India 2009!

It’s currently 10:30 PM in Allahabad, and for once, I’m typing this day’s blog at the end of the actual day! Michelle and I both took naps earlier this afternoon, so we had big plans to scrub our apartment down, but a huge rainstorm just took over Allahabad and the power is out again. That means that we’re using Kamal’s backup generator, which means we have to use only one fan and one light to make sure that we don’t waste the battery…which means we can’t turn on all the lights in our apartment to clean anything. I know Mom, aren’t you surprised!! For once I am actually bummed that I can’t clean things up. You would be so proud of me. Everything here is so well organized and put away. Even Michelle was very shocked at my organizational skills!

I just want to explain power outages here India real fast. We’ve only talked about them in the context of bad weather, but the reality is that the power has gone out every single day we’ve been here. The first time it happened in Kolkata was actually really funny; I was sitting at the dinner table with Mayadidi and Uncle when all of a sudden, BOOM! Pitch darkness. My first though was I wasn’t going to be able to find my own nose. My second thought was that I wasn’t going to be able to find Michelle, who was actually in the middle of her shower. Luckily Uncle found a flashlight and I was able to bring Michelle an extra. It would happen like that around the same time every night, and then the cyclone was just the icing on the cake, making the power go out for a whole 2 days. Here in Allahabad, the power goes out every day from 10 AM to 1 PM, so Kamal and Joy both have backup generators they use to power fans and a few lights during that time. It can go out at other times without warning though – it happened in the evening a few days ago, or like right now, in this rainstorm, it’s out. You can tell when it goes out because everything goes pitch black for a second before the generator takes over. I almost peed my pants the first time it happened because Michelle was asleep in the next room and as most of you know, dark strange places don’t really agree with me. Now I always carry a flashlight J

This morning we woke up around 8:30 AM and had breakfast with Kamal. We went over some logistical things about our apartment and some other things we need – we’re trying to get a broom to sweep, and a radio so that we can start playing Indian music all the time. When we were driving with Joy’s son he was playing sick nasty Indian music and so Michelle and I have started keeping a list of all the radio stations we see him play so that we’ll know how to do it ourselves.

After breakfast, Kamal’s servant, Suresh, went with us to help us buy some fruits, vegetables, and milk from the roadstands that line the streets around Kamal’s apartment. It was awesome that he went with us because now we know where everything is and we can shop on our own – and we also know how much everything costs, so we won’t get ripped off just because we’re white when we go to buy something. We bought tomatoes, cucumbers, bananas, mangoes, and this awesome fruit that Uncle first gave us when we were staying with Maya called litchi. On the outside they don’t’ look very good, they’re tiny and the skin is really tough, but when you peel them the inside is so sweet and juicy! And the taste will always remind us of Mayadidi and Uncle, since it was one of the first things we ate with them. Without Uncle to help me open it, I still haven’t been able to open mine without it exploding the juice all over me.

Around 11, Kamal called the skin doctor for me to set up another appointment to check out my serious case of leprosy, and Michelle and I headed there on a rickshaw. I am really so impressed by the healthcare system here – or at least, the kinds of healthcare Kamal has been able to secure for us. There is literally a hospital right in front of our building, and Kamal has personally introduced us to the manager there and given us his cellphone number in case of emergency, and this skin doctor person is right down the road and agreed to see me straight away, ahead of any of his another patients. (I think another thing is that Kamal is just an amazing woman with all types of connections, so she makes everything much easier). Anyway we showed up at the skin doctor’s … the waiting room was PACKED this time and I am not kidding when I say that every single head in a room the size of a small bedroom was staring at me while I checked in with the receptionist. I made the mistake of turning around to observe them all and almost burst out laughing – I still can’t get used to every head turning my way. Michelle and I are just waiting for one of the rickshaw drivers or men on bicycles and motorbikes to crash into each other because when they drive by us on the road, every single one stares over their shoulder at us while driving straight ahead!! Anyway, the doctor saw me in about five minutes for no charge since he’d seen me a few days ago. My rash has been doing so much better thanks to what he prescribed me a few days ago, and he gave me some more stuff to keep things under control for the next two weeks. Medicine was even cheaper this time, only 76 rupees – and 50 rupees = 1 dollar!

