The Last Month

It has been a long time since my last post. As I have been watching April fly by me, rather than stopping to write about what is going on I just wanted to keep going so that I would reach the end sooner. Now, the end is practically here. It's Wednesday and on Monday I leave Prayas and Chittor and head up to Jaipur. Then the last two weeks will be running around different parts of the country. I am going to attend Pallavi's wedding in Mumbai, and then I come back to Jaipur for my last few days of classes, and on the 7th I leave for the airport. It is all going so fast!

Prayas this month has been so much more interesting thanks to a few new girls from MSID. I wrote a little about them earlier. Lisa is from Madison, Roberta is from Penn State, and Samantha is an old friend from Hindi class at the U. All three of them have found their way to the middle of nowhere to enjoy my last month with me. Soon after they arrived they were hustled off to various Prayas field locations, but I have gotten a lot of chances to see each of them. We played a delayed Holi out in Devgarh a few weeks ago, and they got stuck in Chittor for a while because of a miscommunication with a bus. Actually, Lisa and Roberta's adventures together are HILARIOUS! They always seem to have interesting things happening when they are together. The other nice thing about these girls being here is that Lisa is from Madison. Since I have never lived there, the number of people who I know in that city are limited to a handful (my Mom's pastor, my cousin, any number of various friends of both my sister and mom) so to make a friend who will live where I will and may be able to introduce me to the area is fabulous.

My host family is getting very sad that I am leaving. Everyday they always ask if I will forget them when I leave. Their last student didn't even send them a card when she left last year, so I can understand why they are nervous. Kavita seems especially sad. As a housewife in India she has very rare opportunities to leave the house and mingle with women her own age. Her life is basically just the family in Chittor, which is too bad. She is very young (only 30) and has two terrifying children and a whole home to manage when she should be able to go out gossiping with her girlfriends. So to have me in the house for six months as someone to talk to and share with was, I am sure, very comforting. I am of the age where I can talk to her as a peer, like a girlfriend. She told me the other night that I am like a sister to her, and that she likes my "homely nature" (which I think refers to how much time I spend at their house) and is sad that I am leaving. She even bought me a going away present. My feet are often a topic of conversation because I wear two toe rings (like married Indian women) and an anklet on each leg (cheap tourist stuff I got from Goa that are not real silver). Anyway, I was telling Kavita one day that I was thinking of getting real silver anklets before I go home. A few days later Kavita called me into her room, and she had bought two silver anklets and two toe rings for me as a going away present.

I feel terrible about all that is going on with them because I AM sad to be leaving all of them and everyone who has been a part of my life here for 6 months, but it is hard not to jump for joy that I am leaving and escaping this life for my home in America. I feel that, my family especially, doesn't see how hard it will be to leave them for me because I am practically giddy at the thought of living in America again.

Although it does scare me a little. I have been here for so long that I am afraid I have forgotten how to live in America! It may seem silly, but I have adapted so much of my life to live here that the prospect of going home now seems overwhelming. I have been away for most of my responsibilities for a year, not having to pay monthly bills or go to school or a job. Plus, just 7 days after I get back is my graduation, my family is moving to a new house with my aunt, I will be recovering from my year abroad in a new city without my friends. For a few days I was very nervous that I would have an emotional breakdown when I get home, but that actually happened two days ago (although it may still happen again when I get back). I got an email that broke the last delicate thread that had been holding everything together for me, and I just lost it in the middle of Prayas. Anjali was in the office and she held me as I bawled and bawled about so many things. All of my worries about finding a job when I get back, paying back my school loans, moving, leaving India the life I have known for 8 months and going back to America the life that seems like a distant dream far away from my reality. All Anjali kept saying was, "You will go back to your country soon...You have handled this so well...Its hard for me to be in Chittor and I am an Indian..."

Of all the people in my life at the moment, Anjali is the one who understands most how hard it is for me here. She has closely observed the way people stare, gawk and speak to me on the streets here, so when I cry and complain about it she really sympathizes and gets it in a way that not everyone does.

I think you can tell by everything I am saying how close I have gotten to these people who form my life here. To leave them all behind and go back home seems wrong, but it is the way life is. It's so odd to balance two worlds: to be foreigner here to finds friends and home, and to be a stranger here who is away from all of her friends and her home.

On a completely different note, the last 24 hours have been very adventurous here. I have been getting calls from people I don't know on my cell phone for about two weeks now. I thought that it was just people who had my number and thought it was someone else's, and if they spoke to someone who spoke Hindi better than I could the misunderstanding would be cleared up and all would be well. So, yesterday when I got a call I gave the phone to Anjali and apparently it is one man (or a group of men) who does know who they are calling. Anjali said after she got off the phone that they were fooling around with her, trying to be coy and flirty. She just hung up on them, and I thought that was the end of it. Except they kept calling, and phoned over 20 times in an hour! This happened to be Dr. Gupta's lunch hour and I had a feeling that if he answered and yelled at them that it would scare these boys off. It seems to have worked, but Dr. Gupta was so worked up that he called the police station and we filed a report (my first police report ever--and its in India!). So, anyway I got a few more calls last night after I had left the office and I gave the phone to Kavita who talked to them. At one point her eyes got really big and she hung up, I guess they had been saying that they wanted to meet her. When they called back a few minutes later, Dr. Sharma answered the phone and they hung up right away.

So just now, as I was writing this I was interrupted by a police officer coming to the office to speak to me. So I sat down in the main office area with Anjali and the police officer and soon the whole office (about 15-20 people) were standing around us joining in on telling the story. The officer got all the information he needed and left. They are going to print the incident in the paper, I would assume in the police report section but who knows for sure. I think the funniest thing to me, though, is the reaction of the men in the office. Since most of the men who work here don't speak English and my Hindi isn't fabulous, I haven't spoken a lot with them. But I can usually understand conversations and all of them are very upset that someone has been bugging me through the phone. It's so interesting and flattering that they would all be so protective of me when I have such limited communication with all of them.

Having said all of this, I don't want any of you to worry about me or my safety! These people have no idea who I am and only contact me through my phone, and it's really easy to ignore them. I am in no danger, and I would just change my phone number if I weren't leaving in two weeks.