Conferences, Cultural Events, and a Consular Visit

Earlier in October I traveled up to the city of Dehradun at the foothills of the Himalayas to participate in a national English teacher's conference.  It was nice to be in a place that had more trees an cooler temperatures (at least 70s and 80s instead of 80s and 90s).  In India each conference or educational undertaking is kicked off with a Hindu ceremonial lighting of the light of knowledge.

It was nice to finally meet the team that works in the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi that has been supporting me along with the team in the Mumbai Consulate.  There was also an author from Louisiana who was here for a short-term specialist course, which is under the same program as my fellowship.  He gave one of the plenary speeches on promoting democratic values in the classroom.

I also had the chance to present at the conference.  I was on a panel with 5 other people speaking on 'Homegrown Approaches to Language Teaching' (whatever that means - I just made some stuff up), and then on the final day I gave a workshop called 'Reducing Student Friction in Task Completion.'  It sounds fancy, but I basically adapted some concepts from a business marketing book and applied it to helping students complete their assignments.

It was a good experience and it was the first time I had really presented at a big conference, aside from doing a ten-minute teaching tip at the mini-conference that I helped organize in Utah earlier this year. 

Indians sure love their ceremonies, certificates, and presenting mementos to the participants!  

The Embassy in New Delhi is always looking for cultural and educational programs that the United States can support, and when I met the team I was informed that we were going to have a meeting with the director of the prestigious Forest Research Institute which happens to be located in Dehradun.  It's like if the U.S. Forest Service had one large training academy for anyone involved in forestry.  Government workers and forest 'rangers' from all over the country come here for training and ongoing professional development throughout their careers.  Some of my students are even aiming to get into the training courses here after they finish their Master's degrees.  The embassy is looking to possibly adapt the curriculum that I'm developing with the students of Environmental Science in Vadodara to create a program that would help support and teach communication skills to the people who come here for training.  It was an interesting meeting, but we have yet to see if it goes anywhere.

After the conference finished, I decided to stay the weekend over in the nearby town of Rishikesh.  Rishikesh is a holy city where the river Ganges merges with two other rivers to really start its journey through the country.  It is a center of yoga and meditation and attracts a lot of Indian pilgrims and foreigners looking to complete yoga teacher training courses.

I wanted to spend some time in the mountains hiking, but I did something dumb.  I don't have a high tolerance for spicy food, so sometimes it's hard to find food that doesn't burn.  Whenever I ask if something is spicy the Indians will say, 'No, it's not spicy' but what they mean is it's not spicy for the average Indian, or for someone who likes things spicy.  So while I was walking around hungry I found this guy and couldn't resist some fresh-squeezed sugar cane juice that definitely would not have any chili flakes in it.

Yeah, it was delicious but made me pretty sick so I had to stay in my hotel room for about a day and a half.  Eventually I made it out to walk up the hill to a nearby waterfall.  The road looks nice, but there were a lot of scooters and even some cars that would honk and pass by me.  One guy carrying his wife and two kids on the back of his scooter even stopped to offer me a ride but he was really just looking to earn some money from me.  I said no thanks.  The hike wasn't as peaceful as I had hoped.

I found a spot along the river away from the road and finally found some peace and nature.

Another place I walked to was the ashram where the Beatles spent time studying transcendental meditation and writing music when they came to India in February of 1968.  

A lot of it has been left to be overgrown by the jungle and part of it is listed as a tiger reserve, but I didn't see any tigers around.

On the last night I went to a ceremony called Maha Aarti at a place called Triveni Ghat.  Pilgrims come to offer prayer to the goddess of the Ganga river, and it is considered to be the place where the god Krishna was cremated.

It's always interesting to see people's devotion to a religion that I don't feel I know very much about.  

By the end it turned into a big mosh pit of Hindu joy and celebration.  This happens every evening at sunset at various points along the river, but this location is known to be one of the more popular ones.

Back in Vadodara, I found out the Environmental Science department was having their own conference.  I was asked to watch as the PhD. students were presenting some of the findings from their research. My students were not presenting as they are Master's students, but most of them were there in attendance.

They know I am not a scientist, and that I am here to teach English and communication skills, but they asked me to help judge the presentations that the students were giving.  Here is one section of the topics I had to judge them on:  

I had no idea what most of them were talking about, so I judged them on the things I teach my students, such as voice projection, intonation, body language, slide visuals, etc.   Most student here have a high level of scientific vocabulary, but those who didn't grow up in English medium schools sometimes struggle with grammar and vocabulary outside their field of study.  One thing I did understand, is that there are a lot of new developments and studies in Environmental Science that give me hope for the future of this planet.

