Miscellaneous

One of the more impressive series of archways in the Red Fort.

Retired Gen. Singh, our intern host. Who wouldn't want to work with this guy? I think I've said it several times before, but this guy was the leader of counter-terrorist forces throughout India. Pretty rad.

A member of the Haryana Police Academy in uniform.

Office yoga at Maitri (or perhaps East meets West)

The four of us in the back of a rickshaw, riding home from an event. It's a lot tighter fit than it looks.

Our driver, stopped in traffic. One side note - this guy had us piling on one side of his rickshaw as we went around turns, so that his rear wheel well didn't shred his tire. As we neared each turn, he would yell at us in a mix of Hindi and English.

Maitri's office, where we work.

Sorry for the slowdown in posts. Our internet has been down at our apartment, and we really haven’t done anything crazy over the past two weeks. We’ve done lots of smaller scale activities and trips, but nothing enormous, like the Taj Mahal or Varanasi. However, we did: go on a road-trip to police barracks; walk through the dethroned Shah Jahan’s Red Fort; shop at Delhi’s largest shopping center; and participate in a United Nations Development Program meeting on AIDS competence. We also finished a session of office yoga this morning.

First - an update on our work. Jenny has been working on a number of project outlines. She has compiled summaries of health education projects, and has created a Maitri summary, which concisely describes what Maitri does and how it benefits the community. She has also been creating Maitri’s first newsletter, which will go out to donors, Indian VIPs (the Indian President and Prime Minister perhaps), and others who sign up for it on Maitri’s website. Before she leaves India, she is excited to finish the creation of a 12 week health curriculum for women in Delhi’s slums. The curriculum includes information on safe food preparation, proper hygiene and good nutrition, among other topics.

I have created a microfinance business plan and spreadsheet showing how much money Maitri will need to start small scale microfinance operations. I am also putting together a slide show for potential borrowers. As many of the women are illiterate, the slide show is completely made up of pictures and symbols. Trying to show 20 women, through pictures, the importance of re-investing in a tailoring business has been enjoyable. While Maitri isn’t aiming to become anything like SKS, which has nearly 2 million borrowers, it is fun to think that I may have helped implement a program that benefits the borrowers, and the non-profit organization.

(Back to our sightseeing) We’ve traveled just about every weekend since we’ve been in India, but so far, we haven’t seen too much of Delhi. Over the 4^th of July weekend we decided to stay in town, and our work has taken us to a number of places in and around Delhi over the past week.

Our roommate, Nancy, is dating a guy back home who is half Indian. His aunt and uncle, Piu and Gary, live in Delhi, and on July 4^th, they took us out for a night on the town. Until then, we had only seen the tourist sites and several markets and parks, but Gary and Piu took us to the Select Citywalk, a shopping center that would rival any of the best malls in the U.S. We talked with Gary about his job as the head of marketing for a weapon simulator company that sells to police units and the Indian military. Piu was endlessly energetic, and told us numerous times that we should call her anytime, even if we only needed a ride to a nearby market.

Gary and Piu bought the four of us dinner at Jeffries, an upscale restaurant/bar inside the mall. We ate Indian appetizers (some kind of grilled chicken kebab), Lebanese spicy chicken pitas with hummus, cashew chicken, and large coconut shrimp. As we ate, we talked about sports and culture in India, and heard about Gary’s travels to Paris and Dubai, among other places. Gary is fond of table tennis, and he accepted my challenge to play at a local rec center before we take off.

After dinner, we grabbed ice cream at a popular stand and chatted some more before catching a late movie at the mall’s movie theater. I couldn’t believe how late Gary and Piu were down to stay out. They were pretty determined to take us to the movie, even with two kids at home and a road trip planned for the next morning. We didn’t get home until 2:30 in the morning, and Jenny set a new personal record for staying up late.

While I won’t go into the details of the movie (it was an American movie about quintessential American material girls - not really mine and Jenny’s pick), I will say that this theater was amazing. The chairs all reclined to 45 degree angles and there was plenty of legroom.

We went back to the mall the next day (Saturday, July 5^th) and found an awesome, inexpensive vegetarian restaurant. Now, prior to coming to India, I thought that the word ‘vegetarian’ was just a good way to start a conversation. Ever since my bad experience with “chicken parmesan” at Wild Oats, I decided that vegetarianism wasn’t my cup of tea. However, India’s “veg” food has made me a believer. Our meal at this restaurant (the name escapes me) consisted of several outstanding dishes. One had cauliflower, peppers, green beans and ginger in a yellow curry sauce. Another dish was made of mashed lentils in tomato cream sauce. We poured the two dishes over a plate of fried rice, and pushed it onto our forks with cheese naan. It was AMAZING.

On Sunday afternoon (July 6^th) we went to Old Delhi to look through the silver bazaar and to visit the Red Fort. While the silver shops were closed, Sunday is apparently the day of the used book market, and we saw vendor after vendor with his or her piles of books for sale.

We wandered down Chandni Chowk (the main street in Old Delhi) to the Red Fort, and were impressed with the façade, but not equally impressed with the inside. To be honest, the fort was somewhat of a let-down. After all our sightseeing, the Red Fort just didn’t match up. The fort was constructed by Shah Jahan, the same guy who built the Taj Mahal. He didn’t rule from the Red Fort for very long because his son, Aurangzeb, imprisoned him and basically took over. There were actually several semi-interesting sites in the fort, including Aurangzeb’s personal mosque and bath house.

I’m just going to be honest, the best part of our afternoon in Old Delhi was a stop at McDonald’s for a wafflecone which was made in front of our eyes and which made our vanilla soft-serve melt quickly.

Last week was rather busy in terms of trips and events. Last Monday, we drove all morning, with Winnie and the General, to a police academy in the neighboring state of Haryana. The academy is basically a large enclosed town, where police recruits live with their families and are trained. We watched a recruiting video and our supervisors talked with two sets of recruits about HIV/AIDS, and the ways in which the virus can be prevented. As the meeting was conducted in Hindi, the four interns didn’t have too much to teach. I was assigned to take photos of the event:

On Wednesday we had a kick-off event for the OMAXE construction worker project that Maitri is working on. Maitri was contracted by one of the largest construction companies in India to teach thousands of employees about TB and HIV prevention. Oh, and on the way home from this event, our car stopped running no less than 6 times. 5 of those times we had to jump out of the car and push for about 100 feet, in 6:00 Delhi traffic, until the car started. It was a memorable expereince.

Finally, on Friday we attended a conference hosted by the United Nations Development Programme. The mediator was a big, happy, teddy bear of a man, from Belgium. We talked about how to make progress in AIDS education, particularly in communities that may view people trying to help as “outsiders.” We also evaluated the current condition of HIV/AIDS prevention and de-stigmatization in India and talked about the ideal scenarios in a 10 categories including: access to treatment, inclusion, and risk patterns.

Jenny and I followed our enjoyable 4^th of July weekend up with an equally laid-back 11^th of July weekend. We hung out, watched about 6 movies, and discovered the most incredible chicken malai tikka at the restaurant in our complex – Colonel Kabobs. Chicken malai tikka is a set of skewers of spicy grilled chicken with a tangy sauce reminiscent of Café Rio’s tomatillo. So much for vegetarianism.

Maitri just started doing office yoga the other day. Vijay, a personal yogi, comes and has us breathing, chanting, and twisting in our chairs. Vijay claims that Gandhi only slept 3 hours per night, and could still function perfectly because he performed yoga several times a day. While Jenny and I still need more than 3 hours, the yoga was very soothing.