Anecdotes and Pictures

We feel incredibly blessed to have been a part of the rescue operation Lauren shared about in her last post. This post is a little different, and has nothing to do with our work. I (Mark)wanted to put up a few pictures (below) and give a few anecdotes about life in India -- how, despite the fact I am really enjoying myself, it can be  frustrating, entertaining, difficult, and just really time consuming.

Grocery Shopping – Not many Indians can afford to shop in grocery stores. But there are enough to make “picking up a few things after work” a full evening affair. After my rick-shaw driver battled traffic for twenty-five minutes to get me the kilometre or two to the store, I came to realize that traffic here is not confined to the streets. It spills into the grocery stores, where the aisles are jam-packed with miniature-Indian shopping carts. There were busy intersections, one-way streets, turning lanes, wider aisles that served as high-ways, opportune u-turn places to avoid heavy congestion—all the standard traffic features. I forgot to get milk near the entrance of the store, but I quickly realized I was better off cutting my losses and continuing my forward progress through the store. And then, of course, to round out the analogy, there was the big traffic jam. Gridlock. A one hour plus line-up just to check out my groceries. After playing every single game on my cell-phone, I finally emerged, drenched in sweat, only to line up again just to have someone check off my receipt and let me exit the store.

E-mail – Checking your e-mail should take a few seconds. When we arrived at the office, however, the Microsoft Outlook server was down, and the internet was on-and-off. We tried to use the web-based version of our e-mail. When it worked, about 20% of our e-mails came through, and they were often up to a day late. Some never made the harrowing journey through cyberspace. Even when we could access emails online, it could take up to twenty minutes to switch from viewing the inbox to the sent items folder. I assumed the problem would be remedied within a few hours. I quickly revised this expectation to within a day or two. Two weeks later, Outlook seemed to take heed of my silent, mouthed, screams, and decided to return to us. I don’t know why, but I will never take it for granted again.

Critters – We have a lot of roommates, and they like to eat our food. Dozens and dozens of ants roam around our house searching for anything edible. Lauren had a rather unfortunate experience with these guys. We didn’t realize that all food must be sealed. One morning, Lauren realized that her cereal seemed rather alive. It was crawling with ants, but it was too late—she was already several mouthfuls in. But, please don’t get me wrong. I’ll take the ants (Lauren may beg to differ). So far, the cockroaches I’ve seen in my neighbours’ garbage are yet to make an appearance. And the rats that terrorized the previous intern (she swears it wasn’t the reason she gave us the apartment) seem to have been successfully vanquished.


[I (Lauren) have this to add: Mark has, unfortunately, been shocked out of the idyllic childhood cocoon that is created by growing up in a rat-free province (Alberta). He saw his first rat the other day. I, on the other hand, have been amazed at his capacity for selective blindness until then. Mark and I spend a lot of time together here, and I've seen PLENTY of rats. I'm fairly confident that he has been mistaking them for small cats all along. From a distance, it's an easy mistake to make. They are impressively large.]

Water – We get the water for a couple hours in the morning and a couple hours at night. From about 10:30 to 6:30, there is no water. Unfortunately, it’s not actually that predictable. A lot of times, running water will just disappear in the evening, right before you were going to take a shower, wash your face, or do the dishes. We never know if these are scheduled or unscheduled turn-offs. Back home, you’d need a month’s notice to turn water off for a couple hours. But here, you are expected to have a bucket filled for such times. We, however, can never remember to fill it. But we’ve got it much better than the people in the slums, where, almost incomprehensibly, close to 80% of Mumbai’s twenty million call home. Often, they’ll get just an hour or two of water from a community faucet. And during the monsoon, when flash floods cause sewers to overflow into the water supply, the slum-dwellers are sometimes forced to drink water that is mixed with their own sewage.  

     -Mark

PICTURES

                 

                                     Market just ouside our apartment

                       Back Alley Cricket

 

Sachin II (No idea what I'm talking about? Common, only the greatest cricketer of all time)

 

                            Catfish

                         
                                     Fruitstand near our apartment, self-help seminar is tempting

Pani Pura -- famous street-food. You find one every block or so, a bit like Starbucks in Van (we haven't tried it yet -- during the monsoon season, eating street food is a bit like playing Russian Roulette with your digestive system).

Some slum-ish dwellings bordering the five-star Grand Hyatt that is just off the picture.

I'd like to think he goes to school during the day, but who knows.

Some relatively civil garbage cans, by this city's standards. At night, rats would join the mix.

British architecture in the South of the city. A good example of the traffic volume. But 99% of the city looks nothing like this.

 

A National Geographic shot from one of the world's most famous slums. Around a million people live here.