Marrenahalli Living

It's ironic that I write about everyday life on my last day here. It is true that I’ve been worked hard, though I feel that I have fire left in the tank.

We are packing up now, yet I’ve barely been able to unpack life here. But I have a little time now with a packed bag to write down stuff.

This is what home looks like:

Yes, I lived in a big pink house. Much better than a
Big Blue House with a Bear though...

This girls room/house

The wall of pictures

Kitchen, minus convenience

"storage"

The view you get when you walk it.
It looks really messy, but try to trust me, it wasn't THAT bad... k

Looking back the other way, west

The south wall of the living space, featuring;
Basic Kannada, House Rules, Map,
Photo's, and Team Calendar

Kitchen on the left, bedroom to the right

My mornings start early, at the beginning of the month it was a solid 5:30 wakeup courtesy of the nearby temple. It blasts out all sorts of messed-up music that truly rattles the mind like some irritating joke, like some jester dancing in your face who you just want to punch. Over the month I have got used to it and I’ve been able to get back to sleep without ever using earplugs (the rest of the team use them), and now my wakeups are mostly due to delightful potty runs.  

Had only 2 foggy mornings, not very cold though

We get up between 7:30 at 8, depending on how tired we are. I’m usually the third one up and the first task of the day is to decide if I feel dirty enough for a shower.

In one situation, it’s a quick change and off to breakfast. The other…

PAIN!!!

The shower works by filling one big bucket with water, and then a small one that you pour over yourself then refill from the big bucket.

There is nothing like a cold bucket shower in the morning. Nothing.

More specifically, there is nothing like the first 2 drenchings from a bucket shower.

I wouldn’t say that it’s jarring or rattling, the cold water is more elegant than that. It is like your whole body is in a pressure suit that suddenly turns on and squeezes every ounce of your skin that it contacts. And with that feeling of being pressed tight, your breath is stolen away from you and it's an effort to take in air.

The pressure relaxes as time goes on, but each new wave of water is another weaker compression.

I do about 4 drenchings and then put shampoo + conditioner in my hair, 1 more, then soap and scrub my body, 3 more to wash off it all, then grab the towel in relief. In all it takes 10 minutes.

That’s what a shower feels like to me.

Toilet in front, buckets for shower are beneath the left taps

The sight you see
when you take a wee

It is interesting to think that this is such a strange feeling to me. For so many, this is routine, and also is something that can be lived with. Without a doubt, the few times I’ve had a hot shower on this trip it has been incredible, but this is just another case of convenience rather than necessity. I could live with this, I have lived with this, and some part of me prophesizes that I will live with this (though hopefully it will still be bucket shower but with hot water).

Being clothed and ready for the day, I dive into some muesli and milk, and occasionally add left-over steamed rice. Breakfast also consists of bananas and some try-hard toast. I say try-hard as it doesn’t actually go brown, it’s smaller, and much more brittle than the toast of Melbourne’s home. I put peanut butter on one, jam or honey on the other. I used to add butter but we left it out over a weekend and I’ve been suspicious of a funky bit of orange on it ever since.

Banana storage system,
featuring some artistic 'flare'

I eat breakfast with the 3 other lads I share the bedroom with. I usually read a bible passage whilst doing this, and I’ve been working through John’s gospel, though I relaxed from this in later days as I’ve tried to get some work done. Initially I’d also update my journal of the previous day’s adventures, yet I stopped doing that in order to record just the crucial bits.

The girls shuffle into our room/house from their own room/house which is a mirror of our's yet with a narrower bathroom and less furniture.

After breakfast was the 8:59 morning meeting, which is sometimes commenced by a Spotify rendition of Akuna Matata. The meeting consists of 5 5 5 and then what we were doing that day. 5 5 5 is a self-rating out of 5 to determine wellbeing. The categories are mental, physical, and shits. It establishes a casual team culture that has lead to conversations of poopiness and farting efficiency, a team culture that I will cherish (to clarify, a 5 in shits means too hard/constipation, a 1 means diarrhea, and 3 is perfect, cause I'm sure you really wanted to know that)

After the meeting the team attitude is either “k, let’s get shit done” or it’s “alright, lets take 5, for like an hour, and re-group at 10”. As the month passed on it transitioned more from the second one slowly into the first one, to the point where we were blasting out work even before the morning meeting. 

