Last Days in Mohuda

So Maulin and I were initially intending on staying for 2 weeks longer at GV to finish up some work while Molly and Hallie headed back to the states early. Despite this brilliant idea, Joe and Chitra felt it to be better if we were to all come and go in one large swoop. So, we are now all out of Berhampur, and Maulin and I had to regroup with a few others from Wagner for some travels up north of Delhi. We had planned to leave, then, on the 29th in the afternoon for the 4-hour car trip. But after a bit of disagreement with some of the staffers, and some car situation that was a bit complicated, we found out that we were actually going to have to leave at 6am sharp. That being said...

Our last day at GV was like we were a group of celebrities or something. Everyone wanted to see us. Joe had also booked a phone meeting for us with a government state official, to add onto our agenda. We were actually trying to get our own work done while we were running around finishing up staff meetings and tying up loose ends. But everyone else was much more important than our silly project. We were all growing (and still are, mind you) a bit grumpy, too. So we ended up having to split off in subgroups of our original foursome and plow through all of the people we had met over our short visit, and cleaning up our office & house.

Our first stop in the evening was at Gobardhan's room. He had made us homemade tomato spicy soup, and wanted to share with us a slew of his philosophies and aryuvedic teas and miscellaneous tastes. Tastes were varied, and often extremely hard to pronounce, but it was pretty enjoyable, and we had the most amazing mango leather ever (because it was homemade!). We were late from our meetings at the office, but we still ended up being able to manage a hearty session of Gobardhan-isms.

We got to dinner and ran around like we owned the place, walking through the kitchen while the cooks chopped fresh fish with hammers and iron sheets. I had a heated conversation with one of the workers (Jacob), which actually upset me a little bit and I'm still working on it. But mostly people congregated around us during dinner to talk to us before leaving. We traded emails with many people, and some hasty goodbyes were had. And we relished in the fact that it would be our last rice and dhal meal, if we chose it to be. And we have; we haven't eaten rice or dhal at all since.

Joe had invited us to his house for late-night drinks. Our group was so excited; drinks with Joe, THE Joe! We hurried over to his house from the mess hall farewells, to find out in a tragic moment that we were not alone at his house. As it turned out, Joe had invited a group from the Board of Directors (because their big Board Meeting was a few days away) to drink as well. So here we are, sitting in a room awkwardly sipping Kingfishers and Fresh Lime Soda with an older Indian crowd, not knowing what to talk to them about, or whether the circumstances were more painful for us or for them. One woman (our team has kindly renamed "Tough Cookie") only gave yes/no answers, and scowled at us with such vigor that there were a few times I thought she was in fact the infamous Medusa and I would be turned to stone if I said anything distasteful, which would be potentially anything (I almost was zapped to stone because I asked her if she worked in government, and somehow that implied if she was someone's wife, which was offensive). Another man was a former Indian diplomat/ambassador, and he was the most talkative to us, so we mostly grilled him about his work while he asked us more about our stay in India and how was the US. The team left as soon as we could, but only after the group of older elite Indians started cracking jokes about people from other Indian states, particularly from the state Maulin's family lives (Gujarat).

Cristina and Julie came over to our house while we all frantically packed until early into the morning, talking about an array of topics and interests. We slept for maybe 3 hours, or at least I did, and woke up from our naps to get into the tightly-packed care on the way to Bhubaneswar.