Himalayas!

Now that I have finished my internship I will be traveling in northern India for 2 weeks. Our first stop is Ladakh, in the heart of the Himalayas.
We first took a bus to Manali (14 hrs from Delhi), and from there a jeep to Keylong (8 hrs), crossing some of the highest motorable passes in the world. On Saturday we continued towards Leh, surrounded by snow-capped mountains and ragged peaks. After 12 hrs we arrived in Leh. Tomorrow we are going to Pangong Lake, in the border with China.
Pictures will be posted later, with more details on these adventures.

Gulbarga

Last week I went to the field to see how the health insurance project is going on the ground. Being on the field was one of my major motivations for choosing this internship, but sadly, because of my foot, I had not been able to go until now.

I spent four days in Gulbarga and Bidar, two districts in the state of Karnataka. Every day we visited a village in the area to talk to the people and get a sense of how the study is going. It gave me a much better understanding of who the people in the insurance scheme are, where and how they live. Most of the people are very poor and live very simple lives. Some of the villages are so small the arrival of anyone from outside is a major event, and if the outside person happens to be a woman, and white, it is a great novelty for them. I would have little kids following me around to see what I was doing (which was problematic when I needed to go to the bathroom, given that in some places there were no bathrooms or outhouses at all). All of them have very pressing needs and worry about their health and their families.

Gulbarga is the capital of the district of the same name, and even though it has been growing rapidly, it is still no more than a large town. People are very conservative and not used to seeing outsiders. It is not common for families or couples to eat out; it is still a widespread idea that why would you go out and eat something that you can make at home? So it is mostly men who go out to have a drink with their friends. On the first day we had dinner at one of these restaurants, a nice place on a rooftop overlooking the city. Since it was a bit late no more women were around, so they set a special table for us behind a little wall (and under a cell-phone antenna) so we'd be away from the men. Two thigns strike me: first, that women should not come in contact with ousiders, particularly men; and second, that it is assumed women don't drink.

The next morning we went to a nearby village on a jeep and then on a bus to see the new mother survey take place. It was pretty obvious I was not from around the area, which is nice because people are curious and like to engage in conversation. So few foreigners go to that place, some people actually asked me if I was from the Russian Circus that was in town (agreed, I was wearing the crazy pants, but still!).


The New Mother survey goes to houses where women have had a baby in the last 72 hours and takes measurements of the baby and the mom as well as asking her some questions. I got to see a very beautiful baby girl that was 2 days old. Her mother, grandmother and great aunt were taking care of her. It was amazing. It was interesting to know that since it was her first baby she had gone back to her parent's house to have it and her family would pay for everything, not her husband.


The next day we went to another village to observe an SKS center meeting where the clients repayed their loans and discussed the health insurance product. Once again, it was interesting to see these groups of women, the difference in ages and how they engage among themselves and with the loan officer. I'm also always surprised at how old they look even if they are still young and how serious they are most of the time.

On Saturday we went to Bidar, where the earth is very red and the road is surrounded by fields being plowed and you might see some running monkeys alongside the bus. We visited a very small village to see how the endline survey is going. Probably no more than 200 or 300 households live there. It is surrounded by fields, and oxen and cows roam the streets. It was interesting that in that very small place they have a temple, a mosque and a christian church. Even though it is close (10-15 km) to Bidar, the district capital, it feels like a very remote place. If I had only looked at the data for this village in the computer, I would have thought that since it was so close to the main city in the area it would be better off than it actually is.

That's why going to the field is important: to conceptualize and give dimension to the problems we are trying to solve, and also to better understand the data we so aptly analyze. By spending those four days outside the office, I was able to put a face on the people we want to help, and that gave a whole new dimension to the work I'm doing and want to do.

Green Kerala: Backwaters

The main attraction of our trip to Kerala was to go to the backwaters. The backwaters are a chain of lagoons and lakes parallel to the Arabian Sea that extend over half the length of Kerala state. The lagoons and lakes are fed by 38 rivers and are connected by over 900 km of canals, both manmade and natural.

It is one of India's most important tourist destinations and was placed among the `50 destinations of a lifetime' by National Geographic. It's easy to see why. The mix of salt and fresh water gives place to a very unique ecosystem, with many birds and fish. The waterways are lined with rice paddies and palm trees and small fishing villages.

