The Simple Life in South India: the First 48 Hours

Noted on December 8, 2008 by Natanya in

Tuula Rebhahn, a UO Journalism student, has spent fall term living in rural India working on environmental projects at Vanastree. She checks in with a summary of her experiences. This installment highlights the first 48 hours of her time in India.

The departure gate for Continental Airlines flight 49 to Mumbai is spare. No chairs; just an empty desk, a roped off area in front of the door, and a crowd of a couple hundred people standing around in no particular order. I’ve just arrived at the gate a couple of minutes after boarding was scheduled to begin, but it doesn’t appear that I’ve missed anything. Nobody seems to know what is going on, and neither do I. I’m on my way to a site in rural south India to work as an intern for an environmental NGO called Vanastree. Life in Oregon, where I’m in my last year of studies, had gotten a bit too comfortable, and I needed some practical learning credit anyway. I spent last winter break combing through internship and volunteer opportunities in developing nations and eventually settled on this one. My love for travel and the thought of ditching textbooks, midterms and apartment life for three months were all the incentives I needed to sign up.

Back at the airport gate, a couple of airline representatives finally show up. The ticket-taker encourages everyone to form an orderly, single-file line to facilitate the boarding process. Everyone ignores him completely. I shove my way on. Mumbai, here I come.

Non-Indians boarding the plane: Three.

I hope this disorganized episode is somehow indicative of what I should expect over the next three months. I’m having fun already.

After staying overnight in Mumbai, I catch a flight to Hubli, a city about 200 km from my internship site. As I sit outside the tiny, deserted airport, a warm breeze gently sways the coconut trees lining one side of the empty parking lot. Birds sing cheerfully and the sun is blindingly brilliant. There’s just one problem: All the suited executives on my flight have taken off in taxis. Nobody seems to work inside the terminal. I’m all alone. Corralled inside my circle of bags, I’m saying the first of many prayers I’ll say India that things will work out: Please send the driver soon. I have no idea what to do if the driver doesn’t come. Please send him soon.

I re-check the email I’d printed off with the name of the driver and my expected arrival time. Then, I look at my watch and realize that I’ve arrived early. According to the piece of paper in my hand, I should have just touched down thirty seconds ago. Relaxing a bit, I lean back onto my suitcase. Five minutes later, a tiny van pulls up and Mushtaq, who will become a familiar, quite punctual, face in the next several weeks, hops out. Willing to go anywhere he might take me, I pile my stuff inside the van and get in the front seat, noticing a pink sticker on the side mirror reading “smile”. It’s an order I can’t resist following.

After two hours on bumpy, dusty roads, I arrive at a modestly sized dwelling built on a forested hill. If Mushtaq has brought me to the right place, this is the homestead of Sunita Rao, one of the founding trustees of Vanastree who will be my job supervisor, cultural coach and teacher during the course of the internship. I’m the only intern at this site, and she’s the only member of the organization who works full time in the office. She’s built her home as a learning center and a comfortable place for Westerners to live, so it will serve as my home base for the next twelve weeks.

Luckily, I take a liking to Sunita – and her farm – immediately. With its traditional mud-and-tile construction and the terraced garden below, the house first looks like a trendily rustic eco-resort. A woman calls from inside over the sound of excited barking. “Tuula! You must be exhausted!” Her head passes by the kitchen window and I hear undecipherable words addressed to the dog. Looking a bit ruffled, she emerges from the house a minute later. “You and Scrabble will become friends eventually,” she informs me. From a back room, Scrabble agrees vociferously. Other than that, no introductions are necessary; we’ve been emailing each other for months working out the logistics of my stay.

The first item of business is the tour. Sunita acquired this piece of land seven years ago to create an ecologically sound homestead, where she could build up the collective that would eventually become Vanastree. The house is simple but comfortable, featuring Western and Indian-style toilets, a dining room table (another Western invention), a stove that runs off biogas and potable water pumped from a well. Above her desk in the living room hangs a scroll with a poem by the Dalai Lama, entitled “The Paradox of our Age”. It sums up the philosophy behind her home and work quite nicely:

We have bigger houses, but smaller families: more conveniences, but less time... We have become long on quantity, but short on quality. These are times of fast foods, but slow digestion... It is a time when there is much in the window, but nothing in the room.

[There’s more, I recommend Googling it.]

In the case of my living quarters, there is much jungle in the large windows and nothing but a king-sized bed and a writing table in the room. Which couldn’t have been more perfect.

After a tour of the homestead, including the vegetable garden, the cowshed where the biogas is produced and Sunita’s various land restoration projects, we have a traditional dinner of daal and rice. Then, I have one more thing to take care of before crawling into bed.

Borrowing Sunita’s cell phone, I hike back up the hill to a spot she’s informally named “cell phone point”. It’s the only place on her land where she gets a signal. Squinting to see the numbers through the monsoon rain that is now falling, I dial my mom, who hasn’t heard from me since I left three days ago. Even after having come so far to escape the madcap world at large, or perhaps because I felt so removed, I am incredibly grateful for the technological convenience in my hand and the relieved voice on the other end of the line. [To be continued...]