Quote from my host father:

"India has too many people — the country is going to sink from all the weight! You turn on the faucet and you're afraid people are going to trickle out. I think we should send half a billion people to Australia. They have a lot of coastline; the people can fish."

He's actually hilarious. He seems pretty self-conscious a lot the time, but he's really knowledgeable about the history of India and Delhi and world events in general. Today we talked about the presence of several Christian organizations in their neighborhood, Warren Buffet and Obama's proposed tax increases, traffic in Delhi, Indian weather, American weather, the caste system, population control, the university he works at, Christmas in London, and plenty of other interesting and random topics. The other day he told us that Columbia University flew him to New York to interview for a position teaching Hindi, Urdu, and literature, but he ultimately turned them down because his mom wanted him to stay in India (he said the people at Columbia were quite mad because it's hard to find people who can teach both Hindi and Urdu, which saves the university money).

I also made a deal with my host mom to meet up in Morocco in a few years. We'll see how that turns out. Khadeeja is going to take Rachael and I to get our noses pierced this week! I'm still on the fence about the whole thing, and I want to run it by my mom because it seems like a common courtesy to let her know if I plan to punch holes in the body she gestated (this might not be a transitive verb but I don't care) for so long, but I think I'll end up doing it. Hi Mom! I figure I can have it here and if I don't want to deal with it, I'll just take it out. Khadeeja said she'll take us to a reputable place, and I actually don't think it will be at all sketchy because literally 75% of women here have their noses pierced, so the piercing people definitely have experience. Also Khadeeja is planning to get her nose re-pierced so if she's doing it, it must be safe (she has high standards).

Oh they put the baby on the floor just now! I'm going to go play with her and see if she will crawl. She's about 7.5 months old and doesn't crawl yet, but she was premature by a month so apparently they start counting developmental things from the due date, not the day the baby is actually born. Crawling normally happens at 6 months, I guess. I'll let you know how this goes. She usually just lays there when we want her to crawl.

Yesterday, 23 of us took a bus to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort. Before going, I was cautiously optimistic but also a little skeptical because, really, how great can a big white building that I've already seen hundreds of pictures of be? Pretty unbelievably great, as it turns out! It has this magnificent gleaming quality, and it truly is breathtaking when you first see it walking through the main gate. Even from so close, it looked fake in all its splendor. There were some clouds in the sky and it only magnified the effect — the sun somehow seemed to spotlight the Taj and since it's entirely white marble, it seems to glow. The Red Fort is beautiful as well and offers back views of the Taj as well.

Rachael and I also visited the Qutab Minar the other day, which is a tall stone minaret built during the Mughal rule of India. There were also stone ruins of other buildings, and it was a lovely area to sit and take pictures.











I'll upload more Taj pictures tomorrow! And a video!

Hi everyone! Today I finally took the time to read the blogs of two of my best friends who are also abroad (Hi Angie and Dylan!) and Angie's is hilarious and Dylan's has fabulous pictures, so I figured I would link their blogs here if you want to see what they're up to as well! I'm jealous that they're in Europe (Dublin and Prague, respectively) and get to visit other parts of the continent and drink in so much beautiful scenery and architecture all the time. I miss you both! And everyone else who isn't with me here of course. So many of my friends/friendly acquaintances are scattered around the world: Ireland, Argentina, Spain, France, England, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Hungary, Scotland, Australia, Israel, China, Korea, Switzerland, and of course the United States!

