Jaipur Journey: Happy Birthday Gandhi-ji! ...Bikaner Excursion Day 2

I began reading Gandhi's Autobiography: My Experiments with Truth, today...not knowing that it was is birthday! We sang happy birthday on the bus and were handed candies by the staff in honor of him.

The past two days have been some of the most "new experience" packed days thus far in India. Right now, we're at Hotel Desert Winds (a very ritzy hotel in Bikaner, Rajasthan, a city 330 kilometers northwest of Jaipur.) I can definitely see what my tuition money is going towards. The staff treats us so well! I'm in a nice hotel room with one other girl with an air conditioner and TV and the SOFTEST sheets ever!

Today, our schedule was set to travel 2 hours north to visit a village where the non-profit organization, URMUL Rural Health, Research, and Development Trust (Their website here!) works and provides services to. URMUL provides intervention services to people living in these harsh, isolated regions of the northern Rajasthan Thar Desert area. They provide pre-natal care and education for women, spread awareness and educate local people about how they can take advantage of their legal rights that they otherwise may not be aware of (like the Right to Education Act that states that every Indian child is entitled to free, formal education.) They've created initiatives to get children enrolled in school (like sporting clubs, singing/dancing competitions, and vocational training schools.)

We left the hotel at 9:00am, and were joined by 10 teenage girls from the local Bikaner Girl's College (we're going to their campus tomorrow.) We split up and sat next to the girls. They spoke better English than I spoke Hindi, so we talked in English. The girl I was next to was really friendly, and we told each other about our families and interests. I told her that I like to sing, and she told me to sing something for her. I did, and she gave me an ear-bud of her MP3 player and showed me some of her music, in Hindi of course. It was really catchy. I'm really starting to enjoy Indian music, particularly Bollywood songs. We talked for a bit longer, and she asked me if I was married. (Young girls here are fascinated with the idea of marriage. It isn't uncommon for girls to be married (usually arranged by their parents) by the age of 16.) I asked if she was married, and she said that she had a boyfriend (hadn't heard of Indian girls dating yet.) She said that she is planning on getting married to him within the next year, but is having complications getting her father to agree to it, because it isn't really acceptable in the rural areas of India for girls to pick their own partners.

We talked a bit more back and forth, joking and what not and was having some really good conversation until she suddenly stopped talking and stood up and vomited. 30 seconds later, another Bikaner girl behind me stood up and ran up to the front of the bus to get outside to vomit too. This happened to 2 other girls. Apparently, they aren't used to traveling much at all and get motion sickness really easily. We had to pull the bus over 3 more times to let some of the girls get air. This was the first semester the staff brought the college girls along with us, and hadn't considered that being a problem.

Two hours and few close calls later, we reached the village. I've never seen landscape like this before. It literally was...desert...sand and heat and all. We wrapped our scarves around our heads as a makeshift hood and headed into the village. My Bikaner friend who I had been sitting next to showed me how to tie my scarf around my head so that only my eyes were showing.

We were greeted by men and women of all ages, the children huddled around the women and the boys smiling and whispering in packs behind us. The head school teacher drew a map of the village in the sand, using water bottles and sticks to marks where different buildings and water sources were. We asked them questions about where they get their water from (a water harvesting well provided by the government,) how they make a living (farming aloe vera and millet in the fields surrounding the village or herding goats) how many people are living in the village (1200 people, 150 households,) if the children go to school or not (some do, more boys than girls because the girls are expected to do household work,) who of the girls was married (most of the older girls were and a few young girls were, one was 12 years old) and if they had electricity (they did.)

Later on, we had some time to explore the village on our own. Myself and 4 other SIT girls headed down a road to look at some goats and a camel, when one of the young village girls following us grabbed my hand (Indian girls are quite forceful) and brought me to her house. My Bikaner college friend from the bus came with me. We had been talking all day and were very friendly at this point. The girl's house was a clay building with probably 4 rooms from what I saw, all open and bare and without doors. She brought me upstairs to her bedroom which consisted of two thatched beds (one for her, one for her younger sister) and some posters of birds on the walls. She brought me back downstairs and sat me on a couch and took out a red fabric-looking thing. By this point, there were at least 15 children ranging from ages 3 to 18 in this tiny room with us, just watching.) The girl held up the fabric, which my Bikaner friend told me was part of a wedding sari (the girl's mother's.) She motioned for me to put it on, which felt a little intrusive, but I did it anyways. They tried to get me to put the top part of the sari on over my Kurta-top, but it wouldn't fit, so they just put the red veil over my head. I felt like a doll, but I didn't object because they were having fun and I was enjoying it too.

Then, my two other SIT friends walked in and were like "Whaaaat is going on?"The girls stuck bindis (stickers) on our foreheads and one girl came out of nowhere and put red lipstick on me. My Bikaner friend helped fix it, because I'm sure it was half on my mouth, half on my cheeks. One girl said in Hindi, "Now all you need is a husband!" Yeah....right.

After this fiasco, we sat outside the room on a bed and one of the sisters who lived in the house offered to make us some chai. Of course! We were crunched for time, but my friend and I thought it was totally worth it to hang around. We watched her make it over a small clay pit built into the floor of the room. In the meantime, we ate a vegetable-slash-melon that someone had picked from outside of the house. We were a little skeptical to eat it because we had both been sick and were weary of getting sick again, so we just ate the inside of the melon, avoiding the rind. The Bikaner girl sat with us as we ate melon and drank chai and tried to make small talk with the children who were sitting around us. Every time I offered a piece of the melon to the group, they all scurried and backed away like I was holding out fire in my hand. It was pretty funny.

We had to down our chai quickly in order to make it back to the bus in time, which we did, barely. We met back up with the rest of the group, but I had forgotten that I had bright red lipstick and a bindi on my forehead. It was an experience to say the least.