In the Market
Today we brought the whole family to the market in the town nearby. The market is like a large, delapidated, crumbling, dirty mall, made up of hundreds of tiny shops. Anything you are looking for, anything to be found in this town, you can find in this market. You just have to know where to look for it. I’m getting, there, but still, I find myself searching and searching for things. I’ve only just now located the yarn, sold in the same small specialized shops that sell bangles.
Today is Dussehra, a Hindu festival. While we are not Hindu, what’s not to love about everyone decorating everything with flowers?
Including the gas pumps.
Here’s our gas man. He wanted me to take this photo, and be sure to get it to him.
Before we went to the actual market, though, I needed to send a fax. After asking around a little, I found out that the place to go was the same place that most people around here recommend for electronic needs: Deejays.
When the foreigners we first met raved about Deejays, we really expected to find something different. But now we know not to judge a shop by its appearance. Deejays really does have almost everything you would need in the way of electronics.
And there are the super helpful men that work there. Really, in India, so many of the things I hate about shopping are removed. Large stores where you wander around overwhelmed by too many choices, looking for someone, anyone, just someone to help you PLEASE. Here people can be overly attentive. Pushy at times. But always helpful.
Once we made it to the market we had to stop and let the kids smell this incredible citrus-like berry we found yesterday.
Goan people use it in fish curry. We stumbled upon it quite literally, when we were walking through the market with some boxes and one of them busted open on the bottom, spilling its contents onto a lady’s goods. As we bent to pick the stuff up, we were surrounded by a heavenly smell. It came from this berry. No idea what it is called.
Here’s the source of all the garlands on all the buses, cars, buildings, rickshaws and motorcycle taxis.
The flower shop.
They don’t always have so many marigolds, but being a festival day, marigolds were present in abundance. One day I would like to go and find these marigold fields. They must be incredible.
The other day we were at one of the stainless steel shops buying bowls and plates and all that jazz for our house (because we are sub-letting here, we’ve been using the kitchen stuff of the people who normally live here), and as I passed this spice lady, she crushed some mace and let me smell it. I’ve been thinking of her spice stand ever since.
I just had to buy some spices and masalas. (Masalas are mixtures of spices used for specific dishes.) And YaYa just had to dip her finger in one of the piles of chili powder and then rub it under her nose.
Seriously, we didn’t get a whole lot done, but it’s always an adventure here, even just marketing.
But that doesn’t mean he likes the way you put an outfit together…
Catholicism + India + Traveler Scene = Hilarious.
Amen on that Froggy Milk Post
In case you hadn’t seen, there is a mini plague beginning in our house. I half expect to look outside and see a pint-sized jungle Moses mumbling provocations against us.
Rae wrote about them here. Every night now, several plopping fat toadies explore our home, half-aware and earnest, compelled by some powerful urge to do something very suicidal and very naughty. I must hop maniacally towards the jaws of that sausage dog. I must jump in that yogurt. I must commit hari kari with that toothpick.
By the way, the thought of frog flavored yogurt is peerless puke makin magic. I mean, I can taste it. Can’t you?
The funny thing is, I was reading Rae’s post when this guy came popping into my peripheral vision. Good timing.
Home Sweet Home
Well, Chinua did arrive at our new house (which is still being built) in time to ask them not to paint the interior Pepto Bismol pink, but not in time to keep these tiles from being installed in the kitchen.
Hmmm, strange.
One of the bedrooms…
The living room. We’ve requested that the stripe not be purple, and our request has been respectfully granted.
There is no accounting for these tiles. I don’t know how this kind of thing goes on getting made in the factory continually.
I should probably show you a close up. But I don’t have one.
Here’s another shot of the kitchen. The bags of cement aren’t staying.
This is the back of our house at this point. To take this shot I stood on Renee and C’s porch, which shows you how close our houses are.
These guys are building the stairs that go to our rooftop. I got some video, and it’s really quite astounding. I’ll try to upload it at some point.
The exterior of the house will be painted Pepto Bismol pink. Not much that we can do about that… but YaYa is thrilled.