In the cocoon-houseboat you glide along the quiet waterways, eating delicious food and drinking coconut water; you can swim, read, have good conversations; watch the sunset; look at the stars and fireflies in the night. It is incredibly beautiful and just what I needed for a birthday celebration.

Green Kerala: Kathakali

In Fort Kochi we saw a performance of Kathakali, a traditional style of theatre from Kerala. It originated in the 16th century (more or less at the same time as Shakespearean drama). The name Kathakali comes from the Malayalam (local Kerala language) words "katha", religious story, and "kali", play or performance.

Actors in Kathakali do not speak, so they rely on elaborate makeup and costumes, marked facial expressions and eye movements, as well as advanced choreography that comes from martial arts to tell stories from the Mahabharata or the Ramayana. The story is sang in Malayalam by a narrator to the beating of drums and ringing of bells. All actors are men, so the different colors in makeup guide the audience to who is who in the play: yellow is woman, red is evil, green and red is hypocrite, and so on.

Kathakali was traditionally performed in religious festivals and temples, but nowadays more and more it is performed in theaters and in shorter versions of the original stories. It is very impressive to see the makeup and the gestures of the actors; and once you get used to the loud drums it is quite enjoyable.

The story we saw was about an evil prince who wanted to take advantage of a princess (who was in diguise as a servant). With the help of her husband they trick him and kill him. Serves him right.

Important visitors at the office

Today has been a very exciting day. We had very important visitors this morning at the office. I really think they'll make a huge difference in the project...

They're a family of monkeys who are very happy sitting in the stairs picking off each others fleas.
We can't go out! If we try the mother monkey comes running towards us like crazy. She looks like the monkey in the movie 28 Days. See for yourself:

I think this can potentially become a twilight zone episode or something like the movie El ángel exterminador by Buñuel, where an outside force impedes the characters from leaving a certain place. I wonder what awaits us...



PS Could this be Hanuman at work?? Has Ganesh passed on the torch to a fellow god?

Green Kerala: Fort Kochi*

The story of Fort Kochi is the story of the foreigners who have settled there at some point or another. The name Cochin actually means “like China”, and comes from Chinese traders from the court of Kublai Khan who settled in the area in the 14^th century¹.





The foreigners came because of the spices². Kochi was the centre of Indian spice trade for many centuries; Kerala has some of the most important spice and tea plantations in India and Cochin is still a major trading post for them. As you walk past the different warehouses in the market you see people unloading sacs of all possible spices; you can smell the peppers, cardamom, anise seed, cumin, and cinnamon in the air. And if you get close enough you can also smell the tea leaves packed and ready to be shipped. There is so much happening all around it is difficult to walk and take it all at once, the emaciated people carrying heavy loads on their heads, the covered women buying groceries, the dilapidated buildings from colonial times, the heat. It’s easy to imagine this place two or three hundred years ago. As in many other situations V.S. Naipaul’s words ring true: India exists in a multiplicity of time periods at once. Behind the old warehouses and the traditional coolies you can see the modern port, full of ships and containers ready to be sent off around the world.

Next to the spice market there is the Jewish quarter that was founded by the so-called Malabar Jews. According to tradition the oldest community was founded in Cranganore in the year 70 AD after the destruction of the Temple of Jersualem by the Romans and the resulting diaspora. They controlled a major portion of the world spice trade until the 16^th century, when neighboring princes took advantage of internal divisions in the community and attacked them. The Jews fled to nearby Cochin (legend has it that the Rabbi escaped swimming with his wife on his back), where the Rajah welcomed them and gave them land. Today there are very few Jews left in Cochin (they actually need outsiders to have enough people for a minyan), since most of them went to Israel after 1948³ or converted to Christianity. For this reason the Pardasi Synagogue (from 1568) and the neighborhood around it is now mostly full of antiques shops for tourists and bookstores (where I obviously bought more books).

Across town from the synagogue is the Church of Saint Francis (originally St. Anthony’s) built in 1503 by the Portuguese. It is the first Roman Catholic Church in India⁴ founded by the Franciscan monks who arrived with the Vasco de Gama expedition⁵. He died in Fort Kochi in 1524 on his third voyage to India and was buried in this church for fifteen years until his remains were taken back to Portugal to the Mosterio dos Jerónimos (built to commemorate his success in securing a trade route from India to Portugal around Africa). Fort Kochi was the first European colonial settlement in India. It remained the capital of Portuguese India until 1530, when they opted for Goa as their capital.

