Chalo

'And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.'

~ Ecclesiastes 12:12

The library at CRHP Jamkhed is well stocked and I am taking the opportunity to read books I've always wanted to read but couldn't bring myself to buy. (I cynically joke about expensive tomes named like Sociology textbooks which discuss the plight of the poor when ironically, they are so expensive that a copy would probably pay for a week's worth of grocery shopping for same impoverished folk. Meanwhile, they are set to become coffee table reading for the intellectual elite, subjects for light -if impassioned- conversation. Knowledge is power, eh?) This may be a(n admittedly slightly bitter) joke but it does highlight the much darker issues surrounding research of the marginalised. Who gets a voice? Who pays the piper? And to what ends? What is the role of academia in society and how do academics make ends meet? There are plenty more questions where those came from but I will spare you the inquisition: besides, that is not the purpose of this blog post.

When this morning I started reading a book I had yearned to read since it was first published three years ago and broke through the charts as an incipient classic of Development Economics, I realised that things have changed. I have changed in many ways - in my thinking, or more precisely, my perception of events and assertions. That was when I realised that I'm nearly halfway through my elective and it's time to write about what brought me here and what I'm learning - the 'on which more later' of previous blog posts. Alors, on y va. Chalo!

'Why Jamkhed?' I've been asked many times, in association with, 'how did you find out about this place?' I chose to come here on my medical elective because I was interested in learning about how you combine healthcare provision as a clinical service with preventative Medicine in the form of public health planning for a community. I am firmly convinced that the two should go hand in hand and are unnecessarily fragmented a lot of the time. The health of a society is a hugely underestimated (and thus neglected or even ignored) resource, driving the behaviour of almost all of its inhabitants - or this is what I think anyway, and I believe from personal experience that I am right. So I was excited to finally find somewhere that had good health as the centre of the agenda for community development, somewhere that had an encompassing definition of good health.

Why is health so important? The answer is self evident - good health means well being, which means productivity: the ability to get a good livelihood, to secure a safe living, to live well. But it's not as linear or simple as that: insecurity, the lack of a good living, they also contribute to poor health. People will do anything to preserve or safeguard their health. This is often felt subjectively as happiness or even contentment - although herein lies the rub: often our bodies conspire against us in our pursuit of happiness, causing us to indulge to excess in ways that are detrimental to our health, while we still feel good. The cause of this confusion? The electrical wiring of our brains. Dopamine, the 'happy hormone' operative in the reward centre of our brains, can be rather indiscriminate when it comes to identifying pleasure, failing to distinguish indulgence from reward. Or at least this is the current thinking of neuroscientists. The result is that want becomes synonymous with need and we are driven to increasingly dangerous extremes of the pursuit of happiness. It's almost like the mechanical theory relating to tensile strength: when a material is stretched beyond its elastic point, it is permanently deformed and no gain in energy is achieved from stretching it further. And still we stretch, for there is something awry in the feedback loop - we continue to feel the illusion of gain.

That is the world I'm coming from. A lecturer once said that we would do better to focus on improving the health of the poor in the world than straining for the unattainable (and unfeasibly exclusive) El Dorado of immortality. I was inspired. We live in a world where there are huge disparities between the lives of the rich and the poor, where poverty dogs people's attempts at self actualisation like shadowy spectres, spiriting them away before the promised change. Is this not injustice? And there are degrees of poverty, often related to the external surroundings. People will do anything to safeguard their health and livelihood: often, the only thing to do is to change the surroundings. For an individual, one way to do this is to physically remove yourself to a better place.

So we have this sequence. It starts with the rural poor, invisible to the power brokers, lacking representation, under served, toiling to survive and lacking the infrastructure to make their work and lives easier. Those with opportunities, with education, or skills, or simply savvy to serve the needs (or better described as desires) of society beyond their own survival, can capitalise on this to make a better life, moving to where they will be well remunerated. It continues with rural-urban migration and its entailing stresses - a few make it big, many join the masses of cheap labour ripe for exploitation, living in straightened circumstances and coping with the psychological stresses of displacement. There are other stresses too: communal tensions, what happens when people from different walks of life with different ways of life, have to share living space. And then there is politics and power, complicated by prejudice, affecting what solutions are effected to these challenges. Stigmatising communities? Or stereotyping them, for good or ill? Battening down the hatches? Focussing on social mobility? It's a Pandora's Box.