Diapers here
I can’t remember the last time that Solo pooped in a diaper. It must have been three weeks ago, I guess.
This is because he poops in a bowl.
Yes, in a bowl.
I’ve always wanted to work on infant potty-training, or elimination communication, or go diaper free. In the West, it has many different names, but they all mean the same thing. Basically, paying attention to your baby, learning what signs they make when they need to pee or poo (just using the basic words here folks!) and helping them learn your signals, so that eventually, they can wait for you to let them know when to go.
I tried it with Kid A. But my life was much crazier then and I was working and I was not confident with any part of parenting. Plus, I didn’t have the freedom that I give myself now.
All the books I read on infants and potties seemed to imply that women who do this in China or India are perfect at it. But when I arrived here, this is what I learned. If you keep your baby diaperless and attempt to have him or her pee and poo in a bowl, you will get peed on! Same for poo! And this happens everywhere. The main point is that somewhere along the line, you will both mainly be getting it. And it will happen a lot sooner than if your baby wears a diaper all the time and learns to ignore the feelings that go along with needing to go.
So. The cool thing is that I happen to be potty training a toddler at the same time as having Solo pee and poo in a bowl, so I can see, in real time, how much more of a hassle it is down the road. And remember, I’ve used a combination of cloth and disposable diapers for all my kids, so I’m not saying this is the best way, or the most righteous way. It’s just a way. And here, where it’s warm, and we have tiled floors, and it’s very normal to see a diaperless baby, it’s a perfect place to be learning a new way. (New for me.)
Infants sleep a lot. So, although Solo is diaper free during his waking hours, often with a thick diaper beneath him, or one on my lap, in case I don’t notice his signals, he wears Indian diapers to sleep in. I love them.
The diapers are made of very thin cotton, which you fold. Because it is thin like this, it dries and breathes easily. Important for the heat and humidity.
It’s kind of an intricate fold, but it didn’t take me TOO long to get it.
Awww, look. He’s wearing a dhoti! Really, I love the diaper. It takes me about two seconds to put this part on. And then there’s this little triangular diaper that I tie on top.
The triangular diaper can also be worn by itself, but then it doesn’t do much more than simply act as a catcher. Maybe for later on. Not for naps.
The triangular diaper has strings, so you tie it on. No pins, which is nice. Also, no velcro, which is nice. I don’t put a cover on him right now, although that might change when he’s sleeping through the night. (When pigs can fly!)
Things I am loving right now
1. The looks on the Leafy Boy’s face when he’s watching his baby brother.
This one…
and this one.
2. Our new van! We finally got one! I was just talking to my mom the other day and she asked me if we’d managed to find a van yet. I told her no, it’s been difficult, and then that very day someone came by with one that was in the condition and price range we were looking for.
Good thing, too, because with our family size there’s no way we’re all fitting on a scooter anymore. We will keep the scooter because we can zip around with it, but for all being together, there’s nothing like a little Omni.
3. Going to the beach in our new van, and instantly finding ourselves in the midst of an Indian crowd. Very nice ladies trying to sell us their goods, Indian tourists wanting to take our pictures. And of course the coastline and waves were nice too. We really haven’t had too many outings all together for a long time.
4. You can’t see really in this picture, but we are looking at little tiny flowers. The kids and I have been studying flowers lately, and I loved how they picked some off a bush while we were at the beach and had me help them identify the parts. Stamens! Pistil! Sepals! Petals! Learning is fun.
5. The YaYa sister making her first chapati with Jaya.
So sweet.
When she was done, Jaya said, “She is making a very nice chapati. YaYa is learning very quickly!”
Tomorrow, it’s Kid A’s turn!
Chai for Saturday!
Oh, our simple chai, how we love it. Before I moved here, I always thought of chai as something a lot more difficult to make than a cup of say, regular black tea.
Don’t get me wrong… I’ve made a lot of chai. But it’s always been a special occasion sort of thing. And then I was introduced to simply chai.
