Reliving India

Last night, I emerged from a small airplane into a familiar atmosphere of warmth and humidity.  After a whirlwind six weeks in India and a few days spent in England to decompress and reacclimatize to Western culture, I was back with my friends and family in Florida. I woke up yesterday morning, and before I even opened my eyes my first thought was "where I am going to day and how am I getting there?"  Then I remembered that I was at home and in my own bed.  My family was in the next room with a pot of freshly-brewed coffee.  It was a wonderful, wonderful feeling.  I am honestly still a bit numb, and the knowledge that I am actually home with my family is still sinking in.

For the record, Oxford was a wonderful place to decompress.  As a fan of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the filmed adapations of Harry Potter, several days in a city with such a rich literary history and a dozens of recognizable movie locations provided several days of diversion that I needed to return home to the family as something other than an edgy, coarse-mannered mess.  I also had the opportunity to see good friends, new and old, even getting the chance to meet Andy Proper, an Oxford photographer with whom I have corresponded on Facebook for the last two years.  The only drawback to my time in England was that something in the water disagreed with my stomach in the strongest possible terms.  After six weeks in India with no lasting damage, a glass of UK tap water was enough to give me gold-medal stomach cramps and runs.  It's a funny world.

Apart from my long walks through the ancient "city of the dreaming spires," I also had time to reflect.

In the third-floor loft graciously provided for me by friends in Oxford, I spent several mornings staring out the open window, racking my brain in an effort to digest and make sense of everything I saw and experienced in India.  My friends whom I stayed with have both participated extensively in missions, and we spoke extensively on the subject of service in other countries.  With their counsel I came to the following conclusions:

1. I don't need to rush to find a resolution at the end of the trip, or expect God to rush in with one as I seek to boil down my experiences to a cohesive, single "lesson."
2. I shouldn't assume that the experience should be measured by how much change I consciously caused.  I should look also at the changes caused in me.
3. There might not be any single, unified final conclusion at which to arrive.

So, for now, I'm not even going to try.  Instead, during this week, I am going to relax, start the photo editing process and relive the journey image by image.  You, dear readers, will relive the journey with me as I post my photos as a daily journal, covering the events my journey from days one through forty.  I dumped four camera cards and my iPhone yesterday for a grand total of 5,643 image and video files, and I cannot wait to start curating, separating and processing them.  I humbly invite you to follow this blog closely, because I guarantee you that it will stay interesting for a long time to come.  In addition to the photographs, the written recap will capture my own personal revelations as each photograph triggers a fresh memory.  As I articulate them for readers, I will be better able to make sense of the trip myself.

Was the trip a powerful experience?

Yes.

What made it powerful?

Everything.

Can I name individual elements of the trip that made it powerful?

No.

But I can still quote Tom Wilkinson:

“The light, colors, the smiles, it teaches me something.”

India is coming to this blog, but I won't challenge you like a big shot to "be ready," because I'm not sure that I am.

Journey's End

And another adventure draws to a close.  The serene beauty of the mountains was traded for the unwelcome mayhem of the city as the team and I rode back to civilazation. The final push through the airport was a little slice of hell.  As I will be spending a few days in Great Britain before going the rest of the way home, my flight left a few hours later than the rest of the team.  As such, I was just outside the window for regular check-in, and I was made to jump through extra hoops at every stage of security.  It was only through the efforts of one helpful young man from another department in the airport that I was able to get my boarding pass and get past the hands-off laziness of the first person I spoke to at the immigration check point.  By that time, the rest of my team had already boarded their flight and were on the way home.

I have to confess that this experience--two hours of red tape, smug apathy and rejection--left me angry.  No, not angry.  Furious.  Enraged.  Spiteful.  I have spent forty days traveling this subcontinent helping as many people as I could and documenting their lives to share abroad, and my only reward at the end of the trip was to be denied a final goodbye to a group of people whom I count as dear as family.  I cursed the beauracracy under my breath every time they turned me back.  Major cities and large crowds bring out the worst in me on the best of days, and to be stalled at every turn by self-important airport personell was simply the icing on the cake.

But I have no right to feel entitled to anything.  I offered my help freely in the places I went, and I never asked for anything in return.  I should not feel like I was denied something when nothing was promised me.  My rage was impotent and pointless; the primeval reaction of someone who was simply denied something he wanted.  What matters is that I made it through.  I have a few days of decompression in South England to look forward to, and after that, home and family.

The last six weeks have been a roller coaster.  As I unload the photos from my camera, I will be recapping the trip day by day, almost like a serialization of a story.  Don't stop reading the blog, because the adventure has yet to be fully shared.

Update from India

What's this? Wifi at a midrange Indian hotel? Wonders truly never cease. I'm in the home stretch of the trip now. The last week will be very busy, and I am taking a few days off before throwing myself back into the thick of things. My host and I are doing a quick tour of some tourist-type places before meeting the rest of the team in a few days. I'm taking photos and looking forward to my weekly sweet treat in the form of a lassi tomorrow afternoon. There's supposed to be a legendary place to get one near my hotel. Mango or banana, or both! That is the question. I suddenly have the luxury of choice after living in villages for most of the past thirty days, and I find that Barry Schwartz was on to something when he wrote that too many choices can lead to unhappiness.

