How Bazaar

On the terrace of the building 13 in Khan Market, the smog lifted and I was happy.

Our last night in Delhi was a jam session. Students from Manzil, an education based NGO, played Hindi songs with acoustic guitars, tambourines and a rhythmic dhol drum. My entire body responded to the frequency of the beautiful music and I sang and tapped my feet and danced with a presence that had left me since our night walk with Jamghat (what I described in my last post).

Over the past few weeks our own group of 21 (we picked up some people) had become a traveling orchestra in its own right. We visited a flute maker and now about 10 people practice the raspy bamboo flutes on our train rides and during meetings. There are also guitars, ukeleles and goosebump-worthy singing voices within the circle.

Last night wasn't about the Indians or Americans or the technique or our education -- it was about the absolute joy that came from a bunch of young people wanting to get lifted. And I got there fast.

Now I embark on the last leg of this journey. I have learned more in the past four weeks than I have in years of college and I'm hoping this week in the mountains will help me start to absorb and digest everything I've seen and done.

I know now that so much of what I thought was backwards and regressive about India is actually its saving grace. I feel like the girl who got off of the airplane on June 22 was some breed of hippie-colonist who thought if only those tribal kids would learn English and the government would transform slums into proper living areas, everything would be just fine.

But now I know that a farmer's adamant refusal to leave his land helps India's soil and fabric more than teaching calculus will. I know that those squatting toilets in the ground are the reason that people still have enough water to drink.

Last week I was wrist deep in cow dung and I have never felt more American. But it's just grass, and we are all just people.

Warning

If there is a hell worse than the drugged, midnight streets of New Delhi I don't want to know about it.

The past few weeks in the tribal villages and organic farm have been creating fire within me, but not sorrow. I played with smiling children whose parents were miles away rallying for the right to the land that they've lived on for years. I cooked a meal for twenty people with ingredients grown on the few acres we were living on.

But right now, as I stand in this hostel, I feel far away from the encouraging notion that there is good energy and work. Instead I feel a weight and a pain from seeing so many faces, ravaged by cocaine and marijuana and sniffing white out and falling asleep in the medians of busy streets while namaz plays over loudspeakers from Jamma Masjid. And I am physically and mentally sickened and trying to remember my power rather than the open palms I have held out in hopelessness.

But the line for the internet is long and I don't have the energy or clarity to explain more. Know that I am healthy and hoping to share more with you soon.

Shanti Shanti Shanti

Athithi Devo Bhava

At night the heat is a little less and you don't feel the mosquitos because you are so tired. I sleep on a cot in the small garden of a village family. I hear them breathe deeply around me, I hear the dogs that don't stop barking and the buffalos next door. I wonder how they sleep through the noise, but after a day of planting trees in the beating 110 degrees, I don't have the energy to wonder.

In the past ten days I've bathed outdoors with buckets, slept on the floor in the center of a slum, and been welcomed into families that sacrifice their daily water so that I can bathe. The guest is god, the Hindu scriptures say, and I am treated as such until I plead to do some work and to use my hands. I scrubbed the floors of a grocer who makes just enough to give his daughter a toy on her birthday. I bathed children who have no running water and can only shiver from the lukewarm bath because they are not accustomed.

I'm pushed every day, from 5 a.m. until midnight. I feel dirty, sweaty all the time. I handwash my clothes and they never feel or stay clean. I haven't felt AC or toilet paper since I was at home. The food disagrees with me and fights and usually I sleep with hunger and cramping. I eat food that is chopped on the floor and cooked in pots that are washed with mud and sand from the ground.

But then I wake and do some yoga on any patch of grass I can find. I spend the day with people whose entire lives are dedicated to walking through these slums, teaching children to face the world with knowledge. These men and women are fearless -- they visit houses infested with tuberculosis and check on everyones medications and hug the old grandmothers and play with the children. I can only wonder of their strength.

I feel conscious in a way that I am still figuring out. I laugh all day and cry once in a while and feel kindred with the seventeen other sisters and brothers that I sleep, travel and eat with. And it has only been ten days.