Work and play--it's a balanced day.

By some ungodly force, we slept through the call to prayer this morning. Instead, Dede and I woke to Ruth’s sniffles and labored breathing. We sat and digitally vegged out for a couple of hours before doing anything else. Dede typed like mad on the blog while Ruth got her ipoop fix and I took care of a bunch of e-mail obligations. I got the funniest e-mail from Ruth’s dad—he asked me to change her blog picture because it looked like a celebrity’s mug shot. Ruth chortled as she looked for her own copy of the e-mail, but got upset when she realized that she didn’t get one. Burn on the second favorite daughter! Check it by tomorrow, Mr. Eddy.

We showered, went to the canteen for a breakfast similar to yesterday’s (the mashed rice dish is called poha--thanks, Pragya), except with veg samosas instead of pakura. Every time you eat at the canteen, you have to sign your name in a notebook. Before today, we’ve had no clue as to how to work this ridiculous system, but this morning it was explained to us that each person who regularly eats at the canteen has her own page in the notebook and that you write the date, price, and signature for each meal you receive. Minus one confusion due to language barrier.

While we were sitting at the table, an older woman with the most beautiful contours of lines stitched into her face sat down and began speaking to us in Hindi. She couldn't say anything more than the numbers one, two, three in English, but we talked to her for about an hour. We began communication in the usual way. She asks where we're from, how old we are, how long we'll be in Bhopal, and we ask her if she lives in Qazi camp and if she works at the clinic. She probably has no idea waht we're saying, but she begins relating her ailments to us and talking about the gas disaster. Her words are steady but her gestures become more and more emphatic as she recalls this incident that robbed her of so much. She points to her knee and her abdomen, indicating some sort of ongoing discomfort that cannot be cured by yoga because of her joints. When she begins to describe what she lost that night, she has to wipe her eyes with her headscarf. We all could have used one for how passionate and painful this woman's speech was, despite our inability to understand more than half of her spoken words. She calmed down when another woman came to sit for breakfast as well, and the conversation turned to ayurvedic care at the clinic. When we stood to say good-bye, she took our hands and bowed our heads to her shoulder with her outstretched palm and kissed our cheeks. This was by far one of the most moving experiences I've had since our arrival at the clinic, and one of the most inspiring. We have to learn more Hindi.

We weeded a path in the garden for awhile, undeterred despite the ravenous chitti lal (red ants) that were so small you couldn't feel until they'd already bitten you, which left a stinging burn that seemed to last exponentially based on how many bites you got. Everything in the garden seemed to be of use. Even the weeds we were pulling up, one woman told us, were used for their roots to cure diarrhea. When another gardener heard Ruth sniffling, he walked over to some bushes and pulled off a few leaves. He told her to make tea with them and that it would cure her cold. We'll update you later on the tea's effectiveness.

We lunched (chappatis, dal, bhindi, rice, and chai), went through more newspaper clippings in the library after being rejected from yoga because our abdominals were too full, and chatted it up with Shehnaz (we're going to meet her family on Saturday!) for awhile after the clinic closed. We took another techno-break in our room then headed out to find some kites to fly. Last night we sat in the volunteer tower when the 5 pm call to prayer was announced. It seemed like as soon as that call went off, all of the kids' kites went up. I'm sure we saw at least forty little black diamonds gliding through the sky in trained circles. We decided that we had to be at it by the next day, and so we were. We mentioned our plan to Roopa and she told us that she always and collects kites in Sambhavna that local kids lose when their strings break to give to the cook's sons, Aashish and Jimmy. Now we had a source.

We went downstairs and Ruth monkeyed up a tree to retrieve the first kite, I stuck two huge branches out of a bathroom window on the upstairs story to harness the second, and Ruth shimmied up another tree that most definitely could not have supported her weight without Dede and I providing human buttresses to get the third. These kites are made out of wrappers, sticks, and string, but proved to be respectably durable once we patched them up with some masking tape. We attempted and failed to fly them off of our balcony, but some kids accross the street saw us from their roof and ushered us over. When we got there, we realized that we had been duped and that they couldn't actually fly kites. The daughter is 21 and teaches as well as studies physical therapy and translates Hindi to English, and the son is 15, is in the tenth standard, and plays criquette. We made a date with her for tomorrow to visit one of the biggest mosques in Asia, which happens to be in Bhopal.

