Aug 20th

I’m finally here! You will have to excuse me for not being prompt with posting to this site I’ve been in India for four days now and am finally getting around to making an update. As it turns the world-wide-web is not always worldwide, hopefully I will resolve these issues soon. These last four days have been a whirlwind of activity filled with sensory overload and the normal fascinations and confusions that come with being dropped in unfamiliar surroundings. Needless to say I am exhausted. It could be the extreme heat and humidity or could be the 9 ½ hour time difference, who knew they even had ½ hour time zones. I’ve heard it is for political reasons, but who knows. Curiously the time zones do not change once you have traversed 15 degrees east or west, they never change, there is one time zone for the whole entire country. As best I can figure people in Bangladesh to the far east either wake up and start there day with the sun at 2:00 in the morning or they wake up at a more reasonable 6:00 am and watch the sun set as they eat lunch.

It would be impossible to accurately describe the last four days in a way that would give a complete account of my experiences. Instead I will mention just a few of my experiences here.

I arrived at 12:30 Monday morning in Delhi after a surprisingly comfortable and accommodating 18 hours of travel. I love Lufthansa, three or four decent meals, a Bollywood movie, free beer (I only had one mom), and good conversation. I ended up meeting my friend Greg, another exchange teacher, in Frankfurt and we sat next to each other for the second leg of the flight. My arrival in Delhi was not what I expected, an empty airport and all of my luggage present; off to a good start. One neat thing they had at the airport was a thermal imaging camera operated by a masked doctor. With the threat of Swine flu dominating headlines and conversations this served as a way to identify flu victims by their body temperature alone. It was a great spectral display that showed me how little blood was flowing through my nose region and how although it felt like it was hotter than anything, my body was still at a cool 97 degrees.

The next morning my 2 day in country orientation began, it was an opportunity to meet with the five American exchange teachers I met earlier in Washington and a chance to meet the 40 or so other Fulbright grant recipients (mostly students) and learn of their research they were conducting. These Fulbright scholars have designed many diverse projects from preserving dying arts and crafts, to organizing after school activities for the children of street walkers, to analyzing the socio-economic impacts surrounding a new roadway, to determining the affects of Bollywood music on street children in Mumbai (this last project is being funded in collaboration with Mtv).

The highlight of my 30 hours in Delhi had to be our visit to the Capitol building. The Indian government opened there doors and rolled out the red carpets to host members from the US embassy and of the jet-lagged visitors. At this point it is important to realize my state of mind, I’m tired, disoriented and in constant disbelief that this was all actually happening it seems like it had always been something that I was talking about doing sometime in the future but couldn’t possibly be happening now. We were first greeted by guards with AK-47s, and then once inside a monkey, I don’t know how he got past the guard’s Kalashnikovs. Did you know that the handles on those things are orange plastic with synthetic wood grain? It was like the time I first realized that Station wagons are not really made out of wood. The real pleasure was being received by the Madam Foreign Secretary. She received us for about two hours and showered us with gifts as we engaged in a dialogue about the aim of this endeavor and the relations between our countries and the people of the world. It was during this meeting that the immense weight and responsibility of the Fulbright program became tactile. This high level political figure sat down with us and spoke coolly as though we had all know each other for years about our individual goals and expectation during our tenure here. She impressed upon us the necessity of success in each of our roles as ambassadors between nations and that this far outweighed the millions of dollars her country and ours had supplied. The overall aim of the program is to improve understandings across cultural, geographic, and political lines where change starts with an individual and has the potential to spread without end. Pretty heavy.