Cleared out by The Games

With the Commonwealth Games only 98 days away there have been reports that the government is up to no good again. In the year leading up to the Games they have been arresting beggars and clearing slums.

A reported 52% of people living in Delhi reside in slums. ‘Reside’ is a bad word, ‘survive’ would be better. You can see people washing from a bucket outside, cooking on basic gas stoves and eeking out an existence threading flowers into garlands for temple goers. At more than half of the cities’ population of 15 million, that’s a shocking amount of people living in conditions like this. Often slums are right by the roadside and clearly visible to any passers-by. There has been a few that were allowed to stay in place and screening such as fences or trees were used. For the others, as an eye-sore and an embarrassment for India, the Delhi Development Authority and other departments have been at work.

It is well-reported that beggars have been arrested and put in jail without trial until after October when they may be released. Beggars’ jails are in existence here which are called homes for beggars but in reality they are mini prisons housed next to the bigger prisons. With so many beggars to be tried there have been some initiatives such as a beggars’ court where beggars are tried in a mobile van before being and carted off to the ‘home’.

Recently, Mike Rosenkrantz, another VSO volunteer, received a text from someone in the slums near the Indian Social Institute (ISI) where VSO holds its orientation training. He found out that slum clearances were going on here. If you want to see the area before it got bull-dozed it features on one of my You Tube videos from November 2009.

We walked past these people every day. They looked at us as we walked by and we smiled and laughed with the children all the while getting a glimpse of the side of India that isn’t shining. Now their semi-permanent brick-made shelters are gone and families are homeless once more. Finding out why the government has cleared this particular area, which is not visible from the main road, is unbelievable. These people were displaced as apparently Delhi needed more parking for the Games.    

Manali and Mountains

After a 16 hour bus journey another volunteer and I arrived in Manali in the region of Himachel Pradesh. How great it was to get away to the cool of the mountains for the weekend. Warm enough for T-shirts in the day and cool enough for jeans and fleeces in the evenings. It was a revelation compared to the current 40 plus heat. Yesterday here it hit 50 plus on someone’s thermometer. The AC at home struggled to cool down my flat. I wasn’t sure if it was even on at one point. In Manali it rained a bit every day and it was a welcome experience.

Welcomed by the usual touts and auto drivers fresh off the bus we made it past the hordes until we got a reasonable price and headed into Old Manali. Past new Manali we went up the hill into the world of the backpacker, aging hippy and dried out volunteers. Signs outside cafes screamed banana pancakes, nutella croissants and coffee. All of which must be consumed sitting outside with an air of smugness and a world weary look on ones face. My own smugness tends to come in at the point where I hear someone bragging about their travels and I think, well I live and work here so probably best not to come over here with your stories.

We escaped the tourist merry-go-round of cheap massages and pedicures and fortune-telling by heading to the mountains the next day for a three day trek. We chose an easy option which is lucky when being in the Delhi heat means exercise is irregular and usually short-lived. We were rewarded by green foothills and colourful villages. Sleeping in a tent, fed on dahl and roti, listening to the sound of the River Beas was pretty amazing. Another three hour trek the next day rewarded us with a camp site 3000m up on the side of Patalsu mountain surrounded by the other snow-capped peaks. Lolling around in the sunshine all afternoon, reading, chatting to passing trekkers and playing with Terry the dog who had abandoned the trekker he was with in favour of our tent. He proceeded to sleep in our tent porch all night and accompanied us on the trek until he got distracted by some cows and another group of trekkers. Our cooks and porters did us proud feeding us with unlimited chai and three course meals. The only problem was finding a suitable place to go to the toilet as the trees were a bit far away. I was slightly embarrassed to be caught peeing on the side of the mountain by an American trekker and his four year old son but the chance I’ll ever see them again is remote!

Our final day involved another three hour trek followed by another four hours to get back down the mountain. The day after, we headed to Manali main town on sore legs for some retail therapy. Blankets, a variety of wool products and Yak’s wool shawls have been obtained and are waiting for the next Delhi winter or my return to the UK depending on where I’ll be in December. The main part of Manali was full of Indian tourists so we were able to get some Indian food at a Dhaba. We managed to avoid the hawkers selling fake Ray-bans and men purveying the pinkest radioactive looking candy floss I’ve ever seen.   

We had to put up with a broken down bus on the way back and a replacement bus with no AC but got a 400 rupee refund when we got into Delhi sweating 17 hours later. The whole thing was brilliant and the chance for a break away couldn’t have come quick enough. Work as well as the weather has really hotted up with government proposals and training to be worked on. The opportunity to get away and enjoy some UK-like weather came at a good time and has meant a renewed sense of enthusiasm on my return. Now I need to plan my next trip away!   

