Adventures in India

New blog post - on poop!

2009-11-17T19:38:00.000-08:00

Pretty please, someone read my new blog? Ok fine, I'll re-post it here.

http://overturningboulders.blogspot.com/2009/11/but-where-do-women-do-their-business.html

Every morning, like a silent, stolid army, the fisherman families and slum residents living on the beach come down to the breakers to take their morning toilet run. A trove of squatters spots the landscape, some relieving themselves quickly and rushing off to work, some taking their time, staring out at the horizon like it’s a good bathroom reader. As I run along I dodge as many turd piles as trash pieces. It’s one way to get a rough gauge for the amount of diarrhea in the community.

I noticed this morning that while seemingly all the men and most of the children (male and female) participate unashamedly in this ritual, the women are entirely absent. Where do they do their business in the morning? How do they get rid of it? And more importantly, if there’s a way for them to use the toilet without using the ocean turning the beach into what is surely every public health professional’s nightmare, why couldn’t the men and children do the same?

The much-acclaimed World Toilet Organization is tackling some of these issues. It sees the “toilet taboo” as one of the biggest barriers to improving sanitation, and seeks to popularize the work of building and maintaining toilets for the 2.5bn people it estimates lack them, through such kitchy marketing campaigns as World Toilet Day and The Big Squat. There’s also the World Toilet College for toilet design and maintenance capacity development, and the annual World Toilet Summit & Expo. It seems to be working – they’ve gotten a ton of press and a number of avid followers – but these things take time.

Without much knowledge of the subject, my guess is that the biggest issue is the social one – convincing people that they need toilets, that open defecation is unsanitary and will lead to disease. Is there some opportunity here in the disparity between women’s and men’s pooping routines? I guess it depends on where the women really go, and whether their methods are any more sanitary than the beach. Until then my neighboring slums will continue to use the ocean as their toilet-cum-garbage can, and I will continue to dodge the turds.

New professional related blog posts

2009-11-01T22:26:00.000-08:00

I'm making a concerted effort to populate my new, work-related blog. Really I am. Even though it's been three months and I have a grand total of six posts.

Have a look - some perspectives on corruption in Kenya and a note I posted on the India Development Blog, my organization's unofficial (and very popular) blog for researcher opinions, on entrepreneurship (original post here).

Blast from the past

2009-10-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

I just had a monster reminiscing session (mmm, procrastination). And realized that my old Kenya blog was not only not public, but not accessible anymore because my host URL had expired. So now it's public, and available here:

http://joanneinkenya.blogspot.com/

There's a bunch of depressing stuff about the evacuation, but also click back to the posts pre-Jan 2008 - an amusing journey back to Peace Corps for anyone who was there with me, and a window into my real developing country experience for those of you in India.

New website launch!

2009-09-19T23:46:00.000-07:00

It's not perfect, it definitely has some kinks to be worked out... but I think it's safe to say our new website is a big improvement over the past one.

We're trying out a fancy new interactive web design where each researcher is a real time content creator, so that the site is (in the words of our director) an "open kitchen" to showcase the research and work initiatives we have going on in progress, rather than just our polished completed products. They're supposed to be writing a blurb to explain this philosophy, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

If nothing else, what's exciting is that I can direct you to much more in-depth, interesting pieces of content:
Main site homepage (complete with new URL): http://www.ifmr-cdf.in/
My programme group (restructuring and new group description coming soon... hopefully along with improved URL, this one is gross): http://ifmr-cdf.in/pg/groups/1223/strategy-advisory-group&type=Program%20area∫=1223
My profile! View all the interesting, or not so interesting, stuff I've been working on over the past year, plus wire posts and bookmarks and all sorts of other junk: http://ifmr-cdf.in/pg/profile/jsprague

Watch for updates and improved site capability coming up soon! I hope...

Look at me, I'm so professional

2009-08-24T00:31:00.000-07:00

I finally decided I wanted to write some blogs that were actually work/life/career related, but didn't want to compromise my ability to bash people and concepts at will, tell embarrassing stories about my life, and be generally unprofessional. So I created a new blog:

http://overturningboulders.blogspot.com/

Check it out, and follow if you're actually interested in my work. If you're just interested in my shenanigans in India, keep reading this one.

Shameless propagandizing

2009-08-23T22:21:00.000-07:00

Check out our snazzy new brochure!

This is exciting because it is way, way, WAY less text than I've ever seen on a description of my organization to date. It's still a little hard to understand, but it's a vast improvement.

If you don't believe me, check out the text on our current website - which is also undergoing a major overhaul, relaunch scheduled for this month. But no guarantees on content quality.

In other news, my boss is in Foreign Affairs this month! http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65271/jessica-seddon-wallack-and-veerabhadran-ramanathan/the-other-climate-changers

This is why I love the internet

2009-08-14T03:42:00.000-07:00

I was browsing through comments from my old blog posts today and wandered across a note from Mike Gannet. Turns out this guy was a Peace Corps volunteer 45 years ago in India, and spent 20-odd years working in and around the country in the 60s-80s. India doesn't have a Peace Corps program anymore but it's amazing to see how similar the experiences are and how much the country looks the same. Check out his picasa album for Rajasthan, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Kashmir and more circa 1966 - http://picasaweb.google.com/Gannettm.

Great pictures Mike, cheers and thanks for getting in touch!

Fighting fire with fire sets the whole world ablaze, Mrs. Clinton

2009-08-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8194539.stm

When I saw this clip of Hillary Clinton giving a “sharp response” to a Congolese student who asked what Mr. Clinton thought of China’s loan to the DRC, my first reaction was my aggressive feminist side: way to go Mrs. Clinton, way to stick up for yourself and show ‘em that’s not acceptable.

My second reaction was holy shit, that’s the DRC. And that got me thinking. Did she come off a little strong? Granted, I can’t tell the context of this interview session or what was said before, but I can imagine a few different interpretations of this question besides “you respect my husband more than me because he’s a dude”: how about “because he’s a former president of the United States” or “because he just got back from diplomatic negotiations in North Korea” or “maybe something was lost in translation”?

On the other side of the coin, what if the kid meant exactly what it sounded like? Now don’t get me wrong, I’m your biggest neighborhood fan of the long-term systemic need for women’s rights in a society. But maybe, just maybe, for a country that’s been ravaged over and over by war and corruption and genocide in recent years, ensuring gender equality in the home isn’t at the top of the priority list.

Which brings me to my biggest gripe. Probably the most high-profile and influential woman in the world, one who has years of public speaking behind her back and is responsible for international conflict resolution, had the opportunity to start a dialogue about a critically important global issue and instead came off looking like a bitter whiny old lady. Seriously you think the phrase “my husband is not the secretary of state, I am” comes off as anything other than the emotional blabber of a woman who’s sick of being stuck in her husband’s shadow? When she could have asked the kid why he cared about a civilian’s opinion, stimulated a conversation about gender equity and provided the example of a woman who has the power to challenge engrained cultural viewpoints, she may well have caused the opposite impression: that’s what happens when you put a woman in power, she gets all emotional and defensive at routine interview questions.

Wasted opportunity, Madame Secretary.

Quit your whining or I will pull this car over right now

2009-08-04T23:50:00.000-07:00

Hmmm. Raila is whining about ambassador Ranneberger's "lecturing on governance": http://www.nation.co.ke/InDepth/Agoa%20Summit/-/634508/634912/-/xmlhr0/-/index.html

Now, I'm not saying the west has any business lecturing anyone on governance. But two things:

1) Uh, how are statements like "you need to implement the reform agenda you made when you formed the coalition government" controversial? Seriously?

And 2) haven't we heard this complaint before? Like, in 1964, when it was uncouth to criticize a newly independent government for corruption that was probably the Brits' fault anyway? This argument seems sliiiiightly outdated.

Also funny that Raila didn't mind when Obama said the same thing two weeks ago... http://allafrica.com/stories/200907140005.html. I guess the Luos have to stick up for each other, si ndiyo?

New boss, same game?

