Today at dinner, I told my host sister, my Didi, that today had been a long day, or in Hindi, that aaj (today) ka din ('s day) lamba ta (was long). I probably could have added a bahut (very) in there too.
It was only after I had said, and sat with the silence that happens a lot with a household that speaks another language, that I really considered how true it was.
Today started out, like they all do, with a 7:00 wake up from my Didi or my mumma here, as they are both teachers who get up at 5 AM to accomplish things before they head out. So my mumma woke me up, and asked how I was feeling, since at the end of the school day yesterday I had suddenly began to feel a little feverish and come home asking for help. Since I had been a little under the weather, she told me this morning that it was probably best if I didn't take a bath, like I normally do in the morning, but rather just washed.
This began the interpretative period of my morning, as I tried to figure out what "bath" versus "wash" entails. My host family is incredibly considerate and thoughtful, so they turn on my hot water heater in my own bathroom for me before they wake me up so that I can use hot water right away (these women are so incredibly nice). I usually don't shower every day at home, but I feel rude ignoring the hot water that has already been made by the time I get up in the morning - so while I have managed a full bucket shower on my first morning, yesterday I had opted to just wash my body off. ... which left me confused about what hygiene was expected of me. Does a wash mean just your body? Just brushing your teeth, face and hair? I didn't feel like reaching higher cognitive function, so I just shut the hot water hearter off and left my clothes on.
From there, I had some breakfast while drafting an email to an internship which meant that I had my internet up, so I set up a skype date with the rest of my family for my evening (their morning), before running off to pick up my closest neighbor SIT student and autorickshaw to school. This was the first time that we convinced an autorickshaw walla (driver) to charge us according to his meter - a new piece of tech around these parts - and we saved 20 rupees more than usual!
The morning class featured a guest lecture who focused on feminist movements in India. One of the more vocal members of the class interjected in early on to debate about whether lesbians in India were acknowledged as part of the feminine experience. Considering that sex is one part of Indian life that still seems to be completely taboo, our lecturer told us that lesbianism had not been an integral part of the women's suffrage movement under British rule. The student who asked the question was unsatisfied with that answer, because lesbians are everywhere, so we spent the remaining part of the lecture discussing lesbians, specifically, in India. This made me tired.
Then began our 3 part, 2 hour Hindi lessons. Part one was practicing talking to a vegetable vendor*, but then we got to learning how to conjugate the verb for "to be." Although we would seem to enough Hindi teachers - 3 - for a group of 22, this guest lecturer shows up to teach us grammar. This was difficult. Here's why:
1. Many many of my classmates do not know how to read Hindi characters. This is hard because many characters look the same, if not even are the same, besides connecting the top line to it or adding a dot at the bottom. For example, this symbol भ makes a bh noise, while म makes an m noise. Not so easy huh?
2. The Hindi lecturer was not writing the Hindi characters well. She was more scribbling Hindi-like shapes on the blackboard. This is challenging because the characters do not seem very distinct. (see point 1)
3. The Hindi lecturer is French, so speaks English with an accent. And maybe Hindi too? I am not advanced enough to tell.
4. Yesterday's lesson was how to make the right noise for which symbol. Today's lesson incorporated use of pronouns, conjugating verbs, switching tenses, masc/feminine, and distance all in one. It seemed like kind of a leap.
I have the benefit of one semester of Hindi at school under my belt, so although I have far from mastered the language, I have been exposed to the basics before. No one else in my class has, so I really feel for them when we whip around from subject to subject in Hindi class without much explanation. After we learned the new lesson, we break into drill groups - today my group was with the guest lecturer. She pretty much just yelled and pointed at us for the whole half hour, which sucked. She would improvise sentences at us, arbitrarily switching gender and number. She also swapped between present and past tense without any notice. Even with a firm grasp on the basic past tense, she had me questioning my whole knowledge of the Hindi language. One of the other girls in my group said afterwards she had felt like she was going to cry the whole time. It was just awful.
Finally got out of Hindi drilling to eat. Lunch was chicken - which made this the first time in a week that I have had to think about being a vegetarian. Definitely nice to be able to eat most everything around here.
After lunch, we headed into our trusty "TOURIST" bus to take a trip to Basti. I did not know what Basti was.
Turns out, Basti are some slums in downtown Jaipur, not more than a 5 minute car ride away. All of a sudden, we were in the middle of a 3-part field exercise about observation, so we were instructed to follow our teacher through the slum and not to talk to each other for the duration of the walk. So there we went, a group of 11 Americans walking through an Indian slum, holding notepads and paper, and not talking. There were a lot of kids yelling at us, trying to talk to us, touching our hands and clothes, and just generally around. I felt very invasive. This was weird.
