Field Day 2

So the last few days we have been in the field, going from village to village (both successes and failures) to see what makes this organization tick.

The first day we watched a self help group (SHG) full of women learn how to manage money accounts, then proceeded to have an interview with some GV staff and village leaders. Afterwards, we drove off into another village and took a tour of the village's pond (where they fished) and of some houses, asking women questions as we walked through.

The pond was less-than-pristine, but while touring around Orissa, I can safely say we've seen worse.

The kids in these villages love us. Maybe not me so much, as I don't give them much attention, but the rest of our team seems to really be taken by the kids, and play with them, take pictures, etc. They giggle and scream when Hallie jokes around with them. They ambush Maulin when he takes pictures of them. The Halie & Molly try teaching them songs in English, and often we get blank smiles in response, since they haven't a clue as to what we are doing. It's always funny to me, though, how little language can count when bonding with people. Most people cannot talk to us at all, and yet there seems to be this appreciation, respect, or something between us all. Understanding, perhaps. The kids don't seem to mind that we can't talk to them, and they pick up on our games pretty quickly.

And then we went to a failure village. This was quite an experience, because it was a room full of men. And as we began (and continued) our conversation, more men piled into the room. Our questions were about why the GV project failed here for the village. The noise crescendo-ed quickly, and soon we were surrounding by a bunch of yelling men. At first us girls were worried that we had begun a big argument, and were stuck in the crossfire. Our translator assured us that this is just how the people here have normal discussions, no problem.

Though it was dark out, we went back to the first village and had a meeting with the villagers. Mostly women came the meeting. I sat across from the translator and became our team's ambassador for the translator, trying to simplify the questions for him to understand, and trying to make sense of what he was explaining back to me, while following how the villagers responded with body language & tone. It was actually kind of neat, and I liked feeling like I had a good hold on what was going on with the villagers. We got the women to break off of the rest of the men and ask them female-oriented questions. They were so sweet, and were clearing excited about seeing us in their village.

Another note: we have began deeming this issue as "White Stare". Because it seems that we can actually stop a village from its daily routine and chores, just for the fact that we are white (women). We have witnessed traffic jams in cities from our coloring, and men almost swerving off of their bikes while staring at us, and men in the village walking by us drop their jaws and gawk at us like we're purple. We might as well be purple, it seems. Some people look at us baffled, completely confused, like they don't understand what happened to our pigmentation.

Villagers often will stop everything they're doing just to stand by and look at us. If we smile at them or wave, they giggle and stare more.

By the end of our meeting with the women, a female bonding experience happened. They were all looking at us 3 women eagerly, and an older woman next to me was talking to me in Oriya (i have no idea what I was saying), patting me on the arm and leg. Then someone came out with bangles, and took our arms and started putting bangles on our arms, as some kind of gift or token or something. It was really amazing to see how welcoming these women were to a bunch of strange foreigners in their town, how they were willing to touch us and give us a piece to remember them for when we go home. They all smiled when they finally got them on all of us (they were hard to get on, Molly accidentally broke one). They were almost going to start painting our nails, but we had to go back to campus.

We got back in time to finish dinner and go to bed, knowing the next day would be longer.