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!