Thoughts on "Transculturalism"

Back in Ann Arbor, my head pastor talks a lot about the concept of transculturalism. Instead of trying to be multi-ethnic by simply increasing the population of certain ethnic groups (we're predominantly Asian) and leaving it at that, he's talked about developing a culture of jumping between the lines of people's backgrounds, worldviews, and differences. As people are better able to transcend the natural barriers that people of varying ethnic groups have when they first interact with each other, our pastor is believing that we will naturally become a more multiethnic church that reflects the true spirit of multiculturalism.

One of the difficulties of transcending different cultures and interacting with people that might be different from one's self is that there are likely to be a lot of awkward moments, which in the future might deter us from ever associating with people that might make us feel uncomfortable. For example, when I first met Dr. Mandi the other day, I asked her "what kind of doctor she was." She responded as if it was the most ridiculous question she had ever heard. Her response, "I'm a medical doctor!" after which she mumbled a couple things in her Naga language. In the US, it's perfectly normal to ask people what kind of doctors they are, but I guess in the culture of Indian medicine, it seemed like a outrageous question to ask. I have a feeling she didn't understand the kind of answer I was expecting. Even in some everyday interactions with people at work, there are always instances where the way I say something doesn't make sense either because of my word choice or flow of language or vice versa - sometimes it's hard to understand what people are saying through an Indian accent or through their choice of words (think: British English). This can be particularly troubling in the cases when my boss is trying to tell me something important or my taxi driver is saying "I don't know where you live!"

Even though there are a lot of awkward moments in these attempts to face transculturalism, there are also a lot of moments where I remember interacting with people of different background being some of the most significant moments in my life. For lack of a better description, I would call these instances "golden moments." I guess a quick definition of a "golden moment" would be an occurrence where there was a significant sharing and exchange of life between two groups of different background/culture.

When I was in western China last summer, a group from my team visited a Uyghur market bazaar one afternoon and decided to eat lunch at a girl's family stand. She was very friendly and even asked us where we were from. She made us a simple noodles dish and then served us this awesomely good donut pastry that wasn't being served anywhere else in the bazaar. We didn't think anything of it at the time, but as we continued to see different parts of the city over the next couple of days, our little team of people decided to keep going back to that girl's stand in the bazaar. Time and time again, she was overjoyed to see her new American friends come back for a meal and some donut desserts. We eventually shared our background and why we were in western China, and learned some about her - she'd been working at the stand since she was eight or nine years old. On our last day in that city, we decided to bless her and her family by buying them a whole bunch of fruit and going to the local Kodak shop and printing out a full sized picture of a family portrait we had taken for them. As we presented it to her family on the last day before leaving that city, it was one of those moments where you realize on both ends that there was a significant exchange of "life" in the previous days' interactions. That is what I would look forward to in a "golden moment." There aren't necessarily found at the flashiest tourist attraction or in the five star hotel, but more often than not, in the realms of the lives of everyday normal people, who are carrying on more or less with life as usual when you run into them.

And those kinds of experiences are what I'm looking for here in India. Maybe it will come with the people at work. Maybe the people at the local market. Maybe with people at the hospital or people that I live with. Where ever those moments are to be found, they are a big part of what makes an overseas experience meaningful and memorable. I'm guess I'm just keeping my eyes open for now.

(Pictures from last summer)

These donut things were really good


Our little team when we visited one day after it rained


The girl's family when we gave her our last batch of fruit and family portrait

Weekend in Pictures

Friday:

Dinner at Parikrama, a restaurant in downtown Delhi that's at the top of a 25 story building. It spins - making a revolution once every hour and a half or so.


Dinner at the top. We'd met some UPenn graduate students this week at a malaria talk and we got together for dinner. L-R: myself, Caroline (PHFI intern), Jin and Danny (Penn Med), and Emily (UMich 04 alum! and Penn Nursing)

Saturday: Touring Old Delhi and Fourth of July bash at the US Embassy


First stop in Old Delhi: Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India. India's the 2nd largest Muslim country in the world, to Indonesia. Most of the people in the area (there was a bazaar leading into the mosque) were not tourists, but were there to pray.


Not knowing that Jama Masjid was a mosque, I accidentally wore shorts. In order to respectfully tour through the place, I had to rent a large cloth to cover my bare legs. Other tourists had to rent cloths that would cover their entire bodies.


We climbed to the top of one of the minarets and this was the view. You could see all the flat rooftop houses of Delhi and the skyscrapers from there as well. It was awesome.