After the doctor’s, we headed to Balson’s, which is the small store Kamal took us to a few days ago, to buy a more heavy-duty flashlight in case the power totally fails on us one of these nights. The man who runs the store there is so good to us – they actually didn’t have the kind of flashlight we needed, so he sent someone to another store to buy one for us and sat us down in front of a big fan and gave us some cool lemon drink to have while we waited – for free! Again Kamal’s awesome connections are really helping us out!!

When we came home, Suresh showed us how to light our stove upstairs so that we could boil the milk and make it safe to drink. Michelle got over her fear of matches! Our first attempt to boil the milk was a fail though – we heated up pan first, and the milk is packaged in this awkward plastic bag instead of a bottle, so we couldn’t pour it in fast enough and burnt straight away. The second time was a little better and we put it on a lower heat, but then it almost exploded into a giant messy cappuccino. Thank goodness we have lightning fast reflexes and turned the stove off before we got milk EVERYWHERE J We also rinsed out all the containers Kamal has given us to store our food. The way the sink works is a little interesting, its just a pipe that goes into the ground, and lets just say it didn’t handle all the soap I was giving it so well…I looked down, wondering why my feet were wet, and there was a giant lake forming beneath the sink, complete with giant piles of soapy suds. Awesome. At least the floor got cleaned.

Afterwards I went downstairs to have lunch with Kamal and Michelle took a little afternoon siesta. She’s still being careful and making sure she is sleeping when she needs it so that her fever and sore throat don’t come back. When she woke up we talked for awhile about our plans over the next few weeks – all the places we want to visit and all the different sites we want to see in Allahabad itself. We called Sachindra, who we’re going to have dinner with on Monday, and we called Shubham in Delhi, who said he would love to meet us if we can make it up there sometime! Kamal has a house there as well actually and she said we could stay there if we wanted to, so that might actually be a great option for us. It was so awesome to get to talk to them on the phone after literally months of emailing, and we can’t wait to meet them in person for all the help and advice they have given us over the past few weeks. Sachindra especially has been really awesome about calming us down – at one point, after we’d asked him about 17 million questions, he was finally just like DON’T WORRY YOU TWO! Just get yourselves to Allahabad and the rest we will figure itself out! At the time we were like yeah right we’re going halfway across the world, it’s going to be the most complicated thing we’ve ever done in our lives…but both of us have actually been so amazed and relieved at how well it has all worked out. So he was right after all J

Then Joy called us to let us know that he couldn’t meet with us to go over plans for the next few weeks because an AIDS patient he has been working with was in the hospital and wasn’t doing well. We are just hoping everything is OK. We’re going to meet him tomorrow around 10 AM to talk, which will be great for us. After we talked I took a nap of my own – actually what really happened is that I passed out midconversation with Michelle and she snuck out to blog for a few hours. When we woke up, we went downstairs to spend some time with Kamal. She really is such an awesome woman – she has a hysterical personality and is always making Michelle and I laugh with another one of her stories. She has rented the rooms we are staying in now, along with several others, out to different women in the past around our age or a little older who have all come to Allahabad for different reasons. They have come from all over the world too – Israel, Germany, Pakistan, you name it! She’s always telling us different stories about them. She also talks about her husband a lot, who is a retired Colonel in the Indian Army, and her two sons, who are in their late twenties and early thirties. All three of them actually live in Delhi and she says she often prefers it that way so that she has some space to herself! She has also introduced us to many of her friends in the area. There are Auntie Jain and Lili, two older women who live right next door, and another doctor friend who serves in the Indian army.

Afterwards we went upstairs to make our first meal in our kitchen!! We toasted bread in a pan and put peanut butter and jam on it. Everything Kamal has been making us has been delicious, but it was so nice to taste something familiar and American. And now we’re just relaxing in our bedroom, I’m blogging while Michelle decorates the walls with some pictures and we listen to music! I’m excited to talk with Joy tomorrow and even more excited to start working with the kids on Monday J