I'm stealing a post topic from Angie's blog here: Yesterday I came as close to peeing my pants as I have in a long, long time. I cannot even EXPRESS how bad it was. We were nearing Delhi on the train back from Aligarh, and I decided to wait till I got home to use the bathroom because it was 9:40 and I was told I would get home around 10:30 or 10:40. So manageable, I thought. What a bad, terrible, awful, ill-fated idea! We got off the train and got on a bus and proceeded to sit in the railway station parking lot for about 15 minutes. At this point I had to go quite badly (blasted two-liter bottles of water that they give out on the train) so I asked Archna Ji if I had time to go find a bathroom. She indicated we were about to leave so I grudgingly agreed to hold it (you are seriously getting a play-by-play of my near-accident but it was just that traumatic for me). I got increasingly antsy as we sat in the lot longer and longer, and Poonam suggested that I might be able to find a restroom in one of the nearby restaurants. Finally we were on our way, though! Thank you gods of all the religions practiced in India! Driving on Delhi roads turned out to be more painful, however, because potholes and uneven areas of road are even more plentiful than people in India (trust me, this is a feat) and the bus bouncing was not helping my bladder situation. I started pinching my arms to distract myself, and people could tell my situation was getting dire so they began offering me plastic bags and bottles (thanks guys, luckily I haven't sunk quite that low yet!). After taking literally six wrong turns and backing up like 100 yards on a six-lane arterial (I SWEAR IT WAS A CONSPIRACY), we finally dropped the first people off at Lajpat Nagar near the Central Market. I asked Bhavna Ji if there was a restroom nearby, and she said it would be difficult to find one. I think she knew I was serious though when I said I could hold it as long as she took me to the hospital today to get bladder reconstructive surgery. So as we dropped off the Lajpat people, Bhavna Ji found me an empty lot and I peed behind a gross wheelbarrow next to an abandoned building while Bhavna Ji stood watch and shooed away a curious (probably rabid) dog. Lesson learned: Never, ever turn down a bathroom in India, regardless of if you have to go or how gross it is. Restrooms are few and far between (hence the huge sanitation problem here) so take what you can get, because your next option might be a bottle or the side of the road. #firstgradelessons

Also I finally bought an external hard drive today and I'm backing everything up now! My screen has been having neon green seizures lately, so I'm hopefully going to take it to the Apple store soon to get it checked out.

And in closing, a quote from my guy Dylan Koutsky:

"I just read your most recent blog post and it seems like such a bigger adjustment to go to India than Prague. Like so far the most inconvenient thing here that I've experienced (except for the language barrier) is that the orange juice tastes funny."

Namaste! I have now been here for three weeks and I'm happy to say I've learned boatloads already. I'm trying to finish some leftover things from school right now, for the sake of brevity I'm making a list of what I have learned so far in India.

~Human beings are remarkably resilient creatures. My host family's baby is the most coddled child imaginable when it comes to remaining healthy (apparently when Rachael and I put her on the carpet to let her practice crawling, it was the first time she had been on the floor in her seven months of life, oops),  but we have also seen infants born in slums who seem to be doing just fine. While obviously they are at a great risk of health problems and will likely have a much more difficult life than a middle-class child, they somehow manage to survive and thrive in very unfortunate circumstances.

~Bodies never run out of sweat.

~I need alone time. After long days in the heat of Delhi or traipsing around hospitals in Aligarh, sometimes I feel guilty for wanting to sit on my bed and do nothing for a little while. I've learned, though, that this time is more important to me than I realized.

~People generally think that the United States is "religiously deteriorated and morally corrupt" (actual direct quote from an AMU student).

~Abortion is not seen as the huge ethical dilemma here as it is in the states. The only moral issue that comes up is sex-selective abortions, which are a big problem here and are causing wider and wider gaps in the number of women and men.

~Old cows in India can't be slaughtered because the majority religion (Hinduism) considers cows sacred, so elderly bovines are smuggled across the Pakistani border at night to be slaughtered.

~Gender roles are pronounced and not as egalitarian as in the U.S. According to one of our teachers, a gynecologist friend of hers said that when women come in to confirm whether or not they're pregnant and the doctor asks when their last period was, the husband will answer for the woman 99% of the time. Definitely not the case in the U.S. Also, women who live in dorms in India (or at least at Aligarh Muslim University) have a curfew but men don't. At AMU, curfew is 6:30 p.m.

~Never put a band-aid on your armpit.

~As my dad likes to say, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. I have found bartering and dealing with people much more successful when I'm not frustrated and I can maintain my sense of humor. Trying to get a rickshaw has become easier now that I'm less angry about an extra Rs 10 or 20 (25 or 50 cents) and am able to haggle in a more friendly manner with the drivers.