Also in the search for spices, the Dutch arrived in 1683 and destroyed many of the Portuguese buildings, particularly the churches (although even today Cochin has one of the largest Christian populations in India and there's a church in every corner). The Dutch stayed in Kochi until 1795 when they were defeated by the English. It was only in 1947 with Independence that Cochin ceased to be under foreign control. No wonder it was the first princely state to willingly join the Indian Union…

Today foreigners keep shaping the history of the town. Fort Cochin is still a main trade post and an important tourist destination as the gateway to the famous Kerala backwaters. It is very enjoyable for its calm pace, lush vegetation and delicious food.

*Two weekends ago we went to Kerala to celebrate 3 birthdays: mine, Olga's and Dany's. We spent one day in Fort Kochin and 2 days on a houseboat in the backwaters. Kerala is one of the most beautiful places I've been to. This is the first post on this trip.

¹All that remains of them are the Chinese fishing nets that are still used by the local fisherman. They are very large nets that hang from wooden structures and are lowered when the tide comes in.

²f you remember from primary school one of the reasons for the discovery of the New World was the search for a new route to India to get spices (the Turks had closed the route through the Middle East). From the confusion that America was in fact India comes the use of the word indians to describe the indigenous people of that continent.

³ A very good movie that deals with Indian Jews' migration to Israel is Au bout du monde à gauche (2004). Very recommendable.

⁴The church founded by Saint Thomas is known as Syrian Church of India. As with the Jews, the Portuguese also persecuted them since they wanted them to be part of the Roman Church!

⁵I’m always impressed at the Franciscan monks who would travel with the explorers and just get off on unknown lands and found churches. In Mexico with Hernan Cortes arrived 12 Franciscan Monks who started converting and baptizing the Indians. Can you imagine arriving at a place like Tenochtitlan and start telling people that their gods (who like human sacrifices) are wrong? That takes courage and a bit of madness I think.

Had I Been Born in India...

This weekend in Cochin I bought even more books on India (I know what you must think: when am I going to read all of this? The answer is: someday, someday). One of them is a book on women in India by an American journalist called May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons. Even though it is a bit old (1990) and not terribly academic it is a very interesting read (and it helps me become conscious of many of my prejudices and judgments when I read them from someone else).

One of the chapters is on female infanticide and sex-selective abortion. The author interviews couples who have done these practices in a rural district in Tamil Nadu and in Bombay. Some of the families were very poor and decided to kill their newborn daughter because she was the second or third girl and would not be able to afford her dowry and she would lead a miserable life, so better to spare her. In most cases they would poison her with a local plant. In Bombay, people of a higher socioeconomic level would get a test to know the sex of the baby, and in many cases would have an abortion if it was a girl. The reason why the rural women would not get abortions is not that they could not get one, but that it would require them to be on leave from work for a month, and they cannot afford losing that income.

As shocking as these practices are, they're not really that uncommon. They also happen in China and many other countries where girls are seen as a liability, not as an asset. In India it actually makes economic sense not to invest in girls, since they will leave their parents house to live with their in-laws. She will only take up resources and her parents will have to pay to get her to marry. In other cultures, even if women are seen as second to men, daughters take care of their parents in old age so it makes sense to have them around; to the extreme that in Spain (and thus in Mexico) the youngest daughter was not supposed to marry and would stay home to take care of her parents (becoming el báculo de la vejez)*.

What really impressed me is that the stories of these women are from 1985 or 1990, not from a century ago. If I had been born in any other country or situation, I might not be here writing this. As the fourth girl in my family I would have been considered a terrible curse. My mother would have been looked down on for her incapacity to have boys. If my parents had chosen to keep me, they might have become indebted their whole lives to pay for my dowry, and even then I’d have probably married with difficulties and would have lived as a quasi slave with the risk of my in-laws torturing me (throwing acid or burning me) because I did not bring enough money into the marriage. Dire prospects on all counts.

So even if women face many problems in Mexico, and machismo is still rampant; I do not believe even girls in the poorest households face these dangers. In my case (as exceptional as it might be), my family welcomed me when I was born and were joyous at the event even if my parents would have probably liked a boy after three girls (they did get 2 after me). I was well-fed and educated, raised to believe in myself, free to work, free to marry who I choose, and around long enough to be in India comparing my situation to others who were not so lucky.

*as is portrayed in Como agua para chocolate by Laura Esquivel