it's getting better...
Sayla is better the second time around.

The rains came yesterday, and the temperature has dropped about 10 degrees.

I completed my first survey, which took 3 hours, yesterday. My translators were doing all the work, but it was interesting nevertheless. We interviewed a Harijan (untouchable) family. I felt like an ignorant but micro-managing boss as I constantly peered of my translator, Merambhai's, shoulder and pointed out his mistakes. My city upbringing (and complete ignorance of indian farm animals) made me point out that in the section of the survey where we would note the produce from animal husbandry, Merambhai has forgotten to include the milk from the cows. Tarun said, 'which cows?', and i said, 'those right there,', pointing at some animals right next to us. Tarun snapped, 'those are castrated bullocks!'. Then we laughed like maniacs for a few minutes.

We caught a ride back from the village where we were surveying to Sayla in the cab of a truck. Halfway through the ride the wind started blowing furiously and we could see it start to pour in the distance. It started to rain here in Sayla just as we got back.

I cooked spaghetti for dinner, which was a home comfort for me and a new experience for Tarun and Anand who ate with me. We borrowed some tomatoes from some other people on campus to make tomato sauce, and i used some garlic-masala mix for flavour. The spaghetti was quite good, and just as everything becomes indian when it gets here, it had a south-indian masala taste to it. Tarun poured cream over his pasta, and Anand used his fingers to eat, which i thought was pretty funny (spaghetti is not easy to eat with your fingers).

Throughout our cooking of the spaghetti, people wandered into the kitchen, and Tarun had to explain, 'this is spaghetti...like noodles'. They were bewildered. There is no pasta in India, I guess.

We ate dinner while watching a show that is an exact replica of Jay leno, except the laugh track is hopelessly arificial and the band has a sitar and tabla player instead of electric guitar and drums. And the band does the 'bah-dum-bum-ching' thing everytime the host makes a joke, but it was with a tabla and sitar, so it was more like a short sitar whail and exotic thump of the tabla.

Continuing with the western foods, i had corn flakes for breakfast (with buffalo-cow milk, for the required indian twist) and sweet corn soup from a packet for dinner (with coriander, baby corn, and lemon as the indian twist).
- posted by aziz @ 2:04 p.m.

 
Sayla sucks
I’m back in Abad for the weekend after a week-and-a-half at Sayla.

Sayla is much less savoury than Abad. To arrive at the Sayla field office, you take a bus three hours down the Abad-Rajkot highway, and about 2 and a half hours into the journey, bang of the glass behind the bus driver and yell ‘Sayla’—at least, this is what I do to ensure that the bus stops there, because there is no other reason to. Most buses, at best, slow down near Sayla, but only because there is a buffalo-poo covered roundabout there, and they don’t want to risk skidding into the chai-wallahs and phone booths scattered along the side of the road.

After getting off the bus, you must walk through an archway and down a dusty, rocky road to arrive at a gate with a rickety, rusted sign that says ‘AKxxxx’ and some other things in Gujarati. Further down the same road is an old mansion that once belonged to the local feudal landlord. The mansion has been converted into a restaurant for the Abaddis stupid enough to take their vacation in Sayla.

The AKI compound at Sayla is comprised of two depressing concrete buildings; the guest house cum office (as they would say here), and the row of flats where the staff live with their families. I can’t say anything too bad about the guesthouse: it has a great shower, a toilet with a seat and a proper sink with a faucet. It is also good because of what it doesn’t have (bugs).

After staying in the guesthouse for the first week, I moved into one of the flats just before I left to come back to the city. The flat is not as comfortable as the guest house; the toilet is a hole in the ground, there is no shower (only a low tap and some buckets—why could they just place the tap higher?) and the greasy faucet in a dark corner of the hallway (there is only one tube light in the entrance way) lets out only a tiny trickle of salty Sayla-grade water.

But everything seems worse than it is when you have the taste of bile in your mouth, which I did for the 24 hours following my encounter with what must have been a very bacteria-infused cup of chaas. I spent all of Thursday night and Friday morning stumbling between my bed and the toilet (luckily I was still in the guesthouse then) to expel partially digested food, water and bile through various bodily orifices. I can’t remember ever having been that sick since I ate a salami sub from a dirty place ironically named Belly Busters in Toronto when I was in grade 11. Needless to say, I missed my 8 am (sharp! Be there sharp! Come early if you have to!) breakfast appointment with Srinivas (the administrative manager who offered to make me eggs and toast).

Meanwhile, nobody at the office seems to be available to do translation work for me, so although Ive spent almost two weeks in Sayla over the past month, I have yet to complete one household survey.

Tarun told me that people seem to run away from Sayla, and indeed, he and Anand are soon leaving to go work for a new development consultancy firm in Mumbai. I can see why: like Sloan says, there nothing left to make them want to stay. There is absolutely no time or outlet for leisure. Work is slow and unfocused, but takes up 12 hours a day 6 days a week. And on the one day off, there is absolutely nothing to do: no table tennis, no pool table, no get togethers, drinking, laughing, joking, gaming or any other diversion whatsoever. I would rate the chief diversions of the AKI Sayla office as follows:

1. Paan chewing (I don’t indulge)
2. Chai drinking (they make the tea sickly sweet here)
3. Dog watching (they’re scared of humans)
4. Standing in the breeze

We shouldn’t under-rate number four, because it is the one thing unique and good about Sayla—it gets a terrific, constant wind. This goes a long, long way towards making Sayla bearable. It means that you can sleep well at night and stay relatively cool if you can find a shady but breezy space to sit.

The website project got cancelled this week because AKDN decided that AKI shouldn’t have its own page, but only a page within the AKDN website. This means that my hours of slogging over the design will be wasted and that I no longer have an excuse to come to Abad for the next month.

The good news: I’m feeling almost back to normal after my sickness, I bought lots of good things to eat to take back with me to Sayla (corn flakes, spaghetti, etc.) as the food sucks and I don’t trust it anymore, and I plan on not spending any weekends in Sayla itself (I’ll go to my ancestral Kutch, Bombay---which I have to go to to get my Swedish residence permit anyways, etc....).

I saw a funny movie tonight called 50 first dates, starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. I laughed my ass off, which just tells me that I must have been starved for some jokes, because no Adam Sandler movie has ever made me laugh that much.

- posted by aziz @ 3:51 p.m.