It's been awhile!

Hello All,

It's been a really long time since I've updated. A lot has happened, and I've done a lot, so I'll just update on the last few events.

Emma came to visit for a week or so. It was really nice to have her here. She was sick when she got here, and got progressively worse, and then a little better, and then she left. But it was still nice to have her here. The day after she got here was Diwali. Diwali is this huge festival all over India. In the North it's the festival of lights- and I think they just light little oil lamps all over the country for that. But in the South they have a different festival for lights. So Diwali was pretty much just a huge display of fireworks, and more firecrackers than I've ever cared to hear in my life. For a week or two leading up to the festival firecrackers were getting louder and more and more frequent. On Diwali I woke up pretty sure war had started. All day there wasn't a second of silence. It was honestly a constant stream of insanely loud firecrackers. Some of them were so loud I would temporarily lose my hearing, and then regain it a few seconds later to find that a nearby car alarm had been set off by the cracker. They were some pretty serious stuff. And to make things even crazier (and more Indian) the people who were really into these crackers weren't just your expected, run-of-the-mill teenage boys, but little little children. Ajit, who is 6 years old and lives below us LOVED setting these things off in his hand, and then waiting, and throwing them just in time to see them explode in the air. Some of these, I am fairly certain, could easily take your arm off. But, his parents were there providing "adult supervision"- which pretty much just meant- when they were out of fireworks, going and getting more. Or when they were out of those- going and getting matches to light.

Mostly everyone on Diwali gets a new dress. Because all of my clothes are new here, I just wore a sari. We spent a good portion of the day going from house to house in our little neighborhood, eating and taking photos. That night we went up to this huge hotel called Hotel Supreme- and ate dinner. Emma was wanting some soup for her cold- so we chose that restaurant. It is close to the temple, and overlooks the city. It was amazing how many fireworks there were. All around us there was a constant display of flashing, popping, glittering fireworks. Some of them were a little close for comfort- but for the most part it was just really beautiful.

While Emma was here we went to Chennai. Emily and Laura (the two girls I live with) came along. We stayed in a pretty nice, and relatively expensive (for Indian standards) hotel that smelled a little like mildew. To be fair, it was raining the whole time we were there, so the room didn't have much of a chance to air out or anything. We got there via sleeper train- which I found pretty comfortable, but I think maybe Laura and Emily were a little harder to please. I slept great though for pretty much the whole 9 or so hour ride. While we were in Chennai we spent a good amount of our time trying to barter with the auto drivers. In Madurai I have the advantage of knowing how much it Should cost for me to get from one place to the next- but I was so clueless in Chennai. It made it really hard, not knowing how much I was being ripped off at any given point. But we got around okay. It was raining pretty horribly the whole time- which was unfortunate- but I guess that's what we get for going there during the monsoon season. It was interesting, however, to turn on a national news channel and see the weather danger warning for a place that I was currently in.

We went outside of Chennai one day and went to a crocodile farm. There were a lot of varieties of Crocodiles and alligators there, and a lot of tourists, Indian and Western. Some of the crocodiles had their own cages, but a lot were crammed into one small enclosure with a little space to swim and pretty much no space to move around in. I don't really know how much room it takes to make a crocodile happy- but it was pretty sad at times. On the other hand, most of these are endangered species, given a chance to reproduce. I guess it's the age old zoo debate again.

On our last morning in Chennai Emma and I went to the beach. Chennai has one of the longest (perhaps second longest?) beaches in the world. I think it was called Marina beach, although I could be wrong. A few years back there was a radioactive waste spill or coverup or scandal of some sort- but people were still kickin it in the waves. Mostly it wasn't people swimming around and playing, as far as I could tell, but people who were there to bathe. There were a lot of tourists, and a lot of people selling things. One man came up to us and asked us if we wanted to buy his stuff. In Tamil I said we didn't want to- and then he was curious about us knowing Tamil. And then he asked if we knew Spanish. Emma replied that she did, and then he proceeded to speakin in some language (that was definitely not Spanish). And then he took something out and said we were his friends, and here was a gift. He unwrapped a little parcel, and took out a few pearls, and put one in Emma's hand. He told us he was a deep sea fisherman, and nodded as if this explained a) why he had these pearls and b) why he just put one in her hand. We just kind of looked down at it, and then Emma handed it to him, and we said goodbye and walked off. A young man who had been watching this all followed us down the beach and asked if we would take a picture with him. So we did, and then he asked us if we had American coins, which we didn't (I think I exchanged pretty much every last penny when I got here). Anyway, it was all a pretty good experience- not too much harassment while we were there, and it only smelled mildly awful- but it was nice to be on the beach (and at this point, for some reason, it wasn't raining).

