goodbye to Sambhavna

Amidst packing, saying goodbyes, typing up Supreme Court documents, eating cake, and other things that go with last days I thought I'd upload some more pictures of Sambhavna and around..
w/Lalita and Ratna
gardening/medicine making crew
garden
medicine making area, free of gilo vines and clippings for the first time since I've been here!
current volunteers at the train restaurant for our last night.. Nirupa and Lukin have Nirupa's boxes of stuff to ship home on their heads
clinic
chillin in the entrance of the clinic on Holi
pictures of some of the staff
Jayshri in the kitchen
clinic

So tonight at 7:30 Nirupa and I are catching the sleeper, getting to Delhi in the morning, killing time for 6 hours and then taking a train to Chandigarh in the afternoon where we'll spend two nights. The real on the 20th more trains to Shimla and mountains! And after that we have many plans but no tickets..

elephants, tourists, and Holi.. oh my!

ask and ye shall receive.. thanks for the comments loves. And in return, I'm attempting to put up lots of pictures as promised! Even if it takes hours on the dubious internet connection.
Meanwhile.. my plans changed a bit and I am actually still at Sambhavna; basically realized I wanted more time here and was only really leaving so soon b/c of the elephant festival.. so I just went out to Jaipur for two days, saw the sights and the elephants and then got back this morning. Now I'm planning on leaving the 17th with Nirupa, or maybe a day earlier if I try to go tiger-spotting in a national park first. It's definitely nice to have a "home" here, and in some respects I feel like I could stay for quite a while.. but then there's so much I want to see in India, I've got to get moving at some point, and I think I'll be really happy when I do. The couple days in Jaipur were actually great for getting back into travelling a little and having some time to remember I can do things on my own, and I'm really glad I went even though my instinct is not to go somewhere and then back the way I came.
I took the passenger (i.e. stop everywhere along the way at every single tiny station) sleeper train to get there which was quite the experience what with three sections of three levels of bunks within like a 12 by 6 foot space, the various bugs, random people getting on and off all the time.. but it was actually fine, I spread out my nice little sheet bag and had plenty of time in the morning to watch the for the desert. Course we got to Jaipur like 3 hours late, but it all worked out b/c I found out the elephant festival wasn't until 4 the next day, not all day like I expected, so I had plenty of time to do the sights and festival. Monday afternoon I went to Amber fort a little outside of town, which was sort of a huge palace with all these labyrinths of rooms with stair cases leading to unexpected places.. I could just see myself running from all the Indian tourists and getting more and more lost, like "No! I don't want my picture taken! No!" Then Tuesday I walked around the bazaars a bit, went to the part of the City Palace (where the Maharajah and fam still live) that's open to the public, saw this crazy observatory made out of sculptures that one of the Rajput kings built, and dodged all the people trying to sell my sparkly shoes and gorgrous Rajasthani tie-dye. Jaipur is right up there with Delhi and Agra on the tourist track, quite a ways from Bhopal, so it was pretty weird to see all these white people everywhere and tons of touristy shops and a lot of international chain stores. Then there was the elephant festival, which on one hand was just a huge photo op (complete with people yelling at each other for standing in their shots) but on the other hand was some crazy cool stuff I wouldn't have seen anywhere else, like painted and lavishly decorated elephants and costumed dances. I caught the express (and much cleaner and calmer.. the food vendors even wore uniforms!) train back to Bhopal and arrived this morning, just in time for Holi!
Holi is the big spring festival for Hindus, which involves lots of coloured powder and water and rowdiness and fun. I'm not too clear on the religious significance though.. for the last couple days there've been tons of stalls in the streets selling powders in all kinds of bright colors, water guns, balloons, etc..and a few people got started yesterday, with powder throwing during the day and bonfires and music at night. Today we got started early making a mess at Sambhavna, then went to a party on a rooftop nearby for lots more powder, some intense water fights, and old ladies signing and playing drums. All of my hair and exposed skin were dyed, and a lot of it still hasn't come off after the first scrubbing.. I guess I'm having a relapse to my purple-hair phase.
Tomorrow the clinic will be back open after two days of holiday, and our group of volunteers has changed a bit.. Mary and Frank are gone and missed, and there's a new American volunteer, a 26 year old guy from Montana. Really my last week now!
me and Nirupa mid-Holi
Elephants at the festival
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bazaars in Jaipur

largest sundial in the world

City Palace in Jaipur

bangle guys making little wax powder bombs for Holi

powders

demonstration for International Women's Day (can you find me?)