So after going through the slums and then talking about our emotional reaction to walking through a slum, I did what any American would do - go shopping. The fact that I had only one pair of pants still fully functional was really starting to get to me, and I guess a lot of girls were beginning to feel similarly out-of-place in western wear and worn down, because we rounded up a majority of our classmates and headed to the nearby mall. 2 kurtas and 3 churidaar later, I felt much better to take tomorrow head on.
I caught an autorickshaw home, and chatted for a bit with my mumma and didi, and then got to my computer for a chat with my parents and sister.
Unfortunately, the electronics in my life had other ideas. My internet connection comes from an MTS usb stick that launches an internet server from my computer. Sometimes when I try to open the application to connect, it gives me an error message that the internet "isn't ready for use". Ummm what. So it did that a few times, then finally launched, and loaded up Yahoo India - its go-to page. Then still my Skype will not log in, nor will my Gmail load. Which begs the question, if my internet isn't working, how will I tell my whole family that I am having technical difficulties rather than totally blowing them off? I was getting more stressed about it, and finally things started loading, and I logged on to skype successfully. My dad was pushing for a video chat through Google, but when I tried to launch it, it gave me the prompt for downloading the appropriate technology. Given that my internet connection can only barely handle streaming a youtube video, I didn't want to push it. So Skype it was! But the internet was still not great - so video chatting prompted a red box on my screen that said "your internet connection does not support video, we suggest switching to audio only."
So I switched to audio. And still, a box would pop up not infrequently that suggested that my internet connection had completely been lost. So my call home was really a half hour of me talking to my computer, hoping my parents could hear me, and just taking long pauses when the red box would show up. And it showed up a lot. So after about 45 minutes of broken explanations of autorickshaw fees, good classmates and Indian family life, we called it quits, and I went to eat dinner with my buppa who was just finishing up his dessert.
Bathing + rickshaw negotiating + hindi crisis + slums + shopping + unusual rickshaw route home + bad internet = long day.
*Conveniently, learning vegetables is the only set of vocab that I really committed to memory from my Hindi class back in the States. Well, actually, I learned vegetables and fruit, which in Hindi is "sabzi aur pal". This got me into trouble when I was first getting to know my host family while they cooked dinner. They asked me what I normally eat at home, and I blanked, so I thought of pasta... then pasta and vegetables. So I said "Pasta! Pasta aur pal!" which, for those of you playing at home, means "Pasta and fruit!" This, technically speaking, still describes my eating patterns at home, so I just let it go, but pasta and vegetable sat the same time is a good combo and pasta and fruit sounds gross.
It was only after I had said, and sat with the silence that happens a lot with a household that speaks another language, that I really considered how true it was.
Today started out, like they all do, with a 7:00 wake up from my Didi or my mumma here, as they are both teachers who get up at 5 AM to accomplish things before they head out. So my mumma woke me up, and asked how I was feeling, since at the end of the school day yesterday I had suddenly began to feel a little feverish and come home asking for help. Since I had been a little under the weather, she told me this morning that it was probably best if I didn't take a bath, like I normally do in the morning, but rather just washed.
This began the interpretative period of my morning, as I tried to figure out what "bath" versus "wash" entails. My host family is incredibly considerate and thoughtful, so they turn on my hot water heater in my own bathroom for me before they wake me up so that I can use hot water right away (these women are so incredibly nice). I usually don't shower every day at home, but I feel rude ignoring the hot water that has already been made by the time I get up in the morning - so while I have managed a full bucket shower on my first morning, yesterday I had opted to just wash my body off. ... which left me confused about what hygiene was expected of me. Does a wash mean just your body? Just brushing your teeth, face and hair? I didn't feel like reaching higher cognitive function, so I just shut the hot water hearter off and left my clothes on.
From there, I had some breakfast while drafting an email to an internship which meant that I had my internet up, so I set up a skype date with the rest of my family for my evening (their morning), before running off to pick up my closest neighbor SIT student and autorickshaw to school. This was the first time that we convinced an autorickshaw walla (driver) to charge us according to his meter - a new piece of tech around these parts - and we saved 20 rupees more than usual!
The morning class featured a guest lecture who focused on feminist movements in India. One of the more vocal members of the class interjected in early on to debate about whether lesbians in India were acknowledged as part of the feminine experience. Considering that sex is one part of Indian life that still seems to be completely taboo, our lecturer told us that lesbianism had not been an integral part of the women's suffrage movement under British rule. The student who asked the question was unsatisfied with that answer, because lesbians are everywhere, so we spent the remaining part of the lecture discussing lesbians, specifically, in India. This made me tired.
