The consistent blogging thing is not something I excel at and I'm starting to have panics about all the details I'm forgetting to write about and how 80-year-old Pia will be sad that she doesn't have sufficient documentation of her young and wild days as hooligan in foreign lands. So I'm going to cheat and make a little list of things that have happened lately so I don't have to try and recall all the beautiful sensory details that would enable each tid bit to become full fledged, stand alone stories.
-My projects and work here are rolling on through. Coming in as a high school graduate and professional dork, I was really worried about being able to contribute anything of value whatsoever to the programs and projects here. I've actually been pleasantly surprised. The Soukhya Project, which is a domestic violence intervention program in Bangalore that focuses on educating and empowering primary health care providers to accurately and sensitively screen women for domestic violence and then provide victims with references to support services, asked me to redesign their project posters. After the training of the primary health care providers, the Soukhya team does field visits to the health centers and drops off job aids and puts up posters. However, the current posters were borrowed from another project, and didn't have enough focus on the Soukhya projects goals. So I've had the opportunity to design three new posters for the project, two with the target audience of victims of violence, and one targeted at doctors and nurses, reminding them to screen and treat and care. I did concept design, and mapped out the scripts and took photos and made draft after draft, having feedback meetings and emails with the team in between each round, and then I made changes based on their input. I presented a set of drafts to some champion nurses in the program and got their feedback and after all that, I have a final set. A final set in English...and now they need to be in Kannada. So that's my current battle. But it is amazing to know that my work and my photos will go up in every health center in Bangalore one day soon.
The other project that brought me a lot of joy is one that I had a very small part in. The Soukhya project has teamed up with a tech company called Dimagi to develop a job aid application that will aid the nurses in screening women. This is just the pilot for what we hope could be a city wide project. The idea is that 10 champion nurses within the programs will receive phones that have this app on it. The app has audio, images and text that help the nurse go through the screening protocol and record the woman's details straight into the projects database. Before the phones, the nurses would have to use a paper calendar type job aid while screening to help them remember and follow protocol, and then record the woman's information in a paper register that was then collected by the Soukhya team every so often. If this project works, it could mean instant collection of data into the project data base, with different cases stored within the phone confidentially using the patients Thai or OPD card number, so that if the woman makes a second visit, the nurse can simply look her up. The app also records which program the nurse recommended through the referral network so the team can keep track of whether woman are getting the right help and if the support programs are receiving woman and helping them. It could streamline and modernize a very challenging project. And I helped design the images in the app. It's a tiny part of the whole process but there was something amazingly rewarding about sitting in a public health center and watching a nurse get trained to use a revolutionary job aid. Watching her click through the app and get to a question that is paired with a visual cue, a visual cue that I created. I'm sure this will change when I'm a professional in some sort of career, but right just being a tiny part of a project like this means the world to me.
I could write all day about the other things I've been doing, but I just wanted to share these two because I feel as if they have been the most rewarding. Which is hard to say because sometimes I just feel like having the opportunity to be here and work with who I do is the greatest reward. Just being here.
- I attended a super cute Birthday party. Vishy, who is the head of the Soukhya project, has a one year old daughter named Stuthi and Emily and I were invited to her first birthday. Until that sweet under the sea themed party, I had no idea how big a deal one is here. It does make sense though, life expectancy after the age of one improves dramatically. If a child can make it through a year, they are much more likely to make it through many. So for little Stuthi, a whole hall was decorated in under the sea themed paraphernalia and in one corner there were 30 glass bowls, each with two little fish in them. Talk about cool party favors. I was convinced that I could keep a fish in my Annexe room and tell Sister Bertha it was a symbolic representation of the loaves and the fishes or the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus or Noah or something biblical but Emily talked me out of it. Too bad though, woulda named them Jeeves and Wooster. The party was very sweet though, about a hundred people probably came, with all the family from near and far and Stuthi was passed about and pinched and kissed and she never cried. I never really had the big family experiencing growing up as a first gen to immigrant parents, but it doesn't take much to make me see it's value. The mermaid barbie cake was a nice gesture, but cake or not, it was obvious that this little girl was so incredibly loved.
