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Last Friday afternoon (Jan 4), the whole group went to a few Mandirs (Hindu Temples) together, which was really nice as we haven’t been able to do much as a group. The architecture here will never cease to amaze me. On Saturday I went to the zoo with Annu, Amrit, and Jenny. It was for the most part like any other zoo I’ve ever been to, except all the plants and birds were different. I expected to see elephants and tigers that would be happier than those in zoos in North America, but I can’t say they looked too different. It was nevertheless a good experience. Monday was a typical day of outreach at the Drop-in Centre. We did a few house visits and spoke with family members of clients at the DIC. At the first house we went to, the wife of our client offered to get chai and disappeared. Within 5 minutes of arriving, there were almost a dozen people (women and children) around Annu, Tekchand ji (the outreach worker), and I, asking questions and telling me I should move to India and get married here. The chai came about 30 minutes later, and I found out that the client’s wife took so long because she had to milk their cow before making the chai. Needless to say, it was very good chai.
Each day, the clients at the DIC receive free food from the Iskcon Temple. So, on Tuesday, we went to the temple to thank the man who is in charge of the ‘Food for Life’ program. We weren’t able to go inside the temple as it was closed at the time we were there, but it was still great to see. The Iskcon Temple is just behind the famous Lotus Temple (aka Bahaí Temple) so we went there right after. Then we left to meet the group at a huge convention center, where we observed a videoconference on trade between India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Nepal. Representatives from each country spoke about their needs and the barriers they face for trade, and how they could motivate their governments to work together to improve the logistical constraints they were facing. It was a really amazing exposure to many concepts I would not normally think about.
Yesterday (Wednesday), Annu and I went to do some outreach work with Tekchand ji in another area of Delhi. I don’t know the name of the colony, but it is apparently the largest (by area) in Asia. It has been around about 25 years, and they had still not yet completed many of the roads in the area. It was obviously not a place where tourists go, because many people seemed very surprised to see me there. When we went in the house of a client, everyone again crowded around me, practicing their English to ask me my name, where I was from, etc. It’s really a bizarre experience for people to be so fascinated with me because I’m a foreigner. Tekchand ji was going to be staying longer, so he had two boys take us to the bus stop where we needed to catch the bus to go home. We followed them through crowded streets and narrow alleys, hoping Tekchand wouldn’t send us with people he couldn’t trust, and they eventually got us out to the main road where the bus stop was. They even got on the bus with us, made sure we got seats, and told the bus driver where we needed to go. That was good service. It took us almost three hours to get home, and we have guests coming for dinner, so we decided to take a leave from our placement today. We leave for our mid-project one week from today, which means we’re almost at the halfway point already!