2009-08-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

I rarely follow Peace Corps news. But hey, what the hell. Maybe this one will be interesting.

Obama nominated Aaron Williams to be the next Peace Corps Director. And now it looks like he could be confirmed, really soon.

Who is Aaron Williams? Well, he was a USAID country director for a while (hmm...), and is now a VP of inernational business development at RTI International (hmm!). He also serves on the Council on Foreign Relations, and happens to be a board member at CARE alongside a number of my esteemed mentors (hmm hmm!). Sidenote: interestingly, his USAID experience isn't mentioned in his CARE bio...

So, will he be a good PC director, or more of the same? Chris Dodd, resident Senate Peace Corps mouthpiece and reform campaigner, seems pretty ecstatic about him. So do the other advocates pushing for reform. That and his experience are a pretty good sign.

That said, I was a little underwhelmed with his statement to the Senate committee - plugging sustainable expansion (yay for sustainability, ? for expansion), the continuing importance of volunteer security (sounds reasonable, but this is what cost me my respect for the organization), and the Third Goal of Peace Corps - coming home and getting Americans to "better understand people of other cultures" (yawn... like Peace Corps volunteers can do that). To give him the benefit of the doubt, I'm not sure what he could have said that would have been politically correct and actually impressed me. Maybe something about overhauling the priorities of the whole organization.

So, we'll have to wait and see.

Delhi enters the 21st century

2009-08-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

For those who haven’t been following recent (not so recent anymore) news from Delhi - the High Court decriminalized homosexuality this month by ruling down the famed Section 377 of the penal code. Very exciting. Very about time. Very controversial.

Original breaking news: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/NEWS/India/India-decriminalises-gay-sex/articleshow/4726608.cms

Now Baba Ramdev, a very famous acclaimed yoga guru with millions of followers, is shooting his mouth off and trying to get the ruling overturned. Below is the (albeit very biased) summary of a (somewhat more, but still outdated) recent interview on Hindi TV from an LGBT listserv I get:

Just saw Baba Ramdev's Interview on :Seedhi Baat" at Aaj Tak.

Prabhu Chawla, the interviewer tried to bring in some objectivity and reason to the rhetoric, but the baba went on and on with his tirade against

homsexuals. The gist of his arguments:

1] Its harmful to the character of the nations and therefore should be criminalised.

2] Only criminalisation will ensure that these people are brought in for 'rehabilitation'

3] That he will organise rehabilitation camps and change people using yoga.

4] That it is all about national interest and that irrespective of the court, the people of India who are opposed will win, because theirs is the

path of truth.

5] That his stand is constitutional because the exceptions to fundamental rights includes grounds like national sexurity and morality and

homosexuality is against both.

6] That WHO, UN etc are wrong in describing that homoseexuality is not a disease, and that he is right in describing it as such

AND FINALLY THE CHERRY ON THE CAKE:

7] That because homosexuality is a disease, homosexuals should be barred from donating blood, since anyone who receives this blood by transfusion

will also be infected with homosexuality.

I think the WTF is self-explanatory. I did like this response comment on India Today though:

Baba Ramdev said on Seedhi Baat that receiving blood from gay people makes the recipients gay. Why don't the people follow Ramdev's advice and donate blood to gay people and make them normal?

In better news, the mood here in Tamil Nadu is a bit more optimistic. Chennai, a particularly conservative part of India, does have one advantage in that transsexuals have traditionally been respected members of society – the community may not mingle with them, but few tamper with fate by failing to give money and get their newborns blessed by the hijras. More in the mainstream, one of the many sexuality rights organizations in the state is organizing a workshop to sensitize the Tamil media on LGBT issues, as well as undertaking the ambitious goal of coining new terms in Tamil to better define LGBT communities. Good luck to them.

Dog update

2009-07-15T22:03:00.000-07:00

My current roommate (I'm staying with some friends while looking for a new apartment) is a photographer and caught my dog in a model pose. This picture is pretty much awesome.

In other dog news:

1. My friends have decided that Malaika bears a strong resemblance to Santa's Little Helper from the Simpsons. Her new nickname is, appropriately, SLH. (For the record, she is much MUCH better behaved than the cartoon version. But I can't deny the resemblance.)

2. My Kenyan host brother emailed to tell me that Malaika's puppy had a litter! So she is now a grandmother. Making me a great-grandmother. And my mom a great-great-grandmother. Do you feel old, mom?

3. My friend's driver differentiates me from his other female friends by calling me "dog lady". I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to be flattered or offended by this label.

Blast from the past

2009-07-15T21:42:00.001-07:00

Kenya continues to surprise and perplex me.

My friend Phoebe just found this in her mailbox - her Christmas package to me from December 2007.

I left my village Dec 22, and never went back, so never received any gifts people might have sent me. My host family had told me there were some packages waiting for me, but the post office was raided during the riots and I assumed my gifts had just found their way into some looter's apartment.

So how did this one

a) survive getting there

b) not get looted

c) get sent back??! In my experience the Kenyan postal service does not shell out for return to sender

d) take over a year and a half for this whole process to happen, yet still make it back?

And all this when the gift involved electronics!

This would have been a really interesting study if it had been trackable.

Pirates

2009-04-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

I would like to dedicate this blog post to my good friend McKay, the original discoverer of the pirate bar in Adyar.

I recently had a conversation with a journalist friend about the Somali pirate trend, admitting that despite the seriousness of the situation I couldn't help but snicker every time I saw the term "pirate" splashed across a headline. And I think the media plays it up too - "Pirates take captain hostage and demand ransom," "Somali pirates strike again, hijacking 4 ships." I know I know, that really is what happened, but don't you think they dramatize it a bit?

And wouldn't you? Nobody dressed up as a burglar or a carjacker for Halloween when they were a kid, but a pirate...

Anyway, another participant in the conversation passed this article on to me, justifying any sympathy I may have had for the real-life version of my eye-patch wearing, parrot-toting fantasy. Pirates 1, Italian mafia 0. And as always, Africa gets the shit end of the rest of the world's stick.

CDF in the news

2009-03-10T12:01:00.002-07:00

I don’t work on this project, but 10 points if this article helps you understand the term “economic governance.” If you weren’t confused about what my organization does before, you probably are now.

Speaking of governance, I’m pretty excited to have ordered a copy of It's Our Turn to Eat, which is only available in the UK and apparently is too hot for Kenya. I wonder if it’ll make it through Indian postal screening, because you know, Kenya is the only country with a corruption problem.

An apple a day…

2009-03-09T01:47:00.000-07:00

I just had my first experience with the Indian healthcare system. It should be a credit to India that I’ve been here 8 months and this is the first time I’ve had to see a doctor. That or to Kenya, for immunizing me against every tropical disease imaginable.

India is acclaimed for the high quality and, more importantly, dirt-cheap nature of its healthcare services. It is so dirt-cheap, in fact, that health insurance covers hospitalization only, no basic services – which seems fair, since the typical price for a doctor’s consultation is around $10 (half that of just the co-pay in the US!). In Chennai, if you are a foreigner, no one will recommend to you any institution other than Apollo Medical Center, the world-renowned ultra-modern private hospital. There were rumors that Apollo was a little pricier than the typical clinic, but hey, this is “high quality and dirt-cheap healthcare” India. So when I developed a mild but stubborn skin rash from SE Asia, I decided to go check it out.

The dermatologist was friendly and professional, and shrugged off my concern about the price of tests with a “don’t worry, nothing is expensive in India.” Then came his recommended course of action for my rash:

3 blood tests
2 inflammation-reducing creams
Avoid groundnuts
Avoid bottled beverages
Avoid cheese
Avoid processed foods
Avoid strawberries and strawberry products
Avoid beer
1 anti-allergy tablet
1 prescription soap to use in the shower
…and a partridge in a pear tree.

I guess I don’t have to worry about underdiagnosis.

The bill for all of this hoopla came to about $60 – nothing outrageous, but at the end of the day it was 3x what it would have been if I was working in the US. It does not make me excited about the prospect of seeing a doctor for an *actual* medical condition.