First off, chai as we know it in the West is really different from chai in India. When you walk into your local coffee shop and order a “Chai Tea Latte” or whatever, it tends to be much more highly spiced and intense. Here, chai, or “milk tea” is a milky sweet tea with a few spices in there to liven things up a little.
So, here we go. Today I needed an assistant, so I grabbed the nearest willing person- the YaYa Sister, who is guaranteed to be up for anything if it includes “helping”.
All you need to make chai is some milk, some water, some black tea of some kind, and some spices. This is what our milk looks like:
In India we have cow milk and water buffalo milk. This happens to be cow milk.
My ratio is half milk and half water, per cup of tea. So I usually measure it out in the cup first. Pour half a cup of milk…
And fill the rest of the cup with water. Here we have to make sure that it’s the thrice filtered drinking water, but you can probably just use any ol’ water. (Depending where you live. In San Francisco the water was great, but in my opinion the water in San Diego tasted like the bathroom floor.)
That little hand is Leafy caught in the act, just about to stick his finger in my milk/water solution.
Pour the milk and water into a pot and place it on the stove on high heat. Now you can add the sugar. One of the things about real Indian chai is that it’s quite sweet. So I added about three teaspoons of sugar.
This is Indian Chini- or sugar. I swear, most of my sugar intake comes from my chai. I’m not a big cake eater, but I do like my tea sweet.
Today I made ginger and cardamom chai. Sometimes I add cloves, and sometimes cinnamon and black pepper, but today I stuck with ginger and cardamom.
I just used a peeler to get a few peels of ginger.
And used one pod of green cardamom.
Which we smashed, to get the flavor out.
All of this we threw into the milk and water, which started to boil. We turned the heat down, so it kept boiling but didn’t overflow.
Now we added our tea. Loose black tea is what we use, but you could use bags, you could use fancy tea, or plain tea. Make it as strong as you like it. We added three heaping teaspoons of tea.
Mmmm.
And we just let it boil until it was the color that I like. Darkish, but not too dark.
And, just like that, it is time to strain it!
I just pour mine through a strainer. I don’t strain it with my teeth or anything.
Chai ready.
Happy Saturday!
A Comedy of Errors
Up with the baby at night, I had been lying in bed wondering, “What will we do if we don’t get any water tonight?” It had been three days already, and we were all desperate for a shower, needed clean clothes, and needed to treat our heads for lice again.
(Since Chinua and I have dreadlocks, we can’t use a lice comb, so we’ve had to re-treat several times to get rid of any lice that may have hatched. Finally, after several tries, we seem to have found a treatment that really works–the medications didn’t–so we’re on top of it now and are mainly being careful.)
I knew in the morning that no water had come. Why, why why did we not have any water? We get water from the municipality, which is piped into our huge tank. There had been a problem on our water line which resulted in days without any water coming in, but this was getting ridiculous. Something else had to be wrong.
The first thing I heard that morning was, “Mom! Leafy pooped in the bed!” It was a brilliant start to the day. How do you deal with things like this with no running water. Of course, we have the well. Chinua has so sweetly and uncomplainingly drawn up bucket after bucket of well water for us when the running water has given out.
But this morning was different. Jaya had drawn my attention the night before to a small animal, perched on a ledge corner far down in our Really Big Well. It must have fallen somehow. It was still alive, but we couldn’t keep using the well with it in there. Jaya and I leaned out of the window and tried to figure out what it was. A kitten? Awww, poor kitten! But then it lifted its pointed nose. “Is it a RAT?” I asked. We both jumped in horror. If it was a rat, it was gigantic. Ewwwww.
So, I got up and cleaned Leafy up somehow, and then turned to making breakfast. Jaya came in. “You need to call this man this morning,” she said, and I nodded.
“At eight,” I said, stirring the oatmeal and throwing some raisins in. “I’ll call him at eight.”