Wot choo looking at?

So I’m more used to the auto drivers now. I even have a bit of a laugh with them when negotiating in Hindi. I still occasionally jump when car horns toot but mostly not. There are things to do for fun and places to relax. I’m settled and happy.

So why does the staring get to me sometimes? It’s like there is no one around who isn’t Indian other than me. And it’s not just men, its women too. Even when I’m going to work and my clothes are more Indian, it doesn’t make a difference.

Granted sometimes you can tell that the person staring may not be a Dilliwallah and could be from a rural village. You see everyone comes to Delhi to work. That’s why some sleep on the side of the street. Construction workers often build tent-like homes from bricks on a spare bit of pavement. You see whole families cooking, washing and living their lives side-by-side with the traffic.

So what gives me the right to get wound up? On the rare day that it does now I have a little chat to myself and think...ladyee, you are rich in comparison. Just deal with it.

Pic from http://blogs.sacbee.com/photos/2010/04/indias-national-census.html 

Lingua Franca

Learning two languages has been a challenge and one fraught with usual faux pas. In Hindi if you don’t roll your R enough in Kurta (shirt) it sounds like kutta (dog) and everyone giggles. I mostly use Hindi for auto drivers and vegetable shopping so I find that it hasn’t developed as much as I’d have liked though at times I sound quite good.

The other language I’ve been learning is Indian Sign Language (ISL) and it is one of the languages of my work here. In the UK we use British Sign Language (BSL) and I’m fluent. It’s a common myth that there is a universal sign language. Pretty much every country has its own sign language due to communities developing their own just like spoken languages developed. Sign Languages have been researched by linguists as early as the 1960s and proven to be full languages in their own right. As many different sign languages have similar grammatical features once you learn the vocabulary of another sign language it can become much simpler.

But there are still complications. As one of my first encounters with ISL was an international sign linguistics conference in Delhi I met many Deaf people from around the country. Trying to learn a new sign language is a bit difficult when you’re meeting people using five different dialects of ISL from as far apart as Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Also some Deaf people prefer using the American finger spelling system. In Delhi they mostly use an alphabet similar to the British system. Finger spelling is used for spelling anything that doesn’t have a sign or does but you just don’t know it! It’s more complicated than that but I won’t go into that here. I find it gets interesting when people fingerspell Hindi words to me. Luckily these tend to be about food so I’ve obviously learnt all those words.

It was really hard at first trying to remember to stick to very visual elements of the language and to pick up the Indian signs along the way. Sometimes I have to work hard to decode the language if I don’t know what the subject is. Once I know the context it’s much easier and I just get it. I find myself wishing I could just sit around the office chatting to the Deaf staff and students but it’s a mix of Deaf, hearing interpreters and sadly, laptop time as work must be done.

The hardest things to learn are the real cultural signs that have been adopted into ISL. Many of these are slight head nods or certain movements of the hands. Some of these signs are used by hearing people on the street gesturing to each other that something isn’t possible or when they are agreeing to something. But it’s great when it all fits in and I love it when I sign in ISL without coding from the BSL first.

And just like Hindi I’ve had a faux pas in ISL. In my first month I asked a Deaf member of staff what the sign for toilet was. I spelt it out and asked for the sign. I wondered if it was appropriate but thought that’s an important sign to learn and I really wanted to find one at the time. He held out his first two fingers palm facing upwards and pulled them back. Not many people use toilet paper here which is why eating with your left hand is taboo. So in my naivety and surprise I thought the sign was a graphic description of what Indian people do in the bathroom. Anyway a month or so later whilst chatting with staff over lunch about travel arrangements I realised what the man thought I had spelt: ticket.     

Here’s some info is you want to know more about Sign Languages:

World Federation of the Deaf – Factsheet on Sign Language

Learn Indian Sign Language

UCL Mini-lecture: The truth about sign language

UCL Video - A visual people and a visual language

 

Pics:

Hindi Alphabet from Google Sites

International Women's Day from The Deaf Way Foundation

Video Killed the Radio Star

Not content with my own You Tube channel: www.youtube.com/jenpenwen

I've got in on VSO-UK's. See the clip of a few volunteers talking about why we love it and why you should volunteer too: www.youtube.com/user/vsomediauk#p/a/u/0/lkCBX8lhTFk

Another clip on my channel to come soon: Staff leaving lunch in the office. I'm subtitling in three languages again so it always takes a while.