And for the record, I bought one of the creams and the soap, ignored the rest of the diagnosis, and the skin rash was gone in 4 days.

Dartmouth’s new prez

2009-03-02T22:30:00.000-08:00

Dartmouth just announced its new president , set to take over for good old Jimmy Wright on July 1. He’s like, way young (49), way accomplished (MacArthur Genius Grant) and way global-poverty-focused (Partners in Health co-founder, WHO HIV/AIDS Dept director). Woot.

Of course there is no transparency on who the other nominees were, so I have no idea if this was the best choice. But in absolute terms, a young-minority-notentirelyacademic-globallyconscious choice for a traditionallyrunbyoldwhiteguys-antichange-indangerofinfluencebyneoconservativealums school sounds pretty good to me.

When the law and order guys disrupt law and order

2009-02-22T03:50:00.000-08:00

This week when I picked up the newspaper each morning, I have to admit that it was all I could do to keep from laughing at the tragic headlines. “Lawyers, police clash at Madras High Court.” “150 lawyers protest Madras High Court violence, arrested.” Lawyers and police are taking turns smashing cars, setting buildings on fire, and throwing stones at each other. Am I the only one who finds this ironic? The two groups of people we rely on to maintain law and order in society, the two that are supposed to maintain checks and balances and ensure peace is kept and justice is served, have resorted to skirmishing like drug-addicted youth gangs. These are the guys who have to deal with violent members of society every day and clean up the messes they make, one group stopping people from rioting and throwing stones and setting buildings on fire, the other prosecuting or defending those who commit such raucous acts. And here they are doing it themselves, as their chosen method of protest? Seriously?

On top of it all, the whole reason for this clash in the first place, raising the awareness of which which could be the only possible explanation for such childish misbehavior, has been completely diluted in this mess. If you’re lucky you might get a tiny tagline at the bottom of an article about burning effigies and flooded hospitals that provides a half-hearted explanation of “where it all started” – something about a lawyer or two unfairly arrested, a politician failing to support the Sri Lankan Tamils, or some caste discrimination issue at the root of the conflict. These might be worthy causes to support and publicize. But by 50 lawyers standing around, courtroom suits and all, hurling stones and burning police stations? By cops and police administrators bashing windshields of private vehicles? Really, people.

More coverage of the tomfoolery available here.

Prop 8, Karnataka and gay Nepal MPs

2008-12-01T21:35:00.000-08:00

Like any good mainstream Californian, I’ve always felt strongly about sexual rights, but recently I’ve felt a lot more passionate about the issue as a basic human right. Maybe it’s the passing of Prop 8, maybe it’s the rampant homophobia I hadn’t been exposed to before. It was one thing in my predominantly Christian village in Kenya, where I expected people to be less educated or open-minded. It’s another in an urban center in India, a nation exploding with diaspora and Western influence. To see young people scoff at traditions like arranged marriage like they’re arcane vestiges of their parents’ generation, but hold tight to their anti-gay prejudices without questioning their origins, is something I can’t get used to despite knowing full well that this is not a phenomenon of the east.

This came to be even more front and center this morning when I read a press release about some recent events in Karnataka, the next state over. This brought back to mind so many images of the issues we worked against in the HIV fight in Kenya – stigmatization, misrepresentation of facts, deliberate deception… but for all my whining about corruption in Kenya, I never saw these types of actions carried out by the police. They were carried out by non-state players, churches, Western-backed NGOs, but never by the very government agency working to prevent misinformation and promote awareness. This reaches a whole new level of atrocity.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel. Recently a panel was held here (in Chennai, capital of the country’s most conservative state) featuring Sunil Pant, a member of

Nepal

’s parliament who is Asia’s first openly gay MP. Milk is coming out this week, although sadly not in

India

. The No on 8 campaign is finally waking up and taking some legal action, albeit a month late. And the realization that this is a battle that’s far from over, not just a “matter of time” as I had previously thought, has pushed me into a far higher level of awareness and incited my inclinations towards activism. As much as the comparison offends some communities, I do think of this as our generation’s version of the 1960s civil rights movement, and am starting to consider getting more proactively involved (hmm, next career move? stay tuned). If a few events like these can spur a straight, middle class white girl who’s experienced relatively negligible discrimination in her life to action, imagine what they can do for the rest of the population.

Mumbai

2008-11-26T22:03:00.001-08:00

Decent local coverage and streaming video of the terror attacks here.

To me this one is particularly scary not just because of the scale of the attacks (as opposed to Delhi in September) or the targeting of foreigners. It's the indiscriminate shooting in train stations, the ambiguity of motive, and the impact it's actually having. The Delhi, Bangalore, and Ahmedabad blasts didn't receive this kind of coverage from the international press. There weren't hostages. The markets didn't close. They certainly didn't cause the death of the chief of the Anti-Terrorism Squad, which may be the most scary so far.

I do sincerely hope, though, that this isn't considered a crisis just because of the involvement of foreigners, the threats against US and UK passport holders. The latest counts say 101 people have died, 6 of them foreigners. Let's remember that the other 95 deaths are just as tragic and despicable.

Night at the Museum, or, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

2008-11-26T10:35:00.001-08:00

Recently I’ve been on a touristy streak, having realized that I have lived in Chennai for 5 months and seen only a fraction of the city sights that a traveler would see in two days. So my friend Mike and I decided to take a tour of the Government Museum over the weekend.

You know those experiences that you can already hear yourself retelling (or writing in a blog) while you’re still going through them? This was one of them. The museum was a typical underfunded, poorly labelled government project with dozens of valuable ancient artifacts just lying around in open air, deteriorating and occasionally falling victim to petty vandalism. Some of the pieces (mostly religious carvings and writing slabs) were just slapped down on the floor and loosely covered with plastic. Others had been residing on window sills for so long that when the caretakers decided to “renovate” by giving the sill a fresh coat of paint, instead of removing and then replacing the slabs, they just painted around them and left the bottoms with an inch or so of bright blue paint. I kid you not.

But that’s not what made the story retellable. We also visited the “animals” section, which was more like a high school biology exhibit. Or as Mike would describe it, the Mütter Museum of medical oddities transplanted from Philadelphia to India. There were taxodermied displays of just about every animal on earth, from birds to tigers to fish (yes, taxodermied fish). To display the anatomy of certain animals, there were exhibits featuring the disembodied wings, tail and head of various birds. There were cheetah paws, just the paws, cut off at the elbow. There was a whole section on insects, complete with 50x models of dog ticks. My personal favorites included the displays on humans (one case showing the skulls of “man, horse and elephant,” another featuring a full human skeleton alongside a full horse skeleton, in a posture that would never have occurred in real life). Another favorite was a cat, split open all the way down its belly, floating in a jar of formaldehyde so you could see all its innards. Oh, and a Siamese twin pig fetus, also floating in formaldehyde.

But I still haven’t reached the climax of the story. We were so engrossed by the displays in the museum that we wanted to see more, and had the curator open up the door to the botany section (which clearly hadn’t been viewed for decades, not because it wasn’t open but because no one was interested) for us. There we found such treasures as algae floating in formaldehyde-like jars, except the preservative had evaporated halfway so the leaves were only partially submerged. Also a display of mosquito repellents over the years, progressing from a jar of eucalyptus oil to a tube of commercially manufactured bug cream.

We had been exploring this section of the museum for about 10 minutes when the power suddenly went out, leaving us in relative darkness (thank goodness for the glow of our cell phones). We decided this would be a good time to leave and headed for the exit. When we got to the door, however, we found it mysteriously closed. We messed around with it for a couple minutes until we realized it had been locked – from the outside. That’s right, we were trapped inside the museum. In the darkness.

We also heard some rustling around outside, so we banged on the door and yelled out. We promptly heard the rustling stop, and someone walk away. Then silence. Literally, a curator had heard us inside, continued locking up, and just walked away.

