I Had A Good Day

I rode my bike home with a sense of satisfaction. I emailed my supervisor with a document (I never said that what I did was good, helpful, or mattered to people). Today was a good day.

This is not the script of an anti depressant commercial, it is the lead story of my nightly broadcast and as I stand in the kitchen eating yogurt, fruit, raisins, and peanuts for dinner, it finally feels good to know that the sun is setting on a day where I did something.

Tea and newspapers still dominate the morning. But, just before lunch I was able to complete a needs assessment survey, get it translated into Gujarati and have it photocopied so that when I go on field visits next week I will be able to clearly, and with some methodology, ask the field staff basic questions that will guide me on my way to helpful work. Lunch was delicious. In the afternoon I finished an organizational map, trying to filter my thoughts and observations from the past month into a chart and series of paragraphs that show funding flows, interpersonal, and interorganizationl power dynamics. Completing this proved to be a good exercise, a way to walk through my thoughts see which ones were clear enough to put down, which need further exploration and which are just wrong. The real challenge now is to understand how to use this constructively, to present this information is constructive feedback that can be used to improve the relationships, communications, and work in general. I even got on the schedule for an upcoming three-day capacity building workshop for the staff which gives me a project to prepare. A good day.

As I close my eyes to the lullaby of circling gnats, my boss’s (the in-country AJWS coordinator) words echo in my brain, haunting almost, as if I may have betrayed all my academic training and the good advice so many smart people have given me. Is my push towards productivity counterproductive in this context, rushing me along to the point where I am missing the lessons? Why am I so happy that I wrote a document? Parts of me hate that I even entertain this thought, peeved two days ago by not having anything to do and now actually taking mental bandwidth to consider if doing work is bad. In the call she toed the anthropological party line, urging me to rethink what productivity means, how the people at my organization view this word in the course of their work, and where the real lessons might lie.

Defending my desires for productivity before she finished her thought, I found myself quite the scientist among liberal arts majors, punishing ideas of cultural relativity, shredding notions of non-traditional knowledge, and suplexing the too common thought that history has many paths and outcomes. Problem is, I am not a scientist. I am an anthropology major. I appreciate a holistic way of looking at the world and appreciating different peoples, places, and mental paradigms.

Balance is what I seek. Not surprisingly, I fall into an anthropological thought to save me – like anything I am a product of my environment and how I view the world, the opinions that I hold deep down, unconscious reactions to certain situations, my impulses, are cultural constructions that rise from an upbringing in America. Despite desires to distance myself with the most spurious American stereotypes, or think my upbringing non traditional, these ideas don’t stretch this far. Standing next to other Americans, my childhood was unique. Nothing radical, but substantially different and how I think, the people I know, and who I have become as a result is atypical in America (it may be fairly typical of kids of liberal parents, kids who like to think their upbringings different – but that’s another conversation) but standing in India, my mind stands out as American, Western perhaps, modern, in how I approach things, in my judgments of good and bad, assessments of culture and ‘progress,’ ‘development,’ and productivity. Seesawing, trying to find a space that is balanced, respectful of local customs, patient with the office, staff, and organization on the one hand and ideas of helping, improvement, efficiency on the other, I keep this in my mind, happy, and unashamed to say it, that I did some work while hoping to put that work within a framework that is not imposing, scientific or didactic, but guided by those mushy and important anthropological thoughts.

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I think of my time in intervals, intervals structured around big events, events that I can look forward, that can make a week pass extra fast, can crack a month in half, or put my mind into the next year. This week a friend is coming to visit, then site visits next week with Navratri going on all along. Easily, without even noticing that time is passing, that gets me to the late 20s of October when I am going to present at the staff training and my roommate is having an engagement party on the 28^th. Preparations for that will kill the last days of the previous week. With the Impact Assessment in the first week of November, I should be able to get all the way to Divali before I know it. And, once I do, I am off to Mumbai and Pune to see some friends and celebrate. Basically, it is already mid November and I’ve not gotten to planning that far but hopefully I will have consistent work by then that will be exciting and engaging. A couple of days off for Hanukah, the mid year retreat in Thailand in January, hopefully the ‘rents will visit in February, another retreat for Passover and things are cooking. Time flies when you are planning to make it so.