Next stop: the Red Fort. It was one of many forts around the area. Since we were a little short on time, I was considering not paying 100 rupees to go in, but I'm glad I did. Turns out the entire complex is like one huge maze that you walk through, observing different monuments ranging from tombs to reflecting pools along the way.


The Fourth of July party was held at the US Embassy in Delhi. They were trying really hard to recreate a taste of America by having it on a baseball field. We were welcomed by this guy...


After the sunset, they had a small fireworks show. I found out after I left that the Lakers were in town to promote "Basketball Without Borders." As a couple of us were waiting for taxis, we ran into several US diplomats and they were egging us on to join them at their next stop. Since we were doubtful of their sobriety, we declined. We found out later on of course that they were actually serious, though.

Sunday: Sightseeing in south and central Delhi



Lotus Temple - also know as a Baha'i House of Worship, this place is home of worship for those of the Baha'i faith. It was a beautiful building with nine pools of water surrounding it. The religion is known for promoting unity of God and the unity of humanity.


Sightseeing with several Caucasian interns, this has come to be a common sight. Whenever we go to any of the touristy places in Delhi, we are inevitably stopped by people (usually Indians who are visiting Delhi) who want pictures with us. I took this picture outside of the Lotus Temple with my friend who's also interning at PHFI, Caroline. A couple minutes before, a group of people started videotaping their friend walking alongside her. The same thing happened to one of our other friends from UPenn.


Next stop: Humayam's Tomb. This place was a beautiful and peaceful complex that serves as a precursor to the Taj Mahal. It's not quite as majestic or famous, but the story is similar and it's still a UNESCO World Heritage Site.


Inside - the main tomb.


Last stop of the day - Janta Mantar. There are several structures here that were built by an emperor hundreds of years ago for making precise measurements according to the sun, including the time.


I decided to climb into one of the instruments for a picture.

Next weekend: the Taj Mahal!

A Sensory Experience

Before I left New Jersey to come to India, I would have dreams at night about what it would be like to walk the streets of New Delhi. I tried imagining some of the things I would see, the smells that would go up my noses, the different sounds of languages I didn't understand or vehicles whizzing by. It took a little while to get around, and it might sound a little self-explanatory, but I came to the realization that over the course of a normal day in Ann Arbor or New Jersey, I would typically identify my surroundings based on the different senses that we use everyday, touch, smell, sight, sound, tastes. Things that we take part in everyday, like the food we eat, the places we live, the people that we see, they are all part of how we identify with everyday normal life.

So obviously, a lot of these things changed when I arrived to India. I've only eaten meat several times (I would eat it basically every meal in the US), people's external appearances are different, and there are dozens of languages that I haven't the clue of what people are saying (including people trying to speak English sometimes).

On this note, I saw this post from a blog of fellow working for Acumen Fund and starred it earlier this year in my Google Reader in hopes of being able to test it out should I be able to come to India. It's from a guy who is working in Hyderabad (south India) and he learned of an activity where one records the sounds of the city in the early morning to get a taste of what life is like in that city. To my disappointment, I don't have anything that can record sounds (unless I carry my laptop around with a microphone hooked up) - but as I was walking home from work the other day, I thought about all the sounds that were going on around me that I would never hear in the US. If I could record the sounds of a walk home from work, I would hear all these unique and interesting sounds that reflects a lot of what you would see regarding life in India:

• a screeching horn every two seconds
• the sounds of men riding bicycles howling a phrase (literally howling, and I haven't found out what they're doing yet)
• barking from one of the masses of stray dogs
• sweeping of brooms from people cleaning the streets
  
• children smacking balls around with cricket bats
  
• the nasal engine of an auto-rickshaw
• languages that I can't decipher whatsoever
  
• ...probably another horn or two.

You can find his post here.

Housing Update!

In the last couple of days, a lot of things have worked out for the better regarding my housing situation from before. Instead of moving out on Wednesday night, we worked out a compromise between my landlord and I where I would stay a full two weeks (until next Thursday) and move out after that. That way, I've basically given him my 1 week's notice to find someone else for his paying guest room and myself time to find another place to stay in the meantime.

Which...I have successfully done! Meron and I met on Wednesday night after work to go apartment hunting in neighborhoods around my office. I got a chance to meet one of his friends, who asked me to call her Dr. Mandi, and we checked out a place in a nearby neighborhood called Gautam Nagar. They showed me a room that is much more bare bones than where I'm staying right now: single room with a bathroom, a bed, a dresser, and a table with a tv on it. It would start getting crowded if more than four people were standing in the room at one time. There's no kitchen or anything, but rent is going to end up being about 1/4 of what I'm paying right now. I decided to take the room in anticipation of starting afresh for life in Delhi. It will definitely be different - no housekeeper to bring coffee and biscuits in the morning, no king sized bed to pass out on, and no posh neighborhood to walk through. The area is actually completely different, there are a lot of shops and stands to walk by, so I'll definitely be interacting with a lot more people hopefully. I'm looking to check out the local Chinese joint that's right next to my apartment, "Spicy."

