Indian Security

I am sitting in a coffee shop in a mall close to my house. My flat is being de-bugged by two very friendly pest control guys, so I am spending most of my day here, happily drinking cold coffees and doing bits of work.
There are security guards at the doors into every place now, especially at places frequented by westerners such as myself.
Since a bomb exploded in a popular western food joint in the city, not far from here, killing 11 and injuring many more, security has been ramped up and there are now additional guards and in depth ‘bag checks’ everywhere.
I recently ate in the Hard Rock Cafe, here in Pune and to gain entry I had to fill in a security log, name, phone number, photo ID type, passport number, company name and nationality. I had to produce said photo ID for inspection and smile for a security camera as well as have my handbag and pockets searched. These measures would be a good thing if the people doing the searches had any training, or the information given checked in any way. I could write any number, name, nationality in the log because the guy there didn't even look at the picture in my passport, never mind checking the number against the one I wrote in the book!
As I write this, I have two bags with me, both are full of electronic equipment, cables and thick books. the guards at the door looked into both and didn’t even ask what they were.
How nice it would be if we could have confidence in the security provided for our ‘comfort and safety’.

The run up to Christmas

As you may know, I had to leave India fairly abruptly due to visa issues arising from my previous boss not wanting me to work anymore. So home I went, back to a life of playing with my sisters babies, eating all round me, attempting to learn Hindi and generally having an easy time of it. I got another Visa with no real drama or hardship, caught up with some old friends and planned for my happy return to Indian soil.
To make my return less stressful I decided to embark on a little enterprise making and selling holly wreaths, as my sister has done for years. I hoped to make enough to pay for a few months rent and some other set up costs, so I aimed to make 100 wreaths and sell them at 15 Euro each over a weekend just before Christmas. So after a good few cold hours in the garage, a few trips to the canal bank to liberate some holly and two trips to a florist supply shop, I ended up making 80 very nice wreaths if I may say so myself!
To sell them, I packed up Mums car, (thanks Mum!) and took over my sisters regular spot on the side of the road in a nearby town. 5 days I spent sitting in sub zero temperatures trying to sell the dam things. I started out hopeful, but my sister had warned me that day one is always slow. Not one did I sell on day one, only 5 on day two and after dropping my price to 12 Euro, six on day three.
Day four, a Saturday, brought a surprise in the form of another seller! Another girl arrived and set up at the other end of the bus stop! The cheek! She was selling wreaths too, but not holly wreaths. she put up a sign saying ‘only 10 euro’, bitch! So I dropped my price to 10 Euro. It worked out very well for me, people saw her, slowed down and pulled up to me! I sold about 30, and I think half were due to her!
One woman even stopped and while looking at my wreaths said:
‘competition for you there’
‘not really’, I said ‘she has no holly in hers, and anyway me and my sister have been selling here for 20 years, we get the odd competition now and again but they never last’
‘Well’, she said, ‘in that case I’ll take two from you!’
I was delighted! It warmed my heart, but not as much as when various family members arrived to let me run off and pee! Mum even brought me chicken soup! I got so cold during those days that when I got home in the evenings my whole body hurt to warm up. It was like a full body bruise.
It was all worth it when I took my hard earned bundle of cash to the bank!

Our favorite Watchman

At Sangam, as with most compounds in India, we have a watchman. A watchman is a guy that sits at the gate all day making sure people that shouldn’t come in don’t and making sure people that should come in, sign in and out.
Recently we have a new watchman, he works for a security company so we never know who we will get, day to day, but this guy has been with us for a while now. He is great!
He smiles all the time, he learned our names so he can sign us in and out as we come and go, we suspect he even thought the other watchman to do the same! He gives us a cheery wave to let us know he has everything under control, keeping us safe and happy.
He also makes sure our forgetful foreign guests sign in and out too!
He must live close by, as is daughter goes to school in the area and his wife keeps him company from six to eight each evening. His daughter sometimes brings him his lunch and they eat together under a tree by the gate or giggling in his hut when it rains. Him and his family always seem happy and they laugh a lot together.
If I go out in the evening before eight, he works eight to eight, he will sign me back in before he goes home for the evening to save me the bother when I actually do come home. This is very sweet, but somewhat defeats the purpose of signing in and out!
This can be especially tricky when the night watchman locks up the gates because he doesn’t know I am out.
Climbing over the Sangam gate is not as easy as it looks or very dignified.