Also happening that week was a big festival called Navratri.  Navratri means 'Nine Nights' and celebrates the nine forms of the goddess Durga.  Each evening for nine nights worshipers will do a specific folk dance called the Garba.  Vadodara is actually famous for this festival and the Garba.  It's not a dance that happens just anywhere; there are specific locations and you need tickets to enter those locations.  If you are going to participate in the dancing then the tickets are much more.  One of the teachers in the Environmental Science department was able to get tickets to watch at the location on the university campus.  

Only students and staff in the School of Fine Arts are allowed to participate in this particular one.  It was mesmerizing to watch.

I asked my students how they were able to physically stay up most of the night dancing.  They excitedly told me that many feel they are given spiritual energy to do this for hours each night and they work themselves into a kind of trance.  

I attempted to have English class at 9 am, but not surprisingly most of my students were absent that week.  It didn't help that I told them I believed festivals and family time are important, and that I would unofficially not be taking attendance that week.

The teacher who took me to see the Garba also invited me to watch her dance in a different event that focused on West Bengali dance.  She didn't have time to get her hands dyed with henna beforehand, so her friend used a marker to get her ready.

It's nice to be in a culture that is warm and welcoming, where I get invited to random things by people I have only known for a short time.  

It was an entertaining evening and fun to see someone I know up on the stage.

Finally, I was informed by the Mumbai consulate that the Consular General Mike Hankey wanted to visit Vadodara at the end of the week.  He wanted to come and see the famous Navratri festival and Garba dancing, but he also wanted to see the work I was doing here.  I felt honored that a high-ranking diplomat would take the time to come and visit us himself.  They asked me in advance to choose 5-6 students to sit down and have a conversation with him.  It was an easy choice - I chose the students who had regularly been coming to class that week.  We spent some class time learning about his background and preparing questions together that the students could ask him.

He asked them about what kinds of things they were studying in our class and what they planned to do in the future.  They had a chance to ask him their questions.  They talked about environmental issues and the differences between teaching and learning in India vs. the U.S.  Some of them have expressed interest in possibly studying or working in the United States, so they were interested in what he had to say.  They also loved that he came in a big black government SUV (bulletproof?) with a security guard.  He was a very nice guy and the students and I really enjoyed meeting him.

The next big festival coming up is Diwali, and this is when schools take their big end of the year break.  My university will be closed for 3 weeks, so I plan to come home and be with Gregg and my family.  It would have been fun to stay and see the festivities or visit other parts of India, but there were many reasons I decided that going home would be the best thing to do.  It's a little difficult for Gregg to work from here so he is still in Utah.  I also found out I am on the wrong visa, and I've still not been able to complete my foreigner registration.  So, I will be reapplying for a different visa as soon as I get there because I can only apply for that from my home country.  If all goes well I should return to India just after Thanksgiving.  And there will be NO chili flakes on my turkey and mashed potatoes. 🙂

Settling In

It was so fun having Gregg here even just for a short time!  We went to see the biggest tourist site in Vadodara, the Laxmi Villas Palace where the royal family / Maharajas over the area lived and grew up.  One of them started MSUB, the university where I teach at.

We did an audio tour of the palace and learned about what it was like living in the palace.  The family still lives here in one wing of the house, but have opened up the rest of the palace to tourists.

There were no photos allowed inside, unfortunately.  This article shows some of what it looks like and explains more about the family.  We also had a chance to try some more Indian food.  Gregg doesn't have as much of an aversion to spicy food as I do, and we found some new restaurants to eat in.  

We also tried to find a river for Gregg to fish in, but it turned out to be harder than we thought.  The river that runs through the city is polluted and the banks are overgrown with vegetation.  The larger river outside the city was hard to find access to (especially in an Uber with a driver that didn't speak English), so we'll have to try again another day.

I was sad when Gregg had to go back, but we agreed that it was the best decision because of some of his upcoming projects at work.  He will try to come back after the elk hunt, at the end of October/beginning of November.  

My next big task was to get registered at the Foreigners Registration Office.  The process of doing anything (especially anything related to the government) is always a long, tedious, bureaucratic process.  I uploaded my documents to the portal but instead of being accepted I got an automated message saying I needed to come to the office for an interview.  The interview was to be in Ahmedabad, 2 hours away, scheduled for the following morning.  I panicked and contacted Mr. Manthan at the university, and he knew a person who knew a person who used to be the professor of the guy I was supposed to meet with.  He was able to change the meeting for a day I wasn't teaching.  The university hired a car and driver to take me to the appointment.  Here I am sitting in the hallway, not very happily waiting to find out why they wanted to see me.

It turns out to be the same issue the other Fellows faced.  There is no real visa category for the English Language Fellows program, so they brought me in on a research visa.  The guy wanted to know more about the program, and how they were justifying it as 'research.'   Long story short, I had to get a new letter from the university with more details about the program.  They threw in some more fancy words and got some extra higher-ups to stamp and sign the letter, and now I'm waiting to see if they will accept it.  Without foreigner registration I can't open a bank account, and I would be ineligible for a visa renewal.  It also might mean I pay a big fine when it comes time to leave.  It could jeopardize Gregg being let back into the country, since his visa is dependent on mine.  So, it's been stressful.  

After the meeting I had the car and driver for a few more hours, so I had him take me to the Ashram that was founded by Mahatma Gandhi.

It was relaxing to walk around, read the information and think about the life he lived.  It was from here he launched his non-violent resistance to British rule.   

He instructed people to spin and make their own clothes and learn to extract and use Indian salt, so they wouldn't be reliant on the British. 

They had a completely self-sufficient ashram that practiced communal living here.

He spoke against the caste system, and praised the poorer classes.  When people would riot and become violent, he would fast until they would calm down.   His teachings inspired Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the non-violent civil rights movement in the U.S.  Tomorrow is his birthday, and a national holiday in India.  

To celebrate the holiday, people clean.  The university organized a 'cleaning afternoon' instead of having classes yesterday, and the students all pitched in to clean the classrooms in the building.  

It was nice to see a different city, but I actually prefer Vadodara because it is smaller and not as crowded.  I am starting to learn my way around the city and I have figured out how to buy food and other things I need.  This day was lucky because the fruit guy and the vegetable guy were on my street at the same time.

I am finally settling in to the university.  The head of the department had a birthday and it's tradition to provide lunch for the teachers on your birthday.  They were nice enough to ask what my preferences were, and I just said, 'Anything not spicy!'  So they ordered pizza.  

My students are polite, hardworking, and friendly.  Our classroom doesn't have air conditioning, and there are fewer materials compared to what I had at the University of Utah, but I am learning how to provide all the assignments and materials online, so the students can use their phones to access them.  Here they are learning how to calculate their own ecological footprint as part of their reading assignment.

We are on the top floor, so with the windows open the view of the campus just looks like a jungle of tree canopies.  There are lots of monkeys, squirrels, big black birds, and noisy bright green birds all in view of our classroom window.

As they calculated their ecological footprint, I was amazed to see how little they consume compared to most in the western world.  Afterwards I felt like I needed to tell them that I am not here to preach to them about how to take better care of the earth, but that they, as Indians, were in a unique position to teach the rest of the world how to live in harmony as the world's population increases, how to adopt a plant-based diet that uses spices and flavors and protein-rich grains that most of us have never heard of, how to keep traffic flowing with smaller modes of transportation, and how to generally not use so much of the earth's resources.  I think it made them happy to realize that they have something to offer the rest of the world, when so many people around them are just trying to leave India to either study or work abroad.

Another part of my settling in has been to try to find a decent pool where I can swim for exercise.  I found a municipal pool for the public, but when I went there, of course I couldn't just pay the entrance fee and go in.  First I needed to get a doctor's note (signed and stamped) saying that I was healthy enough to swim and then take a swimming test (and wait for it to be signed and stamped) before I could buy a monthly pass.  Plus, I have to pay all the various fees online, which I need an Indian bank account for (see issues above).

I left the pool disappointed but still determined, and I decided to walk down the street to a place where I had seen on the way in they were selling house plants.  I didn't want the trip to be a total waste.  On the way I passed some pop-up tents with markets inside, so I did a little impulse shopping.

Everybody is getting ready for the next big festival, Navratri, where they dance for nine nights in October.  My colleagues have promised to take me to one of the places where they do the folk dancing but you can see some of it in this video.

I made it to the plant store and bought a house plant to help keep me company in the apartment.

Gregg and I always name our plants Robert in honor of Robert Plant, the lead singer of Led Zeppelin.  It's nice to have little Robert here.  He looks so happy in his new home!

Here's a random video of some street ruckus.  I still don't know if it was a political rally, a religious celebration, or a wedding party.  Another mystery of India . . . .