We got back to the clinic then entertained Aashish and Jimmy with my digital camera for awhile before getting dressed for dinner. We went out with Roopa, Dr. Jay, and Maude to a fancy restaurant where we were plain too loud. We got to know so much about them and how things were for them growing up in regions from Berlin to Maharastra (the state from which Dr. Jay's mom won the Best Mother Award). Ever day I am more and more grateful to be in such a diverse and intreaguing place as Sambhavna. Every person we meet, every task we undertake, every view we see seems to enrich our lives far beyond the experience prior to it. And it's just our third day!

Thoughts on the disaster

Dede here. Yesterday as we were eating lunch in the outdoor cafeteria – a shiny grey outdoor platform shielded by a grass-thatched roof – I realized something about our blog. This blog describes in detail the highlights of our work and experiences at Sambhavna clinic but when it comes to capturing the unique (and in many ways still mysterious) order of the place as well as the work that makes this place so special, it doesn’t come close. Thus I decided, sitting there finger deep in eggplant and chilis and ankle deep in poisionous mosquito saliva, to explain a few crucial things we have been learning about Sambhavna. 1) If we had any shadow of a doubt about the validity of Sambhavna’s and IJC’s (International Justice Campaign) claims of the continued gravity of the contamination in Bhopal and its effects, it has been thoroughly stamped out. From the 

corridor outside our room we can look past the lush herb garden that Sambhavna has planted to a hideous reminder in the distance. The Union Carbide India Limited factory that spewed the toxic gas cloud of methyl isocyanate on Dec. 3^, 1984 stands unabashedly rotting for all in this area (Qazi camp) to see, evoking the trauma of that night and reminding with every run of brass-colored rust of the poison it continues to leak into their soil and groundwater. Lately, I,ve been trying to imagine it and you should too; what if the resources that are both most precious to us and most taken for granted – our soil and water – had undetectable poisons in them? What if th

e water we drank no

nchalantly from the tap our used to boil pasta could end up giving our children painful malformations or causing the moldlike blooming of psoriasis on our skin? I wonder how any Dow executive could  live with themself if they actually came here and faced the calamities of past and present that Dow is legally, not to mention ethically, liable for. Every time that I see that rotting tower I think about the presentation that a specialist on cleanup of contaminated sites gave; he explained it wouldn’t take very much money (the highest estimate comes to $30 million) to rid the area around the factory of contaminated topsoil and water, despite 25 years of the toxins spreading. If this is not done, he added emphatically, every hard rain (like the one we had 2 days ago) compounds the damage, forcing the contamination downward into deep groundwater and even aquifers and allowing it to travel to even more communities. $30 million dollars for a corporation as massive as Dow is a joke. What isn’t a joke is the cynical and disgusting reality that Dow’s acknowledgement of the truth would end up costing them billions as many who invest in them would realize what a precedent such actions set. ‘Imagine’ they would exclaim to their spouses and business partners ‘ what would happen is every corporation began to pay such reparations. Tata, Coca Cola, Nike. Imagine how much we’d lose.’ Shit. Now I’ve gotten bogged down in this rant and forgotten to leave space for information and thoughts about the clinic. Well, more will accumulate and I’ll record them in my next entry. In the mean time, now you have a sense of the mental rotations and spirals I experience when pondering this harsh reality that once was an amalgamation of facts and fuzzy images and now is a community that is waking up creating the bleating, beeping, screaming and laughing that is drifting through my window with the early morning light. 

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!

Settling in with the chipmunk and the puddles

 Dede here. Today was mostly a day of settling in and exploring the clinic. We woke up at 5 to a long, flat, ancient sounding melody blaring from a nearby mosque. Much of the community around the clinic in the neighborhood of Qazi camp is muslim so the calls to prayer throughout the day have already become natural time markers in our day. It was raining and the puddles in the corridor outside our room grew all day as the rain strengthened, promising luxurious homes for the mosquitos to sit in and congratulate themselves on being so quick, tiny, quiet and ubiquitous. Above is the view from the roof outside our room. Anyway we had some time before the sunrise so Ruth and I read (Moon Palace by Paul Auster for me and Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry for her) and listened to David Bowie while Alizarin dozed. The we got up and ate a quick breakfast. Long story short Ruth got an oreo crumb stuck in her eye kicking off the day with a long, hard bout of laughter.
 This is main portion of the clinic including the library and research area. After breakfast we cleaned the volunteer kitchen hardcore with boiling water and rags that turned black with dirt, dust and grease as we wiped the surfaces, walls, sink and bottoms of cans clean. Later, we unpacked and then spent some time in the library reading about ayurveda, practicing hindi and meeting some nice men who work doing surveys in the community and statistics about the effects of the gas and water pollution. They found our hindi hilarious.