This sequence is replicated worldwide and on an even larger scale with migration between countries, between continents. Inter-country inequalities become intra-country issues, as when a Western medical student is taught about Tuberculosis - '1 in 3 people are infected globally, but largely in the developing world. It's been more or less eliminated here, but is starting to show a resurgence -mainly in the immigrant population with the rise of HIV'. True, but the framing bugs me. Does this mean it's not a problem? Or that immigrant populations don't really belong - they only exist as reservoirs of infection? How do we define ourselves? I believe inclusivity matters.

What if you change the surroundings themselves? What if you change the physical and the cultural mileu so that life and health are better for the poor - and the very poorest of the poor? What if you remove the link between socio-economic status and good health, looking at it as a fundamental human right, so that social mobility and migration are no longer prerequisites for good health and nobody is left behind? How do you do this? Is it a paradox, an impossible ask?That is why I am here, living and observing and learning from this project that has aimed to do just that over the past four decades, working with communities that have experienced the worst forms of deprivation, discrimination and poverty: whole communities, but also sections of those communities, illustrating the pervasive degrees of poverty. How do forgotten communities pull together to improve their lot?

Any good Scheherazade will tell you that you never finish a story as soon as you begin it. And so it is with this story. More will come later.

Clichés

'Thing's aren't always as they seem', they say - and, 'travel expands the mind' - and, 'it's good to step out of your comfort zone' - and, 'we live in a global village; it's such a small world' - and, 'globalisation is making the third world Western: development will come at a high cost to the planet because this is unsustainable'.

And so on and so forth. Sometimes, it seems the world is like an open book, teaching lessons in an instant that would otherwise take ages of struggle with reams of words.

Take for example this issue of meat. Increasing middle class lifestyles are a corollary to development in the third world, it is argued, leading to increased consumption of meat in imitation of Western lifetyles. This increased demand for meat spells doom for the agricultural industry: animal husbandry is a lot more wasteful than cultivation of crops, since it takes more land to cultivate crops for animal feed. This, coupled with the metabolism of commercial farm animals (specifically cattle), also contributes to global greenhouse emissions. So the problems of increased meat consumption are manifold - increased food insecurity, famine for the poor, environmental degradation and struggles over diminishing land which may easily become violent, causing conflict in already fragile areas. What is the solution? To eat less meat?

The problem is that meat tastes so good. I'm not so sure meat is an acquired Western taste for the majority of people in the world. Being here where meat is so scarce (because it is so expensive) and I am eating very minimal amounts of meat (and very rarely beef) has led me to the conclusion that the taste for meat is a primeval one, latent in most people, and the reason many people in the third world do not eat meat (other than those for whom it is proscribed for religious reasons) is because meat is so expensive. The growing middle class do not eat more meat in an aping of Western lifestyles, they do it because they can finally afford it, and it tastes so good.

Clearly, the solution to the issues outlined earlier are much more complex than simply coercing, manipulating, or otherwise imploring a mass conversion to vegetarianism. More equitable relationships between people, better land rights for the poorest, and other policies to reduce insecurity of the most basic of human necessities for the vulnerable (food, clothing and shelter: not just from the elements but also from those who would seek to exploit them and from violence) -in baser terms, a piece of the pie for everyone- or, if you would like, justice, are much trickier, but ultimately more sustainable -and feasible- not to talk of effective, solutions.

So

There are villages and there are villages. The longer I stay here the more I'm learning about generalisations, about how things are not always as they seem, and how taking a position of relative ignorance is often the first step in gaining understanding. Not all that is rural is idyllic; there's a lot of hardship here too.

Today I went with the paediatrician, the pre-school teacher and another medical student to pick up children from the villages and take them to the pre-school on the CRHP complex. It was a fun day; I enjoyed being a child all morning - in fact the pre-school teacher mistook me for a child when getting off the bus, she gave me her hand to help me out and waved me into the group of children, counting me in like you do children to make sure they're safe and feel secure! We had a good laugh about that. The children also made a nickname for the other medical student, 'Bishi walla baba', they shrieked in that delightful way that only children can, on account of his impressively ginger facial hair (I'm told in good faith that the nickname means something akin to 'bearded guy').

In addition to playing and taking part in the joyful learning program, I got to sit in on the paediatrician's examinations of the children in the school. One of the things that impresses me about the CRHP is how they've managed to build a health service that works around the needs of patients. So often it's the other way around; patients are made to manoeuvre around the complex workings of a health service that penalises them for not understanding how things are operated. For example, they have to cancel other engagements to make an appointment which they are then kept waiting for, while being denigrated if they are late for the appointment or even taken off the books if they miss consecutive appointments for any reason. It sometimes seems like provision of health care is a privilege and the time of professionals more precious than that of patients. Obviously this is not necessarily deliberate and is merely an inevitable consequence of the pressure that hard pressed professionals are under to spread their services very wide, but it's helpful to see another model where communities play an active role in their own health and their participation makes them equal partners and not just passive recipients. I like the fact that rather than having the children skip school to go to the hospital, the doctor goes to school to see the children. This is possible and efficient because of the ready accessibility of the health care facility within the community, not in the form of a (physically and metaphorically) removed hospital that is in some senses a law unto itself. That's the beauty of community based primary health care.

