Cayley – Camel Safari & Trash
06/02/2009
This last weekend was a bit of a whirlwind. We traveled to Jaisalmer, a small city about 10 hours from Udaipur. Jaisalmer is famous for its Jain temples and desert scenery. I think the group was ready for a change of scenery, but we didn't expect to appreciate Udaipur even more after this trip. Getting there and back was a bit of a challenge, but once we got on those camels and starting riding out into the desert, we knew it was well worth the trip. The sand dunes were incredible and the stars were brighter than you could imagine. We knew we riding to some sort of "camp" (which I imagined to be tents of some sort). After riding on the camels for about 2.5 hours, the man leading my Unt (that's camel in Hindi) told me it was just around the corner. I stretched my head out further to look past the sand dune and saw... a big cement platform. We slept on the platform that night with some blankets. The wind was relentless, and so was the sand, but it was beautiful. We didn't even notice the layer of sand the covered our faces (and the rest of our bodies, even inside our underwear!) until we got back to the hotel in Jaisalmer.
The filming is going well. The past two days have been productive... lots of interpreting (some from Mewari and some from Hindi) with Tanvika and trying to wrap our heads around how exactly these women are making change in Malaaria (the village we are concentrating on).
I've been thinking a lot about poverty and my reactions to what I've seen since I've been in and around Udaipur city. Our group has had a lot of great conversations about the poverty and rural circumstances that so many people live in. I've often heard the concern that so many people in rural areas "need" development, as if that is the only means of their success and growth in this fast-paced, technological world. After taking Gangi's class on 'Environment and Society' sophomore year, I've thought a lot about when it means to live in a truly sustainable way. People who can actually support themselves by growing their own food, living off the land, and not produce excess waste that ends up harming the environment (and of course this is a very complex topic that could go on for pages and pages...) are the kind of people our world needs to be looking to for guidance. It's amazing to look around and see the trash that piles up along side the road. It isn't even just in the cities, it's in the villages as well. People are eating snacks packaged in plastic, throwing it to the side of the food stall, and not really thinking about it. It's really scary to think about how fast development is happening in places like India, because the education of how to deal with the fast-paced changes isn't there to accompany all of the changes. It seems that most people in the developing world (from what I've seen in various parts of northern India, Indonesia and Central America) don't know how to deal with the plastic packaging, because it's everywhere, and it's not customary to consolidate the waste in a specific place, like a landfill (out of sight, out of mind of course), so it seems like Indians are much more wasteful than most Americans... but of course this is what we are seeing on the surface. How much are we actually learning from our mistakes of producing more and more waste, filling more and more landfills, and somehow convincing ourselves that we are turning in a more environmentally conscious direction? I'm a bit pessimistic at the moment, but I do hope that people stop pointing so many fingers, and see these changes not as foreign developments, but also as mirror images of our own tendencies to produce more and more waste. The more we consume, the more we have to throw away, and the more we are tied to our belongings. In a lot of ways, I envy the simpler lifestyle of living from the earth, and not having so many possessions. In a nutshell, visiting the village has made me think a lot about my own habits and tendencies, especially those that are wasteful.
And women's issues is a WHOLE different topic... more to come on that...
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