Last night, I got a chance to eat dinner with Dr. Mandi. She works at a local hospital that provides free care to all of its patients. I was very intrigued by this because my research topic at the Public Health Foundation of India is to investigate the equity and access of healthcare in India's population as well as the effects of having to make healthcare payments out of one's own pocket on everyday life. Dr. Mandi works in the triage center of the hospital so the realities of patients coming in will be even more relevant for the topics that I'm looking into at work. I'm going to shadow her at work sometime next week during one of her night shifts - it'll be cool to see up close and personal some of the things that I saw in my high school anatomy class trauma videos.

Tomorrow, one of my friends who's also interning at PHFI invited a bunch of us over to her house - the US embassy. The embassy is throwing a private Fourth of July bash for American citizens tomorrow night. I gotta say, I'm not sure what the expect at this, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be pretty interesting. Fireworks? A whole lot of red, white, and blue? Juicy Angus burgers? I just gotta remember to bring my passport and 150 rupees to find out!


Dr. Mandi made Tandoori Chicken!


Around Dr. Mandi's place are all vegetarian restaurants, except for McDonald's and Pizza Hut


Cool shot of Delhi night traffic (people walking, motorbikes, auto-rickshaws, and cars)

Housing Lessons

It’s been about a week since I arrived in Delhi. Even though adjusting to jet lag has been fairly annoying (I would get tired at random times of the day - 11am, 6pm, and any other time except bedtime), tonight might be the first night that I'll make it through the day without napping or dozing off in the middle of doing something. If you had talked to me anytime up to a couple days before I left New Jersey, I probably would have still said that I did not know where I was staying, or “put up” as the locals might say. When I was negotiating the logistics for my time in Delhi, my boss and I made a deal that if he could find housing for me, I would take care of everything else, including travel, food, and other expenses. Early Tuesday morning (I left Wednesday night), I got an email finally with my accommodations. I was pleased because it was walking distance to work and it supposedly included breakfast and internet as well.

My boss has some good taste. The “colony” or neighborhood that I’m living in right now is called Hauz Khas. My boss even remarked as he was driving me to work on the first day that he couldn't even afford to live in this area, which is why he has to drive about one hour (it should be shorter if there wasn’t so much traffic) to work everyday. Some of the houses remind me of the places that I would see when I visited my cousins in California – they are huge. I’m staying with my landlord and his servant, and I got the bedroom upstairs to myself. It’s been a great place for me to settle down and get adjusted to Indian life. There are little perks here and there, like having coffee and biscuits brought to me every morning, sleeping on a king sized bed in the privacy of my own room, and even having a friendly servant whose smile makes my day whenever I bump into him.

The only thing that I regrettably have to object to is the price. I knew it was going to be expensive coming in (I was planning on shelling out 1,000 dollars for six weeks), but not this expensive. Turns out I’m expected to pay 1250 rupees (thirty dollars) per night plus 100 rupees (two dollars and thirty cents) for my entire time here. Doing the math, that adds up to about 57,000 rupees or 1,360 dollars for six weeks accommodation! I was talking to some people at work as well as people I met from church and I met someone who pays 80 dollars a month for her studio. Another girl who has an entire apartment to herself with a big terrace is only paying 20,000 rupees (500 dollars) a month. There was no way I could justify spending so much money, even more than I would ever pay at school in Ann Arbor regardless of how I split my funding and my own money up.

So I decided today that I was going to move out. Where? I have no idea right now. I teeter tottered all weekend about staying, thinking about how comfortable it would be to stay, how the breakfast tastes really good, how I’m so close to work, etc. But along with the whole money situation, I realized that where I’m living right now is not exactly the experience of India that I was imagining coming in. There isn’t really much street life (except for the guards that sit outside the gated fences of houses all night) and I barely get to interact with people outside of my landlord and his servant. I’m figuring that while I’m in India, I should go out of my way to interact with the people as much as possible. I feel like even those little five minute exchanges over prices for fruits or that innocent question about where the best place to buy a cell phone goes a long way in the memory of my experience here. I’m going to believe that my experience will be so much richer in memory as I move into a neighborhood with greater people to interaction while freeing up some funds to do other things than pay rent.

