The End Of the World (might or just hopefuly not) is Coming!

Wow yay! Other people are starting to do their share of the blog instead of just making me do (and doing that by not letting me go on facebook until I've written more then they have ever even attempted to write...) But still...  Well anyway without any further ado...

Hey guys! Hope you all had a wonderful holiday and also welcome to 2012!!! :) For all of you that believe in the 2012 end of the world, hope your having a good part of the last year of your life... I’m going to  try to be optimastic and ignore all the people that want to follow the Mayan's calendar so here is another short section of my long to come life:

Although I’ve put this blog post off for the last two weeks in which I’ve started up school again, I'm going to write about the second part of our break. After we had gotten back from Jaipur with our grandma, we had a week of relaxing before she left and our confuseingly related family come in. (I say that because they are really my mom's aunt, uncle and cousins, but because of the age difference, they could pass as our older cousins and aunt and uncle... but who really cares.) With them we went to Chandigar and Amritsar. Chandigar, the originally planned capitol, was probably the cloesest I have gotten to America, besides the high-class malls here in delhi, in five months. The city, planned on a very convenient grid system, was divided into sectionns. (It felt very sci-fi in a way... i dont know, something about "we are in sector 35 right now.")  Section17 was the "shoppng" area. We looked there for a little bit and it was VERY clean. It reminded me a little of Boston with the brick side walk plaza area. The highlight of Chandigarh though was a full-on circus that we would have never heard of if we hadn't driven past it. The circus, which showed three times a day everyday ( for a month), had hardly more than 50 people in the tent meant for probably 500 people.

For a meer 200 rupees (4 dollars) a person the acts were spectacular... actually really just plain unbelievably amazing. There must have been 200 acts though. (Some seemed pretty repetitive and it dragged on a little two much... but WOW I could hardly wrap my mind around any of the acts) the scariest act was this guy (who had already done 50 other completely different though amazing acts.) who had a tall poll on which he balanced a tripod like thing that had very sharp legs. Then all at once even before you could tell what was going on, he threw the poll away and fell to the ground laying perfectly just as the tripod like thing fell into the ground, one leg to the right of his hips, one to the left, and one right between legs!!! As it hit there was a firecracker inside that cracked loudly right ad it landed and just about the time I thought the guy had just killed himself.

That was only the first part of our trip so I, or if I can win a bet or something unlikley like that and I can get someone else to do it, will write about Amritsar later... like way later... like once Mom takes my facebook time hostage again... well ya hope your 2012 has ended your world yet!!! Chase

chase

Mom's 2 rupees....or Mom's 2 cents.  I notice that I have not contributed my fair share to this blog and thus a few words now.
My big passion these days apart from the family and video work on mental health is.....learning Hindi. The absolute joy I feel when people laugh at me/with me while I try to put sentences together is more fun than I ever remembered it to be. People are so kind and patient with me and I feel so grateful for that.

A highlight of visiting Jaipur was seeing fabric come to life

The language is confusing for the sentence structure is completely different than English. But the really hard thing is that I can not read Hindi so I can not read about the rules. I have been teaching myself with podcasts and the help of all of India. I have started to take a few private lessons and that is great. I only want to speak Hindi so it is nice to be able to completely ignore all the written stuff...who needs it??? Hindi will allow me to volunteer as a doctor, in some capacity, because the places I want to work have patients from all over India and most do not speak English.  In what capacity I can volunteer my doctor skills has yet to be sorted out....but I promise to blog when I know more.

But why learn Hindi? Doesn't everyone know English In Delhi?  Absolutely not.  The government schools only teach English at most 1 hour a day so, for example, many of the kids on the park do not speak any English.  Tons of people that work in Delhi do not speak any English.

India has severely underspent in Education as compared to many other countries, such as China.  India did put resources towards the top echelon with the creation of the highly competitive Information Tech schools that are impossible to get into.

There is a big trend for families to send their kids to private school, no matter how poor they may be, in part so that they will learn English. The private schools teach in English all day except for the 1 class of Hindi.  I just learned that often a private school can cost as low as $2 dollars a month. 

Recently the government rolled out a new plan and committed new resources for revving up primary schools but no one seems that optimistic.

Taking a break while  recently filming on global mental health  in a Township of  South Africa  

Warmly, Delaney

Jaypor's Adventure

We went to jaypor and for 1 of the 3 days we saw people making things. Some of the things were, cloth-paper making, bloke printing, cloth dying, potery, and cariving block prints!!! It was all really cool, but my favoret was the bloke printing place. We got to make our own so I now the most about bloke printing then the other places… I wasn’t bored like a few others!!! For each desing (animal, flower, ect) there were about 3, 4, or 5 different colors wich had ther oun block!!! Frist you pushed the outline in the middle with a redish coler, then you line op the second block with a different color to some point (depending on the pattern) and after 3, 4, or 5 different colers you put the back round. And finally with the copany’s name you’r done!!!!! HE WAS AN EXPERT AT IT and a charter, too!!!!

                 -Tessa

My Take on Christmass

Dec 30, 2011

My Take on Christmas

                Christmas is always bittersweet for me. I love being together with the family who assemble and long for being 8 years old– old enough to appreciate but too young to have any responsibility. Now I struggle with the logistics and miss being with so many of our far flung family and mostly my brother Parker. I like watching folks enjoy the gift exchange, but have personally never enjoyed giving or getting presents. All of this is only amplified by being so far from home and having children who are “too old” to believe in Santa.