The children themselves come from a diverse range of backgrounds. As an ignorant foreigner it is easy to wonder, 'how can there be such heterogeneity in such a small geographical location?' forgetting that even the most modern cities have gross disparities of wealth and living standards existing side by side. For some of the villages we went to today were extremely poor. Filth was strewn everywhere and pigs swam around in puddles, procreating openly in the rubbish. Every second sow you saw was pregnant. The chickens were scrawny and as for the domestic cattle - well, the one cow I saw in one hovel lay lethargically on the ground, its eyes encrusted with as yet unknown detritus. It is difficult as an outsider to pick up on the subtle structural inequalities that cause such differences in living standards - gender and caste prejudice and discrimination, land ownership, employment differences, and historical factors - but it is my aim to learn more about the stories of the local communities during my time here. Already I have been learning about the influence of agricultural factors and cultural issues (including the caste system) on the face of rural poverty from Dr Raj Arole, one of the founders of the CRHP.

Despite the wide range of backgrounds (and some of the children's stories are heartbreaking - one little girl lost her father to suicide over financial difficulties) the children are all bright, playful and keen in the pre-school. Even the ones who cried when leaving home had fun - and who wouldn't, in a place where you are treated with love and respect by your teachers, and have many friends to play with? They all have two nutritious meals at school, militating against malnutrition. It's inspiring to see such hope for the future.

While we are here on elective we have to write three papers - one on something that has caught our interest at the hospital, one in the community, and one as a personal reflection. I think I might write the second one on sanitation. The contrast between the beauty I have seen in some places and the squalor in others intrigues and disturbs me. I have a feeling that this issue is going to become a hobby horse. Perhaps it's because in childhood I lived in a military dictatorship that decreed every other Saturday environmental sanitation day, or maybe it's the fact that I was health and sanitation prefect in primary school, or it could just be down to personality - whatever it is, I am passionate about the physical environment in which we live: both the built environment and the surrounding landscape. Surely it is one area where collective action is possible, inexpensive, and can make a big difference...we shall see.

I am yet to write about the things I've seen and learnt in the hospital and outpatient clinics and a recent visit to a tribal community up in the hills, but that'll have to go in another post because it's way past bedtime already. Here's a little interesting fact before you go though. Did you know that the entire nation of India, despite being big enough to justify being called a subcontinent in its own right, is just one time zone? That's why the sun rises at different times of the day depending on what part of the country you're in here....

Ten minute post

I have ten minutes before the hospital rounds and have decided to spend it filling this blog with more background in the build up to writing about lessons learnt. On a walk yesterday I discovered more about the stark differences between town and country. The villages surrounding the CRHP seem relatively affluent in comparison to the market town. The yards of the farmhouses are swept clean; there are beautiful flower bushes (which the local children pillage for bounty to give to friendly visitors as they harangue them to take photographs - ' hi! one photo please' is the favourite salutation of children here). They have come up with an ingenious way of dealing with the massive puddles that cause water to stagnate and make ecosystems of mosquitoes an impasse on the roads - the puddles are piled full of rocks, draining the marshland. There are no stray animals save for foraging goats, and the cattle are tied up next to the barns which contain the yields of surrounding fields - it seems onions are in at this time of year. Work and leisure appear intermingled - women sit in the fields harvesting, but also chatting and laughing, while the children play and the younger women attend to domestic chores, coming out to say hello. And the men?

If on your walk you ignore the inevitable insects that this climate brings, you will begin to experience a rural idyll. So it seems that people are capable of coming up with the solutions to the challenges of their environment. On which more later, for my ten minutes are up.

Sleepy Saturday

I have now been in Jamkhed for a week and I suppose it is time to talk a little bit about the things I'm learning. But no story is complete without a mise en scene, so before I go into the medical stuff, here's a bit of background... or first impressions, if you like. They will be brief, for I am sleepy, and in fact the only motivation I had to write this was the energy of the adolescent girls running up the stairs in the training centre. I am quickly falling into the slower pace of life here: walking leisurely, taking afternoon naps...it compels and frustrates me in turns, depending on my frame of mind.