kids of the woman who cooks dinner

kids at a school we visited

sunset from Sambhavna

Lalita-ji making medicine

Union Carbide plant



Wall around the factory


Sanchi


Puja's birthday party

the birthday girl herself

the corner store

in the neighborhood

part of the family who live next to the tailor

at the tailor

I fit right in

gilo-free fence!

fly like paper, get high like planes

(..watched Slumdog the other night and Nirupa just got the soundtrack, so we're going through a big MIA phase)

It's been brought to my attention that I've been slackin on the blog, so let me see if I can bring this up to speed..
Workdays around the clinic have been relatively routine, I'm still trying to do yoga in the morning, working on cutting the giloe vines (finally got em all off the fence but now still have to chop into little pieces), scanning/classifying old articles for the library. It just keeps getting hotter and hotter, consistently in the 90s during the day now so I'm trying to stay in the shade and near fans until 5 pm or so and appreciating that I don't have to work out in the sun in the garden. In the afternoons/evenings we sometimes go to the markets, Chowk (in the old city near a mosque) or New Market, where all the upper-class people hang out; I'm much worse about resisting the temptations of ice cream this time around. I've helped out in the kitchen a few nights, cutting vegetables, trying to learn what the woman who makes dinner is doing, and playing with her adorable kids. Sometimes we watch movies on Dash's laptop, and while it's a little weird being "home" for a couple hours and then coming out into the Bhopal night, it's nice to be able to relax. Occasional visits with the neighborhood kids/families; every time I walk by the tailor's the people who live next door invite me in for tea and I get to hold their cute cat and slightly intimidating parrot. Oh I went back to Ratna the gardener's hosue the other night to celebrate her daughter Puja's 14th birthday! All the kids blew up balloons and hung them around the room, I got to help make dinner (mashing potatoes with my hands while squatting on the floor 3 feet away from the family cow), they sang a slightly twisted version of 'Happy Birthday' and cut the cake (but no candles), a few presents, and then delicious dinner. Puja is an awesome girl-really smart and friendly (with good English); she showed me her school notebooks and told me about how she wants to be a scientist.

On Sunday Dash, Frank, Mary and I went via private car (with a friend and her brother) to Sanchi, a Buddhist site about an hour outside of Bhopal. It was late afternoon when we got there, so the light was beautiful and we spent a couple hours wandering around looking at the stupas (stone mounds that have relics/tombs inside) and beautifully carved gates, and ruins of some other temples and two monasteries. Back in Bhopal we stopped for tea and made a bit of a scene coming in to sit at a very male-dominated sidewalk cafe place, where the owner showed us a framed news story about how his tea shop got really hoppin after midnight.. then we went to dinner at a restaurant in the fancier part of 'New Bhopal' and got to see how the other half lives.

Monday afternoon, we (all of the volunteers) walked over to the Union Carbide plant about 10 minutes away from the clinic to see what we could see.. first encountered a wall painted with lots of anti-Dow slogans in Hindi and English; walking along it discovered a big hole that people were using to get in and out, namely a bunch of kids who were playing cricket in a field just inside. But we were a little wary of going in without a permit, so we went back the other way past the huts where people live right up against the wall and some sketchy pools of water that a little kid seemed to be drinking out of. Wal;ked around to the "front" (off the main street) where we could get closer to some abandoned-looking buildings, but weren't sure exactly what we were looking at besides more kids playing in old radio towers so headed back. But THEN yesterday a French journalist showed up who had a permit to visit the site, so we went with her and got to walk around inside and actually see some things up close. I guess I didn't really know what I expected to see at the abandoned site of a gas leak that happened 25 years ago, but what was there was definitely bizarre. Kind of hard to describe, I'll try and put pictures up soon, but basically the tanks and pipes and things were just sitting out in the open all rusted over (whatever walls had been there were scavenged, I guess) and our "guides" (police?) kept pointing out places where there was still toxic waste sitting around (there definitely is still some somewhere in there, "cleanup efforts" have been basically non-existent). But since we couldn't see any bubbling green pools of sludge and there were all these trees and grass grown up around, it sort of looked.. not very sinister. We did go to the old control room, which was really trippy: still signs there with emergency warning messages and a plaque that said "SAFETY is everybody's business", labels for where pressure gauges to the tanks were, and random papers covering the floor. It seems like whoever wants to pretty much can go in there and take what they want; animals are living all over the place and the people who live nearby don't really seem to realize that the site is still contaminated. Lots more to say in that regard but better leave it til later..