K, let's get shit done

This was also the time I'd sneak in some washing up on the roof. All the whacking, dunking and squeezing is actually quite relaxing for me, another cultural acceptance exercise. The stages (that I used) for washing were:
1. Dunk item in bucket of detergent water, then pull it out squeeze water back into the bucket. 2. whack it on the stone to get water out, then squeeze to get more out, 3. Dunk in clean water, squeeze water back into clean bucket. 4. Whack and squeeze again to get water out. 5. Put it on the clothes line. 

Then at 10:10  the interns/translators would arrive. Ruby came everyday, and Shazia came most days.

Ruby right, Shaz left

At the start of the month we only had Ruby, which meant that half the team was forced into community engagement mode. It is worth noting that by community engagement, I mean have-as-much-fun-as-you-fricken-can with the villagers. This resulted in some houses being painted, games of volleyball, 1 (only) game of cricket, street frisbee, bundles of sticks being carried, and cococuts being opened. The keys were speaking Kannada and particularly “Nanna sahaya” which is, in it’s literal form, “I help” and then you try to make it sound like a question rather than a command (the actual way of saying ‘How can I help?’ is ‘nanu yen sahaya maadu bahudu’ but who’s got time for that).

But before being in the village, we had to get there. Throughout the month we had a variety of different transport methods. It started by building a relationship with the owner of a big rickshaw that could fit us all, his name was Mohan. My team leader would call him every morning and afternoon, put on his aweful Indian accent, and follow this script: ‘hello sir – pickup – marenahalli – 10:15 – Ok sir, thankyou’. The ricksaw had been modified to include a padded seat along the bar separated the driver and the passengers, the drivers seat is elongated so that you can fit two people on either side of him, and the rear canvas is removed with an added foot tray at back which basically becomes a third row facing backwards. I can understand if that’s hard to picture (which is why I include pictures) but it’s crazy, and it’s awesome. By the second week we began to break-off the relationship with Mohan and get free rides to the village in the van of a 40K employee. It was a very tight fit, with many head bangs along the way, both musical and physical. And now in the last week, we’ve caught a few small rickshaws and today we just caught a lift with a stranger who drove past us, and our Team Leader somehow got us a lift to the village.

The tight 40K Van

Old mate Mohan

Modified rickshaw

And so we got to the village at around 10:45 after a drive through rural Bangalore, and bare witness to globalization, urban sprawl, deforestation, and tragic beauty all in one.

In the village we split of into teams and smash out surveys. We walk to people's homes and ask if we could ask them a few questions about their village and their lives. The time for the surveys varied from a 15min blast, often awkwardly standing outside someone’s house, to more than an hour which could include anything from dancing to jamming on a keyboard to lunch. It was very hot when we first started, and people regularly needed to buy more water in the village and I even had to put on my big brimmed-hat and re-apply sunscreen somedays. We did this for 3 weeks, and collected 103 surveys, and we were dang happy with that. It got to the point where we were concerned with going to houses we’d already surveyed, and that’s a good feeling to have.

Looking east towards village from cricket ground

Ominous Shell looms above the horizon

We had lunch provided for free by the school, which was legendary. It was the same food day-in-day-out, samba and steamed rice, but when you’re hungry everything tastes good. It was also amazing to sit with the kids as they pray then eat. The food is free for them too, it’s an incentive from the government to get them to school, and it works.

The leftover lunch is given to the church or to the chickens, and then we play with the kids. And yes, it is as much fun as you’d expect.

We run, we jump, we lift, we unite, we challenge.

We run around a lot with the kids, forming lines that run to the other side of the school (20 metres away) whilst yelling as loud as we can.

We jump for all sorts of reasons, mostly just because the kids start jumping and then we join in. Jumping straight up in the air as high as we can, jumping in circles, we jump anywhere.

We lift kids up high into the air, listen to them giggle as their feet almost kick you in the face. We give them piggy-backs, and I try to lift as many of them as I can like some circus strong man (1 max at 4 littler kids).

We unite kids in fun, as there are conflicts within any school (both guys and girls) but they come together for the chance to join Ring-a-ring-a-rosy or to be lifted by me. We also unite the village by playing with the kids we bring fun and try to send the message that ‘we are here to help you, not to judge you’.

