So here’s a wee update about my working situation. Things are beginning to crawl along. We’ve visited schools to arrange dates to make presentations about global warming in general and also more specifically about plastic waste. The way plastic is handled here is really bad. If I’ve written about all of this already please excuse me (I feel like I may have just because I talk about it so much here). People toss the toxic plastic bags and bottles on the ground, into streams and rivers, or they burn it which releases harmful fumes into the air. Not only are the fumes bad for the atmosphere, they’re also terrible for the human body and have been proven to cause cancer. So, we’re trying to educate the kids about the various problems associated with waste (we’re going to briefly mention other types) and what they can do. We’re also talking with the schools to see if they can get trash bins by the day of the presentation that we can take the kids too after the presentation and have a little “pick up the trash” activity. It’s pretty exciting. The principals and teachers at the schools are so excited to have us making these presentations and are eager to do whatever they can to help. It’s really shown me how arrogant many people are in the U.S. I mean I always knew that people were, but it’s thrown in to sharp relief now that I’m here with these amazingly humble people. And it’s not even that these teachers are uneducated- they knew about many of the issues we were discussing and taught us about some other issues in India, but even at the age of 50 or 60, they were eager to hear about the information we had to offer.
We’re also dealing with the local politics here. I hate that I can’t be more involved because of the language barrier but it’s still interesting to hear about. In order to establish any kind of waste collection system a resolution must be passed by the local council and the politics here are pretty intense so this is quite a process. Our boss claims that he’s writing the resolution but he frequently gets annoyed when we follow up on something he’s said he’d do and tells us we need to rely on ourselves… sigh. If nothing else we’re hoping to do some kind of announcement at the temple when they bring in the beginning of the Indian month (around the 14th of October I believe) so I’m currently working on organizing that.
Next Tuesday is our first presentation to an elementary school. The various presentations are going to be pretty spread out- the last one for me will be at the end of October. Then I’ll travel for a couple of weeks and come home. In those two weeks I plan on going to GOA- the Florida of India, Jaipur- a desert city with a floating palace, the Taj Mahal, and my home base will be Delhi, where I’ll be celebrating Diwali (the festival of lights) with my wonderful hosts there. Sometimes my five weeks left in India feels like an eternity and then other times it feels like a millisecond. I’m trying to make the most of my last weeks in the village and the fact that I’m running out of time is helping me be more motivated. The idleness we experience here sometimes is just downright depressing. There are good days and bad days no matter where you are I suppose. I actually shortened my trip. I was originally supposed to stay until December. But after seeing the situation with EduCARE and how little I’d be able to accomplish, I decided I couldn’t just sit around for 4 months- it would’ve driven me insane. So I shortened my trip to 3 months and plan on writing a paper about aid work in developing countries to make up for the lost time if needed (in order to get academic credit for the internship). We’ll see later if I made the right decision or not- it’ll be interesting to see if I regret it later on. But I’m trying to live day by day and so far today is a much better, more productive day. ☺ Gotta hang on to the little things.
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