Thirty days. As a concept, it sounds great. Thirty days on the road to travel and do truly meaningful work, meeting people and seeing incredibly unique things along the way. But when you are traveling without a steady companion and hindered by a language barrier at every turn, the trip feels long sometimes. This trip, as a whole, has flown by, but there have been individual days that felt like they would never end, if that makes any sense.

I'm grateful, though, that my traveling has been done with a definite purpose. Traveling for missions or humanitarian purposes is always more fulfilling than just shouldering a backpack and wandering for its own sake. I sit now in the breezeway of a hotel as clusters of free-spirited Europeans amble by with enormous backpacks and the ubiquitous male pony tail that instantly identifies a Bohemian on the road. They will go out today and visit palaces and forts, see museums and artwork, and if the boxes of empty Kingfisher beer bottles in the halls are any indication, they will return in the evening for rollicking good times of beer, spicy food and possibly some "liberating" herbs. They will get what they came for: a good time. But their purpose will not last beyond the trip.

That is what I realize now, as I reflect on the past month. 12,000 miles away from home, making a great circle through a subcontinent whose culture could not possibly be further from what I am used to, I have traveled with a purpose that will last. What I have seen here--the poverty transcended by strength of spirit, the Love that can override caste hatreds, the hospitality and care extended by so many people to the gora with the camera whose stomach can't handle their curries--it has all taught me so much. There are parts of the culture here that still drive me crazy; I still have a hard time extending human courtesy to pushy cab drivers, and the Indian use of the head-wiggle instead of plainly-spoken answers to simple questions always puts my knickers in a twist. When it comes to resources, the population has placed India at risk of collapsing under its own weight.

But the people of India, with very, very few exceptions, have beautiful souls. I am no "hero from the west" when I come here. As much as I help, I am very much a student of their humanity and character.

To close, some iPhoneage from the R&R of the past day or two. Most of the working shots are on my DSLR, and will begin to surface at the end of this month. I filled my travel journal a few days ago, and I was elated to be able to return to my favorite leather shop in The Lake City to purchase a new one, as pictured below. It's fun to be a repeat customer of an establishment so far from home. The staff was even kind enough to pretend to remember me, haha.

Update from India

Some notable experience thus far:- Meeting one of the oldest tribes in India and helping fit them with eyeglasses. - Riding a motorcycle through monsoon rain. - Being accosted by husky-voiced hermaphrodites on the trains. - Riding on India's iconic trains period. Every ride is like a field trip into bedlam. - Teaching English to orphan children (call it damage control after the less-than-perfect methods of the local English medium schools.) - Being stopped in marketplaces all over India by locals who wanted to get a picture with the visiting American. My complexion makes me a novelty. - Arriving just in time for the end of mango season. Delicious fruit in the markets for less than a dollar per kilo (usually 10 fruit per kilo!) - Driving over roads that would give Wolverine scoliosis during my trips to outlying villages. - Inadvertently eating an entire dried naga viper chili in one bite. I mistook it for the milder king chili, but I maintain that my tears at the dinner table were shed with manly stoicism.

Throughout the entire trip, I have been in and among some of the poorest, most backwards villages and communities I could never have imagined. The poverty and the squalor that so many people know as "normal" in some areas of the country is unbelievable. The ministry opportunities never end.

Even so, India never ceases to amaze me with its diversity. After the first half of the trip was spent giving aid to people who lived in utter depravity (in every sense of the word,) my journey took me across the subcontinent to visit a school in an area of India that is not only cosmopolitan, but extremely, one might say "comfortably" Western in its local culture. It's like benign in a totally different country, and it brings up feelings not unlike the verse culture shock I had the last time I returned home from India. Stepping off of the plane into Houston airport last time was like time traveling to the future. India, steeped in poverty on one hand and pop culture from the Reagan era on the other, was suddenly on the other side of the world, and I felt strangely alien to my home. To have similar feelings while still in India itself is very disconcerting.

This will likely be my last blog update for a couple of weeks. I begin my northward train ride to a new location tomorrow to return to village work with my next local contact. It's full steam ahead for the next few weeks, and I probably won't have wifi again until I fly to London, where I will decompress from India by spending some time with a few friends in the area before going the rest of the way home.

Update from India

For the past few weeks, I have been traversing the length and breadth of India on a missions/humanitarian journey. It has been life-changing, and will continue to be for a few more weeks. Through the erratic weather of the summer monsoon season, I have worked with remote tribes, the poorest rice farmers and gypsies in the country, orphan children and local workers. With the exception of one day in which I became dehydrated to the point of blindness (blood pressure drop when I stood up), my health has been good and I have worked steadily. Internet is rare, and wifi is rarer, so most of my photos will have to wait until I get back to a city and can upload the growing roll of photos on my iPhone. When I arrive home, I will have another 70GB or so of photos from my SLR camera rig to unload and create some awesome recap posts.

In the meantime, send up a prayer for me as I continue to work and travel the road.

(And, seriously, stay tuned or subscribe via email for pics!)