I've bought my train ticket to leave on Sunday, when I'll have been here for 3 weeks and in India for almost a month! And definitely will try to have some pictures up before then. Love to all (and if you're reading this, leave a comment so I know I'm not just writing to no one!) xoxo

life, pictures, etc.

sorry I failed on appropriate captions as usual, hope the last post was decipherable.. anyway, that was all that uploaded over about 45 min in the internet cafe, so I'm trying more on another volunteer's computer here at the clinic. and now I will be a champion and actually caption correctly!

hardcore gardener didi cutting up the vines in the medicine making area
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burning trash from the well across the street
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with Mary at the ghats
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holy man
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...
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temple in Ujjain
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front of Sambhavna clinic
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selling powders in Ujjain
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tribal hut replica at Museum of Man
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tribal art (marionettes) at Museum of Man
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underwear for sale in the bazaar right outside the mosque (Bhopal)
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adorable child (nephew? of one of the gardeners)
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my mehendi#d palms, courtesy of Nirupa
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outside Lalita (medicine maker)'s house
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Japanese dinner my forst night
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late afternoon Taj
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monkey at Agra Fort
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Taj reflection
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love this Gandhi quote (at the memorial)

so let's see, this week I'm developing of a bit of my own schedule for working on a few projects rather than just putting myself at the whim of the gardeners (I thought I was proving myself with all the vine clearing, but now they're either trying to break me or think I'm really hardcore b/c this morning I got stuck breaking ground to dig up ginger, actually the hardest manuallabor I've ever done). Still planning on spending some of the morning in the garden, but then I'm also putting together an exhibition sort of display on the 25 year anniversary of the disaster, and scanning/classifying all the print periodical records from the library.

We had an unexpected two-day weekend (usually just Sundays are off) because of a big Shiva festival, so after having a pretty relaxing Sunday with a visit to the Museum of Man, four of us went to Ujjain, which I guess is like a pilgrimmage center for Shiva, yesterday. It was four hours there and back on the slowest passenger train ever, but once there we really got to see the festival in action. It was HOT walking around in the sun all day so we pretty much just went to one big temple and the ghats on the river, but a lot of the streets were closed off and there were people everywhere and more than the usual vendors, etc. There was a huge line outside the temple of people waiting to get into a kind of underground part but we skipped that and wandered around the whole temple.. people everywhere making puja and socializing and buying offerings and things to give to the gods and friends (some girls gave me little sugar balls that were nice instant energy). At the ghats everyone was washing bodies and clothes and posing for family pictures and shaving babies' heads.. saw an elephant, moral weirdness w/people giving it bannanas and ignoring the begging kids and lepers.. everyone had orange paint/powder on their foreheads.. holy men in bright orange and red sarongs.. live music outside the temples.. a guy talking to Frank (other volunteer) asked if he could take a picture with me and just did not understand why Frank said he had to ask me..ate lots of deep-fried samosas from the street vendors, best cold bottled water I've ever had.. rode back sitting in the doorway of the train sitting with my feet hanging out until I got dark, when the lights in the carriage didn't come on and I had a great conversation with the old man sitting next to me where he spoke only Hindi and I spoke only English, until the younger guys tried to show off their English with great textbook sentences like "India is a very big country" and "Barack Obama is the best politician"

Back at Sambhavna it seems to be getting hotter every day.. I got completely shown up in the ginger-digging by an old lady in a sari.. my tailor-made Indian outfits have been successfully completed.. the constant sounds continue to amaze me (music at night, 5 times a day prayer calls coming from mosques in different directions, dogs barking, guys selling vegetables, plasticware, fabric).. getting to know the "new" volunteers, Mary from England, "Dash" w/Indian family/lives in England, and Frank the German forester.. really good dinners cooked every night by a woman who comes in with her two adorable sons (did I mention that they taught me a handshake?) and I keep meaning to cook/learn with her..

Walking down the street it's sort of like everything is exactly as you would expect, like all the stereotypes and images that I think of when I hear "India" are right there, from the traffic to the dust to the cows to the random celebrations to the smells and sounds and heat.. but even with all those expectations, actually experiencing it, being right in the middle of it, is constantly so new and overwhelming and amazing

oh and I'm feeling much better now, pretty much spent Friday in bed but I've been up and about since then. And still no tetanus from all the rusty barbed wire I was clipping the vines off/no malaria from my tons of mosquito bites!