While I have on the whole settled into life here, and feel blessed to be a part of such a loving community, I have found my response to life in the developing world quite interesting. For someone (and perhaps because I was) born in tropical Africa I am remarkably intolerant of some of the negative features of the landscape - stagnant water providing breeding grounds for mosquito larvae, ubiquitous flies perching anywhere and everywhere serving as vectors for all kinds of disease, wild sows and their piglets roaming among the rubbish, stray dogs exhibiting odd behaviour, pockets of mini landfill sites littering the place, and last but not least, non existent road safety for pedestrians. These are all threats to the health and sanity of the local population, and are ironically to be found in the town- the main economic nexus of this area.

I do not believe that these blights are inevitable; they are easily overcome with proper planning and foresight - municipal services like proper drainage and water run off, roads, waste disposal facilities, pavements and pedestrian crossings, animal safety and pest control, law enforcement - they all require local government, or at least local leadership, some form of collective action to institute order. The town is where we have to go to do most of our shopping (of which thankfully little needs to be done) and I have started to avoid it as far as is reasonably possible - it seems to bring out the worst in me. My inner Pol Pot is also being stirred, I foresee that I may soon be yelling at people to cover food - actually I'm doing a good job avoiding uncovered and other suspect food. I haven't even started drinking tea yet, which I was assured I would have to embrace in India to avoid causing offence despite surviving years in England and Ireland without taking up the habit. Or perhaps people here are just very polite (in fact I know that they are, which is a win-win situation). Thankfully, I have enough subcutaneous fat stores to last me a while...

The country, by comparison, is an oasis - and the CRHP where I am based in particular. The complex of the Comprehensive Rural Health Project houses a small hospital, a training centre, accommodation for resident staff, students and village health workers, a mess hall, some sports grounds, and my personal favourite - lots of beautiful gardens and even a fountain. It is a 10 minute drive from the town and surrounded by farms. When the CRHP was first set up 40 years ago, Jamkhed was not a town - it was a village in one of the most deprived areas of the state with poor health and economic indices. The improved health of the local community achieved through the service of the CRHP, largely through the work of the village health workers and the farmer's clubs, has contributed to its evolution into a market town. But I'm jumping the gun here, I'm supposed to be limiting myself to descriptions of first impressions in this post.

The most important first impression I have had so far is the spirituality of this place - and I don't mean spirituality as a theme to be confined to a section of a bookshop, I mean an organic way of viewing people as living beings, not just sources of material income or manual labour. People here really do seem to care about other people and there is a genuine sense of relationship in the way even strangers interact with each other - and with foreigners like me. I feel that this is desperately missing from the Western world, which, ironically, despite its much needed (and vaunted) social order and social welfare, has an immense social and spiritual poverty: we neglect the totality of our existence because we choose to measure ourselves only by defined parameters and limit what we are capable of in the name of convention. I think this sense of genuineness, of people being more important than ideas, of kindness being routine, is the best thing about being here. On which more later.

Rural Life

Sometimes your memories choose to come at inapposite times though, when they are too late to be of any use. Like last night. I killed an insect with my shoe just before I went to bed and thought nothing of it. By the time I came back to my room for my afternoon siesta the floor was crawling with ants. They'd even made it into my laptop. Nature at its most elemental is here - wild and unsettling. My mother told me that once, when I was baby, she left me on the bed in the room in the bungalow in the peri-urban Nigerian town we lived in at the time (which Jamkhed reminds me of a bit). She returned to find an army of ants swarming around the bed.

It is also beautiful - there are many well ordered gardens in the vicinity, including one opposite my bedroom that has a calming fountain. For all our rapacious greed, I think the earth is a better place with humans in it. We introduce order and peace. I do not think that the similarities between the words sanitation and sanity are coincidental.

I planned to write about the many things I've been learning but have found myself too tired to do so. A synthesis is coming your way soon...

Where is home? Everywhere...

You never truly forget anything. Once formed, your memories are part of you forever, deposited in your DNA by your skin, muscles, bones, nerves. You often misplace them, it is true, and sometimes you can never find the key to their repository, but that is - they are - neither here nor there: that is to say they are with you all the same in some way, even when unconsciously. By the end of a week I had acclimatised to the Abu Dhabi heat and my skin could remember the feeling of walking out into baking sunshine in humid heat - it felt like a hug from the past. How anodyne. Anodyne, but true. And now it was time to say goodbye to my family and head off on the next leg of my trip - the main bit, and the truly solitary one. I was heading to rural India.