This is about when the panic started to set in – as much as I enjoy a good museum mystery, the dinner I was planning that night sounded like somewhat better company than the algae. We tested out a couple other doors to the room, to find all of them locked as well. Mike went to work on a window next to the entrance, and miraculously pried it open and looked out. His comment “it’s a little steep” was a bit of an understatement – it was a straight fall two flights down onto a winding staircase. I managed to convince him that wasn’t a good idea before we got a window to the courtyard open and started yelling through it. Finally someone heard us and came over, realized what the problem was, and disappeared to find the people in charge. Fifteen minutes, 6 security guards, a lot of yelling and lot of requests to “wait wait” later, the door was opened and we were released to freedom.

Mike would like it to be noted that we had found a way out on our own, in case the guards hadn’t found us. I would like it to be noted that the guards are idiots. We did, however, have many plans of what we were going to do if no one found us (break down the door with a stool, burn a hole through it with Mike’s lighter, swing through the window to a fire escape, take a bunch of stuff from the display cases and have a party all night just like Claudia and Jamie).

So for any others who decide to visit the Government Museum in Chennai – be aware, it closes at 5 and if you’re not out by then, you might be there all night.

Upon recounting this story to my roommate Ponnu, who happens to be a journalist, she (and subsequently her editor) found it entertaining enough to run in the paper. My debut in the Indian Express: http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=Locked+in+museum+room+for+30+minutes&artid=BYZwuUSMzBU=&SectionID=lifojH

Boys playing with fire in French colonies

2008-11-19T01:32:00.000-08:00

October 27th was one of the biggest holidays of the year in India – Diwali, the festival of lights. The nation celebrates this by making it temporarily legal to purchase just about any and all kind of fireworks, and set them off unregulated. Pretty great.

A few friends and I decided to celebrate this three day weekend by driving down to Pondicherry, a semi-autonomous former French colony about 3 hours south of Chennai. We packed five people plus a dog into a Hyundai hatchback and took off down the coast.

We ended up staying at a great half-hostel half-campsite elevated bungalow thing right on the coast in Auroville, the hippie colony neighboring Pondicherry town. This was particularly convenient because a) it cost about $15 for 5 people, and b) not only did the caretaker not mind my dog being there, but he liked her so much that he offered to trade the dog for the room fee. Unfortunately he was unaware of the effort that has been put into this dog.

After settling in our bungalow we headed into town. Our first stop was the reason most Chennaiites make the journey down to Pondicherry: because of its semi-autonomous status, the colony is not subject to the same alcohol laws as the rest of the state. We were able to stock up on coveted imported liquor, including French and Australian wine (sure to make our upcoming Thanksgiving feast far more pleasant).

Errands finished, we spent the rest of the weekend gluttonously stuffing our faces full of crepes, pasta and pizzas. To celebrate Diwali properly, we bought a 60-shot firework that looked like a huge car battery, dug a hole for it in the sand on the beach and set it off. (This was the brainchild of my crazy friends Mike and Raghu, who are exceedingly lucky that they didn’t lose any limbs.) My dog was not as amused as the rest of us.

We finished off the Festival of Lights by returning to Chennai in time to watch the celebrations in the city from a rooftop restaurant. It’s really an incredible sight, seeing fireworks erupting all over the city at random intervals, hearing sparklers and crackers on every block. You could never get an experience like this in the states. And admittedly, it is a very dangerous tradition – walking to the restaurant I almost walked into at least three crackers about to go off. But it was also a pretty amazing celebration.

Two work updates

2008-11-12T04:59:00.000-08:00

1.) After initiating contact with the IT guy a mere two and a half months ago, a description of my program is finally up on my centre's website! http://ifmr.ac.in/cdf/strategy_advisory_group.htm

Please note that reading this is unlikely to actually help you obtain a better understanding of what I do... but one can always try.

2.) Our organization, and its many affiliates, are recruiting like crazy. There are a number of job descriptions up on our site, but there are lots of others available that aren't listed as well. There are jobs available in everything from environment to digital marketing to tourism to finance.

The most recent of these is that my group is starting to recruit to double our team (from 3 to 6), so I am now personally looking for people. If you, or anyone you know, are interested in moving to India for a year or two to work at a very exciting, sometimes disorganized, never boring development research & consulting organization, please let me know! The biggest advantages of working here, in my opinion, are that you have a lot of freedom to develop and mold your own projects, and that we have access to some of the most influential academic, government, corporate, and public sector names and organizations out there (in India and the US).

I'm hoping the financial crisis and subsequent unemployment will help me in my recruitment endeavor. ;) Job descriptions coming soon.

VOTE!

2008-11-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

And also, watch this hilarity and customize it and send it to your friends. If you already got it from me, you're someone special (or maybe one of the 5 remaining people who still reads this blog).

http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/index.html?nid=JPJdcJK7ggXWWH8aRQJ77DI3OTc2NDE-&id=-13100268-kTneemx

For further entertainment, here is the story of my experience voting absentee from India.

In Chennai there's this wonderful group called Democrats Abroad that organizes events to help people register to vote, keep up to date about American politics, etc etc. They offer personalized advice on how to fill out your ballot and make sure you sign in all the right places and all that. (For the record they run nonpartisan events, but you run into very few people living in developing countries who are not Democrats.)

You'd think with a great organization like this, voting would be easy, right? Right.

So I registered to vote with Dems Abroad way in advance. And typically, my absentee ballot did not arrive. And did not arrive. And did not arrive. Fortunately, as it turns out, some dude in the 1970s came up with a great solution to this absentee ballot mailing problem and got Congress to institute the "Federal Write-In Absentee Ballot". The FWAB, as we absentee junkies like to call it, allows people who have registered to vote but haven't received their ballot to download a generic one off the web, fill it out, and send it in. So I did that. Yay, job done right?

But, there are all these weird county rules and it's very unclear whether you're allowed to vote for local issues on the FWAB. Apparently there's actually a danger that if your county doesn't allow you to vote on local issues and you write in your votes for them anyway, your federal vote could be discounted. Since California is such a swing state, I didn't want to risk that, so I only voted federal. However this precluded me from having my say on things where my vote might actually make a difference, like Prop 8. Not so good.

By some stroke of miracle, a week or so later my absentee ballot showed up. I was positively floored. But it arrived on a Friday afternoon, and about 30 minutes later I received an email from my trusty Democrats Abroad group informing me that the next Monday was the last day to turn in absentee ballots to the Consulate to get them sent home. Unfortunately that Monday was Diwali, arguably the largest Indian holiday of the year, and our hardworking friends at the Consulate get both American and Indian holidays off. Plus, the Consulate website told me that citizen services were only open 9-12:30, so I was too late to submit my ballot that Friday. Sweet.

Fortunately, a call to the Consulate informed me that I could in fact submit the ballot on Tuesday and get it sent in time. So like the good informed voter I am, I called up my mom Tuesday morning and had her tell me what to vote for on all the local issues. (Kidding. Mostly. In CA you can vote for everything from animal rights to your high school superintendent, so there were a few things mom had to advise me on.) I then went to put my ballot in the envelope, seal sign and submit. You'd think the story would end there...

Gotta love India. My ballot envelope had glued itself together without the ballot inside, because the adhesive melted in the heat. I had to force it open to get the ballot in, which obviously made it look like it had been tampered with.

Another call to the Consulate. Apparently the way to get around this is to tape the envelope shut and sign over it, put it inside another envelope, and include a little note explaining that the ballot has not been tampered with. I didn't feel ridiculous at all typing up a professional business letter to my county registrar, explaining how the adhesive had melted my ballot shut in the south Indian heat.

As the icing on the cake, I finally went to the Consulate to submit my ballot. You can't take it inside the building because they don't allow sealed envelopes, and of course the people who work security at the entrance to the Consulate aren't experts in US voting procedures. You're supposed to personally put it in one of those fancy ballot boxes without anyone touching it or influencing you, right? Nope - they took it from me, shoved it through the metal detector, and dumped it in some generic box. I'm just hoping it was the US mail box, not the trash bin.

However, the point is I voted. So now everyone else better vote too.