The man I needed to call was our landlady’s handyman. We wanted to ask him about what on earth was going on with the water, as well as ask him for help with getting this, uh, creature, out of the well. His name is Matthew, but Goan people pronounce it, “Madhue.” Madhue obviously thinks we’re a little cracked, but since he doesn’t speak much English, he only tells Jaya, and she is polite enough not to let it on too much. Renee has made the observation that he has a Biblical face, and she is right. He’d be the perfect casting to play Joseph, or maybe John the Baptist, if his hair was a little longer and he was snacking on locusts.
Madhue came a little while later. Frustrated and stressed out from trying to do eight things at a time, I had eventually handed the phone to Chinua to call him. He took a peek in our well, and then asked if we would like a tanker of water to come to fill the tank. This was a new option. We said, “Heck yes we do!” or something of that nature. Madhue left and came back with three people; a couple of men and a young girl, to see about getting the animal out of the well. The house was just full of people walking back and forth, and I was helping the kids with their math, and it was just chaos.
Renee wandered into the big room where the kids and I were. “They’re going to kill it,” she said, and then clapped her hand over her mouth as she realized she had just blurted it out in front of the kids. Kid A looked up.
“They’re going to KILL it?” I explained that sometimes when an animal is hurt, it can’t get better, and you need to help it by stopping its suffering. These were new concepts. The people left to get more supplies or something, and Jaya corrected my assumption.
“These people want to eat this animal.” Kid A looked up again, his eyes huge.
“They want to EAT it?” We all wanted to see the little guy survive, so we tried to think of ways to rescue, Chinua and our other friend C (who has arrived to join our little community, hooray!) and Jaya putting food in buckets to try to get the little guy to climb in. Meanwhile, the tanker had arrived, and water was being pumped into our tank.
Oh, how stoked we were. Now we could move to the next phase of hair treatment. As people continued to parade through the house, I gave up the school morning entirely, and decided to slather the kids’ heads with olive oil. Yum. It needed to be on their heads for the rest of the day, smothering anything that might be on their heads, before we could wash it off. Kid A was the only one that we were sure about- treating the other kids was mainly out of paranoia. But olive oil was simple. When we were done, the kids looked like this.
And we kissed them, because they were oily and adorable.
So far, there was no luck getting the animal out of the well. It seemed doomed.
Jaya came in with bad news. “The pump is broken. And the water is gone.”
“WHAT?” We had done two loads of laundry and one sink full of dishes. The water from the tanker, 5000 liters, had leaked out of some hole in the tank. This explained our water problem a little more clearly. There was a tiny bit left, but now the pump that brought the water from the tank outside into the tank in our house was broken. We all groaned.
But the little animal had been climbing! He was part way up, in a little hole in the side of the well.
It was obviously time to tie bedsheets in the well, Rapunzel style, to help him along. (Have you ever thought about the fact that Rapunzel is kind of a cousin word to Rappel? Do you think that’s purposeful?)
Madhue came back and made the diagnosis that there was a hole in the tank. Thanks, Madhue. We needed to plaster it. It would take about three days. This was too much! (That’s a Jack Handey quote, by the way, I just needed to throw that in there.) It was lovely that we also all had olive oil on our heads, lulled into safety by the promise of a tanker full of water.
Our neighbor from across the street, a delightful British hippie guy, came by at about this time. He and Chinua put a ladder into the well to help the animal a little more. By this time, he was only about ten feet from the top.
And he offered his house for showers in the evening. Oh sweet kind neighbor. He had also filled us in on the fact that what was in our well was a Palm Civet. They are rare and protected in India. We were glad that we hadn’t let the people eat it. Now if only it could climb out! Since they are nocturnal, we hoped it would climb out at night. They eat Chiku fruit, so it had probably fallen out of our Chiku tree and into the well.
So we trekked down to our sweet kind neighbor’s house to take our showers, rubbing dish soap in our hair to get the olive oil out. YaYa and I were accompanied by a lovely butterfly, who hung out with us in the bathroom while we showered.
The next morning? The Palm Civet was out. Another crazy day here, another small animal out of a well.
(The pump is fixed. Water is sporadic, but we are conserving and making the best of it. We put another pump into the well for emergencies. Life is good.)
