More reflections on my time in the village

***Below have included a few more of my thoughts (with pictures) about my experience in the village. I know it can be overwhelming to read so I subtitled it so you can pick the topics you are interested in.


An American in Rural India
In addition to the wonderful relationship I built with my host family, I also was able to connect with many other families in the village. My presence in the village was a bit of a spectacle. Everywhere I would go people would come peek their head out of their windows and stare and my host would say something in which the only thing I would understand is “America.” Children, adults, and elders would all crowd around me and practice the few sentences in English that they knew and then ask me questions like “What is your house like in America?” “Do you have a car?” “What does your father do?” (BTW, news was going around the village that my father is an engineer) “What is your father’s salary in the U.S.?” “What does American $ look like?” “What do you eat?” (This was also a very hot topic; every person I met wanted to know what type of food we eat in the U.S.) “What kind of clothes do you wear there?” “Your mom doesn’t wear a sari?” (This was really surprising to many people as well). At one point I was taking a picture of one of the bullet carts that are used for farming and the next day we were walking through the village and my host father told me “See, they are washing the cart so you can sit in it and take a picture.” Everyone in the village wanted to host me in one way or another and this mostly involved an offering of food. As I was saying goodbye and leaving the village, several families were disappointed that I didn’t come to eat dinner with them or have chai. Of course I had to promise I would come next time.

In light of these experiences, I realized that the way Indians, particularly those in the village, relate and share food was not only so wonderful but also very familiar because of how Persians also put a lot of emphasis on food. The way we show our love and caring to our guests through food was the same in this village.

It would be so easy to walk into this village and just see poverty and people living without things we consider necessities but when you really spend time in the rural areas you realize how much they have that we are missing in our lives. As I was doing my rounds through the village I would momentarily start to feel really sad about the poverty and how little they have but just as this thought would cross my mind, something would happen that reminded me about the richness they have that is probably something few of us will ever have in our entire lifetime. I know this may sound really cliché but it’s the only way I can think of to describe it.

Gender in India
During my time in the village, I had the opportunity to see so many different houses and families in the village from the very poor and dilapidated to the more spacious housing that belonged to those who are landowners. Since 80% of India is rural, agriculture and farmland is HUGE and those who own land often have more sustainable lifestyles and are considered wealthier as compared to those who don’t. Through my interviews with woman in the village I discovered that the loans taken from the self-help groups often help woman contribute to their husbands’ businesses or agricultural work which can be a significant form of empowerment, particularly in the village setting where women’s roles are very rigid and they are thought of as only doing housework and childrearing. Given this confinement, it was so amazing as well as a little disheartening to witness how hard these woman work on a daily basis. Women make up a huge segment of the manual labor force in the farmlands and work alongside men for 12 hours a day without any breaks. I visited a potato sowing field and as I was watching the process I noticed that the women’s responsibilities are the hardest part of the labor; bending down to sow the seeds of the potatoes while the men sprinkle fertilizer or ride on the bullet carts (see picture). On top of this, after their day of work is complete they go home to tend to their families and responsibilities at home, prepare food and do washing. In an interview with one of the farm laborers, I asked her if they ever switched duties in the farm and she laughed and said “No way, the men would never do this work. This is just the way it is. This is their work and this is ours.” The interesting thing about this interview was that although this woman accepted her position and duties in the field, she was very aware of the unequal division of labor and that the women carry much of the burden of the work.

Another example of the perseverance of women in this village is my host mother who wakes up at 6:00 am every morning to make breakfast and lunch for her family, boil the water for baths, and clean the house (which is more just like a concrete room-here the kitchen, living room, and bedroom are all shared in a single space often among 10-20 people). After she completes these tasks she goes to the local elementary school and makes food from scratch for 130 elementary school students in a HUGE caldron over an open fire. I went with her one day to watch the process (and I learned how to cook an Indian dish) and could not believe how much time it takes and the effort that goes into this. She has to carry the rice and vegetables from where they are stored to the cooking area, start a fire which involves lots of smoke that burns your eyes and gets into your lungs that she must breathe in for the whole two hours it takes to make the meal, fry the vegetables, wash and clean the rice three times, and then cook all the food. Following this, she comes home and prepares lunch for her family then goes back to school to wash the dishes and huge caldron from the lunch for the children. After this she goes back home to tend to her family and make dinner as well as get things in order for the next day. The most mind blowing part is that she does all of this for 100 rupees in salary-that is $2 a month (50 of these rupees goes directly to her contribution to the self-help group for microloans). I was absolutely shocked when I heard this. And in between all this work she finds time to be the president of her SHG group as well as attend federation meetings and be a leader in her community.

I can’t even express how touched and inspired I felt after seeing the hard work and strong spirit of the woman in this village. I keep getting emails from people back home about how they are so proud of me and how strong I am but when I go see what the woman here are capable of and how hardworking, brave and motivated they are, my plight seems so little. These are the real woman we should be admiring.