The Muggle Empire

2008-10-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

The eminent Kristian Lau and Ellie Smith were my first visitors in India last week! Okay, so they didn’t actually come to where I live, but they gave me a great opportunity to travel around the tourist spots of north India with them. We spent 10 days trotting around the forts and temples and rooftop cafes of Rajasthan (the state west of Delhi).

Most of the noteworthy sites in Rajasthan were constructed during the 16th to 19th centuries by rulers of the Mughal Empire, a bunch of Persian imperialists who were patrons of culture and intellect when they weren’t busy imprisoning their own fathers and entertaining their concubines. When Kristian first learned about the Mughals he couldn’t help but wonder aloud why the name sounded so familiar, until he realized it bore a striking resemblance to the non-wizarding communities of Harry Potter fame.

Every city in Rajasthan is different – has its own character, its own type of tourists, even its own color. We spent our first day in Jodhpur, the “blue city”, named for the use of indigo dye in paint (people thought it was a pesticide). We walked around the beautiful Mehrangarh Fort on the hill overlooking the town (the unfortunate site of the deadly stampede a few days later), and made friends with the sellers of overpriced pashminas at Baba’s Art Emporium, where apparently Richard Gere and Angelina Jolie have also been duped into buying at a 300% markup.

From Jodhpur we went south to Udaipur, the most romantic city in India (a great place for three plutonic friends to visit together). The most remarkable feature of the city, which is reminiscent of Venice except for the rickshaws and cows in the street, is a massive island palace that’s been turned into a hotel and is now accessible only if you stay there or shell out $100 for a meal. Jerks. But we did take a boat ride to a similarly cool island with a similarly enchanting palace. We also toured through the City Palace which has 12 different palaces all with different motifs, saw a sweet traditional dance show where a lady balanced 12 jugs on her head, and hung out with an entrepreneur who had just opened a coffee shop near our hotel.

Next we went to Pushkar, an important city for Hinduism because it houses the only temple to Lord Brahma in all of India. Unfortunately the city has turned into a haven for drug-addicted ravers (a rave was raided and 50 people were arrested a few days before we got there), and the sacred lakes you can visit near the temple are swarming with fake priests who pressure you to give massive amounts of money to pray for the health of your family. It did, however, score us some big bindis (the Hindu marking placed on the forehead during prayer, in this case consisting of red powder and dried rice), which we were still wearing none too gracefully along with our dirty sweaty clothes when we arrived at the 5-star hotel we were staying at in our next stop, Jaipur. It wasn’t too surprising when the receptionist, encountering three grimy young adults claiming a reservation on a platinum card that included a free suite upgrade (Kristian has a lot of hotel points from work travel), asked for ID.

So basically Jaipur consisted of us taking advantage of the free Sheraton. We did manage to find some time between the pool and the steam room to see the “pink city”, one of the three points of the Golden Triangle of India (the other two being Delhi and the Taj Mahal). These included the City Palace (complete with a south Indian movie set), Amber Fort (site of the biggest cannon in India, an unusual tourist attraction)

, and the largest of five incredibly accurate observatories constructed by the Mughul ruler Jai Singh, called Jantar Mantar.

We left Jaipur a little later than expected (I blame the swimming pool) and consequently hadn’t quite reached our next destination, a remote tiger reserve, when we ran across a village protest around 10pm. The crowd (who knows what they were protesting) had dragged a tree across the road and weren’t letting any cars through. Our awesome driver, Chain, got tipped off that there was a way around the barricade through some dirt roads, which seemed like a great idea until we found ourselves at a fork with the options of getting our car stuck in some deep rivets or running into sleeping cows. We chose to turn around. Eventually we found our way around the protest though, and stumbled into our hotel (actually luxury tent camp) around 11pm. Which was great since we had a game drive at 6am.

Our trip to Ranthambhore Tiger Reserve was well worth the adventure of getting there, though. On our afternoon drive we had an amazing sighting of a 300kg male tiger, aided by our jeep guide, who was clearly the alpha jeep guide (he tracked the tiger and informed all the other drivers). He also turned down my offer to sacrifice Kristian to the tigers as bait.

We finished our trip in Agra, where we got up at 6am (again) to catch the sunrise sighting of the Taj Mahal. The first clue that this was going to be a good visit was the fact that Kristian, Ellie and all other foreigners had to pay 750 rupees ($17) to get in, but as a “local” with an Indian tax ID card, I got in for 20 rupees. We had expected a crowded, touristy experience to an overhyped monument, but to our surprise this one actually lived up to its reputation. This tomb, built by the Mughal Shah Jahan as a memorial to his favorite wife (imagine how the others must have felt) really did look like the most romantic building in the world. There’s a massive garden with a bunch of reflecting pools leading up to it, and two red marble mosques flanking it that are architectural wonders in their own right. The real thing, beautifully symmetrical and situated picturesquely along the banks of the Yamuna River, naturally took up about 80 photos on my camera.

If you want to come visit me here and see all these amazing things… too bad, I already saw them, you’ll have to see another part of India with me. Just kidding, but if I do go there again, you have to make sure I fit in an elephant ride.

The Long Road to Reunion

2008-10-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

Warning, this is a long one… but, there are pictures at the end of it!

They always say the harder you work towards a goal, the sweeter the victory when you achieve it. The month of August was a poignant reminder of how true that is.

After much debate and reflection upon moving here, I decided to bring my dog to India from Kenya. I had been advised that it was a bad idea, Chennai wasn’t a dog-friendly city, but after seeing the pet I had raised from a puppy living off my Kenyan family’s table scraps (as is the fate of only the lucky dogs in Africa) I decided that her life would be better with me in India than alone in Kenya. I also decided to suck it up and pay the exorbitant cost of hiring an agent to go to my village, get my dog, bring her back to Nairobi, get all the necessary vaccinations and paperwork done, and ship her to India.

It turns out this process was just the tip of the iceberg. To start with, when I called my Kenyan brother up to let him know the agent would be coming to collect my baby, his reaction was “hmm, that might be a problem.” My dog had been in heat the week before, and was now pregnant again! (She had 6 puppies in February.) I got a hint at the panic a mother must feel when she finds out that her teenage daughter has gotten knocked up.

Of course, a pregnant dog can’t travel any more than a pregnant mother can, and neither Kenya nor India need any more puppies that can’t be taken care of. So my agent got her spayed in Nairobi (which also aborted the pregnancy). After a week of recovery, she was ready to go. My agent mentioned that I should check into the clearance procedures for imported animals at the airport, thinking I might have to get a couple forms in advance. Little did I know what a nightmare that would be… India, as it happens, is even more of a bureaucratic nightmare than Kenya.

The quarantine office requires you to produce a bunch of papers (arbitrarily decided depending on the mood of the quarantine officer) in person in order to receive a “no-objection certificate” to collect the dog at customs. However, the quarantine office is located an hour and a half outside the city and is open 10-5 on weekdays. Having recently gone through the process of getting my visa registered at the Foreigners’ Regional Registration Office, I had an idea of where this was going. At the FRRO, the list of papers required by a given foreigner changes on a daily basis, is extraordinarily confusing and inefficient, and requires the average foreigner to go and wait in line a minimum of 3 times (10 times is not unusual) in order to get through the whole procedure. The FRRO is only 5 minutes from my office and nearly made me tear my hair out; I had no interest in dealing with the same hassle at an office 1.5 hours from me and subsequently going bald.

After multiple phone arguments with the quarantine officer and consultations with various vets and cargo shippers, I begrudgingly paid another exorbitant fee to hire an agent to get me through the clearance process (ie pay the necessary bribes to the necessary people) on the Indian side. From then I thought I was good to go. How wrong I was.

My Kenyan agent booked the dog on an Air India flight direct from Nairobi to Chennai. We were all surprised that they had direct flights. It turns out they don’t – it was actually a flight from Nairobi to Mumbai. After that annoyance she switched the reservation to Emirates Airlines. Now she was booked to fly through Dubai, which has a good reputation for animal handling. However, the Dubai airport requires three days of processing for a transit permit, and doesn’t do processing on Sundays… and the health certificate they need in order to process the transit permit is only good for four days. On top of this, Dubai requires a dog to have a microchip in order to be held in transit. Neither Kenya export nor India import require a microchip, so shelling out another $75 to ship the dog through Dubai seemed illogical. So a week and many expletives between my Kenyan agent and the Emirates guy later, the dog was back on Air India. This time they gave us the correct flight details, with a 6 hour layover in Mumbai.

