edge. You see it in the way people talk about their country, or about the state within India, which is where their allegiance often really lies.

Communism. I have come across very, very few people in the United States who would call themselves "Communists" in public or even in private. Even "liberal" can be a dirty word. But here, the Soviets weren't the bad guys to hide from under your desk at school; they were the ones supporting you more than the other guys (the USA) as the world seemed to be burning all around. (India was technically non-aligned but in reality sided with the USSR over the USA during the Cold War.)

So conversations include Marx. Proposals to change capitalism are considered less than ludicrous. Communists get elected, sometimes. And a few of us students on IHP have been surprised to find that we were surprised that extremely complex intellectual debates and movements really are taking place outside the West (and outside the Northeast corner of the United States in particular). How's that for challenging assumptions you didn't know you had?

---

These differences change the language and the assumptions that we use to talk politics. They also lead to disaster after disaster of failed development programs, blaming the mismatch between expectations and results on how India just plain "doesn't work." India works. It works differently from most of the countries where development programs are planned (and it would be preposterous to think that it would work just like Europe when 6,000 years of history beg to differ). Often, it works better.

And it's also too bad when we conflate these differences in politics with differences in people. When really we share a lot of fundamental similarities. So for now, it's time to get back to laughter and food - and maybe even some good rooftops.

 

The Commute

I've swapped out my independent research topic, "The Commute," for a new one: "Rooftops." Research has been incredibly fun and interesting so far...but to get my commuting fix, I think it's time for a blog post about how people get around in India.

Every trip out on the street is an adventure. Cars, buses, bikes, motorcycles, bike rickshaws, auto-rickshaws, hand-drawn carts, buffalo-drawn carts, horse-drawn carts, camels, and, yes, even people all share the road. Each offers a different kind of travel experience. Here's your foolproof guide to navigating this system:

A bike-pulled rickshaw surrounded by Delhi traffic

If you want to get from Point A to Point B as fast as possible then an auto-rickshaw's the way to go. The three-wheeled cars get painted yellow and green and roam the city twenty-four hours a day. To catch one, stand on the side of the road and flap your hand excitedly with your arm extended while shouting, "Ay auto! Ay auto!" If it's nighttime, you can tell the autos by their single headlights. And once the driver pulls over, just tell him where you want to go (please note that pronouncing the destination with your best imitation of an Indian accent will be the surest way to make sure he understands where you're headed; "Goojerrat Co-lij" will get a better response than "Gujarat College"). If you're in Delhi, get your game face on and haggle the price down for the next twenty seconds or so. Or if you're in Adhmedabad, then trust that the driver's printed fare chart will get you a good deal. Climb inside, hold onto your bag, and enjoy the wind in your face.

But if truly public transportation is your way to go, then you've got a few options. In Delhi, there's a state-of-the-art subway system that never runs beyond 20% capacity because the fares are too damn high. Between cities, you can enjoy the world's longest rail system - whether you prefer to ride in private air-conditioned cars, or the more affordable open cars lined with benches instead; just be warned that a typical train ride might take about 24 hours, and upwards of 40 or 50 hours is perfectly common as well! And if you plan to stay within the city, then just hop onboard one of the buses. There are about a thousand different routes that crisscross Delhi, and sometimes lines last longer than drivers' patiences, so do try to get to the front of the line or else be prepared to pull yourself onto the bus as it begins to move.

One of the more colorful trains of India!

One of my favorite ways to get around has to be the shared vehicles. Autos and buses seem cheap to us but when you compare it to the price of rice or sugar, you start to see why so many actual commuters in India choose this option instead. Owners of vans and rickshaws will set up their own routes, sometimes based on the bus lines and sometimes not. You might be able to fit ten people into a rickshaw, or about twenty into a van. And that's where the really fun interactions begin: playing Temple Run on my iPad with an eight-year-old, picking up a few words of the local Gujarati language in Ahmedabad, or laughing at yourself when you find out that the rickshaw you chose is headed not to Lahore Gate (the entrance to the buliding you just arrived at) but rather Lahori Gate (the train station 4km away).

Shared vehicles = Efficiency.

There are thousands more alternatives if you're interested! Ride on the cart being pulled by the buffalo. Rent a bike - but make sure you get a good horn or bell with it, since the honking here walks a fine line between ubiquitous and oppressive, and the existence of standardized traffic laws is questionable. Or, if you really want to look like a tourist, hop aboard a camel and take it for a ride.

(Okay, this is actually me on a camel in Senegal. Same idea.)