Pandemic Partys

India is in the grip of a Swine Flu panic. Pune, my city, is the epicenter. It started in the schools, and with the government issuing a ban on all foreigners or Indians that have traveled outside India from entering schools. A young girl died, in the posh hospital. Queues formed outside the government hospitals for H1N1 testing, people on the streets are wearing masks, more people are not going on the streets. The Schools closed, then the cinemas, then the shopping malls, the vegetable markets and now whole shopping districts are closed. There is a fear of foreigners here, when I go outside the gates I can see fear and people reaching for their masks when they see me coming. Waiters in cafes put masks on before they come to take my order. Rickshaw drivers don’t stop for me, or for our guests.
The funny thing is there is not one case of a foreigner here in Pune with Swine Flu!
It’s not going to be very funny when our next guests arrive on Friday, 65 people fresh from the UK, where they have Tamiflu and safe hospitals and not a lot of fear and panic. It is difficult for them to understand the fear here. If you suspect you have H1N1 in the UK, you go online, fill in a survey, get a drug number and you can get the drugs, quarantine yourself in your house and ride it out. If you get really sick you can go to the hospital where you can be confident of receiving decent care.
If you suspect you have H1N1 here and you, like most people here are in the low earning bracket, you stand in a queue with other people that might have it, (if you didn’t have it before, you probably do after) for several hours for a test, the results of which takes two days to return, If you have it you can try and quarantine yourself in your home, where you might live with anything from 4 to 14 family members, where you might have just one room, you miss work, which may mean no food for your family, hopefully you can afford drugs. If you get really bad you can go to a designated government hospital where conditions are so bad, and over crowded a healthy person would be unlikely to come out unscathed by infection. There are several designated Swine Flu Hospitals. More each week, in the newspapers yesterday they reported the numbers of doctors and nurses in infected each hospital.
So taking 65 foreigners by rickshaw to a busy shopping district may not be the best or easiest thing to do, even if the district is open! Not everyone is panicking, there is a core of reasonable people that still go out for coffee and meet their friends, take reasonable precautions like hand sanitiser in their offices, but not going mask mad.
There is also fun to be had, people have started having Swine Flu Parties in their homes, as most of the bars are shut or empty. The dress codes for these parties range from just silly masks to whole hog bio suits! There are also advice emails regarding the medicinal benefits of vast quantities of alcohol.
I had to take one of our guests to the hospital two days ago, she had asthma, a cough and chest pains, (quite common given the air quality) anyway, we couldn’t get past the gate without masks. She was sent to one of the swine flu hospitals for a H1N1 test, before any of the doctors would see her. Of course, the test takes two days, so it doesn’t make any difference to the doctor who sees her. When we finally did see a doctor, he wouldn’t touch her, made her wear two masks, and only asked her about swine flu symptoms. She could have had anything else, he was only interested in Swine Flu.
I have had a sore throat for a few days, no temperature or any other swine flu symptoms, I wasn’t going near any of our regular doctors, one of the girls had a similar experience to my hospital one with our regular doctor. I asked an Indian friend to recommend someone so he took me to his doctor. Never have I been able to describe a visit to the doctor as a pleasure before. So civilised, not a mask in sight, no fear in his eyes, a real gentleman. I almost look forward to being ill again, just so I can go to see him again!
(I just have a throat infection, in case folks are worried, I already feel better)
It’s ok for me, I’m a foreigner with money, so I can get the best of care.
Dead Irish Girls make too many international headlines...

Sweet, Sweet Irish Blood.

I have been in India three months now, I have grown accustomed to the food, somewhat, the heat, the noise, pollution and most aspects of everyday life in India. Everything that is except the mosquitoes. They love me. It doesn't matter what I do, they find me. They find me and bite me and suck my blood and leave itchy red bleeding lumps all over my pale pale skin. When I first arrived I got bitten quite badly, as was expected, so a week or two in I decided to try insect repellant and a net around my bed, I had 50% Deet, tropical strength spray on repellant. Every morning for a week I sprayed it on after my shower in the morning, a top up at lunch time and another top up after dinner. I also sprayed my window screens and net. No difference. not a bit. I still got bitten to bits. So I tried something a little stronger, 100% deet, maximum strength, toenail melting stuff. Full week, same routine, no difference. I gave up for a week or two, surrendered to the insects, expected to die from blood loss, but strangely, no difference. Still a steady 10 to 15 new bites each day. An Indian friend recommended an Indian product with 12% deet, Indians use it with success, so I reasoned it might work for me. No joy. On day one, I got over 20 bites on each foot, and similar numbers on my arms. I was nauseous and dizzy all day from the sheer number of bites and exhaustion, because its hard to sleep with that number of itchy painful bites. It’s like the indian cream was catnip for mosquitoes. I had enough. I got a new repellant oil lamp and burning coils for my room, and now that I have the lamp plugged in the right way up, it seems to work ok, there are fewer of them in my room anyway. I bring burning coils to meetings and events. Now I have had four long sleeved blouses specially made to wear under my clothes, new socks to wear all the time with my ankle length skirts. I fear the world will never see my knees, ankles or elbows again. The only parts of me exposed now are my hands and face.

