Delhi Living
Two weeks in I suppose it’s time to write! Already I’ve been socially faux pas-ing all over the place. Yvonne and I became the two most unpopular girls in school yesterday when we sat at the warden’s table for lunch. All the other people in our hostel were sitting at the tables for regular folk and the only two foreigners in the building strutted right up to the top to sit with the bosses. Not a good move for making friends.
I should probably back up a little bit and introduce the people I will be rambling on about for the rest of the summer. Yvonne is my team-mate, from Hong Kong, currently studying in the US. We’re living in the Indian All Women’s Conference Centre, a place where working women from all over India (and now with us – the world) come to stay when they’re working in Delhi. Our other two team mates are Delhites so they stay at home and we all get together Monday to Friday in our shared office to try and write a case study for UNICEF.
We’re working on toilets at the moment. It’s supposed to be a general health type programme for schools but toilets seem to be the only thing anyone’s interested in around here. Clean drinking water is often forgotten about when someone visits to brief us on the programme. One chap got so excited he spoke to us for three and a half hours when he was supposed to have been on a day off.
Our job seems to be to go to the countryside and see if SWASTH+, which was part of UNICEF’s programme in two Indian states, has made a difference to the hygiene standards in some schools. I say ‘seems to be’ because no one seems sure. Our plan is to head down to Karnataka next Sunday, find some people who may not have washed their hands before this programme came riding in to town, and see if they are now scrubbing after using the facilities. Also have to check if the school still has ‘facilities’.
By the end of this summer I will be full of funny toilet stories, my friends will be amazed. Our research supervisor, Sindhu, has been telling us great tales of how when she was a student they used go to the villages to see how the people there were getting on with their newly constructed toilets. These people have only ever had mud huts and when some billy from the city came along and built a cement structure next to their house they rejoiced that they now had a cement home. And so the toilets were rarely used as toilets. The villagers used pull a slate over the latrine so the unsightly toilet could not be seen and then use their new room for a host of other activities. By August we will hopefully be saying that this is no longer the case, and that the people of Gulbarga have embraced the new technology.
Being back in India is great fun. Yvonne now knows to run away quickly whenever anyone asks me where I’m from. It usually goes a little like this:
“I’m from Ireland”
“Oh! The UK!”
*Loads shotgun*
Ok, so I haven’t loaded my shotgun yet but I’m getting there. I like to ask the Indian people how they’re getting on with the British Raj these days and generally they get the idea.
I passed a pop quiz on my first day here. Every time I got a taxi into town I passed the President’s palace and India Gate, a lovely arc type structure. And every taxi driver likes to take a few moments to explain both to me. Instead of being rude I sit there and nod. Once I may have nodded with too much enthusiasm. The guy pulled over, whipped out a photo album and went through all of Delhi’s famous sights. He wouldn’t believe that I’d seen them all before and just wanted to go to town so I started naming them all as he flipped. After getting about ten in a row correct he finally gave in and were on our way again.
I passed a pop quiz on my first day here. Every time I got a taxi into town I passed the President’s palace and India Gate, a lovely arc type structure. And every taxi driver likes to take a few moments to explain both to me. Instead of being rude I sit there and nod. Once I may have nodded with too much enthusiasm. The guy pulled over, whipped out a photo album and went through all of Delhi’s famous sights. He wouldn’t believe that I’d seen them all before and just wanted to go to town so I started naming them all as he flipped. After getting about ten in a row correct he finally gave in and were on our way again.
Photos will be up once I get another break from toilet training.
Tags: India
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