This post is coming a bit late as I have had no internet access over the past few days. Luckily, I’ve had the good sense to take copious notes to help remember all of the amazing things that I have been up to. With some more luck, I will catch up on my trip so far tonight. Although I’m only on the third day of my visit to the Water Resource Center at the Jal Bhagirathi Foundation (shown in the picture above), I am already sure that this will be a life-changing experience for me.
On Monday morning, we had a wonderful breakfast at the Ahuja Residency. Joining us at the table was a man staying overnight on his way home from a trip to Germany. He is a teacher at a school nearby. We discussed his plan to integrate German into the curriculum, and how difficult it is to do so given their limited resources and technology. His school still only has access to typewriters, and as he works on creating a text any mistakes would require him to start over again on that page of his manuscript. Few of us stateside remember what this was like, and it is a difficulty that I never encountered myself. We also tried to explain to him the concept of a liberal arts education. It amazes me how specializing schooling is here and in many other parts of the world. The concept of a diverse curriculum based on building skills rather than accumulating specific knowledge was difficult for him to grasp.
After we walked through the Defense Colony into a nearby market. Our main task, to get money from an ATM, was successful thanks to a Citi Bank branch. Mostly, we just walked around and took in the sights. People sold fruit and chai in the streets, an unfathomable number of insects hovered around us (it’s no wonder that vector borne diseases are so prevalent), and there was a considerable lack of proper sanitation based on the amount of trash we saw everywhere.
In order to catch a 1:05 flight, our time in the market was limited and we soon left for the airport and flew to Jodhpur. The ride to Indira Gandhi International was quite an adventure. Traffic rules seem not to apply or maybe even exist in India. There are no lanes, and our vehicle maneuvered around a sea of other cars, rickshaws, scooters, bicycles, pedestrians and even livestock taking up space in the road. The speed in which they drive through the chaos is nerve-wracking, yet accidents are rare. At about 2:30, we arrived in Jodhpur. In this short flight, one could see the transition from miles and miles of houses stretching out into the sunset in the dense metropolis of Delhi, to smaller, very compact cities, and eventually miles of nothing but desert with a house here and there, before we reached the blue city, Jodhpur. The population of the city proper is about one million, but unlike the airports of comparably sized cities in the United States, there were no gates and space for only on airplane at a time to park behind the terminal. At the airport, Ganpat Singh was there to greet us, and he and a driver took us to the JBF’s Water Resource Center, about a half hour ride.
The Center is a converted palace, a donation to the center from its founder, the Maharaja (aka “king”) of the Jodhpur region and we were greeted like dignified guests before meeting a cast of characters that you will get to know well in my future writings. Slowly, I began to encounter the Northwestern Students and got to know them a bit better over dinner and through our conversation after on the veranda next to one of the palace’s courtyards. Before this, myself, Morgan and Sunanada, the other Grinnell students, as well as Lesley Delmenico, the professor who orchestrated our involvement, got a crash course in the Marwar Region of the Thar Desert, the problems its people face, and also in the history of the JBF and what it is doing to combat these problems. Look forward to me sharing their perspective with you, along with the knowledge that I have gained through my own research, in a series of columns that will appear on this site in the coming days.
