After Shillong

After Shillong.

When I returned home from Shillong things seemed to happen in the same progression as every other time I traveled in India. I got a little fever for a day. In that day I slept for about 20 of the 24 hours. By Sunday I was still tired, but feeling good enough for church and social interaction. By Monday I was ready to go at it again.

Monday Anita came back from the U.S. at 5:00 AM. There was no time for rest for her. We went to 2 meetings on that very same day. One was cut short because the person we were meeting did not come to work that day. The other went a bit long but at least it was at a coffee shop so I could get a cappuccino and a muffin to carry me through.

The meetings ended up also generating some good opportunities in advocacy on a government level. Although I do not really understand how this is going to pan out, I am excited at the opportunity.

Tuesday Anita, Christine, and I went to Chennai to have some more meetings. The trip was really a comedy of errors. First we had tickets on a train in the morning, but they were not confirmed or waitlisted. In India this means that you have a spot on the train but you do not know exactly where. To fix this problem we would have to go early to the train and see if we could get confirmed in the morning. When we got there we realized everyone on the wait list in line before us and after us got seat; we did not. We would seriously have to hop on the train and hope that a seat opened up or else we would have to stand for the 5-hour journey. Luckily seats did open up; not together, but they were seats.

In Chennai we got to the YMCA where we were staying and quickly put our stuff in the rooms and then went to the office. At the office for some reason I was feeling very tired. As people were talking about the schedule for the day I was nodding off. I felt bad, but my body was rejecting the entire reality of me being awake.

We were supposed to have a meeting with an NGO and the police that day. The NGO got moved to Wednesday, but the police meeting was still on. I was somewhat dreading the police visit because of my previous experiences there. The police visits always went the same way. We walk in and ask to see the person we are meeting with. The secretary (or whoever) says that the person is busy or in a meeting and says they’ll be there in 5 minutes. We then sit down. 15, 20, 30, sometimes an hour pass before the person comes in to the meeting. That person then sits down facing us while talking to someone else in the office or on the phone. We wait for another 5 or 15 minutes then they talk to us. Sometimes they listen, but most of the time we do the majority of the listening. It’s tough because the meeting sometimes goes off track right off the bat and there is no ability to reign in the conversation. This is difficult because the meetings are meant to foster mutually beneficial partnerships, but they end up becoming something else.

This meeting we very much in line with our previous ones. We met with a woman who was from a department that probably was not quite in line with our work. She then gave us a long discourse on how there was not that sort of problem to be addressed in her city. Again my body rebelled and also fell on the floor in a slumber.

We left his meeting a little unsatisfied, but hopeful. Hopeful because that night we had planned to go bowling. We got to the alley around 9:30 PM and bowled one game with about ten people from the Chennai office. It was great fun. After bowling we went to Pizza Hut. My first time in India. Pizza was lovely. I fell asleep quickly this night.