I tried to describe Jamkhed to people I'd spoken to about my elective. Even Indians didn't recognise it (India is a very big country after all). It is quite remote (I was soon to discover that was an understatement). 'You're going to Ikoro Ekiti!' my aunty exclaimed when I told her. Ikoro Ekiti is my father's ancestral family home (though he was neither born nor brought up there) and in Nigerian parlance, it is technically my home town (though I've only been there once, for this same aunty's wedding, when I was three - and she herself was neither born nor brought up there). I have no memories of Ikoro. I get conflicting reports as to the state of its development - is it a small town, a village, or a mere hamlet? I've seen photographs. They have electricity. And storey buildings. That doesn't seem so bad. Yes, that's right - by my ignorance you can tell that I am a townie. I have a great love for the tranquility of the countryside, but when it comes to it, I was born in one of the great megacities of the world, which is expanding by the minute - Lagos. I was transplanted from Lagos too early to realistically be called a city girl, and did a lot of my growing up in small town England and provincial Northern Ireland, but still, my knowledge of rural life in the developing world is rather limited. Or is it? I may yet have a joker up my sleeve...

Anyway, beginning at the very beginning is a very fine place to start. I lost my kitab (pen) on the plane and had to share one with the other guys sitting next to me as we filled in our landing cards. I started chatting to the guy on my left, a previous non resident Indian who had lived all over the world - Russia, America (that is the great thing about the third world: they are by definition politically non aligned nations - pragmatic to the max. You know it was the first Indian Prime Minister Jawarhalal Nehru who coined the phrase?)... and had now returned to India. We had an interesting conversation about justice and he was full of advice for me on my travels, the main indication being to stay safe. I was beginning to get the hang of this urban rural divide. City dwellers are terrified of the countryside. 'Rural India?' my mum had exclaimed when I told her about my elective, before resigning herself to her fate - 'well, we've always known you're an adventurer, just like your father...' (truth be told my mum is an adventurer herself - some of the stories she could tell you about her travels would make your hair stand on end. Maybe this is why she was so concerned, despite being my inspiration). When I grow up, I'm going to marry an adventurer just like my dad, masha'allah (I learnt this in Abu Dhabi - it's Arabic for 'by the grace of God', just like insha'allah. I think the difference between the two is that the former, a conditional, expresses a desire, while the latter qualifies an actual plan - but I stand to be corrected).

(Interjection from the future: I stand corrected. Insha'allah is actually conditional and expresses a desire, as it means God willing, so it would have been more appropriate in the above sentence. Masha'allah expresses a certainty and means thank God. I have this on good authority - well, from my Egyptian friend.)

After a long wait at the conveyor belt for my luggage where I again encountered my disabling passivity (I waited ages before reclaiming the bag I had recognised as my own being removed by a member of airport staff because I didn't want to offend anyone), I was finally on my way. In Abu Dhabi I had felt really European, in Bombay I was beginning to feel really Yoruba. 'Emi naa ni mother tongue (I too have a mother tongue)', I thought as all the hitherto anglophones chatted away in Hindi. Also, my inner Lagosian started to emerge - at least on the inside. The sarcasm and aggression gives you the patience of a saint when dealing with a mean (that's the only word for it) customs official - 'you think your rudeness fazes me? I was born in Lagos!' became my inner refrain. I stepped out of the building into the unknown. The plan was to get the shuttle from Bombay to Pune where I would be picked up by somebody from the Comprehensive Rural Health Project in Jamkhed where I am to spend the next 6 weeks. Easier said than done.

As I stepped into the crowd of welcoming families and alert travel representatives I scanned the placards quickly for my name and walked briskly, not wanting to look like a Johny Just Come (self explanatory Lagos slang for a green person). This is stupid, as a JJC is precisely what I was - or am. Having not spotted my name anywhere I must have looked very lost for a member of airport staff came up to me and asked what I was looking for. I told him I was supposed to be getting the shuttle to Pune. He told me there was unlikely to be a bus at that time of night, it being 3 o'clock in the morning - did I have a contact telephone number I could ring? I needed to look it up on my laptop (I can be rather hapless at times, another one of my personality flaws). He kindly acoompanied me to a safe place where I could find the number, then helped me dial it on his phone. It rang to no reply - unsurprising, as it was the office number, and what office is open at 3 o'clock on a Sunday morning? We tried a couple more times, and were faced with a dilemma - what to do?