~I think I really want to be some kind of medical professional. There's no way I want to or can finish all the premed prerequisites at Dartmouth, but I'm thinking more and more seriously about a post-bac program or something along those lines. I think I need to go see Lee Witters when I get back to campus.

~Hindi! I've learned lots and lots of Hindi. I can write all of this myself: नमस्ते.मेरा नाम एमिली है. मैं हिंदी सीख रहा हूँ.मैं अमेरिका से हूँ.मैं अच्छा हूँ.आप कैसे हैं? It says, "Hello. My name is Emily. I am learning Hindi. I am from America. I am good. How are you?" The transliteration of that would be something like, "Namaste. Mera naam Emily hai. Me America se hui. Me accha hui. Ap kaise hai?" The gender is wrong for "accha" but I'm too lazy to fix that in Google translator (it should be "acchi" for a girl).

~Notions of privacy are different here than at home. People ask questions they wouldn't in the states and adult children (like my host parents) often live with their parents or talk to them at least once or twice a day.

~Apparently (and this is thankfully not first-hand knowledge), it is possible for areas of your body that chafe (i.e. inner thighs) to callous over so the chafing no longer hurts. I have not experienced anything this bad, but I will admit I end up with weird heat rashes on my inner elbows when I sweat a lot (aka every day) and the band-aid-in-the-armpit incident occurred after I got similar spots there. Sorry for the TMI-nature of this, but honestly I'm desensitized to things like this because we're all constantly battling weird digestive and skin and sweat-related health things (don't worry though, it's all minor stuff!).

That's all for now, but I may add to this list later! I've definitely learned other things but I have to pack to head back to Delhi and I'm going to play some cards in a few minutes!

I went for the catchy title, I hope you all like it! Just kidding. I am currently sitting in my bed in the guest house of Aligarh Muslim University in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh (UP). UP is a state east of Delhi with about 200 million people (apparently it would be the fifth most populous country in the world if it were a country of its own! Who knew?) and it is also one of the most impoverished. We are here Tuesday-Friday visiting various levels of health care and meeting doctors, publics health professionals, and professors of medicine.

I woke up at 4:24 a.m. this morning to take a shower and get ready to head to the train station with Rachael. We were basically out of water again, so I had to take a bucket shower with a bucket of water my host parents keep filled in the bathroom for bathing purposes. I also kind of squatted and tried to shower underneath the lower faucet because water was still flowing from that (but not from the shower head) but that was largely uncomfortable and unsuccessful. Apparently each flat has a water tank that fills every morning between 7 and 9 a.m., and that constitutes all the water that apartment can use for the day. This is almost always more than enough, but sometimes the water doesn't come properly in the morning and the tank doesn't get completely filled, so water runs out during the day. To be fair, this morning I was showering at the very, very tail end of the time period before water comes again, so it was understandable that there wasn't much left and there wasn't enough to build up water pressure for it to come out of the shower head. It happened the first night I was here when I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, but I just assumed they turned the water off for some reason. The next day, however, we completely ran out of water in the afternoon, so Adil had to get a big jug of it from his sister's house. As people like to say all the time, welcome to India.

After my bucket/faucet shower this morning, Rachael and I headed out the door to meet the taxi that Adil had kindly called for us the night before. Apparently the first call to prayer for Muslims happens at 5 a.m., so we heard that as we groggily left the apartment. Adil said the driver knew where we were going, but I tried to confirm once we got in the car. I don't think he spoke any English, so I just assumed he knew where he was going and eventually we ended up at New Delhi Railway Station! Everyone was looking super tired as we boarded our train at 6:15 a.m. to head off to Aligarh, but luckily we were able to sleep for about an hour in our air-conditioned coach.

