Email home #7

Hey all y'all!

It feels as though it has been at least a week since last I wrote, although I realize it was only about 4 days ago. Still, these past for days have been incredible. In the last four days I have started to feel like I researcher, and today I am reminded that I am a student. And it feels to good to feel that I am anxiously engaged in both roles.

On Tuesday after emailing we emailed the college and they said to come in the following day. I stayed in the village and Nate and Ashley ventured back to Coimbatore and met Ms. Blossom, a 40ish year old neighbor woman to the vice-principal at the college. She couldn't find a student and so she asked her neighbor to fill in until we can find something more permanent. And so interviews were about to begin on Thursday and continued on Friday.

Before I write a bit about my interviewing experiences, I want to talk about the fun I am having in the village. In the beginning of my stay, I didn't venture out all too often. I spent too much time studying, writing, and doing things in familiar areas. But I decided that I needed to get out of my comfort zone, experience more and search for adventure. So each morning I pray to be able to find an adventure with the resolve to seek it out. That first morning, adventure found me. On a typical day I get up somewhere between 5:30 and 7:30, averaging at around 6:30. I was up closer to 6:30 this morning, and before long I could hear the sounds of drums and horns. This isn't too uncommon, although the drums aren't too typical. As I was trying to decide if I wanted to investigate, Mathew knocked on the room door and told me that there was a Hindu ritual going on relative to casting out evil spirits and he thought I might be interested. And I was. So, wearing my incredibly attractive light blue duck-with-heart-shaped-balloon print pajama pants and my BYU t-shirt, I went out and spent the next hour amid a throng of 30-40 Hindus, going to four different houses and eventually one of the temples in town (the same one where I had done puja) watching 2 girls dance around with neen branches, have buckets of water poured over their heads (I stood too close and now the bottom of my pajama pants are somewhat brown), having a mixture of water, spices, leaves, and lemons that was in a plate with a floating flame of burning incense pellets be poured at their feet, listening to the Priest say something in Tamil (or some other language potentially), hearing the girls scream something, oh, and on two occasions, doing "the snake dance", which involved getting on their knees and making snake-like movements with their hands together about their heads and striking forward (I enjoyed watching this the most, minus the part where I realized I was standing on an anthill). It was so fascinating. I had Ravkumar, a guy I know in the village try to explain it to me, but his English, while better than most, is extremely limited. What I got from him was that the spirit of a god, a god of various names, one of which translates to 'snake', had entered the body of the girl. The presentation of lemons was because it was this god's favorite food. I didn't get much else out of his besides him identifying the 'snake dance' as such.

Something similar occurred again last night, but it was dark so I only observed for about 20 minutes when it was directly next to the house. This time a woman allegedly was hosting the spirit of a reincarnation of Khali and her seven sisters were in seven girls who were all dancing around to the beat of the drum as water was poured a top their heads. It all seemed very peculiar to me. I asked Mathew about it and he was able to explain some things, but we ended up talking about how Satan is real.

Anyway, that was how adventure first found me. And now I spend several hours out searching for adventure and meeting new people each afternoon. That first afternoon I searched for adventure and found cricket. I first observed a group of boys playing at the school. They played with a homemade bat, and the boundaries were grass=4, fence=6. Scoring a six is the equivalent of a home run. And if you hit the school building it was an out (wicket). They had a bowler, two batters, a keeper and several fielders for the two teams. It was fun to watch. I proceeded on and saw a boy with a cricket ball and pointed to it and said 'cricket', or something. That started a game of catch in the lane, and then he fetched a bat and we got a group playing in the lane. Over the fence into the orchard=6. His sister invited me in for steamed, sweet milk, which was delicious, and in my attempt to communicate, I pulled out the family picture I brought with me and introduced my family. Then the cricket continued, and they actually led me to the pitch on that side of the village, which is absolutely beautiful. It is on a big,beautiful field in the middle of a coconut orchard. I looked around and saw beautiful green, trees and mountains all around. Plus, there were goats on the infield and cows in the outfield. And the boys were fun as they showed me what to do. "Madam, do this", as they indicated I put my hands on my knees while fielding. "Madam, do this", as they prompted me to clap my hands together competitively. And as I complied, they would laugh. Yesterday on a walk I walked through their neighborhood and they all smiled and waved and most of them remembered my name. It was sweet.

The next morning, as I looked for adventure after breakfast (I like to walk home from breakfast a different way each day to try to meet someone new or discover something cool) I found one of the large temple gates open with a family inside cleaning. They said 'come', and so for a bit I watched as this temple and the images in it were all cleaned. It surprised me to see the images that many worshiped sprayed down with a hose, but I suppose that such is more respectful that allowing spiders to build their homes upon it. And later that afternoon I met some really cool people: musicians, children, mothers, people who had known other BYU students, etc. And they were always so nice to invite me in and bring snacks and struggle through conversations where little was successfully communicated. But it was still wonderful. I love it! I love the people here.

Okay, now on to interviews. On Thursday Ashley went first. While they were out interviewing, I walked to a new part of the village and made a new friend, a 20 year old girl named Nitia. Her father was very kind, even going so far as to pry the remote control from his 2 year old granddaughter and offer it to me. I was much more interested in learning about his occupation and life, or at least as much as i could learn from pictures, objects and gestures. When I left that visit I came across Ashley and Ms. Blossom returning from an interview. Ashley invited me to sit in on her interviews and so I did for the next two. I really enjoyed the first one, but the second one was a story of a really hard life of a woman in the ward. It reminded me of my mission at times when people would share really sad and personal information about their lives and I ended up partly feeling bad for them and partly feeling uncomfortable.

And then it was my turn with the interpreter. I was really nervous for my first interview. But I went and visited Pushpa, a woman i had met and visited before. She was kind and willing to sit and talk. It wasn't the ideal interview experience though. It was more a "learn through failure" experience. I realized that most of my questions were relative to a given theme and sort of built on each other. But it seemed that the terms I used to define my theme weren't understood as I hoped. And I couldn't figure out how to pose the initial question in a way that was effective, and so none of my other questions would have made since. So everything I learned wasn't particularly relevant to my research. Oh well.

The second interview was much better, and the woman was so helpful and very talkative, and in her speech she revealed different words that I could use in formulating my questions. So I have pretty much changed all my questions from day one to day two, and still need to do further tweaking to prompt more narrative responses. But I'm learning and meeting some neat people. And while I don't feel that I am exactly getting information related to what I want, I am learning about the culture and having an educational research experience. And as I continue to learn from my mistakes and make changes, I expect to have some small successes. I need to work fast though. There is only 3 and a half weeks left to do research.

I have the next week and a half, and then half a week I'll be off at the mid-semester retreat in Ooty. And then there will likely only be two weeks left before starting the world religion tour. Crazy! But I feel like I'm doing my part and using my time well. This semester is proving to be the most rewarding educational opportunity I've had. I'm learning to better study and really try to learn and understand for myself the things I'm learning in textbooks, and I'm learning by experience many other good things. It's a good life. I love it.

Anyway, life is grand. The past few days Ben and Kate visited from Bylakkupe and it was so great to see them and spend time with them. We have a translator, her next day with us will be Tuesday. I am more integrated into village life, and I am learning, seeing and experiencing new things each day. Good stuff. Okay, well, now I need to write 4 papers that I have due for one of my classes. Have a great day! I love you!

Allison