A colleague came and advised me to get a hotel in Bombay and rest for the night. They would sort me out in the morning when it was safer and make sure I got a bus to Pune. There had been an accident on the expressway to Pune, he said, and this had probably held up all the traffic from the city. He wouldn't advise me to go now. He left us to ponder my options. With the helpful official I tried the phone number again. We made small talk as the phone rang. 'Are you a Christian?' he asked me. 'Yes', I said happily, 'are you?' 'Yes', he replied, 'I'm Roman Catholic'. 'That's great', I think I said (or wow or cool or something else stupid sounding like that even though this was very good news to me). I explained to him why I didn't want to stay in Bombay that night - I had been assured that somebody would be picking me up from Pune, and I didn't want them to have come all the way for nothing. Could he please come with me to have a look at the people at arrivals again? Certainly, he said, he was here to help. So we went once again, and this time we saw the placard with my name on it. Gratitude flooded over me. 'Thank you so much for all your help', I must have said over and over again. I've been so blessed on this trip by helpful strangers that I'm learning the importance of prayer - not for ourselves, but the people we meet in life who help us along the way. Who knows if we'll ever meet again? But God is watching over us all.

My adventure was only just beginning. By this point I was already in love with India - it was just like I had expected it to be - the monsoon, the tropical plants, the red puddles from the red earth - just like my childhood, but different. I was grinning from ear to ear as we (myself, the shuttle staff and the other booked passengers) made our way to the car park. 'Where in Pune do you want to be dropped off?' we were all asked. I didn't know. I had assumed that the shuttle was a bus which stopped at a defined desination, but it wasn't - it was more like a taxi to which you dictated where you wanted to go. So I kept repeating myself like an idiot: 'I don't know, I was just told to take the shuttle to Pune and someone from Jamkhed would pick me up from there.' 'Pune's a very big city', came the inevitable reply, 'where in Pune are they picking you up?' Along with, 'where precisely is Jamkhed?' 'Ahmednagar?' (after repetition about 3 times, making me realise I would need to lose this RP accent, and fast) - 'ahh, Ahmednagar! But that's really far from Pune you know!' Dear oh dear oh dear...

Thankfully, God was still watching over me. A helpful couple also traveling to Pune became my intermediaries, explaining what was going on to me in English, and to the driver in Hindi. 'Don't worry', everyone kept reassuring me, 'everything will be fine'. No one was going to leave without me. Meanwhile the mobile number used to make my booking was switched off, so there was no way of finding out where to drop me off, and to whom. One of the cars (there were 3 people carriers - 4 wheel drives going to Pune from the same company) was about to leave, taking the helpful couple with them. The other driver assured them that I woud be fine. Now it was just me, the host of drivers, and another male passenger left. The driver settled me in the front seat with my bag. 'Just relax, sit down', he said. 'You are a lady, so you should have the front seat'. I did as I was told. Then he came and asked me for money. 'Do you have any money?' he asked wheedlingly. 'No, I'm sorry, I said.' I am by now used to denying money to people who ask me for it because of my experiences on the streets of Belfast. 'Just a little change', he said. 'Any spare rupees' - I didn't have any rupees. 'Or dollars.' The only cash I had on me was to pay for my elective, and I wasn't about to flash any of it around. So I told him firmly that I didn't have any money, and eventually he left me alone.

After waiting a while I decided to get out of the car and see what was going on - I felt uncomfortable sitting when everyone was trying to sort stuff out. The other passenger, who had been watching me for a while, came to chat. After establishing that I'd just come from Abu Dhabi and he from Hong Kong on business, he asked where I was from. I told him my usual Nigeria via the UK story. This got us chatting about football and the World Cup final later in the day. 'Nigeria has a good team, hasn't it?' 'No', I replied, still bitter. 'We did in the 90s but our performance this year was a shambles. Is football really big in India?' He said it was. I asked where he was from (he looked Caucasian, although he spoke English with an Indian accent and fluent Hindi) and he pointed here, to the ground, 'India'. I was intrigued but didn't ask any more, not wanting to turn into one of those, 'no, where are you from originally?' people. 'Are you a Christian?' he asked me. 'Yes, are you?' I replied wondering why I kept being asked this. Was it because I'm African? Or was my constant prayer so obvious? Or maybe, and I think this is true, faith matters a lot in India. 'I'm a muslim', he said. Once again I must have said something stupid like 'wow', or 'cool'. I was goin to talk about the similarities between the two religions, but caught myself. It was nearly 4 o'clock in the morning. Neither of us had the energy for that. We were waiting for the last passenger to arrive. I was relieved to find out that she was a woman when she finally came. The two of them became my intermediaries in the next phase of the journey.