The real secret, though, is to get to know your fellow travelers. Google Maps is, believe it or not, actually not used as the ubiquitous way to ask for directions and find a restaurant in this country. They use human beings instead - and if you ever don't know where to go, then looking around hopefully while asking, "English? English?" is sure to attract a large crowd within seconds. At least one person there will be happy and able to tell you where to go; everybody else in the crowd will be happy to gesticulate excitedly with their suggestions as well.

 

"Guests are God."

That's what they told us the other day at the wedding where we were seated as the guests of honor. Why did we find ourselves in that role, you might ask? Simple: we just happened to be walking down the street where the wedding of a few strangers was taking place, and they pulled us in and asked us to join.

Weddings - and I feel allowed to generalize at least a little bit after witnessing at least a dozen (and probably two dozen) by now - are an exuberant tradition in India. I grew up familiar with the fables of elephants marching through the streets, and thousands of people gathering for extravagant weddings. I haven't seen anything quite like that.

But what I have seen everywhere is the joyous, multi-hour processions through the streets of Delhi and Ahmedabad that take roundabout paths from the house of the bride to the house of the groom, complete with loud urgent drums and crowds of dancing men and women. The huge feasts at every mealtime for the two, or three, or four, or five days of celebration. The gorgeous saris and henna tattoos and elaborate jewelry that adorn not just the brides (weddings are really a joining of two families, so the bride and groom sometime seem to play a relatively minor role in the whole affair) but every single female attendee.

Not every Indian gets married, not everybody who does has a wedding ceremony, and not every one of those is necessarily quite this boisterous. But among those that do, I have been repeatedly amazed by how willing they are to let foreigners come and crash them.

Last week, wandering the old city of Ahmedabad in search of some good rooftops, we heard the distinctive beating drums. As we approached, some men and women waved excitedly to beckon us in. We danced, making our way to the middle of the crowd gathered in an alleyway outside the bride's home, and were handed the big metal barrel (which apparently held the plates for eating later) to dance with over our heads. Then everybody took photos with us in what felt like a ten-minute celebrity photo shoot, gave us ice cream and sweets, and took us to lunch. We accepted the invitation to return later that night for the dance party, and made thorough fools (but happy ones) trying to learn the line dance that went with every song. I have rarely felt so welcome in a place I could claim so little ownership of.

Dancing at a wedding with a barrel of plates on my head

But this saying, "Guests are God," seems evident just about everywhere we go. When interviewing residents for a paper in the Culture & Society class, they all offered me tea - and often food as well. I was given tea when I sat on a rooftop to see how it was being used, and when I blundered into a travel agency begging for access to their wifi because email had been inaccessible for four days and I had readings to download, and when I was interviewing the men and women who sort Delhi's trash by hand to find out more about their livelihood.

When I went to the Ahmedabad Urban Development Authority looking for somebody who could brief me on bylaws influencing the use of rooftops in the city, I found myself interviewing the most senior planner of the city (and yes, of course, they served me tea).

When we entered a Jain temple in the middle of the day when the man looking after it was not expecting visitors, we were blessed at a small shrine.

Blessing on forehead, city in background

When I didn't have any small bills to pay for a ride in an auto-rickshaw, two passersby offered to foot the bill for me.

When I jumped into a local college talent show and performed some out-of-practice gymnastics, another competitor gave me a personal dance lesson on stage and the judges awarded me the "Sportiest" award - I think that's the name they came up with on the spot for the "'Let's Give A Prize To The One Foreigner To Make Him Feel Welcome" award.

Every person in every country has their own concept of what "hospitality" is. Here in India, I have to say: it's sure as hell nice to be made to feel like a god.

 

The Dump

I've been trying to journal every day, and doing it most of the time. Usually my thoughts go down with pen on paper - there's something unique about how I process that way. I have to write more slowly, and my imperfect language and the variation among my scribbles reveal some things that might get lost with typing. Sometimes a computer can help me get my thoughts down all in a flurry, though, which helps my writing keep pace with my thinking better - and can thereby achieve a more direct transfer from brain to screen.

Either way, that first-impression kind of writing hasn't ever made it on to this blog. Today, I'm going to try changing that. I suppose the main reason is that I want to write about a very powerful experience, and hopefully some other folks can get a sense of what the experience was like, too, if I publish the blog this way.

We visited the Gazipur dump yesterday. I should have journalled last night, or even better yesterday in the afternoon. But it got late and I was too tired. Maybe things will still feel fresh.

