Email home #9

Hi everyone!

Well, I'm hot and tired and sweaty, but also happy and grateful and good. I just got back from the mid-semester retreat in Ooty. Ooty is a British hill station several hours north of here. It was an interesting bus ride up, smashed with a window on one side, a BYU professor on the other, the wheel well beneath me and my stuffed beyond capacity backpack atop me. But it was lovely. I enjoyed seeing the landscape evolve from tropical to forest to hilly. And I enjoyed trying to follow the Tamil film they had playing on the bus as well. And I saw a few monkeys near the road as well.

The retreat was wonderful. The south group arrived at our hotel at about 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and the north group arrived only a few minutes later. It was so great to see them. I LOVE my India group. The three day retreat was full of research conferencing, shopping, eating out and visiting the Botanical Gardens. Oh, and getting interviewed for a documentary on the field study. I'll try to blog on that in greater detail.

I loved seeing and talking with fellow students, recognizing where I'm at in my research and what needs to happen during the next two and a half weeks, and just playing and relaxing. It really was great. And Gideon and Jeff, our visiting, film-making professors treated us to all our meals, which was really nice. At first it was rough and annoying to have them around, especially at the village, but now in retrospect, I am really grateful that they came. What was initially an unwelcome and seemingly negative part of my field study experience came to be a positive one.

Gideon is a professor for a class we were all required to take and was going to come and counsel us in that regard. Instead, he showed up with a friend and a video camera, never asked about the class and wanted to follow us around and have us accomodate them at the expense of several valuable days of research work. And they initially seemed rather ethnocentric, so they didn't make a good first impression on me. But their presence was a positive one in that it catalyzed introspection about the research, and they just shared a lot of things that made me think. I now know a lot better how my interview subjects must feel being interviewed. Jeff, who is Bonnie D. Parkin's son, shared some interesting insights on church leadership stuff, and I learned that I don't want to be as ignorant about music and movies as I am. And I learned other more meaningful things as well.

My highlights of the retreat have been spending time with everyone and having some good conversations with several of the group members. They really are all incredible people and I'm excited to continue spending time with them in India.

So my week has essentially consisted of being filmed, going to Ooty, loving it, and coming back. I'll try to fill in some of the wholes and throw in some pictures on my blog if this computer allows me to do so. In the meantime, know that you are missed and loved.

Allison