At the moment though, I feel like a Vespa trying to merge onto an interstate mega highway. I do not have the right vehicle to be doing this, but I’ve got what I got, I am here and there is traffic behind me. Life is racing everywhere around me and I can’t turn back, there is no shoulder, I have to drive. If I can just jump in, start on my way in the right lane, time will tell, I will catch some help from an updraft or downhill, and there will be uphills too, but my signal is on and I’ve got to pick a spot. Despite mechanical difficulty, I’ve made it to the on ramp and am sticking my nose out just a bit, not quite ready to jump in, the traffic still too fast and unforgiving, unprepared on this big road to stop for such a different, puny scooter. But, soon I will be driving along just like everyone else.

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Academics and politicians constantly remind the world that India invented the zero. More importantly, I think they invented the color, that before India life must have been in black and white, a charcoal sketch, that when planes cross country borders in the air, you can watch the colors disappear, from front to back, first class to the last cabin, an etch-a-sketch eraser being shaken as the go across that phantom line. If there was color before India it was a boring primary color scheme, Crayola couldn’t fathom the names or the hues of its box of 64 without coming here. Even if the rest of the world figured out how to use more than primary colors, they would still be boring, and pale in comparison to the Technicolor reality throughout India. India’s colors are what technology cant figure out how to capture in megapixels, HD, or HiFi. It is the festival season right now and Sony’s finest engineers scramble from garba to garba, trying to compute the composition of timeless colors, colors that invented the category, predated their names or patents or imitations in television.

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The director returned from his three week trip and it is good having him back. He returned from a series of meetings on the national sewage workers rights campaign. It took him three weeks, and he did stop in his home village to visit his mother, but it raises a tactical and logistical question: how would you run/coordinate a national campaign? The NYT just published an article that says diesel transport trucks average 10 km/hour on trips from Kolkatta to Mumbai. This is a long journey traversing the continent, but the roads are so bad and process to collect road taxes to bad that travel is painstakingly slow. A trip from Ahmedebad to Mumbai takes ~ 9-11 hours on bus. Trains are more expensive than busses and planes the most expensive of all. Most of the leaders from the state levels are not computer literate and phone access is usually reliable but prone to signal problems and many dropped calls and it is not cheap.

Communication with him is difficult but because he is the leader, what he says goes. He is not shy about telling me what do to and I appreciate this. Contrasted by the working environment when he was gone, when there was no clear leader, no person to direct, I prefer this. We have work to do in growing to think in a more long-term way, but it is good that he is back.

At lunch, in broken english, with his right arm punctuating each point, he makes it clear why he is the man. His voice’s passion is undeniable. On a dime, his tone turns from relaxed, talking of cricket or clothes or what’s for lunch, he starts talking about NGO culture in Delhi. That right arm is his tell, when it is flailing, pointing, exploding, ducking, flying, smacking you know he is on, talking from his soul. When it is still, sat on a table, rested at his side, he is trying to be more calculated, a bluff of sorts, an attempt to be more careful in his word choice, the topic not of his liking or comfort. For this comment his right arm is where it likes to be. ‘In Delhi,’ he tells me, ’20 percent of organizations are real. The rest only meeting, eating, speaking and reporting.’

He knows what is important for an organization despite not knowing the word grassroots.

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An article in this morning’s paper helped me get a better sense of the danger of the work. Power in numbers. In the last two and a half years, 227 people in Pune working as sewage workers and street sweepers died. Not all died on the job, but most did.

In the U.S., a story on trapped coal miners in West Virginia enthralls the nation, leads on the nightly news with the packages bearing headlines like ‘What Went Wrong?’ and ‘The Victim’s Families,’ or ‘Is This Work Safe.’ Those men died, and they were brothers, fathers, friends, and sons – it is tragic. I don’t dare suggest otherwise.

Here, there is very little media coverage and the numbers of people who die, fathers, brothers, lovers, and cousins just the same, is not news, it is normal. The corporate representative responded that the workers would be issues gumboots and gloves. Laughable really. As I plunge into a sewer, fully immersed, with toxic gasses in my eyes and lungs, gum boots are really going to save me. Yes, protection of any kind is better than none at all, but the bigger question remains: what is going on that these people are allowed to, that it is their job to, and their children are being groomed to, jump into an open sewer?