Indian Marriage
Another gender issue that I became aware of during my visit in this village involves Indian marriages. Here girls get married at the age of 17 or 18 (men at 24 or 25) and I was told 90% of marriages are arranged; love marriages are very rare (yet at the same time this varies because I have met many friends who have had love marriages). People in the village were very surprised that in the US our parents don’t arrange our marriages. The concept of marriage and family is thought about so differently in India. In the U.S. it I very much about the individual and what makes you as a person happy. In India I have found that there is much more emphasis on the group and how you can benefit and contribute to the collective well-being of the family (which is possibly why the SGH/microloan concept is so successful here). I think this ideology is the basis of the arranged marriages here and why there is so much insistence on within caste marriage (caste is a whole other topic in and of itself that I will hopefully go into in another blog but it is very complex, rigid and hard to understand system).

An aspect of Indian marriages that I was very unaware of prior to my visit was the actual issues involved in the courtship and marriage ceremony. Although Indian marriages are so elaborately celebrated, beautiful and commence the joining of two families, they are also ridden with their own set of social problems. I visited a family who was so proud that their daughter married an engineer last month and they even showed me a professional video of their daughter’s wedding (weddings are lovingly referred to as 'shadi') with over 1000 in attendance (YES 1000). As I was sitting there in a small home that over 20 people shared and their income is probably $100/month total for all the members, I learned that they spent almost $4000 on their daughter’s wedding. I think from our perspectives we look at Indians weddings as so fun and beautiful (and without a doubt they are) but the pressure on families (particularly poor families) to please the grooms family and marry their daughters off is so high that families often must save and use what they would spend in two or three years on a wedding. If they are unable to do this they run the risk of their daughter not marrying (which can cause being stigmatized and out casted from the community) or not being properly taken care of due to their inability to arrange for a successful, stable husband.

Another issue that is very prevalent in rural areas of India, particularly for young women is the family structure in regards to marriages and living in joint families where many generations of the male side of the family live together (father and his wife, son and his wife, grandson and his wife). Many young girls have their marriages arranged by their parents at the age of 17 or 18 and they get married off to practically a complete stranger. Through my observations I noticed that the most difficult part of this is not the marriage in and of itself but the fact that these very sheltered girls that have for the most part never been away from their family for a day having to move often times far from their own family and move in with their husbands family which often consists of 20-30 people. They are then thrown into a whole new family culture, hierarchy and set of unwritten rules which along with it comes many new roles that these young women must fulfill and adjust to. Although this living arrangement is normalized in Indian culture, emotionally it is still very difficult for these young women. Their involvement with the SHG (self-help groups) gives them a forum to discuss with other women who are experiencing the same transition or have experienced it in the past and sharing their hardships and how they have coped. Although the premise of the self-help groups is financial the women revealed that the group actually functions more as a support group were they discuss social issues and problems they are facing in addition to financial issues. The fact that the basis of the group is loans seems to actually help women to gain support from their husbands’ to participate and get involved; their spouses see how the loans will benefit their families but are not necessarily aware of all the other things the meetings entail. Though change is slow to come, these women are carefully navigating how to take a leadership role in their families and communities within the confines of rigid and somewhat oppressive gender roles in rural India.

Education
Another amazing and very hopeful trend present in the village is the education level of the new generation. Even in this small rural village that has little interaction with the world outside of their community, a majority of the families, even VERY poor ones have managed to send their children to college. It was so amazing to find out that many of the youth who are now pursuing higher education have parents with only a 4th or 5th grade education. Education, even in rural communities, is highly valued and families are willing to take loans and do whatever it takes to send their children to school. The son and daughter in the family I was staying with ride their bikes 6 kilometers each day and then take a bus for an hour to get to school and home. Little elementary school children in the surrounding villages walk 5 kilometers a day, often barefoot, to get to school and home-there are no school buses. Many women take loans from the SHG group in order to put their children through school. Some parents (such as the host family I was staying with) even delay their daughter’s marriage in order to allow them to complete their schooling. The educational achievement of their children is a very significant source of pride for families. This could quite possibly change the direction of the country, particularly rural areas as well as the present gender dynamics in the next few decades in India.

Religion
Through spending time with the family I stayed with in the village, I learned how much of their philosophies on life and their traditions are closely rooted in the Hindu religion. Religion, particularly Hinduism, is thought of so differently in India as compared to the U.S. It is seen more as a way of life and a set of guidelines on how to treat not only all other people but all living things including animals, the land etc.

Among the families in the village there is a mix of Muslim and Hindu families that have lived in the village for generations and although their children will not intermarry, from what I could tell and my conversations with people, they live harmoniously and consider each other as family. They come and go from each other’s houses and are involved in each other’s lives. All of the political issues that separate us in the west and even in more modernized cities in India was not present here. They are more cognizant of what connects them as opposed to the things that separate them. Although in India there is still religious conflict particularly in Northern cities, the foundation and history these families have together have allowed them to have mutual respect and love for each other and they consider their religion and spiritually as the basis of equality and befriending each other instead of a reason to put up walls and barriers between each other.