-Elections mean something very different here. The state of Karnataka has been gearing up for elections and in the weeks leading up to election day people have given me all sorts of warnings. There was bomb that went off in front of one of the party offices in Bangalore and this past Sunday was the election day and every store and restaurant was closed from Friday onwards. Two weeks before the election every business that sold alcohol had 'election hours' and closed early. Four days before the election there was an alcohol moratorium, and no businesses across the whole state were serving anything remotely alcoholic. I was confused as to why elections, of all things, would prompt such a premature and extreme change in society, why was I being told to stay indoors and avoid busy places? Elections to me mean casting a vote, hoping for the best, letting your voice be heard, consoling one another if they go wrong and celebrating if they go right. But it's a little different here. India is the world's largest democracy but it doesn't mean they have it all sorted out. State elections can be a very dangerous time. People take their beliefs and build them into bombs, they use politics and their frustration as a chance to get hammered and cause accidents and violence. Alcohol sales coming to halt is the governments effort to curb the violence. So that if there are riots they are ruled by opinion and not booze. So how real is all this? I thought they were being cautious because something could, potentially happen. But I was wrong. Things do actually happen. One of my colleagues was leaving the St. Johns campus on his motorcycle in the days leading up to the election and was hit by a drunk rickshaw driver. It was 3 pm and he fractured his leg. A friend who has been staying in family friends house while the family is on vacation heard a knock at the door one day. It was the representatives of one of the politicians in the area. They told him they wanted the property empty so they could sell it to support the campaign. He closed the door. The next day at work he told the stories to his co-workers, and when they heard the politicians name, they told him to get out. The politician is widely known to be extremely corrupt and to 'eliminate' the things that come in between him and what he wants. My friend went home and packed his stuff and moved to a cousins house. Later that day he got a call from the politician who addressed him in sickly sweet tones as Mr. and asked if the house had been vacated, my friend said yes and then lied, saying he was out of town. The politician then said he was glad there was no "conflict of interest between them" and then hung up. This shit is real. I usually feel very safe walking around Koramangala, but when I went out to get groceries on election weekend I was greeted by deserted streets. The people who were out and about looked like they didn't want to be there or be seen. And I was one of the only women on the streets. I got my yogurt and then took cover. Democracy takes strange shapes.
-It's hot. Like forreal. I wake up each morning before my alarm goes off and even before I have to pee. I wake up because as the sun comes up, my feeble ceiling fan becomes insufficient at keeping me from sweating myself awake. I live in a little box with a bathroom, and my lonely window faces the rising sun and takes in sun for most of the day. My room heats up like an oven, clothes that I wash don't even bother to ring out dry overnight. Sometimes I'm sweating even before I finish my cold water bucket shower. I have to move around slowly after I get dressed in the morning otherwise I sweat into my clean clothes. When I first arrived, I was annoyed and confused as to why everyone walked so slowly, but I've learned that if I try and move at my preferred pace it'll be like swimming in my own sweat rather than walking. Bangalore isn't humid, just a dusty, dry, and polluted hot. At the end of the day the whites of my eyes are yellow from the sun and the particulate matter that is constantly being blown into them. It rains occasionally, but only at night because the days are so hot and dry that there isn't a great enough change in pressure for the rain to fall. When it does rain, I put on shorts and a tank top and sneak my scantily clad self up to the roof of the Annexe to stand in the rain and encourage the core temperature of my body to come down. I usually shower afterwards though because there is a high chance of it being rather acidic. It is hot. And here's the kicker, monsoon season, yeah, that starts right after I leave. I'm a whiner but believe it or not, Bangalore is one of the coolest cities in India. If I lived in Delhi, I wouldn't even wake up, someone would just come into my room in the morning and find a large, overcooked baguette in there because I would just bake like dough in the oven.
-Emily's mom is here and we went to Mysore together and I love it and her and it was so great it's unreal. Emily has been my saving grace here, my guide, my mentor at work, and most of all, my really good friend. We have an 11 year age difference which might prompt some people to say that we are unusual friends, but nothing feels unusual about it at all. Emily is incredibly lovely, and to no one's surprise, her mom Sue is equally as lovely. They are spending time traveling together, but before the travel could happen, Emily had to work over the weekend to make up for the work she would miss. So I gladly offered to 'mom-sit' though it wasn't like mom sitting at all, it was like hanging out with a cool lady. We hired Suneeta's most trusted driver, Golpalan, and took a day trip to Mysore together. Mysore was beautiful and green and is the second cleanest city in India, and I loved it so. I didn't realize how much I missed moms until Sue arrived. Just the presence of a mom and having that kind of energy around. It was a truly lovely day, and a lovely few days in the company of the beautiful relationship that Emily and Sue have. The only downside was that it made me wish more than anything that my own mom could be here, in India, exploring with me. One day.