When the lady arrived and handed over her payment, my eyes met with the driver's (the one who had asked me for money for himself earlier) and he gave me a look. He said I hadn't paid. But I hadn't realised I was supposed to pay upfront, I had assumed payment had been made when the booking was made in my name. Because I was quoted the cost of the journey in dollars I'd thought I was meant to pay for the shuttle along with my elective fees when I arrived. I told them this (or rather, the lady translated for me). The drivers argued amongst themselves. Somebody wasn't going to let me on. The kind man I had chatted to earlier offered to pay my fare. I thanked him kindly, but said if it came to that I would go back into the airport to get some rupees and pay for myself. I didn't want to deprive somebody of his hard earned money, especially if the actual situation was unknown. The lady offered to accompany me to get the money. The bluff was called. I could go on the shuttle. Finally, we were off!

As we drove through Bombay I was reminded more and more of Lagos, but with subtle differences. I was excited. The first song that played on the radio was from one of my favourite Bollywood movies (Kal Ho Naa Ho). I knew all those years of listening to the BBC Asia Network and reading Indian literature and even following soaps on Star Plus hadn't gone to waste! Meanwhile, things were still being sorted out behind the scenes. The driver (not the suspicious one - another person was our designated driver) got a phone call to say they'd got the correct mobile number of the person picking me up, and they'd confirmed where I'd be picked up in Pune. The other passengers relayed this to me. I was so thankful to them both, they had been so kind. They really had stood up for me and protected me on their own soil. I kept saying thank you. 'Stop saying thank you', the woman said kindly. 'We also know what it feels like, this is what it's like for us when we go to countries where nobody speaks English'. This is why I love travelling. It reminds me of what it means to be human - to be generous, to have an open heart, to put yourself out for strangers because they are your brothers and sisters.

What more can I say? Of the unexpectedly long journey (we didn't get to Pune till about 9, I didn't get to Jamkhed till about 12 noon), the breathtaking beauty of the Indian hills, teeming with life, the hospitable climate with the refreshing monsoon rain, the evocative bus of the Indian arm of the multinational company my dad used to work for, making me feel safe, and the surprising number of dogs, making me feel less safe (cheapskate didn't get the 120 GBP rabies vaccine because I was reassured it wasn't necessary). This included the dead dogs - I counted at least 4 - on the obstactle courses that are Indian roads. Once you realise the basic rule of the road - that it is to be treated as an obstacle course to be assailed with as much speed as will get you to your destination as quickly and safely as possible, the hair raising nature of the journey becomes more exciting than scary. You basically overtake anything that you don't like the look of - cars, lorries, tuktuks, cyclists, protest marches, processions - beeping your horn really loudly as you do so. It's only polite. Even the lorries all have written on them, beneath their number plates: 'Horn OK Please'. The only exception to this rule is cattle. They can come and go as they please on the roads. In the cities you wonder why cows are such a protected species, other than the obvious religious reasons (cows being sacred in the Hindu religion) - there surely is a reason for this. Why are there so many cattle when you're not allowed to kill them or eat them? I wondered. Wouldn't that be a waste of resources in taking care of the cow? What is their financial value other than milk? It's only when you get to the countryside that it starts to make sense: cattle are a beast of burden. They plough the land. It doesn't make financial sense to kill your beast of burden. You see, everything has a reason...

Anyway, I finally arrived at Jamkhed, got settled into my room, had a shower, made some new friends, ate food, had a much needed nap, phoned my mother...but I'll write about that later. This has already gone on too long, and I'm very hungry.

Have a blessed week!

Call the man a girl and you've pretty much got my story...

The night before the night before...
I had a headache. A terrible terrible headache. And waves of nausea gripped me like an abortive surf - always threatening, never fully breaking through. I often get migraines, but this was worse than anything I'd felt in a long time. It took me back - way back to my childhood, when I used to get the dreaded disease that makes you weak and anorexic as the taste of your food turns to ash in your mouth; even my appetite was gone. Forget Delhi Belly, if I lost the fabled Belfast Stone(s) in India it was unlikely to be from diarrhoea. This was what what would do it - doxycycline. Not even malaria itself: its prophylaxis.