This whole process took over a month from when my dog was originally picked up in my village. While I, my Kenyan agent, my Indian agent and multiple airline personnel were developing ulcers and popping blood vessels, my pup was blissfully unaware, hanging out in the kennel with other dogs and working steadily towards fattening herself up on proper dog food. Dogs are also amazingly resilient – so at the beginning of September, she finally arrived at my doorstep, unscathed and none the worse for wear!

Malaika is now a happy member of our apartment family (which for a little while was 6 people and a dog in a 3BR flat). She seems to be adjusting well to the new environment, intrigued by the new smells and only getting mildly sick a couple times (much like humans adjusting to India). She even participated in our housewarming party a couple weeks ago, flirting with all the guys and intimidating the girls. She’s the most international street dog I’ve ever met, having lived on two continents in 1.5 years, and I hadn’t realized how many things would be new to her after growing up in a village (beaches, auto rickshaws, staircases…).

It’s also clear that this dog was meant to come to India someday. When my roommates asked what her name was, I was about to launch into an explanation of what “Malaika” means in Swahili, when they cracked up. “Why did you give her an Indian name??” Malaika means angel in not only Swahili and Luo, but Hindi too. It’s the name of a famous model here, and there’s a song named after her. Clearly this was fate.

More bad news

2008-09-30T06:46:00.000-07:00

I'm on vacation in Rajasthan, north India right now. It's great. Full update and pictures to come, but...

Horribly sad news. Every time there is a celebration here there seems to be a risk. We were in Jodhpur three days ago, visiting this massive old fort on a hill there - really fantastic site. This morning, on the first day of the annual Navaratri Festival (also called Durga Puja), the crowd waiting to enter one of the temples in the fort turned into a stampede as the gates were opened. Over 140 people died of suffocation, according to official reports. This follows another stampede on a hillside temple in Maharashtra a month ago, when 160 people died. The tragedy is that much more in our faces because we were JUST there.

Slightly fuller story here: http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/000200809301502.htm

I don't mean to keep posting upsetting news on my blog, but I'm guessing that news from the east rarely makes it into the western papers.

Srilankalicious

2008-09-12T02:35:00.000-07:00

I went to Sri Lanka over India’s independence day weekend. Because that’s what you do when you live in South Asia – you hop over to Sri Lanka for the weekend.

As with most tropical island weekend trips, it was pretty spectacular. To answer the questions of those who follow world news, no, it was not dangerous. We stayed away from the north and northeast where the Tamil Tigers are fighting the Sri Lankan army (long, sad story) and generally avoided Colombo, where large parts of the city are on lockdown. Instead, we rented a van and driver and spent a day each on three activities: a beach, a hill station and a rock fortress.

We found a resorty little village on the southwest coast with a name I can’t get enough of: Unawatuna. It sounds like something you’d say in Swahili, except that “kutuna” isn’t a verb (although it should be – to tuna? What better word could there be?). We bunked up at the first guest house we found right on the beach, and spent the day lounging and swimming and body surfing and getting $6 beachfront massages. We ate and drank our way through the closest restaurant to the guest house, and went out for the local Arrack liquor that night. The next morning we explored this cool old Portuguese/Dutch fort in the neighboring town of Galle. This was one of those days that made me wonder, no, seriously contemplate, why I haven’t yet decided to leave it all behind to set up a B&B on some idyllic white sand beach and while away my days in paradise.

I contemplated this even more the next day when we got up early to leave paradise and embark on a 10-hour journey inland to the hill city of Kandy. After a set of roads reminiscent of my days in Kenya, we arrived just in time to cram ourselves into the crowd that had amassed to view the climax of the Perahera Festival. Like typical ignorant tourists, we hadn’t realized that we had come to Sri Lanka during the weekend of this event, also known as the Tooth Festival. Kandy is the site of a very famous and sacred temple in Buddhist tradition, where they house what they think is one of Buddha’s teeth. Every year they parade the relic around the city with grand fanfare, to the tune of 80 adorned elephants and countless traditional dancers, saber spinners, and fire throwers on stilts among other performers. It was quite a spectacle, and well worth leaving the beach behind.

On Day 3, we went a little farther north to check out Sigiriya, the site of a 1st century rock fortress. Some king built his palace on top of a huge rock overlooking his kingdom for many miles around – an even better strategy than mountaintop and shoreside forts, if you ask me. The ruins still remain, complete with an inner and outer moat, fountain garden, terrace garden and wall frescos (which I assume have been redone). It may have been a tourist trap, but it was still a 2,000-year-old tourist trap.

Did I mention the seafood? After 3 days full of prawns and crab in every meal, it was difficult to get on the plane back to Chennai. Especially difficult when the 1:00am flight was delayed 2.5 hours, getting us home at 6am Monday morning. This is extreme weekend travel at its best.

Mahabalipalabahaba

2008-09-04T03:36:00.000-07:00

Two hours south of Chennai, by public bus, is a sweet little temple-filled town called Mahabalipuram (ten points if you’re not Indian and have never been to India and can pronounce that). I went to check it out a few weeks back with my friend Mike.

My first experience with public transportation in India was a far cry from the speed racer matatu mini bus death traps of Kenya, but it was an experience all of its own. We were pretty psyched to discover that the bus was leaving just as we got to the station so we wouldn’t have to wait… until we realized that it was leaving because all the seats were full, and we had to stand, packed like sardines among dozens of other people, for the entire 2 hour ride.

It was worth it once we got there though. Right along the beach there is this fabulous ancient temple, the main attraction of the town. Europe, I see your 16^th century cathedrals and raise you a 7^th century Hindu temple. The temple is surrounded by a wall of protective stone rams and contains a few hard-to-see but intriguing sculptures inside, including a reclining Vishnu (one of the three gods in the Hindu Trinity).

Then we spent about an hour walking around this vast park within the town that I like to call The Big Ancient Rock Playground. It is essentially a set of massive granite slabs that you wander around and randomly bump into really old shrines and reliefs carved into the stone. My favorite was a massive oval rock egg perched precariously on a heavily sloping rock slab. Not sure what the significance was, but it was pretty fun to take pictures with it.

Incidentally, last Saturday I revisited this little seaside town and experienced the other side of Mahabalipuram: local shopping, mopeds for rent, open roads and restaurants that serve drinks (which Chennai does not). I even tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to ride a motorcycle down a narrow side alley. It was a far cry from temples and granite sculptures, but equally worthwhile.

A bit of environmental conservationism

2008-08-27T06:38:00.000-07:00

As you might know, the human race has been remarkable in its ability to rapidly and effectively work together to destroy the Earth. Maybe there's something we could learn here about the proliferation of activities and habits among the masses, but I digress...

In India, of course, environmental sustainability is a major concern in every development effort. In an effort to take it seriously, I am conceding to a rare promotion of a word of mouth grassroots project.

Check out http://www.onehundredmonths.org/, and sign up if you are so inclined. I think it's an interesting opportunity to raise awareness among our collective social consciousness, and find ways to reduce our personal carbon footprints. We all know climate change is "bad" and conservation is "good", but how often do we actually do something about it in our daily routines?

Ok, enough preaching from me.

One banana two banana three banana four...

2008-08-26T03:27:00.000-07:00

For those of you interested in microfinance: there's an interesting debate going on about the use of microloans on the India Development Blog that my organization produces. I'm not sure where my loyalties lie on this issue, but I sure do like this quote:

"I've never seen what we would call a rich, developed economy which consists of millions of women sitting around selling bananas." - Malcolm Harper

Summer in Chennai

2008-08-24T14:05:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Cheryl Young, a Mark Twain quote. Funny because it's true.

"In India, cold weather is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy."