The Heat is on...

I didn’t think it could get much worse: 47 degrees, trying to stay indoors anytime between 10 and 6, going for a run only after 6.30pm and drinking 6-8 litres of water a day. Reports say it’ll go up to 50 next week. Every time it goes up a couple of degrees I’m not sure how I’ll cope but then I just do. It just gets less enjoyable.

I’m pretty bored of drinking water and I’ve been know on some days to drink up to 10 litres. If you have some alcohol it has to be weighed up against how much water you can drink in the time left in the day. I had two beers the other day and got a dehydration headache. I pretty much stop at a few beers these days.

Today I found it hard to concentrate at work. If the water coolers don’t work in the office the sweat immediately starts. These are contraptions that suck in water from the tap, sprinkle it onto squares of hay at the sides with a big fan in the middle that blows out the water-cooled air. Air con would be nice but it’s too expensive. Someone in the office took pity on me one day and put a fan on my desk. The staff think it’s hilarious and call it my personal AC. It can be a life saver though. If it gets really bad I splash water on my face and sit there with it on the hurricane setting. I don't get big wind-blown 80’s rock video hair though, it's usually stuck to my neck. Make up you can also forget. I don’t think they sell it in sweat-proof.

Keeping up with yoga is fine providing you can summon the energy to get back out of the flat once you’re home. Swimming is ok between the hours of 7 and 9am only. Any later and the hoards of kids appear and sun burn is a strong possibility. I tried the local running track last Saturday at 8am. It must have been over 35 degrees already so it was more of a run with walking water breaks. My companion and I are aiming for 7am this Saturday. I don’t think I can do any earlier.

But here’s the thing. Does this all mean when it gets to 50 I’ll end up house-bound? Not wanting to venture out into the oven-like breeze I might end up planted in front of the AC that I splashed out on. My savings have never been spent on anything better. It used to make my room a freezing 22. Now on max it’s about 30 and my fan is whirring away. Dilliwallahs talk of escaping to the Himilayas in June. A local friend tells me to get up at 5am every day. I might have to take this advice next week. If it gets bad you might see me doing the monsoon rain dance on the terrace at 5am every morning. You never know, it could become a local attraction.

Indian Interpreter Idol: The Search is on

Someone recently made a comment about my blog that it was personal and not about work. It is true. There have only been a few references to work and I wrote about our national conference.

Thing is, it’s pretty difficult to write about everything I’m doing. Just like in offices around the world there is a lot of background work but the glamorous big events don’t happen that often. (And the occasional paint throwing at Holi.) If I waxed lyrical about a meeting I had or a simple email I received I’m pretty sure people would stop reading.

I recently gave a presentation about social media to other volunteers. This was more to do with my enthusiasm for YouTube and Twitter than any specific form of expertise. Something I mentioned was to be careful what you blog about. Your neighbours or the people you work with may be reading. If you’re not getting on with someone, you definitely shouldn’t be making it public.

I also think that a blog perhaps isn’t always the right medium for what I'm doing. Occasional tweets can be seen about how work is progressing but I mostly don’t want to go into all the details now. What I can say is what I am working on is pretty big. There are only 100 known interpreters in India for what estimates have guessed are 4 million Indian Sign Language (ISL) users. A number that is less than my previous estimates due to generations of Deaf children having little access to ISL in their education and many rural Deaf people being isolated from the rest of the signing community. There is hope that education for Deaf children will improve but this will take time. There is hope that India’s laws will change. This will also inevitably take time. There are other projects my NGO works on. My work is on increasing knowledge of interpreters in society, supporting interpreters and finding potential new ones. The talent is out there. It is like Indian (Interpreter) Idol at the moment in our office as we hunt them down.

What I will say specifically, is I am six months in. It is the half way point. After one month’s training followed by five months in placement, I get it. VSO says it takes time to build those all important relationships, to understand the context in which you are working and to be apply your knowledge to the work. It feels like all the prep has been done and we really are cooking on gas. To get everything done in the next 6 months is going to be pretty hairy. We need support, there is a lot of work to be done and it is not as easy as this would be at home. I’m really positive. We have a good team, excellent vision from the Director and everyone I work with is enthusiastic and gets it too.    

Forgive me if I blog more about life than about work. It’s not all yoga, swimming and travelling. I just don’t want to give the game away. How much better is it going to be to report on the success afterwards?

If you want to know more have a look at the Facebook page and join the group to receive updates. We are also on the web here. And if you want to enter Indian Interpreter Idol and haven't done so yet please contact us.