We challenge power imbalances in the games. I know that for me, whenever I saw a school girl interested in what I was playing with some boys, I would offer my hand and bring her into the game. Also I began to see power imbalance aas some of the big boys would pull the smaller ones away from me so that they could get closer and some of the girls skip sometimes skip particular people when playing a game. I try to send the message that everyone should be included in the game, and I’m sure that by doing so I’ve challenged their cultural view of justice.

Lunch finishes and the kids go back into class. Our work even got us onto the regional FB group, and selfies we took with people got more than 150 likes, which was messed up. Besides surveys we also tried to investigate different aspects of the village such as water or tuition, and this helped us get interviews with key people later on. We get on with doing surveys until 3:30 when the interns leave and we either catch a rickshaw home or go with them in the back of the same van from before. During these surverys, it was refreshing to hear people living in poverty laughing. It reminds me of their humanity not their subjectivity.  It works both productively and counter productively as it motivates me to work hard, but also tells me that there isn't much to work on. 
At least they are happy. 

Trying Sugar cane

Sometimes though, after work we go into the main town of Bagalur, a bustling hub for both nearby villages and 40K apparently. It's our go-to place for shopping, travel, photos, atm's, but mostly for food. There's one good restaurant that everyone goes to, and it's this place.

Wide open, straight onto the street, cheap efficiency at its suburban finest. Gobi Manchurian was a favorite amongst the Globers. I got some on the last day, but the rest of the time I tried mixing it up with some culinary hits and misses.

Gobi = Cauliflower

Man living in homelessness
amongst the forgotten construction

We arrive back at home and divide into our rooms/houses. Some take showers, some change clothes, but the first priority is always to get wifi up and running. I sit and relax on my computer, downloading the news of the day. If there’s work to be done, we sit around in our tired state and try to get it done. Otherwise, I go help the chief prep dinner (more “nanna sahaya”) and overtime I became the unofficial chapatti flipper, amongst other robotic jobs  that the chief couldn’t be stuffed doing such as cutting cucumber or carrots.

And so we get to dinnertime, a process that evolved from effort at first to casual as the month passed. It started out formal with a roof-top setting, guests coming over, and a lot of effort to eat with our dirty fingers. The guests were often other 40K teams, especially our neighbours in the village. We put up candles and laid out mats, and it was all quite romantic, besides the mozzies and the random squeels, dog barks, or car horns. But its romantic by Indian standards.

It’s also worth mentioning that we went vegetarian for the month for the dual reason of helping out one of our team members, but also to explore our own pallets (India is, without doubt, the best place to go veg). The dinners slowly turned into sitting on the lounge-space floor (can’t really call it a room) with meticulous management of each finger for eating. I’ll admit it was still messy eating by the end, but it was definitely progress from the first night where I spilt curry on the couch and rice over my shirt.

And then we go back into either work mode or relax mode. Work mode was only activated towards the end of the programme as we had our massive report to write-up. In this case we sat around the same place as dinner, brought out the laptops or tablets, and hit the ground running on either our own tasks (mine was the appendix, so summarising interviews, collecting contacts, organising data) or talking through the group-aspect.

Relax mode on the otherhand, was quite straight forward. We looked at our computers, read books, watched Avatar the Last Air Bender, uploaded any observations from the day, and we just chilled. Some people were in bed at 8:30 in preparation for another tiring day of talking and walking and laughing.

I’d go to bed around 10, feeling very content with a productive day and in need for a good rest before the Temple music started it all again.

We switch off the lights, lock the door, close the windows, switch off all the lights, and lay my heavy head on a firm pillow yet soft mattress. Another contrast in a land full of them.

My bed was top right

It became a bed that was more desirable than a hotel’s by the end of the month, a house that became more of a home than I could have ever expected, a group of strangers that became the type of family I may never experience again, a small time in India that became a miniature life of its own, a place of hard work that became a place of immense love.

A place that I could never be thankful enough for. A place I will truly miss, as it was a place of uncomfortable beauty that Australia has not yet provided, and I’m not sure if it ever will.

That was my life for one month. For just one month. And now, the rest of my life calls me. Another step in the sands of life.