Memoirs of a Foreigner

They call it reverse culture shock. For me it feels like this: I am freezing. I wear a sweatshirt everywhere I go. I have a new sense of indignation about the amount of energy Americans use. It is ridiculous. People have central air–for my Indian brothers and sisters that is hug A/C units that keep the whole house/ building cool. Often people set the temperature at 70-74 degrees Fahrenheit which is 21-24 degrees Celsius.

The fact that everyone here owns a car–like four per family if there are four people over 16 years old–seems strange. The sizes of the houses, the amount of stuff in the houses, and vastness of options at the grosery store seem a bit overwhelming.

I thought that maybe new styles of clothes might stand out to me, but the newer trends seem to be the GPS, and the vegetable garden. Everyone seems to have a small GPS called a tom-tom. You enter the address you are going and an automated voice directs you when to turn as the screen shows a car winding long a digital map. The voice can be very bossy, after one half mile turn left, turn left, stay left. It is generally accurate but occasionally might lead you to an empty parking-lot. I like the idea of not getting lost in an unfamiliar city, but I’m not sure about this kind of dependence on technology. In Delhi, people just stop and ask people where to go. It’s much more relational that way.

The vegetable garden. This is a positive trend to be sure. Almost everyone I have stayed with has had a vegetable garden. I remember when my mom had a vegetable garden… the home owner’s association came and mowed it down.
Maybe somethings are changing for the good.

As I was getting ready to leave Delhi. I started thinking about how I could begin to explain to friends in the states what my life there is like. I wanted to take pictures of everything I saw and try and capture my life on camera. But there are so many things that pictures can’t explain and not only that but I didn’t get around to taking all the pictures I imagined I would take. So below are a few pictures of the flat I stay in, my bed on the floor, my plastic toliet seat and shower that has no seperation or curtain defining it from the rest of the room, the redgate to our building, the presswalla kids that ring our door bell five times a day, a newspaper recycle man on a bicycle on the street below, and the porch we hang our laundry on and if by chance it is not over 100 degrees we sit on. But I would like to describe a few moving shots of everyday sights that will help you place where I am in coming from as I marvel in being back in the States but know that a piece of my heart remains on the otherside of the world.

That man on the bicycle is calling out in a loud and repetative tone, “PAPER, PAPER, PAPER.” Then a fruit vendor comes pulling his cart down the street calling out, “Carbusa, Alm, Liche, Carbusa, Alm, Liche,” (Watermelon, manago, Liche). A woman in a house dress comes out of her balcony and asks the man his rate after telling him how much she will pay she lowers a bucket down on a string. He puts what she asks for in the bucket but tells her to give his price. She insists on her price and lowers down her rupees. Next a man who is selling something in a basket on the back of a bike, but I haven’t figured out what comes down the road calling out his merchandise to a tune that is bound to get stuck in your head all day. I’ll video tape it one day. Though I am enjoying the piece of being in a place where vendors don’t call out loudly at 6 in the morning, I am confident that after a few months of being in the states I would miss it. 

Wednesday night I went to homegroup at my friends’ Tenu and Julie place. It’s a group of 6-10 young people mostly from the Northeast that crowd into a simple little room on the fourth floor of a concrete building. We sit on a plastic coated straw mat that covers marble floors. The walls are concreate covered in peeling pink paint. The bathroom is common for four flats and there is a closet-size kitchen off of the florestent tube lit room–just to give you a picture.

This week Tenu and Julie invited their landlady because she wanted us to pray for her. When she came in I was in the middle of sharing and she kept saying something to Tenu in Hindi and Tenu was telling her to wait until after. Then as soon as the group ended and we prayed for her this Auntie told me she thought I was very beautiful (I happened to be wearing a red punjabi suit–the traditional Delhi attire). I thanked her–but she continued. I wasn’t sure what she was saying something about marrying her son. I understand a little less Hindi then my other friends there, so they said, “Do you know what she is saying? She is saying ‘why didn’t you tell me about this one, if I knew her six months back she could have married my son.” I smiled, knowing this was a mother’s highest compliment . But she didn’t stop there, she said that her Baho (daughter-in-law) was causing many problems and if I agreed on this offer she would run that girl off and I could marry her son. The household recieves Rs. 80,000 income a month from rented rooms and I wouldn’t have to do anything except cook dinner and wash dishes. My friends were dying laughing but this lady was serious. They kept saying, “Do you know what she is saying?” In India a proposal from a mother is more serious than a proposal from a young man.

