Life in Orissa: quite, sunny, interesting and still surprising…
on Le Reveil du Soleil (India), 30/Apr/2009 04:10, 34 days ago
It’s been 2 weeks already since I inhabit my new home. I may say I am starting to get accustomed with the rhythm of life here, which is quite and interesting enough… My day starts at around 7.00 o’clock in the morning. It is difficult to get more sleep as sometimes it is too hot or too noisy –some dogs barking or people picking up coconuts just behind my house or somebody is calling my phone number by mistake…Yes, but I guess the heat and the sunshine are my main alarm clock. Than, I am trying not to forget to go decently dressed at the bathroom as my bathroom is at the back of the house separated by a terrace. For breakfast and my usual instant coffee (which I totally dislike but I prefer it instead of black tea) I need to go out of the house and reach another building just a few walking steps, where usually I am taking my filter water (which is fantastic I don’t have to bother with that..). In front of my house my new friends are waiting for me… In the begining it was just the small funny cat, but two other dogs came along and today there was a third dog…waiting for me to give them something to eat. I don’t have much just bread, cereals and biscuits but they have no preferences. I know the cat is eating everything: from geckos, snakes, frogs, insects to spicy snacks, biscuits, cereals…These animals are used so much with the forest life…it is incredible! Finally, after my “European” breakfast I am back in my room, listen to 15 minutes English news on a local radio station and smoke a cigarette, very discreetly while drinking my terrible instant coffee. And than I am ready for a 15 minutes walk through the forest under a strong sunshine to get to the office. When I am arriving at the office I am totally sweating and relived that I get to a cooler place under the fan but it is just an appearance. Fans can’t really make a huge difference. I usually work from 9.00 to 13.00 when there is lunch time at the canteen, than back to the office again until 18.00 – 19.00. Sometimes I came to my room after lunch just to take another cold shower but it doesn’t help much because I am sweating again a lot on the way back to office anyway. Dinner is just “Cristina’s way”… as I was totally a disaster in doing clever shopping (I couldn’t find any vegetables just fruits…in the whole huge market in Berhampur…!!!) I don’t have manyoptions: either eggs, paneer (cheese), rice, bread and butter and jam, mangos, biscuits or my favorite instant spicy noodles. And of course share with my cat and dogs friends. We (the other foreigners around here) do sometimes stay in the evenings for a chat outside the rooms, enjoying fresh eveningair and beautiful sky covered by stars and shadowed by huge trees and hills and indulged ourselves from time to time with a cold beer. And yes finally after two weeks, yesterday I saw the moon for the first time.. It is still upside down…like in Delhi but just more shiny (there is a whole theorybased on deep concerns about the moon which I won’t get into details as it is comprehensible just for 4 witnesses, including me..). I got used with the clothing style too. Colorful long kurtas, long pants ...everything long and covering any peace of meat and skin…Sometimes I wish I could wear short pants and un-sleeves T-shirts but than the clothes are cotton made and I guess it helps me less sweating… Saturday is short day and office work is finishing at 16.00. I like my house! It feels like I am in a camping with so many trees surrounding it…and dogs, cats, ants, frogs and geckos.. Ihave a whole gecko family in my room. One day I opened the door of my room and a silly gecko fell down and landed on my arm. We both got scared. It felt like a gum but not sticky gum.. Another day I found a baby gecko in my bed.. Yesterday my funny cat friend ran into my room and absolutely fascinated jumped on the wall to get a gecko.. but I stopped it ..I don’t want to have any murder in my room. I guess I am learning fast to get used with this surroundings and surprisingly I am doing so fine.I went to Berhampur last Saturday to do shopping (I have to learn to do wise shopping as I can only do it once in a week and in limited quantity to be able to carry with my backpack) and introduced myself to the city with my poor orientation skills. Yes Berhampur again busy crazy lot of unattractive shops, narrow streets, intensive traffic... I got use to the crazy illogic traffic since in Delhi. I already learnt now who has priority: first cows, than dogs, than cars, motorbikes, auto rickshaws, rickshaws, bicycles and than finally people!!! I was looking in more than 6 shops for toilet paper but the only thing I was offered was face cleansing wipes (????). Shopping anything is so tiring…there are always people pushing, trying to be first to get and first to pay… and as for me shopping is never a fun activity it makes me mad… and than the staring …(yes …there are no foreigners or tourists in Berhampur so I am the center of attention whenever and everywhere I am walking inthe town).. The only shop which I like it is the liquor shop. No Indian woman would never get there and usually men are served through a window, but I am (or my other foreign colleagues) treated like a princess, invited inside the shop and get all the attention.. (it is like in a fancy fashion shopin Milan). It is hilarious indeed. Well, after almost 3 hours of exhausting shopping.. I indulged