Weekend of musical extremes

2008-08-10T06:41:00.000-07:00

Chennai is the heartland of Tamilian music culture. (Tamil being an Indian ethnic group, much like the Luo to Kenya.) Or at least, so we've heard. A couple friends and I set out to check out said musical culture for ourselves a few weekends ago. Little did we realize the extremes we would experience.

Friday night, we went to a traditional Tamil dance show. It was pretty amazing. Two dancers, dressed in unbelievably ornate costumes complete with bells on the wrists and ankles, played out a long and intense story. I can't remember the details now, but there were some journeys and some family values and some strife, like any good story.

The visual effects were incredible, and the dancers' facial expressions were especially intriguing (I guess this is a characteristic of traditional Tamil dance). They were accompanied by a cute little band seated cross-legged on the side of the stage playing an assortment of drums and stringed instruments that I couldn't pronounce if I tried.

Saturday night, we went to the other end of the spectrum. A music school called the Unwind Center was hosting its 10th annual "June Rock Out" concert, which happened to be on the way to a party we were attending later in the evening. Turns out it was a day-long festival of amateur rock bands from around the country, playing everything from their own songs to covers of Coldplay, and wearing everything from 80s hair band fros to Iron Maiden t-shirts.

I was one of approximately five females in the audience. My friends and I were undoubtedly the oldest people there. But hey, who complains about a cover of Snow Patrol when they're living in India?

(I had a video to put in here, but it took waaaayy too long to upload.)

All in all, a pretty culture-filled weekend.

Le contact info

2008-08-10T06:28:00.000-07:00

Call me! (91)97910-18679

I'm 12.5 hours ahead of PST and 9.5 hours ahead of EST... just keep that in mind.

The Great Apartment Search Saga

2008-08-10T04:40:00.000-07:00

I have been horribly lax with updates of late. I could use work, business trips, or slow internet as excuses, but really I’ve just been genuinely busy. Which, mind you, is a huge improvement from my life in Kenya. So in the future you can consider a lack of communication as a positive indication of my quality of life… or something like that.

One of many important updates is that I finally, after 4 weeks of searching, two realtors, countless landlords and a week of negotiations, have moved into an apartment! Pictures of the place the first time I went to see it are below. It’s not much better furnished now, but I do have a bed and curtains (each of which was a full day effort – things take time here).

Front door & entrance hallway

Massive living room and my room

Bathroom, enclosed porch & kitchen

Finding this place was no easy task. After years of being considered the ideal tenant profile (young single female professional), I was dismayed to discover that these qualifications did not make me attractive to landlords here. In fact, being single, female, and foreign is pretty much a recipe for disaster in the Chennai real estate market. Traits like “non-vegetarian” and “non-Brahmin” are dealbreakers. Add to that "has a dog" and "allows male visitors in the home" and the pickings get very slim very fast.

However, with a lot of legwork, some help from my fabulous realtor (who happens to be a good friend of my new roommates) a good helping of luck, I found this place on the 2nd floor of a quaint old apartment building. It's got a ton of space and is down a quiet, tree-filled road about a 20 minute walk from my office. There are 3 bedrooms and we're still searching for a roommate to occupy the third room, but my colleague is staying there for the next month so we have a short buffer. The best part is it's a great place for my dog - who is arriving in a week and a half!

My new roommates (two girls from Kerala, southwestern India, sharing the master bedroom) are Elizabeth, a journalist for the India Express, and Shiney, who is interning to become an accountant. Most likely, a French girl named Marjorie who is interning with an oil society will be taking the third room for the next 6 months. Look at us, so multicultural! (Multiculturalism is a theme here - it's rare that I find myself in a group of people that does not include 3 or more nationalities. There's even a Kenyan girl interning with our centre, so I get my Swahili fix.)

So, I'm officially a resident of India!

Some PR for you

2008-07-28T04:45:00.000-07:00

Check out this WSJ article and audio clip about the ICICI Foundation that I'm consulting for. Nachiket, the interviewee, is the guy to whom all my work is ultimately responsible. Pretty interesting stuff, if you're into this sort of thing.

Hokay. So here’s the Earth…

2008-07-24T22:38:00.000-07:00

Many people from college know that my senior year roommates and I were huge fans of the End of the World flash video. Thanks to Alexa, we even have t-shirts to prove it. These girls will be glad to know that the theme of that skit has now been incorporated into my real life.

You’ll have to see my previous blog post for the full and cumbersome explanation of my job here, but suffice it to say that my work has gotten a little larger than life recently. I am basically in charge of assessing the strategic direction of a large-scale foundation that is trying to solve all of India’s development problems. They have a lot of vision and momentum and enthusiasm, but not necessarily a clear idea of where they want to go or how to go about getting there. (Which is my job to figure out, with my vast 1.5 years of experience in the development industry.)

This leads to a lot of almost comically high-level discussions about how to do things like “alleviate poverty” and “achieve economic growth”. My boss and I actually started a conversation today with, “Okay, so here’s the world. This is where it is now, and this is where we want it to be. So we need to figure out the steps in between.”

This was said with the utmost of seriousness and business-minded logic.

And yet all I could think of was an animated globe floating across a screen, Swiss army knives being thrust into the Chinese flag, and kangaroos standing in blizzards. (If you don’t get it, watch the video.)

WTF, mate?

Just another global tragedy

2008-07-07T21:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it takes moving across the world to make you think about what's going on in other places. I guess that's why we do it.

We all know about the conflict in Afghanistan. Few of us, myself included, pay much attention to it.

Yesterday there was a suicide attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul. No one has taken responsibility for it yet. It targeted a couple Indian diplomats, who have been the main subject of the news here, but also killed almost 40 civilian Afghans, most of whom were there waiting for Indian visas.

My counterpart for this job will arrive in August. He is Afghan. He just got back from spending some time at home, and we just got word from him yesterday that he's arrived in Tehran. He was probably at the Indian embassy in Kabul within the last couple weeks.

It never ceases to amaze me how little things that go on around the world matter until we have a personal connection to them. But what can we do? The burden of all the world's miseries is too much to bear on a daily basis.

Out of the bush, back to The Office

2008-06-27T03:41:00.000-07:00

After a week of work, I have come to the following conclusions: a) everyone is really smart here, b) intelligence does not equate to organization or efficiency.

Sometimes in the whirlwind of high-speed internet, high profile publications, visionary strategy meetings and prestigious awards, it takes a moment to remember that I am still in a developing country. The Board of Directors of the foundation I am tasked with evaluating is a short list of some of the most accomplished businesspeople in India - Forbes Asia businessmen of the year, Fortune's most powerful women in business, Yale world fellows, chairpeople of prestigious bank boards. Staff at the institute have articles published and are considered area experts in almost all of the major national media sources.

Fortunately, that "developing country" reminder still appears frequently. I am supposed to be issued a laptop, but am borrowing my boss' personal computer for the foreseeable future because of a mix-up in the IT department. I am currently stationed at the desk of someone who is in the field for the week because there are no open workstations; the group was scheduled to move into a bigger office today. But, there was a miscommunication and the size of the new office was apparently measured by some metric other than "workstations", so it is unclear when we will move or when I will get a desk of my own. The power tends to go out once or twice towards the end of the day, and the phone lines are inconsistent enough that you often have to contact the operator in order to call out, instead of dialing directly.

There's no doubt this is a step up from the office environment in Kenya, but it's certainly not Boston. And again I am reminded of how precisely this experience is a cross between my two previous jobs.

Day 1 1/2

2008-06-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

Got myself switched to the proper hotel. AC, fridge, queen-sized bed, flat screen TV with digital cable, room service and the aforementioned in-room computer with internet.

India 8,000, Kenya 3.

First impressions

2008-06-21T05:23:00.000-07:00

I'm going to keep a running tally of my initial experiences in India vs. those in Kenya.