After breakfast at the guest house, we bussed to JNL Medical College at AMU and had an introduction to the Community Health Department. I almost fell asleep (just like being in class at Dartmouth!) and then we were split up into groups to visit the outpatient clinics. I decided to go to the obstetrics and gynecology clinic with four other girls, so we were led down there by a medical resident. The hallways were bustling and crowded, with many women in head coverings and even burqas, because Aligarh has a large, conservative Muslim population. Almost as soon as we got to the OB/GYN section of the outpatient area, the power went out. Power outages are common in India but usually get resolved quickly in the cities. In rural areas, they often last for much longer. I assumed the hospital would be on a generator, but a doctor said that they aren't reliable and often take a while to kick in. In the clinic area, women waited outside while a guard at the outer door let them in a few at a time. The actual practitioners were in a rectangular room and sat at a small table, while people bustled around everywhere. At any given time, there were probably 20 or 30 people in the not-very-large room. The chief doctor said that she sees 180 patients a day, which is a ridiculously high number. There is no privacy for women speaking with the doctor, other than a sheet draped over the midsection during physical examinations.

For the first 10 minutes our so, the power was out but the doctors continued to speak with patients. After brief chats, the head OB/GYN would rattle off a list of things to a younger doctor, who would write them down and give them to the patient. The doctor told us that although Indian law requires hospitals to keep their own medical records, they make the patients responsible for holding onto their records at all times. She said that theoretically they could be sued for this record-keeping practice, but the patients are poor and don't know their rights so they would never raise a complaint. Just imagine if this is how the health care system operated in the United States! You would be forced to bring all of your relevant medical records with you to the doctor, wait for an extended period of time, discuss your most personal health issues in front of other patients and whoever happens to be in the room, and figure out how to do all this with incredibly limited access to resources. The government provides free kits for dealing with certain health concerns, so the doctor gave several of these out while we were there.

We saw an abdominal exam of a pregnant woman, a woman who had TB-induced infertility, and other women whose health conditions we couldn't discern because everything was done in Hindi. The woman who couldn't conceive had already had one miscarriage and (it sounded like) and intentional abortion before that. The doctor sent her for a round of tests, and she had her blood drawn by two men at a table in the same room.

We then heard a short presentation from people at the medical school, and we awkwardly sat in on a Doctors Without Borders presentation that was really meant for doctors at the hospital (but was really interesting anyway). Right now we have rest time, and in a few hours we're going to go on a tour of the university campus. We have several other hospital visits while we're here (to which we have to bring the same surgical mask we wore today, ew!) so hopefully I will have more to update about. Namaste friends!

Did you know almost all of the beef and milk in North India comes from water buffalo and not cows? I learned this tonight at the dinner table. We had this really delicious egg curry (fried hard-boiled eggs in curry "gravy") and sweet roti (flat bread basically) that Rachael and I both really like. I still struggle sometimes with the spices, but everything is more manageable when mixed with yogurt and interspersed with big sips of water. It's embarrassing, though, when I'm visibly sweating and my lips feel like they're on fire.

We went to a documentary screening this evening at the India International Centre, which is a cultural center right near Lodi Gardens. Lodi Gardens are these beautiful, lush gardens with a lot of lovely old monuments. Rachael and I walked around them (and ran into some of our friends!) the other day and it was incredibly pleasant. Anyway, Khadeeja's friend had produced a short documentary about women's madness and spirits in India so we went to that. My favorite part may have been the opening speaker. She was a professor of some kind and she discussed madness in cinema, how its portrayal has changed over time (especially with the addition of psychoanalytical theory into film story lines), and feminism. We watched clips from old movies, including one made by Alfred Hitchcock and another by Roman Polanski. The coolest part of her intro, though, was that she talked about ethnographic filmmakers that I studied extensively in my Ethnographic Film class this summer (Emma, are you reading this? It was crazy)! This summer, I wrote papers about Frederick Wiseman's High School John Marshall's N!ai, and then this woman at a random little film screening at a cultural center in New Delhi started talking about Titticus Follies, which was directed by Wiseman and shot by Marshall! This is probably not nearly as exciting for anyone else as it was for me, but it was one of those I-can't-believe-these-things-are-linked-and-this-is-coming-up-in-the-real-world sort of moments. Rachael thought I was crazy because I was writing on a business card I had so I wouldn't forget (I fully plan to email my film professor and tell him).

