Incredible

In the first few weeks of my forays into India I had a lot of time to burn. As a Northwestern student who normally has all my time packed on a very colorfully delineated calendar it was odd to sit at work for several hours with no concrete assignment, to wait for an AIESECer to come by 'sometime' for 24 hours, or just to be looking at an empty afternoon that I had to fill up with my own time. A lot of this free time, especially my time at work, provided me a lot of time to process my experiences and to write them on my blog. The fact that I am having a hard time finding space to write on here is actually a good sign. At the moment it's just before 10am and I'm at work but I wanted to take a few moments to write before heading into the day.

My trip to Jodhpur and Jaisalmer was incredible. It would take too much time to describe in great detail, but if you're interested I've posted an album on facebook called the Blue and Gold Cities that photo documents much of my trip. We left late on Wednesday arriving early Thursday morning in Jodhpur. Jodhpur seemed to be even more dirty than any other city I have been so far and so I was relieved when we took the jeep out of the city to GRAVIS (an NGO closely associated with HEDCON) center in a rural area around an hour drive away. It was so great to no longer be in any city and see lots of bushes, sand, trees, small lakes and huge sky. Our boss didn't really have any plans for us at the center so Menna and I basically just slept but ended up having an incredible 2 hours playing with the local children an a huge sand dune outside of the center. I learned how to sled on a sand dune by filling up a plastic chips bag with sand and then sitting on it and ride it down the slopes. At first only a couple children came by but within an hour there were probably over 20 children. After 'sledding' and taking lots of pictures I organized a game of 'sharks and minnows' and had a boy translate the rules who could speak English and the local dialect. The next day we went on a field visit to several mining villages and were encouraged to see that the interventions in these villages by GRAVIS and HEDCON actually were empowering villagers to improve their life situations and advocate for their (especially laborer's) rights. For example GRAVIS helped to build a school that was originally completely funded by them, but now is 50% funded by the village and will hopefully be 100% by them in the future. Afterwards with our field visits completed we left the GRAVIS center in Jodhpur to go to Singhvi's Haveli in the old city. The old city was incredibly dirty and smelly (though all the blue buildings are cool) but our Haveli was really nice and we enjoyed watching the sunset from the roof and watching a beautiful sunset.

The next morning after exploring the Merangarh Fort (very impressive but highly structured but I liked exploring down the broken down, Indiana Jones style fort, above Bundi more) we took a 6 hour bus from Jodphur to Jaisalmer. The bus was crazy, and commenced by seeing a car compltely in flames along the side of the road, in the middle of the trip the bus filled so tightly with people they were practically (and literally at one point) sitting on Menna's lap (who was in the outside seat). We got to Jaisalmer where a man from the Hotel was there to pick us up from the bus stop. And there our adventures in Jaisalmer began- my best time in India so far. But that will have to wait until tomorrow as I'm now leaving work. Off to KFC to accompany Menna for Iftar.