Best Day EVERRRR (so far)

I'm completely captivated by the ants prowling our bedroom floor. They are approximately the size of the top joint of my pinky, except the crushed ones that Dede smashed a few minutes ago, an action completely out of line with our newly adopted Jain practices.

Today began before the dawn with the 5 am call to prayer. We roused ourselves to walk to the volunteer tower to sit and read while Qazi Camp came to life. On the right is a picture of our view from the tower. Every single building in the area has four concrete pillars with metal spires emerging from the top floor that me them all look like they were given up on, mid-construction. We asked our roommate Roopa, who was decked out in a beautiful red salwaar kameez with yellow-ocre cuffs and a golden scarf to match, how it could be that construction on every building in sight had been prematurely cut off. In her pleasantly decipherable accent, Roopa explained that it's not that construction had been stopped on all of these homes, but that whenever people have another floor added on, they have these pillars included in the construction in preparation for the next floor that they can't yet afford to build. What we were witnessing was a beautiful form of hope of potential- an inspiration, and we mistook it for incompletion. Bhopal delivers in disguise.

After our fill of early-morning community watching, we took showers and headed down to breakfast from the canteen. We each had an Rs. 8 meal of pressed rice with cilantro and spices interspliced with crunchy noodles, onions, and chillies, vegetable pakora, and a shot of chai. Rachna, the wife of the clinic director, came to eat with us and told us about the project that she and Sathyu are currently working on. They've been putting together a presentation for an ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) in Delhi which will decide whether or not Sambhavna gets a government grant to resesarch medical ailments in Bhopali neighborhoods. She said that if they are awarded this grant, they'll have the potential to compile all of the information that they need to prove the continued effects of UCC's disaster on Bhopalis' health. Sathyu and Rachna just left at 9:30 om, consequentially on the same train as our previous roomates from UK, Joey and Lucy, who are getting off at Agra to see the Taj. 

Anyway, after that we got down to work in the library with Shehnaz (our new BEST FRIEND at Sambhavna). We organized articles (newspaper clippings mostly) from 2003 that were stuffed into one big green folder into tons of categories (like community action, environment, international, government policy, victims' health and well being, etc.) so that they can be scanned and organized on the clinic's database. It was both confusing ( since almost every article seem to fit into at least 3 categories) and fascinating as we got to read so many stories about the disaster, environmental problems and solutions in India, new medical research findings and also some very random, seemingly irrelevant articles (ex: Meteor crashes through ouse in New Zealand which started with the quote "I was just making dinner when..." and South African judge accused of Rape. The relation to Bhopal is kind of hazy...). 

Then we did tons of laundry, including bright undies that made us certain that we belong in India, land of neon saris and bold, mismatched patterns. Our new friend, Altaf who is 9 (?) and the son of the cleaning lady hung out with us- jumping around, chattering in rapid hindi and 

being generally crazy. He was impressed with my skills and busted up in our room to start drilling her on her alphabet til Dede playfully threw him out, dragging him by his collar. (They bonded first over how they both have injured toes- Dede sliced the a thick cap of skin of her left big toe on a busy street in Mumbai causing a crowd-inducing commotion with spurts of blood. I knew those tetanus shots were worth the dinero... Altaf's we think was cut. He says thats why he's not in school... fishy).

After lunch (which included yummy mini-eggplants the size of figs) we headed off with Maud to the New Market. We all crammed in a autorickshaw, paying 50 rupees to go to New Bhopal (the richer area, with larger streets and no contamination from the disaster). In the New Market we bought mad food (biscuits, chocolate, oranges, sweet limes, pomegranites galore!), much needed ayurvedic soap for the bano, towels, tiffins! (one is for you mum), and funky shoes. We 

need to get better at haggling. We ate fresh fruit juice with Maud and talked about her background (as a journalist, etc. from Rhode Island), her work at Sambhavna (mostly photos and design stuff), Obama and Bhopali customs. Then we headed back in a rickshaw.. Thats when the craziest thing happened; suddenly in the middle of one of Bhopal's characteristically dusty, smoggy, commotion-filled main road the rickshaw puttered 

to a halt. The driver promptly reached under his butt and pulled out a fanta bottle with a few ounces of neon red gas in it and refilled the r.s. All was good until it stopped again! This time, he hailed a fellow driver who came over and after a brisk talk they clearly worked out a deal. We were herded into the second guy's shaw and we were off; suddenly our new driver pops his leg out of the open side of the shaw and starts pushing the first shaw with his foot while driving. The first shaw would lazily teeter forward for a few paces, with wobbly wheels like an amusement park ride car and then slow to a halt again- all of this  amid the unbelievable chaos of Bhopali traffic (cows, pedestrians, buses, oil trucks, shaws and bikes galore). Laughing our asses off along with the driver we proclaimed this the definition of ghetto.

<----- Altaf

At night we met Doctor J (definitel

y a great name for an M.C.... Bhopal benefit concert anyone? We've been spitting Bhopal-themed rhymes for hours now...), Roopa's boyfriend and the head ayurvedic doctor at the cli

nic. We had the luck of being an audience for  him to practice a speech he is making in front of. Dr. J is giving the speech in a city near Phoenix, AZ to roughly 200 doctors at a giant medical conference in late october, after which time he will be going to NYC. This will be his first trip out of India and he is worried about the plane (so he told us, cutely, that he has been reading about planes every night). The speech is 35 minutes long and about how ayurveda is being used successfully in conjunction with allopathy and yoga to treat disaster victims. It has some sweet before and after picture sequences of successful treatment of psoriasis using LEECHES (thats right.. seems medieval to us but seems to work) and great charts and graphs that we showered him and Roopa with parise for (especially since they had never made a powerpoint before).  We wished him so much luck and gave him some tips and info about the U.S.  He then invited us to go to a hot

el with Roopa and him the next night to drink some Kingfisher and hang out (assuring us that we need not worry about the stigma and conservative backlash since he'll be there in slightly broken English).

After dinner we cleaned our room (in desperate need after the brits rolled out) while listening to Beck and Dede put up tons of fabric as bright decorations- and pictures she brought of family and joey and friends from Europe and

 Oak Park. We went to sleep excited for our prospects the next day (garden, kingfisher, Shehnaz didi, yay!) and after doing 15 minutes of 'deep relaxation' where we relaxed each part of our body and meditated (cause I read it in a natural health book and cause we crazy hippies!) BEST DAY YET!