-My projects and work here are rolling on through. Coming in as a high school graduate and professional dork, I was really worried about being able to contribute anything of value whatsoever to the programs and projects here. I've actually been pleasantly surprised. The Soukhya Project, which is a domestic violence intervention program in Bangalore that focuses on educating and empowering primary health care providers to accurately and sensitively screen women for domestic violence and then provide victims with references to support services, asked me to redesign their project posters. After the training of the primary health care providers, the Soukhya team does field visits to the health centers and drops off job aids and puts up posters. However, the current posters were borrowed from another project, and didn't have enough focus on the Soukhya projects goals. So I've had the opportunity to design three new posters for the project, two with the target audience of victims of violence, and one targeted at doctors and nurses, reminding them to screen and treat and care. I did concept design, and mapped out the scripts and took photos and made draft after draft, having feedback meetings and emails with the team in between each round, and then I made changes based on their input. I presented a set of drafts to some champion nurses in the program and got their feedback and after all that, I have a final set. A final set in English...and now they need to be in Kannada. So that's my current battle. But it is amazing to know that my work and my photos will go up in every health center in Bangalore one day soon.
The other project that brought me a lot of joy is one that I had a very small part in. The Soukhya project has teamed up with a tech company called Dimagi to develop a job aid application that will aid the nurses in screening women. This is just the pilot for what we hope could be a city wide project. The idea is that 10 champion nurses within the programs will receive phones that have this app on it. The app has audio, images and text that help the nurse go through the screening protocol and record the woman's details straight into the projects database. Before the phones, the nurses would have to use a paper calendar type job aid while screening to help them remember and follow protocol, and then record the woman's information in a paper register that was then collected by the Soukhya team every so often. If this project works, it could mean instant collection of data into the project data base, with different cases stored within the phone confidentially using the patients Thai or OPD card number, so that if the woman makes a second visit, the nurse can simply look her up. The app also records which program the nurse recommended through the referral network so the team can keep track of whether woman are getting the right help and if the support programs are receiving woman and helping them. It could streamline and modernize a very challenging project. And I helped design the images in the app. It's a tiny part of the whole process but there was something amazingly rewarding about sitting in a public health center and watching a nurse get trained to use a revolutionary job aid. Watching her click through the app and get to a question that is paired with a visual cue, a visual cue that I created. I'm sure this will change when I'm a professional in some sort of career, but right just being a tiny part of a project like this means the world to me.
I could write all day about the other things I've been doing, but I just wanted to share these two because I feel as if they have been the most rewarding. Which is hard to say because sometimes I just feel like having the opportunity to be here and work with who I do is the greatest reward. Just being here.
A draft...
(Anita is the star of this poster set! And don't worry, she was never injured)
(Anita is the star of this poster set! And don't worry, she was never injured)
- I attended a super cute Birthday party. Vishy, who is the head of the Soukhya project, has a one year old daughter named Stuthi and Emily and I were invited to her first birthday. Until that sweet under the sea themed party, I had no idea how big a deal one is here. It does make sense though, life expectancy after the age of one improves dramatically. If a child can make it through a year, they are much more likely to make it through many. So for little Stuthi, a whole hall was decorated in under the sea themed paraphernalia and in one corner there were 30 glass bowls, each with two little fish in them. Talk about cool party favors. I was convinced that I could keep a fish in my Annexe room and tell Sister Bertha it was a symbolic representation of the loaves and the fishes or the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus or Noah or something biblical but Emily talked me out of it. Too bad though, woulda named them Jeeves and Wooster. The party was very sweet though, about a hundred people probably came, with all the family from near and far and Stuthi was passed about and pinched and kissed and she never cried. I never really had the big family experiencing growing up as a first gen to immigrant parents, but it doesn't take much to make me see it's value. The mermaid barbie cake was a nice gesture, but cake or not, it was obvious that this little girl was so incredibly loved.