When my doctor prescribed me doxycycline he told me the side effects were mild, but to make sure to take it with food and wear sunscreen - because it causes photosensitivity even in someone of my skin pigmentation. I couldn't believe it. Me, wear sunscreen? What is all my melanin for? Am I not an African? Why did I need protection from the 'third world' - sunscreen, insect repellent, anti-malarials, don't drink this, don't eat that, be careful who you talk to? I'm cautious by nature but all this seemed a bit OTT. Until the doxycycline hit and I remembered that I am not as sturdy as I like to think - in fact, I was quite a sickly little child in Africa. It's strange how little control you have over your own body. So, precautions it would have to be, with the following song sounding eerily familiar (as you are to discover in subsequent posts). Enjoy the video link! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULjCSK0oOlI


You Can Call Me Al

A man walks down the street
He says why am I soft in the middle now
Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard
I need a photo opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
Bone-digger, bone-digger
Dogs in the moonlight
Far away my well-lit door
Mr. Beerbelly, beerbelly
Get these mutts away from me
You know I don’t find this stuff
Amusing anymore

If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me Al

A man walks down the street
He says why am I short of attention
Got a short little span of attention
And woe my nights are so long
Where’s my wife and family
What if I die here
Who’ll be my role model
Now that my role model is
Gone gone
He ducked back down the alley
With some roly-poly little bat-faced girl
All along along
There were incidents and accidents
There were hints and allegations

If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me Al

A man walks down the street
It’s a street in a strange world
Maybe it’s the third world
Maybe it’s his first time around
He doesn’t speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man
He is surrounded by the sound
The sound
Cattle in the marketplace
Scatterlings and orphanages
He looks around around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity
He says Amen and Hallelujah

If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me Al

Na na na na …

If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty when you call me
You can call me Al
Call me Al

leave space here...

for Abu Dhabi post - will come back to it later!

New new hemisphere

Even our fantasies are haunted by our nightmares. I was talking to my little sister about the fictional country of her own making. 'It's very warm there, and it hardly ever rains', she said. 'The most popular job is to be a plumber...to fix their water problems. Also, you know how we have a war that's been going on for a very long time but doesn't happen here? Well, when they have wars, they don't go on very long and they always happen elsewhere.'

We were sitting in the library of the Nigerian High Commission, waiting to have our new passports issued and getting an education in the meaning of the term 'echelons of power'. The busy consular staff varied from being unbelievably attentive to blankly obstructive; humanity and bureaucracy make a turbulent mix. Meanwhile, the displaced waited. Waited for proof of identity, of existence, for movement, for livelihoods, for legitimacy - in wealth and poverty and middle income, in good health and ill, contented and restful, vocal and disenfranchised - all waited at the behest of the Mother Country or Father Land and its agents for a place at the family table. We waited in alert silence and competitive watchfulness, and later in jovial camaraderie, brought to us by the children. Lesson 1: in Africa, it is not possible for children to be seen and not heard. Children are our light - our biggest challenge and our greatest hope.

They crawled on the floor, ballet danced around the room, sang loudly, made escape attempts and generally exhibitions of themselves with no recriminations from the generous adults, brightening up an otherwise very dull and tense wait. Here's to you African children, all over the world, young and old...

After my short stay at home I began the second leg of my journey out to the middle east, filled with some trepidation. Why did I lurch myself head first, alone, into such uncertainty? Well meaning advice churned in my stomach - what to eat, what not to drink, who to trust - and my little sister's tears dripped behind my own eyelids. Homesick already? Surely not as heartbroken as the Australian girl behind me on the flight, singing morosely to herself in a very loud voice - 'leaving on a jet plane...' For by now I had found excitement. This was a new hemisphere, a different country - they do things differently here. An advert for designer burqa sunglasses in a magazine was the first harbinger of this, followed by the view from the plane of a different kind of architecture - most buildings white or terracotta, the famed symmetry of Islamic art adorning the landscape, abounding with domes and cubes. Even the natural habitat was different - shrubs peeping through the sands in the perpetual struggle between life and barren desert, and lots of palm trees, evenly spaced, carefully planned. At seven o'clock, the sun was already setting, confusing me about the nature of the darkness - was this foggy snow I could see? Should I have brought a coat? I needn't have worried - stepping out into a sauna which steamed my glasses up reassured me that the 'foggy snow' was in fact white desert sand.

I was given a warm welcome at immigration to the United Arab Emirates as the customs official tried to learn how to say my name. I had a joyful reunion with my family and am glad to be in a new hemisphere - with new news, a fresh perspective, different priorities and a temporary reprieve from the big adventure up ahead. I am not alone just yet. Thankfully. Still, I am a bit excited and grateful for the opportunity to see the diversity of this world we have been given.

Home and tranquility

Leg two done. There's a momentary stillness after 20 hours of travelling and 'se débrouiller tout seul', lugging a big suitcase across train stations in big cities, being stimulated to think - about helpfulness and neighbourliness and community and family and friendship and privilege and discrimination and fear and sacrifice and love. And sleep. It's good to see the family. I could sleep forever. Intrepid now, prayers valued...