   viny area on the roof
  solar panels that pwer the clinic and play area for the kids made out of recycled car tires
 ahhh the futility of raking water...
 garbage goats. yum.

sheets provided by sambhavna hanging after our fellow volunteers (two nice but somewhat disillusioned women from Nottingham) washed them because they are planning to leave in the next few days. We also live with a softspoken, very smart woman named Rupa who is an ayurvedic doctor working at the clinic and whom has lived in this room for 2 years. Rupa has been showing us the ropes a bit,  including giving us the down low on the cafeteria schedule (we ate a delicious and mindnumbingly spicy meal there for lunch at a table with 8 people who work at the clinic- who chatted away in hindi- and one very brave chipmunk who jumped up on the table and crab walked intimidatingly at all of our metal platters of dal, chana and rice til a woman across from us in a tear kurta and with baby cheeks tossed it a little flake of chopati). 

Word of the day: recouperate.

We had a blast in Bombay. We'll dearly miss Tia and Amaya (left, playing in the only plot of privately owned grass around) and their cravings for Bollywood movies, shopping, and boy talk, but leaving Bombay wasn't as hard as it could have been. Ayesha was with us so long that if she'd stayed on the train a minute longer the train would've swept her up and she'd be in Bhopal with us now. It'll be impossible to thank the whole family enough for their hospitality and getting all of our transportation and necessity stuff under control, so I'll just announce how wonderful they are to the universe of bloggers and maybe they'll feel some vibes of appreciation from around the world.

The overnight train from Bombay to Bhopal was unbelievable. (Check Ruth's blog for some better pictures, but we should note that our beautiful new kurtas are from Ayesha. Don't worry, we'll keep them in good shape.) Standing in an open doorway on a moving train means you're free of all fears and concerns and doubts, replete with love for the unknown that awaited us at the landing station in Bhopal 30 minutes later.

Unfortunately, none of us slept much on the train ride. Or the night before. So though we enjoyed our meeting with Sathyu and Rachna this morning and have already started making preparations for the art project we're going to be doing with the Kids Against Dow Carbide group for the 25th anniversary of the disaster using pots corroded by the contaminated water that people have no choice but to use, we haven't done much today except walk around a bit and lie in bed.

Swadisht.

Chicago to Air India to Bombay

I am sitting in the girls' room of the Chinai/Swamy apartment feeling welcome as only Indians can make you feel (as far as my encounters have proven). Dede's sleeping in the next room, Ruth and the girls are watching Kambakkht Ishq, a romantic comedy directed by Sabbir Khan, and Ayesha's in the living room with her mom.

Our flights here were just ridiculous. Eight or so hours from Chicago to Frankfurt, where Dede and I fruitlessly attempted to switch our flight to the direct flight to Bombay, rather than stopping over in Delhi which ended up costing us five hours worth of a delay. We made some friends along the way and created a ton of drawings during our time in transit.

Since then today's been pretty relaxed. We've all got mendi on our hands, we've taken lots of pictures and videos, and right now I'm learning how to cook dal, aloo mattar, rice, and chappatis.

Regrettably, we head to Bhopal tomorrow evening, not to return to Bombay until December at the latest (Christmas, baby!).

Bhopal Conference 2009

The fifth annual Bhopal Conference, which was held at UIC this year, was our first real contact with the international Students for Bhopal group. We spent Friday night getting to know a lot of the members at a dinner graciously hosted by the Millards, Saturday learning about everything from the legal complications of the Union Carbide disaster to the underground workings of the Yes Men and getting a phone-update from an activist in Bhopal, and Sunday concentrating on efforts for the upcoming 25th anniversary of the disaster.

We were impressed by the many people who traveled so far to be at the conference, from the Georgians who drove for eleven hours to the intrepid girl from England, but most of all we were affected by the immense amount of inspiration that everyone provided. Six of the twenty-eight attendees of the conference had spent an extended amount of time at Sambhavna Clinic and all claimed that the experience had heavily shaped their lives, and that the incessent amount of hope that the people of Bhopal exude alone is reason enough to set foot in the clinic.

We came away from this conference with renewed excitement, (somewhat) more realistic expectations, and a long list of goals to bring to the clinic with us.

The only thing left for us to do was finish packing...