India - 10 Weeks in a New Land (Part 2)
Photo: Bangalore Palace.
Flying to India from North America takes a long time. If you’re broke, which I am, you need to balance flying as cheaply as possible with the amount of time you spend laid-over in random cities. On the way down, we stopped in Brussels and Abu Dhabi. We left at 6pm on a Thursday. We got to Bangalore at 3:15am on Saturday. Total travel time: 33 hours and 15 minutes. We lost 9.5 hours along the way that we will get back going home, but it was still a lot of time in the air and camped out in airports.
Waiting in Brussels airport for three hours was disorienting. We had flown for a solid six or seven hours, but we had also lost a few hours. So it was the next morning before it should have been morning, we had spotty internet access, and we were overtired from failing to sleep on the plane. The women’s washrooms were out of order, so I had to go on a trek to find an operational one, and I bought a very overpriced smoothie that cost even more because I was charged in euros. Then we loaded ourselves onto another plane and flew another 7 or so hours to Abu Dhabi.
The airport in Abu Dhabi is apparently nice. I wouldn’t know. We walked though some of it on our way to our connecting flight to Bangalore, but I was half asleep and sweating to death. The planes at Abu Dhabi’s airport drop you off on the tarmac, so you exit down some stairs and get onto a bus, which then drives you to the actual terminal. When you leave, you load onto a bus that takes you to your plane. I felt a bit like a superstar getting onto a plane from the tarmac, but it was just so hot! It was somehow evening again as well, without us ever having experienced a proper day at any point. We finally arrived in Bangalore 3 or so hours later.
So. 3am in a foreign airport after a full day of plane flight. We had to get through customs, exchange money into rupees, and find our driver to take us to the airport. It was nearing 6am by the time we actually got into our apartment. A short nap was in order once we picked rooms, but I was so stressed and overtired that I didn’t sleep. All of Saturday was just a fog of new experiences. I got dehydrated within the day, felt terrible and was overwhelmed. I video-chatted with my mom and cried about being there and being sick and being way too hot.
I didn’t die! I drank a ton of water, bought some Gatorade, and calmed down. Everything after that I managed to sort out and take in stride. Success!
Work started on the Monday, so we had Sunday to try to orient ourselves. I would say it was partially successful. We got more cash, found a few grocery stores and got a morning routine organized. None of us slept properly for that first week because of jetlag. The boys napped at all hours and I just didn’t sleep at all. When I tried to sleep at night by body warned me that it was time to be awake, and during the day when I was sleepy I had to be up and working. On the plus side, the fact that I didn’t sleep much meant that I was able to create a sleep cycle that had me up at 7:30am to prepare for work. It would have been painfully early for me to have to get up at that time normally, but my body just accepted that 7:30am was wake-up time in this strange new world.
My jetlag ended up lasting nine days. I have been told that the rule of thumb is a day of jetlag per hour of time change. We lost 9.5 hours, so I would say that’s about right.
My work in India was an excellent experience. I was able to do a mix of tasks, like research India’s child rights laws, and create a cyber-safety powerpoint for children. The highlight was probably the first visit that I took to a nearby migrant worker community. Migrant workers are people from outside of Bangalore that come to the city to work. They are often from nearby rural villages, but can come from other states in India or even other nearby countries. They move to Bangalore in the hopes of higher wages, because their villages are so poor and isolated that they are unable to survive trying to work there.
Generally, the workers make better money in Bangalore, so they stay.
Better isn’t great. They are still way below the poverty line, and they cannot afford to live in any regular communities. Instead, they congregate on pieces of public, and sometimes private land, and erect temporary structures that they live in until they are forced to move. The community that I visited first had been forced to relocate a few year previously, as the public land they were living on was going to be developed. Now they live on a privately-owned property that they rent.
The homes are made of corrugated metal, and they are so hot that even the field worker said he can’t spend more than a minute inside of them. Clothes hang outside on lines, and there is no electricity or running water. There are no bathroom facilities, so the men and women have designated outdoor areas that they use as bathroom spaces.
Knowing that I would be visiting an extremely impoverished area, I was prepared to be really uncomfortable and shocked. Instead, I was happy. Not at the terrible conditions that the people have to live in, but at the environment of the community members. When we arrived, a group of people brought out a bed frame and set it up outside for us so that we wouldn’t have to sit on the ground or the little cement blocks at the bases of their homes. They sat there themselves, yet they went of their way so that we wouldn’t have to.
The children were just that – children. They weren’t any different because of their poverty. We played games with them that left me feeling old and way too hot, and both the kids and I were laughing and smiling the whole time. They are so friendly and engaging, and they are proud of what they have, even if it isn’t much. I was continuously asked (via hand gesture, as most don’t speak much English) whether I had eaten. I had, but I have no doubt that if I had said no, they would have shared whatever snacks they had with me. There are things to be learned from those children about the way that we should treat others, and about generosity.
The whole excursion opened my eyes to something that I hadn’t thought about much before. I had always heard sad tales about poor children in Africa, India, and so on, and how terrible their situations are. I had never really thought about the perspective of those children. People might be a lot less horrified and a lot more willing to help children in need if they actually met some. You get to see how they make do with what they have, and how they don’t expect anything more. If asked, they will give you a list of things that could be safer, or could be improved. But they aren’t sitting around crying about their lot in life, or about how they want all of this stuff. It’s more of an afterthought – they would appreciate the help in changing these things, but they’re quite okay with how things are as well. Who wouldn’t want to try and help people when faced with humble positivity and polite recommendations? It’s a nice change from the depressing all-negative ads that you tend to see on television, and the perspective is something I will be considering from this point forward.
