in which i want to pass out and sleep for days

First a brief apology for the lack of blogging as of late. I've got a good excuse, though. I spent last weekend camping in Rishikesh, which is the foothills of the Himalayas and on the banks of the Ganges, so I didn't bring my laptop for fear of getting it destroyed. This week was spent in Udaipur and, more accurately, rural Rajasthan. Rajasthan is known as "the land of the kings," so there are a ton of beautiful palaces. There is also a ton of desert and unpaved roads and goats and cows. I know this because we spent about six hours a day driving to remote locations in the state to "learn" about public health. And we talked to some traditional birth attendants and a traditional healer and saw a woman who was possessed by the spirits, literally seizing her way down the village road to the closest temple. We saw a mobile health clinic and talked with yet another ASHA. On our last day, we saw the Chittorgarh Fort, which - according to Wikipedia - is one of the largest forts in Asia. (Good thing no one mentioned that to me while we were there.) We met with a group of girls who were staying at a hostel specifically created to give members of scheduled tribes the opportunity to go to school. That was frustrating because these girls didn't have the ability to stand up and say their names without giggling, despite being 16 and 17. There was also the fact that the girls spoke in Hindi, and despite taking 2.5 hours of Hindi a day for the last month, I still couldn't understand a word that they said because they were mumbling and speaking way too fast for me. We took two sleeper trains, slept in a beautiful hotel on the banks of Lake Pichola and spent another night sleeping in one giant room.

It's been a long week, and I'm so happy to be back in Delhi for a while. But I'm exhausted and I feel like I've been repeatedly beaten with a lead pipe. I feel sort of discouraged because I still can't speak in Hindi, but I also haven't had any time to sit down and study Hindi. At varying points during the day and night, I feel like there's an alien in my tummy.

When you're going to study abroad, you constantly hear about the "cultural adjustment curve." It's going to be awesome for a little bit but then you dip into this depression and this conflict about not being at home and being totally homesick. You finally pull out of it at the very end, but it's still never going to be the level of euphoria that it was at the beginning.

I've been in India for about a month, and I feel like I've reached the conflict stage of this curve, but I don't know how much of that is directly caused by being here in this country. For instance, I'm beat, and I know that pretty much every person on my program is at varying degrees of sick. A large part of that comes from the lack of paved roads and the plethora of long bus rides, but there's also the fact that none of us have really gotten a chance to get a full night of sleep for the last couple of weeks because of our unbelievably hectic schedule. Feeling like poop makes it hard for anyone to be open to new things. Additionally, I feel like I've been dragged to places to meet with people and to see these amazing sights without being told beforehand the importance or the implications of these things. Take the Chittorgarh Fort example. I feel like, as a group, we ask very basic and sometimes ignorant questions of the people and the organizations we meet with because we don't have a basic understanding of who we're meeting with. That only makes things even more frustrating because in addition to the language barrier, there's a pretty significant knowledge gap.

I know that I want to enjoy my time in this country, I really do. It's hard when I feel like my program is forcing me to go above and beyond what my body can physically handle. Then throw in the fact that I'm in an entirely new culture with an entirely new set of norms, which only makes things harder. I need to spend some time teasing out my frustrations -- are they from India or from my program? All I want is a full night of sleep, where I can just wake up on my own accord and without an alarm.

That and a nice salad of arugula, goat cheese and olives.