Real World Hunsur

Seven strangers, thrown together, in rural India... I doubt MTV will ever make it here, but the other volunteers and I jokingly compare our lives to the “reality” show. Seven of us, from five different countries, have finally moved into a house FSL has rented for the purpose of housing volunteers as well as provide a more southern office location for FSL project coordinators. There are three bedrooms, an office/living room, one shower, one Indian toilet and one western toilet, and a shrine room where keep a jar of nutella as an offering to the numerous deities. The “kitchen” is just a smaller room with shelves. We have been promised a mini fridge, a stove, and a cooking lady, but they are still absent. 

Although we come from different countries and are at entirely different stages in our lives, we all love learning from one another and spend a lot of time laughing. We band together through the power outages, curious neighbors, a landlord who amiably barges in and out as he pleases, insect infestations, and other India woes. At the end of the day, as we chatter about our daily activities over another dinner at our favorite restaurant, Tiffani’s, the causes for complaints fade away.

our beautiful green house

my room

Child Labor School

It has occurred to me that I haven’t given an adequate description of basically my purpose for being in India. I arrived under the impression that I would be working in an orphanage. Through fate or lack of organization, whatever the guilty party may be, I ended up working for a child labor school in Annur, a village a 40 minute bus ride from Hunsur. The ethnic tribes in Karnataka, the state in which I live, have been battling for more rights, but these improvements can be crippled by their poverty and illiteracy. The Nisarga Foundation is an NGO that helps facilitate certain rights, including the education of children. It pulls children that would otherwise be working in the tobacco fields and puts them in to schools. It is a noble effort but they are still leaps and bounds away from providing a quality education. 

The teachers are severely under educated and not exactly motivated to actually conduct class on a regular basis. I am supposed to be teaching English along with the other volunteer, Nils, but most of my days are spent inside the school waiting for something to happen. As a result, I don’t have much to write home about. Nils and I have been meeting with the headmaster of the school, the director from the Nisarga Foundation, as well as other child right’s organizations to figure out some way to contribute, but nothing has materialized as of yet.

This has been a fairly frustrating experience, but through it all I have developed a rudimentary attachment to the children that promises to grow with more interaction with them. They hardly speak any English, but like all children, they are satisfied with a smile or holding hands. 

a few of my kids at a child rights meeting

sporting their new umbrellas on the way to Lake Day

Supporting Evidence

“India is magical. You must leave your need for personal space behind, for at any given moment, whether enclosed in a taxicab or exposed on the street, you will be surrounded by men, women, children, auto-rickshaws, taxis, exhaust fumes, carts, scooters, goats, cows, and the smells of samosas, jasmine, spices, manure, and trash warmed by the blazing sun. It will fill and enhance your senses. It is a portrait of life at work with apparent beauty and glaring tragedy, and it asks you to look on it all...

It will show your strands of pearls in Hyderabad, pink stone in Jaipur, beautiful white sand beaches in Goa. It will introduce you to basmati rice and curries that have been simmering for hours, pistachio ice cream, and fried doughnuts floating in sweet syrup, and it will teach you how to eat with the fingers of your right hand. It will show you how to slap dough into chapatis. It will fold its hands to say namaste as you pass by the elderly woman on the side of the road. It will impress you with its propensity for academic excellence in technology, engineering, and medicine. It taps on your window, the beautiful face of a little girl with round dark eyes and black eyelashes, clasping her fingers together and drawing them to her mouth to tell you she needs food...

You will feel special, amazed, full, stirred, naive, helpless, enraged, awakened - and all in the first day. India is magical.”  

-The Scent of Water, Naomi Zacharias

“The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future.”

- Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts

sunset on the street in Goa

just a small example of the colors that pervade India

sunset in Kundapur

From Rags to Riches

      Juxtapose: To place or deal with close together for contrasting effect. Immediately after arriving in India, this word began to manifest itself in everything that met the eye. The strikingly bold crimsons, emeralds, turquoises and golds of women’s saris clash with the brown of dry, dusty, manure lined streets. The energetic, fast-paced cities like Delhi and Mumbai contrast with the tiny villages who still use ox-pulled carts for work in the fields. The alluring smells of fresh flowers, frying street food, and the spices that make India famous fight against the combination of sweaty bodies, rotting trash, and animal waste. Juxtaposition is dominate in India, but I didn’t realize it would become so apparent to me personally.

     I have been living in Hunsur, one of those rural villages with one main road and not much to see or do outside of eat or use the internet cafe. Cows, pigs, goats, chickens, dogs, and cats run rampant through the trash filled streets and nothing less than pure mayhem exists during mid day when rickshaws and people are involved. We’ve been washing our clothes in buckets, using hoses for toilets, and eating some variety of rice or bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We’ve lived in a cramped, dirty, cockroach hotel with an extremely fickle electrical system. I am describing this without the slightest hint of complaint or regret. On the contrary, these things have made my stay in India that much more adventurous. But I want to clearly establish an idea of my everyday reality so that you can better understand the dream world I entered into last weekend.

     My friend Mariana is Portuguese and her parents happen to be acquainted with the Portuguese consul who lives in Goa, a small but beautiful state in western India. Portugal had control over this part of India for a  couple hundred years, finally leaving in 1961, so there is a significant Portuguese influence in Goa, hence the need for a consul. He generously offered to let us stay in his house for however long we liked. As a traveler on a budget, a free place to crash is gold, so we were already ecstatic about our good luck. We had no idea what was in store. 

     Antonio, the consul, and his driver picked us up at the bus station after a grueling 16 hour bus ride (think run down school bus) and took us to his mansion on a hill overlooking Panaji, the capital city of Goa. He led us down the long hall and showed us the two rooms we would be staying in. We also had our own bathrooms, with real toilets, clean sinks, and hot showers. You have no idea what a treasure this is, but it doesn’t end there. We had servants, a butler, and a cook that made us breakfast and lunch. For dinner Antonio took us to the nicest restaurants in town, refusing our constant offers to pay for at least half. After we mentioned that we wanted to go to the beach, he took it upon himself to arrange a hotel for us in a small beach town, dinner at a restaurant his friend owns, and transportation to and from the town - all for free. I have never in my life been so dumbfounded and unable to express my gratitude. I have no idea how I stumbled on such good luck, but I can’t help but think about that frustratingly true maxim: it’s not what you know it’s who you know.

      Arambol, the beach town we stayed in, can be summarized by this quote: “The sixties have never really come to an end. They’re still going on right now in Goa.” (Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides.) Hippies galore. Which also means fun hippy stores to shop in. We shopped, sun bathed, and soaked in the party atmosphere that Goa is famous for. Basically, our lives were the exact opposite of what we had been used to the last month. Juxtaposition is a beautiful thing.

Rainbow over one of the many beautiful churches in Goa

the beach in Arambol

our night out

Check out some videos

My housemates and fellow trekking companions, Amandine and Mariana, are creating videos for each week of their gap year. India is their first stop, and afterwards they are planning on going to Indonesia, Australia, and New Zealand. Here are the first two of their videos:

Week 1


Week 2 & 3


Week 4 & 5