So my new journey starts tomorrow. I’m going to temporarily move into a hostel at the local university, Jawaharlal Nehru University, with the Naga friend I met from church on Sunday. We’ll spend a couple days looking for housing nearby my work in a different area of town , and we’ll see what happens from there. Heres to another adventure!

Taste of Nagaland

Today I got a chance to visit a church in South Delhi. It was an ethnic church called Delhi Ao Naga Church and its composition is mostly people from the state of Nagaland out in the northeast section of India. I got connected with a friend called Meron who knows Panger and Ren, whom I met back in New Jersey before departing. After the service, people would joke around because the darkness of my skin made me look like I was from Nagaland as well. Too bad they could tell exactly where I was from when I started speaking. I'm glad I got a chance to see a different culture right in front of my eyes. People have always talked about how multicultural India is with all of its people groups, religions, and practices but after roaming the streets for a couple of days it hasn't been as easy as I would have thought to break cultural barriers and get into the lives of the people here. Today was a little different, and I'm glad I got a glimpse into the pride and lives of people from Nagaland.

After church, a couple of us took a bus out into a busy south Delhi neighborhood. It was a market, and we walked through for a while, dodging oncoming cars and rickshaws, yielding to cows, and trying to avoid the oncoming rains. I had a chance to try out a sugarcane drink that is made by taking fresh sugarcane and running it through a grinder. I was surprised how the taste wasn't overwhelmingly sweet, it was actually quite refreshing. That, and my stomach seems to be holding it down alright so far. For dinner, one of the sisters at the church rushed home ahead of us and cooked a traditional Naga dinner - we had a pork belly dish, fish curry, salad, and a vegetable called "ladies finger." It was all tasty and slightly different of a flavor from everything that I've been having these past couple of days, but it definitely didn't fall in the spiciness factor!

Tomorrow, I'm starting my first full week of work. I'm looking forward to cutting my commute time from a one hour walk to the twenty minute walk that it's supposed to be!


The man operating the sugarcane grinder-machine


On the streets of Delhi at night


The view from the apartment we ate at

Saturday in Delhi

Yesterday, I had my first day of work at the Public Health Foundation of India. We started the day with my boss explaining the vision of PHFI as well as laying out some guidelines regarding my work and how it would be playing out over the next seven weeks or so. There are a couple of American interns here and overall the people working in the office are relatively young, so it was reassuring to be able to interact with people in a relaxed and joking way. I got to meet Dr. Srinath Reddy, which was a goal of mine coming in. Dr. Reddy is the president of PHFI and is someone I have followed since earlier this year because of his work not only in PHFI but also in the public health field. I would have to say that after one day I'm definitely looking forward to working here at PHFI over the next seven weeks or so.

After work, I decided to avert jet-lag by buying a map and trying to walk back to my office (I had been driven home by my boss' driver and was assured that my apartment was walking distance). When I heard "walking distance" I was definitely thinking something like "down the road" or "around the corner." It took me about 30 minutes to get back to my office (after taking a 30 minute detour in the wrong direction). To get back home, I decided to give the auto-rickshaws a try. They are these three-wheeled green and yellow bug looking vehicles that screech along the road with nasally horns. Even though I had been feeling slightly apprehensive toward getting into any sort of motor vehicle after my first taxi ride from the airport, I decided to give it a try because walking around Delhi is probably just as dangerous, if not more. The ride was filled your typical near-hits and close calls, but that's driving in Delhi, right?

Today I got a chance to sight see a little bit with one of the interns at PHFI. We met up a bazaar type place called Dilli Hat in south Delhi. I was told that this was one of the must sees of Delhi because it has a food court area with eats from nearly every state in India. We had lunch from a store that sold food from Uttar Pradesh, one the states in the northwest that is very close to New Delhi. Afterwards, we got to check out the Qutb Minar, which is the tallest brick minaret in the world. It was cool being able to check out a symbol of Indo-Islamic architecture. I got a chance to talk to some people around the area, who were very interested in my friend and I because we were foreigners. The brief conversations we had brought back a lot of memories from when I would walk the streets in China. I got to meet a child and his brother, who I think were homeless and were going around offering shoe shines. I also got to meet a couple of guys who loved American culture, especially Keira Knightley. We exchanged little things back forth, trading English phrases for Hindi ones. They even wrote their names in Hindi in my notebook. I showed them my Hindi name in return (डेविड ली). Coming back, we hit the rains came which conveniently cooled off the weather, which is another sign that monsoon season is here!


People fighting through the rain