The beauty of travel

After being here for exactly 4 weeks, last night was the first night I really started to miss home. Not home, as in my bed, my mom, and my TV- home as in America.

I've been in India for only four weeks, four weeks in Ann Arbor would have been nothing to me- but here, I feel like I've learned enough for a lifetime. I've had every resource and opportunity here to pull my project together- and I've seen things here that I would have never been able to back home. I've sat in on counseling sessions for women who walked into the clinic and tested positive for HIV, I've sat with women who beg for abortions because their body is physically too weak to carry a child, I've talked to patients who used to have high paying jobs in the health field and now can barely afford to feed their kids. I've talked to women with TB, I've talked to women who have been trying to conceive for months and are still unable to. I've seen the look in a husbands face as his wife gives blood in the small Maitri Clinic for an HIV test. And I've listened in on counseling sessions for Army men who participate in high risk behaviors such as group sex. It's been a whirl wind of an experience but there are some things that I've learned here that no book or professor might have explained to me.

1. Pakistan and India are just an extension of each other. They are like sister countries, they have the same people, the same languages, the same culture- yet they have so much bad blood. If people would take a second to look past religious differences, politics, and learned hatred- they would see that they have more in common than any other two neighboring countries in the world. 

Before the Partition, Muslims and Hindus worked to separate from the British with so much success- how could such a population that worked so harmoniously together for a revolution be split so harshly?'

I'm trying to educate myself a bit while I'm here- and it's becoming clearer to me that Indians and Pakistanis are so historically similar that even Gandhi believed they shouldn't be pitted against each other: "My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. To assent to such a doctrine is for me a denial of God." - Mahatma Gandhi

2. America is the melting pot- figuratively speaking of course. But that's naive to say- India is a melting pot of the historically native cultures tied to their land. It is full of different languages, religions, cultures, regional histories, and foods. The reason everyone says America is a melting pot, is most probably because it never had a culture of its own. The culture that it did have (the Native Americans) was overtaken and wiped out- making the American soil fertile for tons of new languages and skin tones. However, India- it's beautiful how you can travel 4 hours south and find people who have such a different heritage. The one difference I’ve noticed here is the divide.

In the U.S. you don’t find people who are historically tied to the land, they’ve all come from faraway places- so their loyalty is to a country far from where they are. You can turn to any single person in the States and they would find some reason to be a minority. In India- people have loyalty to their history and culture, they’ve lived alongside people of different origins, beliefs, and backgrounds- but they have remained grounded in that their culture doesn’t necessarily need meld with another’s. So you have Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Bengalis, Punjabis, Hydrabadis, Kashmiris, Hindi Speaking, South Indian Speaking, and a whole lot of everything else- all living under the same Indian name. It’s beautiful how much diversity there is- truly one of the most amazing things I’ve seen. But similarly it’s disappointing when you see people who are so tied to one name, that they can’t accept the similarity of another name right next door. Everyone here is Indian.

3. Traveling makes you wary. It makes you skeptical of everyone, it makes you question peoples motives 10 times more often than had you been at home. Maybe it has something to do with being out of your comfort zone- that you constantly have to be awake and aware of what’s going on around you, but it’s exhausting. Sometimes I return to my Som Vihar apartment late at night, and I can finally turn off all my senses. I can stop making sure my auto is taking me to the right place, I can stop checking to make sure my wallet is in the same pocket of my purse, I can stop running situations in my mind where I’m lost somewhere at night. It’s like the constant skepticism keeps your mind running 100 times faster, all day, every day, until the day you are back home again. It’s a weird feeling, cause on one hand you feel like you could so easily become addicted to traveling, and on the other you feel this huge appreciation for home- for the comfort of knowing that you’ll never be lost.

4. As cliché as it sounds, you never realize how much privilege you have until you see people with little to nothing. Maybe I didn’t realize it until I was walking late at night in Nizzamuddin, a Muslim Slum. Or maybe I realized it my first week here while I was sitting in the slums learning how to stitch from girls my age.

See, I always saw my trip as a short venture. It’d soon be over and I’d be back in my home, eating the food I like, catching up on shows on my DVR, and using my Android phone without having to prepay for minutes. But I walked around in the slum that night (don’t worry it was safe) and watched people really carefully. Everyone seemed content. They were barefoot and grabbing snacks from the snack shoppe. They had kids, they had clothes on their back, they had the bare minimum- but they were laughing, smiling, and introducing themselves to us with the little English they knew. It was possibly the most beautiful night of my trip—because it brought to light how much I have to be grateful for. If people living without shoes halfway across the world can smile at the firangi’s as they walk by, what reason do we have, as students in America to ever complain about anything- anything at all.

Only 7 days left in India- I’m trying to make use of every minute I have left!

P.S. Here’s a photo of my house keepers adorable 8 month old, she sometimes brings her along and she crawls around on my bed while dinner gets prepared. So adorable!