Then began our 3 part, 2 hour Hindi lessons. Part one was practicing talking to a vegetable vendor*, but then we got to learning how to conjugate the verb for "to be." Although we would seem to enough Hindi teachers - 3 - for a group of 22, this guest lecturer shows up to teach us grammar. This was difficult. Here's why:
1. Many many of my classmates do not know how to read Hindi characters. This is hard because many characters look the same, if not even are the same, besides connecting the top line to it or adding a dot at the bottom. For example, this symbol भ makes a bh noise, while म makes an m noise. Not so easy huh?
2. The Hindi lecturer was not writing the Hindi characters well. She was more scribbling Hindi-like shapes on the blackboard. This is challenging because the characters do not seem very distinct. (see point 1)
3. The Hindi lecturer is French, so speaks English with an accent. And maybe Hindi too? I am not advanced enough to tell.
4. Yesterday's lesson was how to make the right noise for which symbol. Today's lesson incorporated use of pronouns, conjugating verbs, switching tenses, masc/feminine, and distance all in one. It seemed like kind of a leap.
I have the benefit of one semester of Hindi at school under my belt, so although I have far from mastered the language, I have been exposed to the basics before. No one else in my class has, so I really feel for them when we whip around from subject to subject in Hindi class without much explanation. After we learned the new lesson, we break into drill groups - today my group was with the guest lecturer. She pretty much just yelled and pointed at us for the whole half hour, which sucked. She would improvise sentences at us, arbitrarily switching gender and number. She also swapped between present and past tense without any notice. Even with a firm grasp on the basic past tense, she had me questioning my whole knowledge of the Hindi language. One of the other girls in my group said afterwards she had felt like she was going to cry the whole time. It was just awful.
Finally got out of Hindi drilling to eat. Lunch was chicken - which made this the first time in a week that I have had to think about being a vegetarian. Definitely nice to be able to eat most everything around here.
After lunch, we headed into our trusty "TOURIST" bus to take a trip to Basti. I did not know what Basti was.
Turns out, Basti are some slums in downtown Jaipur, not more than a 5 minute car ride away. All of a sudden, we were in the middle of a 3-part field exercise about observation, so we were instructed to follow our teacher through the slum and not to talk to each other for the duration of the walk. So there we went, a group of 11 Americans walking through an Indian slum, holding notepads and paper, and not talking. There were a lot of kids yelling at us, trying to talk to us, touching our hands and clothes, and just generally around. I felt very invasive. This was weird.
So after going through the slums and then talking about our emotional reaction to walking through a slum, I did what any American would do - go shopping. The fact that I had only one pair of pants still fully functional was really starting to get to me, and I guess a lot of girls were beginning to feel similarly out-of-place in western wear and worn down, because we rounded up a majority of our classmates and headed to the nearby mall. 2 kurtas and 3 churidaar later, I felt much better to take tomorrow head on.
I caught an autorickshaw home, and chatted for a bit with my mumma and didi, and then got to my computer for a chat with my parents and sister.
Unfortunately, the electronics in my life had other ideas. My internet connection comes from an MTS usb stick that launches an internet server from my computer. Sometimes when I try to open the application to connect, it gives me an error message that the internet "isn't ready for use". Ummm what. So it did that a few times, then finally launched, and loaded up Yahoo India - its go-to page. Then still my Skype will not log in, nor will my Gmail load. Which begs the question, if my internet isn't working, how will I tell my whole family that I am having technical difficulties rather than totally blowing them off? I was getting more stressed about it, and finally things started loading, and I logged on to skype successfully. My dad was pushing for a video chat through Google, but when I tried to launch it, it gave me the prompt for downloading the appropriate technology. Given that my internet connection can only barely handle streaming a youtube video, I didn't want to push it. So Skype it was! But the internet was still not great - so video chatting prompted a red box on my screen that said "your internet connection does not support video, we suggest switching to audio only."
So I switched to audio. And still, a box would pop up not infrequently that suggested that my internet connection had completely been lost. So my call home was really a half hour of me talking to my computer, hoping my parents could hear me, and just taking long pauses when the red box would show up. And it showed up a lot. So after about 45 minutes of broken explanations of autorickshaw fees, good classmates and Indian family life, we called it quits, and I went to eat dinner with my buppa who was just finishing up his dessert.
Bathing + rickshaw negotiating + hindi crisis + slums + shopping + unusual rickshaw route home + bad internet = long day.
*Conveniently, learning vegetables is the only set of vocab that I really committed to memory from my Hindi class back in the States. Well, actually, I learned vegetables and fruit, which in Hindi is "sabzi aur pal". This got me into trouble when I was first getting to know my host family while they cooked dinner. They asked me what I normally eat at home, and I blanked, so I thought of pasta... then pasta and vegetables. So I said "Pasta! Pasta aur pal!" which, for those of you playing at home, means "Pasta and fruit!" This, technically speaking, still describes my eating patterns at home, so I just let it go, but pasta and vegetable sat the same time is a good combo and pasta and fruit sounds gross.
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