It is weird for me to think that my this time next week I’ll be back in the U.S. of A. Being away for 9 months has made me very aware of just how American I am. Sure I have criticisms of my culture and certainly for our government, but America is beautiful and we take that for granted. The streets are clean. Furthermore the common courtesy that we give one another is unique. We allow space between people in lines to buy burgers. No one stands over your shoulder when you are shopping. Not to mention that we have porcelain toilet seats–here they are plastic. For an American reading this, you might say “of course,” but  for someone else these things are not first nature.

When a friend asked me about monsoon season a few weeks ago this is what I wrote:

The monsoon season in Delhi offically starts at the end of June and lasts until September. However it doesn’t actually rain much in Delhi so it reality it is more like this: there are two summers in Delhi. The first summer begins in April and lasts through June. It feels like Phoenix. The second summer begins in July, it lasts through September and feels like Houston. Only it doesn’t rain in Delhi as much as it does in Houston, it’s only hot and humid like Houston.

We were in summer # 1, it was dry and hot at least 110F each day. But then it started raining, and thunder storming and it has dropped 20 degrees. This nice weather has been off and on for five days or so. Last night it  rained the whole night. I love sleeping to the sound of rain.

Confession: I am addicted to Lost-the T.V. show. This evening I imagined myself as Kate en-caged by the others (yes I am in season 3), and someone comes and lets me out. But I don’t trust that person. So when that person is off guard I knock him out and run through the jungle going my own way. That weird black monster cloud thing comes and just before it moves through me, my rescuer whom I have treated like a captor stands turns the energy field on and the cloud turns away. I am back with my rescuer and am safe. After a few days, I get suspicious again, why is he so interested in helping me? There must be some other motivation. I am better off on my own. So I run away again.

“Repent and believe the good news!” What does that mean? We have Christianized those words beyond comprehensibility. We seem to think “repent” means admit that you are a sinner. “Believe” means wish something so hard that it comes true. And “good news” means “gospel” which means that Jesus died on the cross so that we sinners can go to heaven.

But we leave out the beginning Jesus’ main message “The time has come, the kingdom of God has come near.” The good news is that the kingdom has come near. On Saturday evenings my family gathers with the family who lives downstairs from us and is in fact our landlords for a time of worship and prayer. This evening my Dad read Mark 1:14-15 and he told us the contextual meaning of these words. His teacher these days is N.T. Wright. Wright talks about a story which Josephus (a first century Jewish historian) tells about being sent to put down a rebellion. When he reaches the rebels he tells them to repent and believe in him. Only those rebels didn’t hear the religious mumble-jumble we hear, rather they understood him to be saying stop trying to make your own way out, trust in me and my way.

This is just what the Kingdom of God is–the rule and reign of God. The ‘place’ where his will is done. So again I have to ask myself what that means to me. I know I’m that feisty girl that just keeps running away– who thinks she knows a better way. But I have set my whole life around entrusting my life to God, I say I believe in Jesus. Do I? Do I trust Jesus or do I think that I have a better way?

I am feeling homesick. The problem is that I don’t know where home is. They say that home is where the heart is…if only that was a simple answer. Perhaps there is something about only being a month away from returning to the U.S. that has me longing for my home land. This last nine months has been my longest time away from the States. My mom has taken a vow to see if she can go the entire time in the U.S. without having rice. She is over it. It is hard to know if it is better to talk to more people from home, eat more french fries, drink coke, drink wine, look at In Style Magazine or if it is better to put all of that aside for a few weeks and just throw myself in the water. Maybe if I do nothing that reminds me of home, I won’t miss it so much. The weird thing about this is that just last year I was in Jersey and went I felt home sick I’d make chai or Indian food.

I started reading this book last night called The Christ of the Indian Road by E. Stanley Jones. As a foreigner who committed his life to India this is what he wrote

I felt that we who come from a foreign land should have the inward feeling, if not the outward sign, of being adopted sons of India, and we should offer our message as a homage to our adopted land; respect should characterise our every attitude; India whould be home, her future our future, an we her servants for Jesus’ sake.

