Acclimatising

After two weeks in a foreign country, it’s perhaps not unusual to be beginning your homeward journey but on this trip I’m still really only just getting adjusted and possibly beginning to imagine what my routine, as far as it will be possible to have one, may look like in the months to come. Since my last update a week ago, time has been filled more consistently with teaching activities, not just in the classroom but also outside of it in the planning and preparation stages and it’s been a real pleasure to have been given the space and freedom to turn some of my visual skills to this end in ways I’d never have had time to do when teaching in the UK. One thing I have been particularly glad to work on is a series of illustrations for the purposes of prompting correct use of pronouns with the verb ‘to be’ (She’s dancing. He’s singing. They’re running. Etc.), copies of which were then laminated and cut to handy flash-card size. These can take quite a while to produce, illustrating first in pencil before adding ink and then scanning for editing in Photoshop, but I never felt rushed or pressured to finish in an unrealistic time frame.

I’ve been taking a bit more responsibility in the classroom too, delivering more content myself and particularly picking up and taking the lead on some common pronunciation mistakes. These are not quickly remedied and will need frequent revisiting but it was gratifying to find something meaningful that I could initiate with the groups in the interest of genuine learning but also developing rapport.

Mark and Shakyajata with the young men (and a supportive wife and daughter!)

Freshly laminated resources!

An eager class...

Mark enjoys his first home-cooked lunch courtesy of Sheetal's famous kitchen!

We’re now a full team too; Mark, our other English teacher arrived on Monday and it’s been enjoyable getting to know him both personally (we’d only met once before in the UK) and professionally in a team –teaching environment. Having someone near my own age with whom I can converse fluently has also been an unexpected benefit of his joining us and I’ve really enjoyed the mild yet very grounding cultural escapism that has been possible as a result.

The fact that I have begun to travel into the city independently and feel fairly comfortable using the local buses now has also been a welcome development of my experience here. The journey is really very straightforward, as soon as identifying a bus from a coach, lorry, private vehicle or slightly suspicious public-cum-private transport option has been achieved and you’ve bravely stood in the middle of the traffic for long enough to flag it down and board. If you can then establish that you’ve actually got on a service for the correct route and negotiated a ticket (as well as your change) from the conductor then you’re well away. Bus stops aren’t too obvious in many places and it’s often not clear which vehicles are actually buses.

Still, the journey is cheap (only 9 Rupees to the first useful stop or 11 to the next) and very quick (only ten minutes on average) with a service coming every ten to fifteen minutes. In the evening, it’s sometimes a bit of a treat to hire a rickshaw as an alternative to the bus. At up to 150 Rupees, it is a bit of a luxury but it takes you door to door if needs be and occasionally a kindly driver can be persuaded to stop for shopping at one of the fresh fruit stalls on the busy main road that leads from Nagpur city centre out to Bhilgaon.

A night-ride home in a rickshaw! Not for the weak!

A decorated bus...

The additional freedom and independence that has come with increased travel confidence has also made it possible for me to start pursuing leisure interests after teaching. I soon realised upon arrival that running outdoors would be a significant challenge and probably not all that safe, taking the dusty polluted air, busy, dangerous, poorly lit roads, and ambient temperature into account. This also before considering the cultural environment in which a single western woman donning sports kit and legging it off out in public would attract even more attention than her attempts to board a bus into town.

However, I don’t give up that easily and having felt the negative physical effects of no exercise after just a couple of weeks without a run, I decided to seek an alternative option in the form of a ‘ladies only’ gym less than a ten minute walk from the Indora campus. Use of this facility has required further adjustment on both physical and cultural levels. Physically, the heat has been an interesting new experience; though there is an electric desk fan aimed at the treadmill, this only provides a little relief from the 28 – 30 degree temperature in the gym and so a big part of the exercise I have been doing has been about getting my body used to that.

That there is no shower facility is an interesting additional twist given that such an environment does encourage unusual amounts of sweating. On my third run there, I finally managed to run for a full 5km. There’s a 15 minute time limit on the machines as part of a queuing system that I try not feel irritated by when the next user is apparently content at an average walking pace, but Indian and Western attitudes to exercise are clearly as different as any other lifestyle factor and there have been times where a recovery break on the stationary bike was probably quite a good idea before getting back on the treadmill in such heat.

Frustrations aside, it has been good to get active again, even if this has been in very different conditions to those of my norm and I am already feeling better for the activity. Combined with a 30 minute yoga routine in my room most mornings, I should be well equipped to maintain a reasonable degree of fitness, even if marathon training distances are out of the window when broken into 15 minute chunks! In addition, I’ve realised the gym is a valuable opportunity for a little bit of the ‘me’ time to which westerners are so attached, before returning to the busy family home where a desire to be alone is not only difficult to indulge but actively bewildering for the rest of the household.

I’m continuing to get used to the alternative versions of ritual practice too, such as different tunes for mantras and entirely different verses during puja. If you’re used to chanting in Pali anyway, one might not think there’d be much difference but it can be surprisingly jarring when you’ve become so used to certain sounds or making offerings in certain ways. Even the shrine salute is a little different here; a slightly longer process and it’s taken me until now to remember I haven’t finished half way through. Meditation too has been a new experience as it’s not been so easy to follow the stages when led in Hindi. This hasn’t had a huge impact on my practice but it is yet another flicker of alteration that builds up to quite a significant degree of difference when added to the backdrop of other changes.

Some Common Scenes

Generally, despite these observations, which I am sometimes more able to take in my stride than others depending on energy levels or general mood, things have been settling into a rather pleasant sense of normality over the last seven days and I find myself unsure if it still feels like I’ve hardly been here a day or if I’ve been here for months already. Feelings of acclimatisation are bound to consolidate still further over the coming days as we fix more permanent planning decisions around teaching timetables and syllabus delivery, as well as settling into other routines around weekend practice and other leisure time. Having said that, we are about to enter a three day holiday period for Diwali; not a Buddhist but a Hindu event that will bring festivities, change and disruption to the whole country, much as Christmas might in the UK. We’ve made some plans for special things to do with the young men and women over that time so whilst any fragile, new-born sense of normality is going to get a good and proper rattle over the weekend, it should be in quite a fun way and there’s sure to be plenty to fill up a new update pretty soon!