Yesterday was my first village immersion! We first traveled to Aurepalle, which was about 2.5 hours away. The drive was scary, I don't know how we didn't hit anyone. Indians are not afraid to use their horn. One thing I noticed on the drive is that there is trash EVERYWHERE, no exaggeration. At one point during the drive, I think we ran something over, but I honestly have no idea. The bus started smoking so we pulled over and the bus driver informed us that it was just the AC and it wasn't working anymore and kept driving.
In Aurepalle, we dropped off my friend, Asha because she is going to be doing educational testing with kids for the rest of this week.
After dropping her off, we went to a different village, but it was only about 5 kilometers away. This village is where the Cornell interns were going to test their nutrition survey. The interns split into groups and each when with a translator. I got to go with Kavitha and Alex. (Kavitha is my supervisor as well as a translator.) The first house we went to consisted of a 22 year old girl and her husband. The girl seemed way younger than 22, she was 9 months pregnant with her first child and she was so adorable. Alex and Kavitha started asking her about what she had eaten the past few days. It seemed like they were one of the wealthier households in the village because she was eating three meals a day, snacks, and tea. Part of the survey was to ask where the food came from. While her husband was there, he was dominating the conversation and answering for her. I figured this was just because that's typically what the roles are in villages like this. However, as soon as the husband left, she started into a long conversation with Kavitha, but of course me and Alex could not understand her. She told Kavitha that the produce that they eat in their meals comes from other family members that own a produce farm, but her husband didn't want us to know that. It was very interesting, because I didn't think that was something that he would be ashamed of. The second house we went to was an older lady. She wasn't really sure of how old she was, but she thought around 40. She was funny, and it seemed like her and her husband treated each other as equals. She only ate two meals a day, and they really only consisted of rice. She works from 2-11pm at a cotton mill. Overall, I think the trip went really well because I was able to be exposed to a lot of things I hadn't before.
There were goats all over. They were all very skinny.
There were also stray dogs everywhere. Everyone told me that they were really viscous and aggressive but I didn't see one dog that the village people were afraid of. The dogs just kind of did their own thing.
These women were screaming and fighting about how to distribute the water.
I didn't even think it was possible, but the drive back was even scarier. It took us 2.5 hours to get there, but it took 5.5 hours to get back because traffic was so bad. When traffic is really bad, men just park their cars on the side of the road and go to the bathroom in plain sight. It's the weirdest thing to me. After just getting in the bus, someone threw their water bottle out the window and it hit someone's house in the village. It just drove me crazy because of the trash problem and I thought it was disrespectful just to throw trash at someone, but it's a completely different culture and no one else on the bus even reacted slightly.
This morning when I was making tea, and this little guy crawled across my hand. He's so tiny.
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