A few months ago my friend Hena who is an N.R.I. (Non-resident Indian) told me that I was a real American Desi. I was flattered. I love India. But can I bind myself to India as Jones suggests? Should I? Is this my calling?

I write this as I am preparing to go home for five weeks. Then I will return to India for at least six months. I will always love India, but is living here my vocation or season of my life? I do not know. Yes, though some of my friends may not believe it I am a “J” (on Meyers-Briggs). In other words, I like to make plans. I like to know what is next.

As a foreigner I often feel overwhelmed in Delhi. It can be something as simple as men staring at me or something as profound as my friends being forced out of their home with less than a weeks notice. I could make a list of the things that make me ask if I can really do this or rather declare I cannot do this, but last week I experienced something that I can never forget. I visited a village within the city of Delhi otherwise known as a slum which has no water.

My Dad and I each rode on the back of a friend’s bike (motorcycle). Dad was behind Shuckti and I was behind Rocky. We drove through the city threading here and there until we reached a beautiful area called Vasan Vihar. “All the foreigners are used to staying here,” Rocky called back to me. “This is embassy area.” Just then we passed a beautiful brick school labeled “public.” (In India public does not denote government run but is usually what Americans refer to as ‘private.’ Just then we turned a corner and went back two centuries at least and we entered a village. The buildings were cement for the most part and a ditch drain ran along either side of the path in front of each home. We entered a room much like the other room/houses people stayed in except that it was filled with desks. The ten children turned at looked at us. A friend of a friend named James greeted us. He sent one of the older boys to buy us cold drinks. It was at least 100 degrees that day and there were no fans and no trees to shade anyone. Soon James asked us to come to the front because if we sat in the back the children would only be looking back and not even look at their work. We went to the front and I started greeting the children and asking their names. They were very excited that I was speaking Hindi and spouted off all at the same time. I had to ask them to speak one at a time and deri, deri, boleia (speak slowly). Many of these children were in school but their parents were illiterate so they were unable to help them so James had opened the church for tuition (tutoring) each afternoon/evening. He explained to me that many of the children did not go to school, but when I asked the kids in that room they said they did.

Then James invited us to walk around the village with him. Everywhere we walked people were staring at us. Many smiled and children said hello. Just in front of me a woman scooped up a pile of dung. She was not trying to make the path cleaner, she would make the shit into a patty and then it would be burned in order for her to cook her food. We walked by the Rajistanis, the people from Herionia and south Indians. In the last area we came to we began to see many donkeys. “These people are very poor,” he said (this is coming from a man who lives with his wife in a room built above house in this same village). “The donkey’s are their only income.” “What do you mean?,” I asked. They are hired to carry heavy loads. Just then a boy of about twelve years old herded a few donkeys past us. One donkey bumped into my bottom and the boy laughed. I smiled and brushed the donkey hair off my pants. Young mothers holding babies stood around with children watching us. “These kids don’t go to school,” James said. This time I thought he was exaggerating, maybe they don’t go to a good school I thought. Then he began asking the kids. No they did not go to school. They have no money for uniforms and books.

As we walked around I noticed many jugs of water or empty jugs lying here and there. One girl at the study center was drinking water out of an old whisky bottle. Then James answered the question I didn’t even think to ask. “There is no water here. We have to get it all from outside. I go each day, it is my duty.” “There is not even a well or a pump?” I asked thinking of my prior village experiences. “There are 13 pumps in this village and they are all broken.” I was shocked. I told my Dad. They have no toilets, they have no water. They serve the city, they are surrounded by the city but they live a village life. Many of these people are servants in diplomats homes and they live like this. A few churches in Delhi are collecting an offering this week. The church is going to sponsor the repairing of the first pump. They have a dream to buy a tank that will be filled by the pump each day. Then the pump can be locked up so it will not break again.

I spent the night at my friends’ place the other day and after getting up I went to retrieve the newspaper from the terrace. By the way, these girls live in a little flat on the roof of a four story building and I was pretty impressed that the guy could throw the newspaper all the way up there. We opened the paper to find out if the Olympic torch had been safely run the day before—the 21,000 troops deployed to guard the runners insured that the 1,500 protestors chanted anti-Beijing elsewhere though they also ensured that civilians did not view the torch—once that was settled, we had our tea. Then we aimlessly flipped through the paper. I started laughing out loud and my friend was confused because she was holding the comic section not me.

This is what I saw: