The Wandering Two: Not another salwar kameez!

Hi from Pune; things are going well so far and we’ve been here for almost one month. Naveed has been working on a sex education and life skills development program to implement in local secondary schools and also occasionally helping out in the creches (daycare centres) on the first floor of the office. We will also be giving English lessons to the ladies who work with Deep Griha’s Integrated Services for HIV/AIDS (DISHA). I have been trying to figure out what I’ll be doing as coordinator of Wake Up Pune; it’s been pretty overwhelming but I’ll get there. We’ve had a few meetings and are in the process of planning some awareness events. We also had a bootcamp yesterday to teach new volunteers about HIV. It reminded us a lot of our work with the peer educators in South Africa and Kenya and went really well. I have also been working on fundraising and grant applications.

We attended a feast here and met some of the local Baha’is which was really nice. We’re heading into festival and wedding season here in India. The 15th was Independence Day and last Monday was a festival called Janmashtami to celebrate the birth of Krishna. It is celebrated by hanging clay pots filled with ghee, fruits, milk and money high up in the air and people build human pyramids to try to reach it and claim the pot. There are usually big prizes for whoever can reach it. There’s some really great pictures of it at http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/08/krishna_janmashtami.html We didn’t actually see any pyramid building but we did see a pot being hung between two cranes and large crowd of people; they were hosing the ground underneath the pot to make it muddy and slippery and add to the excitement. Oh dear.

We have Wednesday and Thursday off work for Ganesh Chaturthi (Ganpati) which is a festival to celebrate the birth of the Hindu god Ganesh. All around Pune they have been erecting huge wooden platforms, which we understand will soon hold huge statues of Ganesh. The festival lasts for 10 days and on the last day of Ganpati everyone parades the statues of Ganesh through the streets and ceremoniously immerses them into rivers, lakes and the ocean. I’m sure we’ll have some interesting stories and pictures from that festival.

Naveed was really excited to find out that McDonald’s delivers here. He has a menu and is excited to one day try the Chicken Maharaja Mac... A friend here took us out to an amazing ice cream parlor which is about a 15 minute walk from our house. We had a saffron pistachio ice cream and loved it so much we went back again to have more.

We’ve gone a few times to MG road (Mahatma Gandhi road...every town in India has one and it’s usually the main street in the town). I wanted to buy some more salwar kameez suits because obviously I don’t have enough :) We went to a place called the Clover Centre which was kind of like a maze of underground pathways lined with various shops selling everything you could possibly want; Naveed said it felt like we were in some dodgy underground black market. Then we found a shop selling jerseys. Lucky for us they even had American football jerseys and even luckier for us they had an Aaron Rodgers Green Bay Packers jersey in Naveed’s size! For $25! He has also put in an order for some Barcelona jerseys (only $12!) and is now best friends with the owner who is going to call him when they come in. Joy. We’ve tried a few restaurants around town as well and our favorites so far are George which has Indian, Persian and Chinese food and is really cheap. We also love Little Italy, a really good Italian restaurant with amazing wood-fire pizzas. Even though we get fed three meals a day here, it’s nice to go out once a week or so to have a change in diet since it is possible to have too many chapatis.

Love,

The Wandering Two