myself with nice food and icecream in a Chinese air conditioner restaurant. The Saturday bus trip from Berhampur is always busy and due to road conditions and bus status it is always a shaking experience but somehow the wine bottle managed to survive. I was thinking at some point what would happened if the bottle will broke and than ..that is my end of discretion…Sunday was a sunny special day: a trip to Chilika lake. Chilika lake is like a sea actually a sea surrounded by land having a length of 1 100 km2. It wasn’t the season and therefore the place was deserted which gave us the pleasure to have the lake for ourselves. We took a boat ride to a small island where Kalijai temple is placed. There is another island – Nalabar which is a longer trip and we didn’t have enough time to get there. The best season to see Chilika is from December to January when birds migrate here to spend a mild winter. But still I could see some birds and even kingfishers. It is a beautiful place and lovely in a sunny day.The campus is surrounded by amazingly beautiful places. I know I am repeating myself… With lot of small villages but we were told it is not safe to walk outside the campus so the only time I can see them is on the way to Berhampur and back. The villages are small with few households and houses are tiny like train compartments. It is not a shock anymore to see that many of these households have no electricity so than on the way back from Berhampur when it is already dark I can see lot of candles lighting the tiny rooms.. Usually people are still outside of the houses talking, smiling and enjoying cooler air, as if they have no concerns ever. In one village that we usually cross by on the bus route there is a cemetery where ashes are buried. On the way back from Chilika, a group of people wearing white clothes were silently looking on a smoking fire. It was a funeral. I couldn’t see the body as the car I was in was moving quite fast, but I could imagine the probably most cultural shocking image that an European (and not only) can have: watching a dead body burning while its relatives beside silently mourning..Moving on to less creepy thoughts I am finally started to work and had some idea of what I will work. I think I am lucky with Gram Vikas because it is a professional and quite well structured organisation. I know not all volunteers are that fortunate from this point of view. But time has a different value here...and I remember in South Africa too. Though the appearance is that time is running and everything seems busy– people, work, tasks…time appears in slow motions… What I already learnt and not just here in Orissa but since I came in India … is that things have a rather slow path in contrary to the appearance of a busy crazy life… and you have to get armed with lot of patience and time whatever youdo or wait for. The most important lesson which can be frustrating (though I am trying to take my patience beyond limit...) is that whenever you need something - an information, someone to do something… one always have to chase people. Literally, chase them and get back to them once again and again… until finally you get the information you need or the thing that must be done. I am still trying to understand whether is that people are very busy, or they look busy and try to avoid tasks and responsibility. Still don’t want to be harsh in my judgments and don’t want to make wrong assumptions or any assumptions but I find difficult to understand when people would avoid or postpone things they should do or that “yes” it doesn’t mean “yes” it probably means “no”. I am waiting for about 2 weeks to be accompanied to the police office for registration, to get an appointmentwith a bank officer to open an account and 2 days to receive very simple information that would get only 2 minutes in normal circumstances... But that’s how it goes and I know I should get use to it.In other respects, I managed to discuss my revised placement objectives, which looks different from the initial job description. Though they are more specific and hopefully it is a reference point for what I am going to do here. The tasks are challenging not only by its nature but also given the working environment. I am still trying to grasp from a large amount of information what is Gram Vikas about. For the last three days an annual review and plan meeting was taken place and I was very much hoping I would get more insights, but unfortunately the meeting is about a whole series of presentations from the field focusing on detailed numbers and other quantitative indicators, some of which not very relevant which in the big perspective doesn’t make much sense to me and though the discussions probably are very interesting are in Oryia language… well too bad I can’t understand anything except good, difficult, we, after that and thank you. I am supposed to put all these presentations together in one comprehensive document which I think it will be so challenging as it is hard to find the links among them or make sense somehow. We’ll see how I am going to manage that. Some presentations were quite painful to follow for the whole audience and people tend to fall asleep …. it could be also the heat…I wish I could learn more Oryia but everybody is speaking in English with me and it is hard to get more energy and motivation to study in the evenings. Yes, it is an excuse too…same excuse I use when indulging myself for not taken any sport exercises in the morning.. The heat is to blame…‘Til the next breeze,Cristina