As Delhi expanded from 1 million to 16 in the last fifty-five years, smaller towns and villages got taken over, enveloped into the folds of the greater Delhi region. And as the municipality's governance expanded, displacement was a common theme: what was once farmland suddenly became valuable real estate, part of a mega-city where land was money and factories or condos were better investments than rice or wheat. So Delhi's government put zoning in place and literally piled hundreds of thousands of occupants into trucks to be relocated on the city's border. I've heard a few times that leading up to the 2010 Commonwealth games, within 3 days at least 90,000 people had been relocated.

Yesterday, we visited one settlement that has yet to be displaced. This is where some of Delhi's waste-pickers carry out their work - and will continue to do so until the 24-hour eviction notification comes from the government and the bulldozers roll in.

We stepped out of our air conditioned taxi cabs into what looked like a nice, calm, middle class neighborhood: the new Radisson hotel towered over the exit off the highway. Dozens of four-story condo developments rose up around us, filled with homes and doctors' offices and one dance studio that advertised classes for beginners.

Screen shot of that Radisson's website; the settlement would be off to the right

I smelled something intense and all around us - was it sewage?

We walked two blocks to the settlement. About 850 people live here, they said. They are Delhi's waste-pickers - but only a few of them. An estimated 1% of India's workforce, or 200,000 individual human beings, do this work. So there are probably a few tens of thousands in Delhi alone. (I'll update this post with photos when I can - a Google search of "Delhi landfill" will give you some idea, if also a sensationalist one.)

We saw one little cell of the settlement, where about 20 people live. It was a rectangle of tents surrounding the pile of trash. Each day, said one of the three men we were talking with, he goes to about 300 homes and takes their trash. He sorts the recyclables and the non-recyclables, which go to the dump (about a 30 minute ride on his bike cart).

The recyclables get sorted into paper, plastic, and bottles. Each he sells to a middleman for one or two rupees (about a penny) per kilogram, and then they go on to a factory to be recycled. Working at this rate, he can usually pay rent to the faceless man who claims ownership of this plot of land (actually the government does, but that seems irrelevant), send home 1,500 rupees each week to his family, and have about 1,000 rupees left for himself each month - that's about 20 dollars, well above the poverty line of 20 rupees (about 40 cents) per day. That's why he can't qualify for any of the government assistance programs targeted at the "poor."

So the men, women, children, and a surprising number of dogs live or work at this site. It's hard to describe the feeling of being there...

I could feel myself having some hypochondriac feelings. My eyes were surely stinging. I thought I could sense a cough developing. I was subconsciously not opening my mouth to breathe, lest the fumes enter. But people live here, I thought to myself.

So there was an element that was very depressing. One of the men I talked with (through a translator) came here when he was 10, dropping out of third grade to join his sister once her income was no longer enough to keep the family afloat back home in Vihar. For the last seven years, this has been his livelihood. And he doesn't think upward mobility would ever be particularly possible - no factory would ever hire him. He will never have a chance to learn any other skills, even literacy. Maybe, just maybe he would one day be able to become one of the "middlemen" who pools the recyclables together to transport them to factories. Probably not.

His kids might have a chance of working for a factory in Delhi, but he doesn't want them to grow up here. There is no water (for that, you take your bike cart several kilometers away and lug it back for drinking, bathing, and washing), and electricity is available only sporadically. Medical care is a joke - a few private hospitals cater to wealthier residents nearby, but they said that the nearest public hospital is probably half an hour away even in a car. The real breaking point is the schools, though: there are none here. There are in Vihar.

Children played with some toys, probably cast away into the garbage, in and around the pile. There's a ball, and a two-foot plastic car to sit in, and a rocking horse with one ear missing. The toddler toddled around one pile. One kid had a bit of crust over his eye. Dogs were everywhere, a few very cute puppies sitting atop one pile of bottles and one mother dog that had actually gotten territorial over a particular mound. One man stopped for lunch a few feet away.

So there was a part of me that felt somber. Depressed, really. Angry, maybe, but more confused and fatalistic about what seemed to be...what? A denial of basic human rights? The definition of "poor living conditions," low quality of life? A raw psychological reaction to things I want to protect - cute puppies and cute babies - in the midst of all the waste and excess and discarded items and stuff we think of as junk or health hazards but which constitute their livelihood? A discomfort with being intrusive, with having no place?