The story of Chin and Rae in India
So many people have asked about what in Kentucky we are doing in India, and here I answer this question. All bloggers are always balancing openness and the need for privacy, and so I have written as much as I feel comfortable sharing. If you have more questions you can email me at journeymama[at]gmail[dot]com, and if you know us, please honor our desire to keep some details private. Thanks.
Here’s a story that goes back to another time and another place. It starts far from here, far from jungles, unless you consider the jungle of the City a true jungle. In any case, the beginning of this story smells like eucalyptus trees in San Francisco.
It’s where we met.
Chinua had already been living there for some time when we met, but the point of this story (I could go on and on about how we met, and how we fell in love and how he fell down laughing when I made a joke and that’s how I knew I loved him, but I won’t) is that we lived with some of the truest and most beautiful people in the world, and we grew addicted to a certain kind of lifestyle.
It’s a lifestyle of community. And community not in a myopic, insular sort of sense, but a community of people working together and living together with a purpose; to welcome other people in, to be rest for the weary, a family for the lonely, a soft place for a tired head.
Back then, we all busted it out to help out kids (young folk, not children) who needed food and maybe a shower. Oh- those were fun days. I’ll never forget them. I have memories that are like jewels to me, and I take them out and polish them whenever I can.
I’m telling you, there is nothing like working together to bond people and give them sweet and strong friendships. I believe this is what is called church, only it is easier to be together more often when you live close together and know each other really well.
So, we all lived in this big ol house for a time, and then some of us decided to take a trip to India.
That was crazy. And fun. And life changing. And crazy. And we found that we loved not only the traveling kids and Rainbows in America, but the international traveling community. In fact, some of us who seemed to have been born with wings on our heels (like my Superstar Husband with his gift for languages, who speaks German and Korean fairly fluently) found that we really really loved the international traveling community.
And we went back to California. And then we came back to India with even more friends. On our second journey, Chinua and I got engaged. And many other things happened. We went to the Kumbh Mela. We rode on a ship and slept in hammocks. We got sick. We saw naked saddhus. We met many, many delightful travelers from around the world and had many beautiful conversations over dinner with them in our little house. We talked about all of the important and brilliant things of life; the beginning, the purpose, and the end.
And then we came back to California.
Chinua and I got married in Canada, three days before 9/11. We always planned to head back to India. We’ll wait a few years to have kids, we said.
And by Christmas we knew that we were expecting Kid A. And then when Kid A was ten months old, we found out that we were expecting YaYa. And then when she was thirteen months old, we found out that we were expecting Leafy. And through it all I wandered through the tangle of a permanent residency in the U.S. of A. (I’m Canadian).
We kept right on doing what we’ve always been doing. Living with other people in our Jesus focused community, inviting people over, helping where we can, and sometimes we did it more sanely than other times. Actually, we were mostly insane. But we were very, very idealistic. I remember one time, we were trying to help this girl who was perhaps crazy and very paranoid. She was really tripping out. But she was pleading for help. She wasn’t sleeping well and she needed to sleep so her body could work better, so to make sure she felt safe, I had her sleep in the bed with me and Chinua slept on the floor at the foot of the bed. Not your average situation. But things like this came to us a lot, and it always seemed like God was asking us, What do you think you can do to help this girl/boy/man/woman?
For a while we lived in a little house in a town in the far north of California. (For a time, with all guys. EVERY WEEKEND, KUNG FU MOVIES.)
And then we moved back to San Francisco, where we lived in a flat on Haight St. with about a hundred people. Well, not a hundred, but it might have been.
And then we moved to the Land, where we lived in a one-room cabin for a year, until a bigger house was ready for us. It was lovely and beautiful, and turned out to be unsustainable for our community. But God was calling our names out in loud ringing tones again! And this country, India, that had been in the back of our minds for so long, well- we were ready to try to make it here again.