Guess where I’m getting bitten now.

My Indo-Irish Holiday

We had three days off in a row, the programme team here in Sangam. Three whole days. So three of the volunteers and myself decided to get out of Pune and chill out in the mountains with some of our Indian friends. We set off for the mountains, happy and excited, with snacks aplenty for our one and a half hour (Indian time, in reality four hour) journey. We started out in one car driven by Sid, and the three girls moved into another car (Raouls) on the other side of the city. They took the snacks with them, grrrr, and on we went zooming through the Indian countryside in the alternately sunny and showery weather. The higher we drove the rainier it became until we were driving through the clouds. We arrived at our rented house, at the end of a track that had been decimated by the rains of the previous few days. You think there are bad Irish roads, you should have seen this one. Anyway the house was beautiful, a huge balcony looking out into the clouds, normally you could see a valley, with a big living room and three big bedrooms downstairs. Lots of sofas for napping, a guy to go out and do the shopping, and cook the meals, it was heaven. It was cold wet and windy, but it was Irish summer holiday weather. I was loving it! The balcony had a tin roof, and the rain on it sounded just like playing pool in the garage at christmas with the family in Ireland, except it wasn’t bitterly cold! We were getting hungry, so the guys and two of us girls went out to collect some take out dinner, burgers and pizzas and the like. We also got in booze which was nice as we don’t drink very often in Sangam. We drove through really thick fog to get to the food place along the crazy mountain path and the nicer but scary forest road. We arrived back t the house in one shaken piece and had a nicely chilled evening with the food, booze and chatting. We got up the next day and had our breakfast cooked for us and we went off to see some sights. This was difficult as the fog and rain made seeing anything past the front of the car tricky. We had a wander in the market, bought handbags, went to viewing points and got wet. It was fun, Raoul and Sid thought we were a bit mad for enjoying ourselves when the weather was so miserable, but they had fun laughing at us. We went back to the house and I took a nap, the first of many, while the others saw lots of monkeys in the trees around the house. The fog cleared now and again so we could see snatches of the view. I woke up for a while and discovered dinner was to be in an hour or so so I thought perfect, just enough time for a nap! They woke me for dinner, which was Indian, but the cooks had misunderstood my no spice needs and made the whole meal very bland for everyone. Poor guys had to make do. After dinner we watched a movie, the wedding singer and then a Bollywood movie. The cool mountain air was perfect for napping so I took advantage again and slept through the second movie. We slept in the next day, and headed home at lunchtime. We stopped back in Pune and ate Ferrero Roche cake and drank coffee, a perfect way to end our trip!

Water Water Everywhere

The rains have come! Finally, its raining cats and dogs. Five weeks late! Five weeks! Five! Ah so, you might say, a few more weeks of sunny dry weather, how bad, you might think, it’s a bonus. You would be totally wrong there.
Here in Pune we have a few reservoirs in the hills around the city. These reservoirs fill up during monsoon, it doesn't rain in the rest of the year so all of our water supply for the year has to fall during monsoon. So when monsoon comes five weeks late and its a light monsoon, which this one is, there is not enough water for the year. The city already practices ‘load shedding’. A delightful term they use when at the busiest times of the day, they just cut the supply. (They do this with electricity too, which is mainly hydropower, very green, but crap when the rains don’t come.)
So the water is on for half an hour in the morning now. We have a water tower that fills up whenever there is enough supply, but its nearly empty, we had to get a tanker in last week to top it up and we emptied it the week before when we had forty guests. now we have another forty people on site and it looks like we will be washing hair in buckets of rainwater again.
You will never hear me complaining about a rainy day again.
My hair smells funny.