Tonight the scariest thing happened to us on the road on our way back from the film screening! It's the most frightened I've been since coming here. Adil was driving, Khadeeja was in the front seat holding little Iman on her lap, and Rachael, Khadeeja's sister and I were in the back seat. Delhi traffic is legitimately terrifying at all times without fail, but it was fairly busy on the road tonight and we were coming back around 9:30 p.m. Adil changed "lanes" (because really lanes don't exist, just general trajectories of cars) to the left, and a car zoomed by him erratically and quickly on the left, squeezing through the narrow space between our car and the curb. It was nothing too out of the ordinary, though perhaps slightly more aggressive than what we normally see, because usually only the motorbikes manage to build up much speed when passing. Then the two cars in front of us stop quickly, so we stop too. I assumed it was just come kind of small traffic jam, but then we saw the driver of the first car, a tall middle-aged man, get out of his car carrying a thick stick about two-feet long. I initially didn't realize what was going on and I thought it was some kind of wooden flute thing, and he was going to start playing it and asking for money. Obviously this doesn't make any sense because he stopped his car in the middle of the road, but really anything goes on Indian roads so it's not that absurd. I realized immediately, though, that he was actually quite angry looking and the wooden thing was a solid rod/club-type thing. He walked back to the car directly in front of ours, whose driver-side window was down, and began yelling at the man and wielding the stick as if he was about to beat the driver and/or his car with it. He wasn't just faking though — every time he swung it, we all thought he was actually about to club the driver. Even Adil and Kadeeja and Kadeeja's sister were somewhat dumbstruck by the scene. Adil tried to yell at the man, at which point I became concerned that he would come for our car. After a few minutes, Adil backed up and drove around the two cars. Khadeeja tried to calm the older man as we drove by, calling him uncle over and over again (what younger people respectfully call older people here a lot). The driver of the second car was out of his vehicle talking on a mobile phone by the time we drove by, and we saw him offer the phone to the scary angry man. I don't know who they were on the phone with, but I was just glad we were removed from the situation. I think perhaps they had gotten into a fender bender because the older man was driving recklessly. As mad as he was, any accident would have been his fault! Adil and Khadeeja said they thought the older man was drunk. Apparently drunk driving is very common here.

Tomorrow we depart for Aligarh, a two-and-a-half hour train ride away. We will be there for four days, visiting a university and several hospitals and health clinics. I may not have internet, but I will definitely have my computer because I need to work on some things unfortunately. It turns out trying to cram a semester program into a quarter is difficult. I would not have wanted to give up this experience just to make the transition a little easier, but boy was it hard to take finals early, and I'm still finishing up a bunch of things now. Someday soon I will be done with all those things though! I really should be in bed by now because we have to get up at 4 a.m. tomorrow to get to the train station by 5:30 a.m. but when have I ever been in bed this early? Answer: never. Sorry mom! I try to have good sleep habits, I really do.

Ok I'm rambling so I should stop. Good night everyone!

Moving through Delhi requires navigating a writhing swarm of cars, cycle rickshaws, buses, pedestrians, trucks, motorbikes, strange automobiles of various kinds, cows, stray dogs, bicycles, and auto rickshaws. Vehicles drive on the left side of the road, but it's not uncommon to see people defying law and good sense driving on the right side of the road against traffic (this is particularly scary when you're a passenger in a cycle rickshaw facing four lanes of fast moving traffic). Lanes may as well not exist, and every car had dents and scratches from minor run-ins on the road. People don't use turn signals and instead maneuver wherever they can find the smallest bit of space. Vehicles (and people) are routinely only inches apart. Every day I'm convinced that this will be the day we will get in some kind of horrific traffic accident (this is mostly me being melodramatic, but honestly it is terrifying sometimes. The roads are often filled with potholes, and I've been slightly afraid that my rickshaw is about to tip over on several occasions. Today I tried to take a video of our commute home from our friends' neighborhood, called Nehru Place, but traffic was remarkably light and it's not that interesting. I'll take another one on a more standard heavy-traffic day, but this will at least answer some people's questions (hi Rach!) about what a rickshaw is and such.