-Elections mean something very different here. The state of Karnataka has been gearing up for elections and in the weeks leading up to election day people have given me all sorts of warnings. There was bomb that went off in front of one of the party offices in Bangalore and this past Sunday was the election day and every store and restaurant was closed from Friday onwards. Two weeks before the election every business that sold alcohol had 'election hours' and closed early. Four days before the election there was an alcohol moratorium, and no businesses across the whole state were serving anything remotely alcoholic. I was confused as to why elections, of all things, would prompt such a premature and extreme change in society, why was I being told to stay indoors and avoid busy places? Elections to me mean casting a vote, hoping for the best, letting your voice be heard, consoling one another if they go wrong and celebrating if they go right. But it's a little different here. India is the world's largest democracy but it doesn't mean they have it all sorted out. State elections can be a very dangerous time. People take their beliefs and build them into bombs, they use politics and their frustration as a chance to get hammered and cause accidents and violence. Alcohol sales coming to halt is the governments effort to curb the violence. So that if there are riots they are ruled by opinion and not booze. So how real is all this? I thought they were being cautious because something could, potentially happen. But I was wrong. Things do actually happen. One of my colleagues was leaving the St. Johns campus on his motorcycle in the days leading up to the election and was hit by a drunk rickshaw driver. It was 3 pm and he fractured his leg. A friend who has been staying in family friends house while the family is on vacation heard a knock at the door one day. It was the representatives of one of the politicians in the area. They told him they wanted the property empty so they could sell it to support the campaign. He closed the door. The next day at work he told the stories to his co-workers, and when they heard the politicians name, they told him to get out. The politician is widely known to be extremely corrupt and to 'eliminate' the things that come in between him and what he wants. My friend went home and packed his stuff and moved to a cousins house. Later that day he got a call from the politician who addressed him in sickly sweet tones as Mr. and asked if the house had been vacated, my friend said yes and then lied, saying he was out of town. The politician then said he was glad there was no "conflict of interest between them" and then hung up. This shit is real. I usually feel very safe walking around Koramangala, but when I went out to get groceries on election weekend I was greeted by deserted streets. The people who were out and about looked like they didn't want to be there or be seen. And I was one of the only women on the streets. I got my yogurt and then took cover. Democracy takes strange shapes.
-It's hot. Like forreal. I wake up each morning before my alarm goes off and even before I have to pee. I wake up because as the sun comes up, my feeble ceiling fan becomes insufficient at keeping me from sweating myself awake. I live in a little box with a bathroom, and my lonely window faces the rising sun and takes in sun for most of the day. My room heats up like an oven, clothes that I wash don't even bother to ring out dry overnight. Sometimes I'm sweating even before I finish my cold water bucket shower. I have to move around slowly after I get dressed in the morning otherwise I sweat into my clean clothes. When I first arrived, I was annoyed and confused as to why everyone walked so slowly, but I've learned that if I try and move at my preferred pace it'll be like swimming in my own sweat rather than walking. Bangalore isn't humid, just a dusty, dry, and polluted hot. At the end of the day the whites of my eyes are yellow from the sun and the particulate matter that is constantly being blown into them. It rains occasionally, but only at night because the days are so hot and dry that there isn't a great enough change in pressure for the rain to fall. When it does rain, I put on shorts and a tank top and sneak my scantily clad self up to the roof of the Annexe to stand in the rain and encourage the core temperature of my body to come down. I usually shower afterwards though because there is a high chance of it being rather acidic. It is hot. And here's the kicker, monsoon season, yeah, that starts right after I leave. I'm a whiner but believe it or not, Bangalore is one of the coolest cities in India. If I lived in Delhi, I wouldn't even wake up, someone would just come into my room in the morning and find a large, overcooked baguette in there because I would just bake like dough in the oven.
-Emily's mom is here and we went to Mysore together and I love it and her and it was so great it's unreal. Emily has been my saving grace here, my guide, my mentor at work, and most of all, my really good friend. We have an 11 year age difference which might prompt some people to say that we are unusual friends, but nothing feels unusual about it at all. Emily is incredibly lovely, and to no one's surprise, her mom Sue is equally as lovely. They are spending time traveling together, but before the travel could happen, Emily had to work over the weekend to make up for the work she would miss. So I gladly offered to 'mom-sit' though it wasn't like mom sitting at all, it was like hanging out with a cool lady. We hired Suneeta's most trusted driver, Golpalan, and took a day trip to Mysore together. Mysore was beautiful and green and is the second cleanest city in India, and I loved it so. I didn't realize how much I missed moms until Sue arrived. Just the presence of a mom and having that kind of energy around. It was a truly lovely day, and a lovely few days in the company of the beautiful relationship that Emily and Sue have. The only downside was that it made me wish more than anything that my own mom could be here, in India, exploring with me. One day.
Pictures of Mysore:
Sue!
The Mysore Palace