Yet I also felt an undeniable sense of awe and inspiration. I couldn't help but respect the craftiness, resourcefulness, hard work, and attitude of the men we were talking with (and the women, too, but our guide was male and I think he only chose a handful of men to speak with yesterday). This is a much better option than the unemployment or hard physical labor that would greet them in Vihar, apparently. And they can send meaningful amounts of cash home. Cell phones allow them to keep in touch with family, and there seems to be a definite social dynamic of camaraderie around the site. Lots of laughing, and gossiping about the visitors.

The man we spoke with the most was one of the most smiley human beings I have ever met (I would love to post a picture but can't say he would be comfortable with that - so his anonymity will continue), and he excitedly and jollily answered all our questions. India probably recycles a higher percentage of its waste than any European country with this system, and the long hours and repeated determination described by these workers - who were funny and articulate, and wore perfectly normal clothes that would be indistinguishable from the other 16 million people living here if you saw them walking out on the street - frankly colored the experience of hearing about their day-to-day work with a surprisingly sense of banality.

If men with clipboards in logo'd polo shirts come from the city planning commission to talk with real estate developers, why would they not come and speak here too? If students take field trips to see a city, why not jot notes and doodles in brightly colored notebooks at this site?

I felt a little raw, a little sombre for the rest of the day. I was also exhausted, drained - but in a way that felt inexplicably satisfying, as though I knew I was exhausted from thinking about things that I knew were meaningful and important.

But important for what? What makes this experience any different from slum tourism? Is the satisfaction I feel really narcissism? Why do the abstract notions of awareness and global citizenship and political cognizance and mutual understanding and empathy and everything else that one might say would come of this experience...why do they suddenly seem like insufficient justifications for going on this trip?

Could I have learned this by just watching the documentary of an IHP alumna who felt so moved by what she saw here two years ago that she is launching a global campaign to raise awareness about these issues? I guess she found one way to make this all important "for" something.

And why is it that I almost left out of this blog entirely the side comment that one man made, that most of their income ends up going towards booze - my hesitance to publicize anything that might provide evidence of a culture of poverty?

We drove from the settlement around the Gazipur dump itself, land bought by the Delhi government from the village once the city's first three landfills were past capacity. These landfills are supposed to be filled up once they reach ground level, we heard - but these are the "Himalayas of Delhi" and they tower a few hundred feet over the city instead. Approaching them is positively ominous - thousands and thousands of birds circled above. None of us had ever seen anything like it; there were sections of the sky blotted out pure black by the wings. We circled around, saw where the municipality is supposed to take all the trash - including the recycling sorted by the waste-pickers - and saw the trucks circling up its ramps. There's another settlement that lives here, scouring the landfill itself for anything that can be recycled.

It sounds like a hard way to make a living, and city officials could possibly be given the benefit of the doubt that they want to put an end to it by finishing the two incinerators now under construction, abolishing this whole system in favor of an organized, formal one. The city is giving free land and subsidizing the construction of these incinerators accordingly; the UN is giving them carbon credits.

But there is concern that this will do little more than take money paid by German auto companies to reduce their carbon footprint, and pay it to German tech manufacturers who are building these incinerators through the UN.

Imagine instead another proposal: Strengthen the existing system. Recognize the waste-pickers as legitimate workers, and pay them to collect trash for the city. Provide them with secure employment and benefits. Develop roads to make them more navigable for the bike carts that transport trash, instead of for cars and cars alone. Don't threaten to evict them from their worksite - allow them to feel secure wherever they are living, so that they have reason to actually invest in a home that is more than a shack made out of the trash they sort through every day. Improve the 200,000 jobs of this industry instead of displacing them.

A Delhi where nobody has to pick through trash piece by piece to eek out a living, where all the trash is neatly collected and either recycled or burned, sounds like a nice dream for the future. But connecting that future dream with the reality of today is another question entirely.

My congratulations to those of you who have read this to its end - that is quite a feat. I hope you understand the conflicting sentiments and the controversial ones too, even if you disagree or feel troubled by them, or by the images I have described. It is my sincere hope that I have articulated what I had the extreme privilege to witness yesterday with as much clarity as possible, and as much dignity and honesty towards everybody involved - including myself. But I have purposefully left my writing as raw and original as possible. I hope it's made us all think.

Namaste.

 

The blog starts up again!

Dear Readers,

Thank you for your patience. I've been trying to still write my blog posts but, for various reasons having to do with weak wifi, laziness, more enjoyable distractions, and trouble hunting down photos that friends took when I was too lazy to play photographer...they've been sitting in the draft pile.

I haven't managed to hunt down every single photo but I think it's time the blog posts start rolling regardless - so enjoy what's coming in the next few days, and thank you for reading!