                None the less, it was another great Christmas (why is there only one S?). It’s been great to have Lynn, Delaney’s mom, here as she has been an enthusiastic and flexible traveler (critical attributes in India). After  a few days in Delhi we took the early morning train to Jaipur (which I now think is pronounced j-pur not Jaipur – does anyone out there know for sure?). We wandered the chaotic streets with hawkers (sounds dangerously like hookers when said by Indian tour guides), saw one of the original Playboy Mansions (the Hawa Mahal, I’ll let Delaney and Chase explain why this analogy is so funny … and loaded), had lunch at a restaurant with food as good as  Burkhana “one of the world’s best restaurants” , and walked thru the urban chaos to the Albert hall. I will spare you the photo I took of the crow’s eating a dead rat – but it really epitomizes our family’s approach to embracing all facets of India. 

                The day before Christmass (I’m ignoring Microsoft spell checker and going with the Christ-Mass spelling) was epic. After an India breakfast with way too much fat (the Indians at the restaurant were eating cornflakes, and the hot milk it is served with,  not with a spoon but by scooping it into some roti (unleavened bread). That visiongoes in the record books with the elderly couple in Toyko I saw eating a big mac with a knife and fork.  A long discussion between Delaney and I about priorities, options, budgets and risks set us onto an adventure with a rented car ($30) and a hope (see stuff being made). Like most gamble we take, we won – we saw guys carving wood block printing patterns, a factory where rags turned into beautiful paper products (they fold paper bags by hand – who what goes into those bags from fancy stores), silk screen printing of those ubiquitous cotton bed covers , block printing (where a guy who our limited language interpreted as immodestly referring to himself as an avatar of some Hindu god…  the god of block printing must exist as there are about 300,000 Hindu Gods), and pottery where the combination of rusted old horse shoes and lemon makes a brown solution that turns black upon firing. Our day ended well after dark with a camel ride down the side of a highway but also by a lake with a beautifully illuminated submerged fort. For those of you who have been to a Grateful Dead concert, I’ll add that just when I thought I was peaking, I heard singing from the camel behind us with my two kids and mother in law singing “We three Kings” as the ride ended (by the gas station where we mounted). I went to bed with no bicycles to assemble or batteries to install.

Christmass morning was fun. We awoke by alarm clock thinking the kids (who are very clear that they are too mature to believe in Santa) would sleep in – but only to find they had been awake for hours. After breakfast we met our old friends Shivam and Raj. I remember extoling the virtues of kids to them after dinner in our first Seattle house when we had kids and they didn’t. They now have 3 young kids and bravely were taking a pilgrimage (with two siblings) to India – now I was extoling the virtues of older kids! It was a total blast to hang with them in a family friendly van as we drove to the Ambar palace, rode elephants to the top, toured the palace and returned to their hotel. Passing on a lunch on the grass at the hotel (that was a total throw back to some British Public Television show) we opted for gorging ourselves at the Indian tourist restaurant before catching the train back to Delhi and spending hours on VOIP with family on the east and west coast of North America trying vainly to explain our holiday.

 Since then we have winded down Lynn’s visit with a few days around Delhi, sharing with her Chase’s prowess with the sax, Tessa’s continually dancing body and our new normal in Delhi. I knew Lynn understood our new life when we went to a “famous” restaurant in crowded Old Delhi. It was  down some random alley and called (or described, we never knew) as Pratha Walla Gully. We waited, jostled by the passing traffic on a crowded 12 foot wide alley, for 15 minutes for some of 30 seats  jammed into a 15 by 15 foot space (shared by the “kitchen” some barefoot and cross legged guy fried stuffed bread in pure butter). Lynn did not flinch while two rats ran by and Delaney suffered stoically while the family consumed about 10 pounds of grease.

My segway to 2012,

Welcome to 2012! As the year wound down, I finished reading Nanden Nilekani’s inspirational and optimistic book “Imaging India” which really helped me understand some of the critical choices facing India today.

Nilekani spends very little space on the contrasts and clichés that fill the other books I’ve been wallowing in over the past 4 months. He does identify India’s key assets (the demographic dividend, a large “democrazy”, relatively high English literacy, entrepreneurial prowess, technology and a global presence – “the sun never sets on the Indian diaspora”). These are discussed in the context of the equally impressive challenges (a country younger than my father, caste, religion, regionalism, class, inadequate infrastructure and primary education and a plethora of challenging policies). 

But what really resonates with my diminishing understanding of India (I feel I know less each day I’m here!) was the importance that the interplay between the state, markets and civil society will play in its future. The scope of the Indian government is staggering - as is the still palpable legacy of colonization, paternalism and socialism. I found Nilekani’s optimism about the capacity of appropriately regulated markets to increase efficiency, accountability and initiative a source of great hope. He identifies the most critical task as empowering people’s Jugaard, a word that can be (poorly) translated as informal innovation, of people at the local level to take charge and innovate. For health in particular, he argues that success depends on unique and innovative approaches to put health funds in the hands of citizens and using IT to build a competitive model with multiple options for care. For me this is an optimistic Segway into 2012.

Peter