That day Emily and Laura and I went back via train to Madurai, and Emma went back to the US.

Since then things have been progressively getting crazier and crazier. I've spent the last week or so doing mostly only fieldwork stuff. I've interviewed three Catholic priests, one catholic family, and one Hindu priest, and have written, I think, about 19 informal response pages, along with about 15 pages of interview transcriptions. And still I'm pretty far behind.

My fieldwork project is probably going to end up being about something having to do with the differences in the relationships between prayer, images, and God in the educated and uneducated Catholic and Hindu groups in Tamil Nadu. So I think I'm going to have to end up conducting interviews on Hindu and Catholic priests both, and then also educated and uneducated groups of Hindus and Catholics here. Tonight I meet with my Advisor for the first time (officially) to discuss my paper, and what I'm doing, and what resources I need, etc. I'm hoping he can help me out with some books or something because so far I haven't really found anything that's Much help (especially regarding Catholicism).

I have, however, managed to slightly offend two different priests. The first just seemed a little taken aback at me asking him what roll the different statues of saints, or the crucifix, play in prayer. As a result he didn't answer the question and I had to cut my interview short. I guess it was a learning experiences, and his reluctance to answer the question said something about his views, I think. The other instance was when I asked a Catholic priest about the idea of "impurities" within the Church. I meant impurities to mean something in the spiritual sense- sort of like Hinduism and "pollution". But the priest thought I was asking him about priests acting inappropriately. To make things worse it took me way too long to figure out this is what he thought I was talking about, so I was asking him questions like "wait... There's none of What here?". But in the end, people have been really nice and helpful and eager to talk to me.

Last night Nate and I went to this place in Madurai called Vidiyal. Vidiyal is this program that was set up sometime in the last decade or so for working and street children of Madurai. India has a really serious problem of children being sold to work, or children being in abusive positions in their homes, and leaving to find work. Most of these children come from rural areas, and are sold into cities. They end up working as shoe-shiners, or table cleaners in restaurants, or as people cleaning up trash and stuff on the street. They get paid what probably comes out to about five cents an hour, and about 95% percent of them are sexually abused by the time they're 10. Then to make things worse, really none of them are going to school because they're spending so much time working- and so they're in a horrible dead-end position. So this program, Vidiyal, was set up to give children a place to stay if they need it, and to encourage children to get back into school. Nate and I went there to see what it was about. He brought a chess board, and I played badminton with some of the kids. They were honestly the most well behaved children I've ever been around. The program was run amazingly well from what I could see. A few hundred kids were there, and by the end of the night they had all spent a few hours studying and a little bit of time playing, and all of them had been fed. When we left I saw that there was a room where the woman who was in charge that day was doing medical check ups on the kids- giving medicines and just making sure everything was okay.

The kids were really fun. It was sad to see how many of them had scars on their faces and arms, but they were so excited to be there, and so excited to be able to talk with Nate and me. We ended up all playing soccer for quite awhile (they were really surprised that I knew how to play soccer, and by the end of the night we had gotten two of the little girls to play with us so it wasn't ALL boys). Mostly it was just Nate and me vs. 10 or 12 little kids. I would guess the oldest was about 15, and the youngest playing soccer with us was about 8. We were playing in a small muddy field without any shoes on, with a flat ball, and these kids were loving it. It was so much fun- pretty hard- but really fun. Then, when it was time to eat, one little girl said: enough! And all the kids immediately stopped playing, and went and cleaned up. It was amazing that there weren't any who tried to keep playing or anything- they all just seemed to glad to have gotten to play a little.

Nate and I ate there, and then as we were leaving stopped in to talk to the women in charge. She said that we should come back on the weekends to play more chess and soccer, but on the weekdays we should come back to teach English. We asked what grades and she said 2nd to 12th. She said we should just come and see what they're doing in their English books, and help out. So, hopefully we'll be able to make that happen. Already for this weekend there are scheduling conflicts (Saturday we have a seminar with local college students about gender and sexuality, and Sunday I'm going to meet with the potter priest to discuss temple tower statues).

Well, I should get going to meet with my Advisor. Thanks to all of you who've been keeping in touch. I hope everything's going well in the US. And Happy Thanksgiving!

Missing you all,

much love

--- Catie