Day 1 observations:

1. Airport pickup. Greeted by a driver with my name on a placard, and whisked into an AC-filled taxi direct to my destination. Particularly convenient considering it was 3:30am.
India 1, Kenya 0

2. Planning. Despite being assured that I had a reservation at a specific hotel (equipped with an in-room internet enabled computer), I was driven to a different hostel, where they had no idea who I was.
India 1, Kenya 1

3. English. The mamas in my village and the 8-year-0ld street kids in Kenya spoke far better English than the receptionist at the hostel.
India 1, Kenya 2

4. Accommodation. Surprisingly similar - down to the same types of shower pipes, the same quality of bed. I think our first Nairobi hostel had mosquito nets, but this one had fans, so it's a wash.
India 1, Kenya 2

5. Weather. The rumors were true: it is bloody hot and humid here. My glasses fogged up immediately when I got out of the taxi, comically welcoming me to equatorial India.
India 1, Kenya 3

6. Soundtrack. In Nairobi you get cars and drunk men outside your window all night. In Chennai, you get howler monkeys.
India 2, Kenya 3

So net, Kenya is up so far. Which is perhaps surprising considering the ups and downs of my recent visit there. But maybe I should give it more than the 2 hours I've been here.

Kwa heri Kenya

2008-06-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

I spent three and a half hectic, emotional days touring around Kenya and (hopefully) getting some closure on my experience there this week. I haven't slept in the same bed twice for 7 nights, and 3 of those nights were spent on planes. I know, I know, you're jealous. Some reflections on the week:

1. Nairobi is the same. Couldn't tell a difference if I tried.

2. Kisumu looks half-normal, half like a battleground. Several prominent buildings downtown were torched (Ukwala Supermarket, Punjabi Electronics), and not much effort has been made to clean them up. It's almost like a bizarre monument to the violence, reminding Kenyans of what they went through and, one would hope, strengthening their determination to move past it. If only that was really why they were still there, rather than just because it's expensive to knock them down.

3. Going to my site was... hard. "Emotional rollercoaster" is an understatement. Shockingly, the kids in the village all remembered me (although it could just be that I taught them to call me Joanne instead of mzungu/odiero/"white man", and consequently got them yelling "Joanne, Joanne!" at every white person they saw). I had a very uneventful reunion with my family members, and a very eventful one with my dog. Apparently the family got in a big dispute over the distribution of the items in my house, which is so sadly typical that I had trouble feeling sad to leave them. Almost no one was around even though they had been informed of my coming, so I spent an hour on the compound and saw each person for about 5 minutes as I was leaving. Ah well.

4. My dog is almost twice the size she was before, and has the longest neck I've ever seen. She looks like this crazy type of antelope we saw on safari called the gerenuk - I swear this is a mirror image. She recognized me and jumped all over me and has the exact same personality as before, which made it even harder to leave her behind (waiting to decide whether it's feasible to bring her to Chennai, and otherwise I may or may not send her home to my parents).

5. A note to south Nyanza PCVs: I was thrilled to discover just outside of Narok that the Narok-Nairobi road, otherwise known as the Road-from-hell-that-always-has-construction-but-never-improves, had finally been repaved! Smooth tarmac, two full lanes - I was thrilled.

Then, 5 minutes later, the paved road ended and we were back to potholes and dust again. The repaving lasted about 3 miles. And I was, again, reminded that I was in Kenya.

Chennai Fun Facts

2008-06-10T22:47:00.001-07:00

Some interesting facts about my new home. And some not so interesting ones.

1. Population = 7.5 million. And it's only the 4th largest city in the country. This is 20% of California, people - do not complain to me about congestion in your city.

2. Also known as "The Detroit of Southern Asia" because of its car manufacturing, which comprises 30% of India's auto industry. My old GM client would be so proud.

3. Previously named Madras, this actually is the namesake of that preppy patterned fabric you can buy at J Crew (so named because it is traditionally produced in that part of the country). Dartmouth, I have come full circle.
Incidentally, the massive hand-looming industry is also the reason there is a spinning wheel at the center of the Indian flag. Yes, believe it or not, this is supposed to be a spinning wheel.

4. Located on the thermal equator, which means it has the highest mean annual temperature of its longitude. Truly a statistic to be proud of.

5. Home to the large, and clearly globally acclaimed, Tamil movie industry of Kollywood. That's right, Kollywood. At some point these LA references are going to get out of control. (In the interest of actually providing some non-satirical facts in this post: Tamil is the native tribe of the Tamil Nadu, of which Chennai is the capital. Tamil is also the local language, although both English and Hindi are taught in school.)

6. Lastly, Chennai is the sister city of Denver, Colorado! This is particularly auspicious since my non-profit business partner, Vanessa, lives in Denver. (Non-profit business partner, what? Details to come.)

Rumors

2008-06-05T23:31:00.000-07:00

In the buildup to my move to Chennai, I’ve taken the opportunity to learn about my future home whenever it has arisen, by chatting with people who are from there, have visited or have lived there. People have been extremely forthcoming with information about India, but the funny thing is that the information never varies. Apparently, Chennai (and more generally, India) has three qualities:

1) Hot
2) Crowded
3) Really Spicy Food

Fortunately, I:

1) Have Been Living in Africa For the Past 1.5 Years
2) Like Cities
3) Enjoy Chili and Curry

None of these make me anywhere near prepared, but they do give me slightly more peace of mind. If anyone has any other indications of what the place might be like, I would welcome the insight.

Travel schedule

2008-06-05T21:30:00.000-07:00

For anyone interested, my schedule for the next few weeks look something like this:

6/12: departing the SF bay area for LA
6/12-6/15: LA for my brother’s college graduation (yes, he is actually graduating! Just kidding Paul:)
6/15: fly LA-Kenya (Kenya? I thought you were moving to India.)
6/17-6/20: run around Kenya saying hellos and goodbyes to friends and family and colleagues. And possibly picking up my dog, although this is looking less likely by the day
6/20: fly Nairobi-Chennai
6/21-6/22: spend two days in a mad rush trying to get things settled in Chennai (like, starting the apartment search)
6/23: start Work. !!

You're going WHERE? You're doing WHAT?

2008-06-05T21:05:00.000-07:00

A reiteration of my last post in my previous (Kenya) blog, explaining in far too much detail what I will be doing in India.

So, I'm moving to India. What I’m going to be doing there is about the most confusing thing I’ve ever had to explain in casual conversation. Recently when most strangers ask me, “so what will you be doing in India?” they quickly regret that they asked. The short answer is “business development consulting.” The medium-length answer is “a business strategy evaluation for a foundation that is investing in rural enterprise development.” I can’t imagine anyone would want the long answer, but since I have for some reason been asked for it multiple times, I have laid it out below. Read on at your own risk.

I’ve taken a job with the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR), a business school located in Chennai (southeast corner of the country). I’ll be working for the Center for Development Finance (CDF), one of several action-research centers at the school focused on improving living standards in India, alleviating poverty, creating a middle class, etc. – all those things that give you that “feel good” feeling.

Unrelatedly, a foundation was established in October with the goal of increasing “access to markets” (namely, financial services) to rural low-income households – that whole creation of a middle class thing. They are operating on a skeletal organizational structure and are in need a lot of intellectual capital from similar organizations in the area, and they sought out CDF.

So, in response to this need for strategic services, CDF has just started a new program called the – are you ready for this? – Strategy & Implementation Evaluation Research Unit (SIERU). It will basically be a consulting group tasked with evaluating the philosophical/academic strategies and the implementation plans of its clients. The foundation will be its first client, and it is hoping to attract more in the future as there seems to be high demand for this type of service.

This is where I, finally, come in. The SIERU unit will be co-run by two managers: one on the academic strategy evaluation side (a guy who already has an MBA and just graduated from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard), and one on the business strategy/implementation evaluation side (yours truly). Am I qualified for this, you ask? Not in the least. Am I totally intimidated? Yes indeed.

So that’s it in a very, very large nutshell. I am extremely excited about this career opportunity, and the chance to move to India and join the bandwagon of capitalizing on the potential of such an amazing country.

Alternate namings

2008-06-05T20:56:00.000-07:00

I really wanted to name this blog "India Joanne and the Temple of Development," but was wisely advised against it. Please send your thanks to my more mature and professional alter ego.