To live the way we love to live, we have always needed to live simply. We spend our money on very basic things, in order to have the freedom to be around people, in small spaces and big ones, traveling at times, stationary at times. When the Land was sold, it went into a trust that helps with the set up costs of starting a new community. Chinua and I are also working on becoming sustainable financially from our art, music, and writing. We want to perfect our crafts and truly make them a huge part of our lifestyles. (At times, the needs of people and community have rushed over these things in a tidal wave.) And we have several incredibly loving friends who have helped us at various times, believing in what we do.
So, to answer the questions. We’re here to do the same things that we’ve always done. We want to be a haven for the weary traveler, a creative and loving community with a Jesus focus. We have big dreams! Art, gardens, music, dance. We want to make stuff, we want to be living and vibrant, a community that glows. We are excited about being in India partly because there are so many wandering souls here, but also because there is so much room for us to help in places of need. Believing the way we do, we are also convinced that we are called to help the widow, the orphan, those in need. We don’t yet know the way, but we’ve put ourselves where we will find a way.
Tomorrow Chinua and I celebrate our seventh anniversary. Seven, the number of completion, and here we are, with a brand new start, back where we first decided to commit a lifetime to each other. And wow, our four kids are with us. Whew! We are heading into the adventure of the first traveler season, looking for a spot that will be the right place for us, wading in waist deep, continuing- onward and upward!
Jaya Part Two: Consciousness vs. Culture
It’s part of living here, I’m coming to see. The question of consciousness vs. culture.
When Jaya first started working with us, or, when we first started living with her, when we moved into this house, I was never sure of myself. I knew that her last employer, an Indian woman, had completely different methods of dealing with a “servant” than I would ever be comfortable with.
In the West, cleaners and cooks are professionals, treated as such. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I’ve never personally come across a household that lived with such a hierarchy as exists here between castes. Castes, as categories that define your position in the workforce, dictate almost everything else about you; who you can marry, how you are treated, where you end up on the totem pole. (Mixing metaphors here- wrong people group.)
In my home, caste has no place. I don’t believe in a caste system, it is as simple as that. I believe that people are brothers and sisters; that we don’t step down to reach one another, that we don’t look up with cricks in our necks. But I struggled with treating Jaya differently than she was used to being treated. Would she feel uncomfortable? Would it mess with who she was in her society? I wanted to be sensitive, but I didn’t really want her to feel servile towards my family.
We felt our way through things. I’m sure it was uncomfortable for her at times, getting used to us crazy Westerners, jumping around and dancing in the living room. It was uncomfortable for me at times, trying to decide whether I should carry Jaya’s chai to her when I made it, even knowing it made her flinch a little. But the chai was done, I wanted to give it to her. For me, acts of service are something we do for everyone. For her, it put me in her role, which, at first, made her uncomfortable.
But over the last couple of months, we’ve figured things out. Some of it has come from being really clear. These are the things we’d like you to do. And kindness becomes her, really, she flourishes. She laughs a lot now. She jokes with us all the time. I have come to love Jaya a lot. It is good for me to see that kindness can motivate someone to do their best just as much, if not more, than keeping someone “in their place.”
And then there are other ways of being clear. Because the situation is strange right now, being as Jaya lives with us, there is never a time that she isn’t here. I was uncomfortable because often when I tried to do something, Jaya would tell me that she could do it. But I like to do things. I like to do lots of things. So being clear really helped.
I make breakfast and lunch. Jaya makes dinner. I organize and tidy and put things away. Jaya does laundry and sweeps and mops. She does the dishes. We both put dishes away. Renee and Jaya and I all alternate between making chai. (Although hers is best.) Renee and I make the yogurt daily. Jaya and I both clean the bathroom. I take the trash to someone who can take it to the dumpster. I burn the bathroom trash. Jaya goes to the market to buy vegetables.
In a way, it’s a lot like any community, although strangely, one of us is getting paid to be here and keep things clean. But the roles need to be defined so everyone feels, “I can live here, I can make this my home.” And that’s what consciousness dictates to me. Although this is our house-my family’s and Renee’s, it is everybody’s home.