The Return of the Monsoon

After weeks of no rain and concerns that Gujarat was moving into drought, the monsoon is back. Saturday the humidity broke and within a hour it had rained so much that there were literally children swimming in the street. Ahmedabad is without a proper drainage system and its sandy soil means that when it rains the roads become rivers. This muddy mess is worth it though because the rain provides a break from the heat -now I only sweat during the day, not at night too.

The flu has been flying around the office. It seems everyone, except Monika, has had it and some people have had it more than once. Last week, I woke up one morning with a horrible cold and my eye swollen shut. If I thought that I got starred at normally as a western woman, a fat eye drew crowds. Unsure what was happening to my body, I was convinced that I was dying. Apparently, however, this was not the case because now I am back to normal.

The paper deadline for the marketing research, is looming and the pressure is on. I spent all last week trying to figure out this duplicate household mess. It has been difficult for Monika and I to get information from aagewans, SEWA field officers, who know about the villages at a household level. There are many of them and all of them are very busy. Also since the research was done in three districts, they are spread throughout the state. Last week, I made trips to three offices (Patan, Anand and Ahmedabad) in the hopes of sitting down with staff members to discuss coupon distribution. More often than not this resulted in me coming home empty handed with promises of information in a few days. These trips, however, were enlightening in other respects. Also, new snags have been unearthed. For example, it seems that in some instances coupons were used twice, making it difficult to know which member received the marketing treatment.   

Because households have received multiple treatments and because it has been difficult to find out the scale of this problem, the researchers are initially looking at individual and village affects. Since an initial draft of their paper is due on Wednesday (tomorrow!!), it seems as though this will have to be satisfactory for now.

Above are pictures of MY hands! A woman from the SEWA office heard that I was interested in henna and took me home with her on Saturday. I spent the evening with her and she applied henna to my hands. It was nice to meet her family and I spent time playing "what is this?" with her 5 year old who is learning English.  This led to a funny situation when I pointed to a goat in a picture and asked, what is this? She replied, "a god". No, I said. A goat. She shook her head. NO! A GOD. A G-O-A-T. There was no convincing her. My accent was incorrect. The goat was a god and that was that. 

I close with a picture of some children I met begging on the street. I distracted them and got them to pose like models instead. Here is one of the resulting pictures.

Comments

[Rebecca]

What a way to spend your birthday! I am so proud of you.oxoxo

[Maria]

I love your hands! Something I would love to do someday, incredible and beautiful.