Today, in a word, sucked.
Giardia is kicking by behind, and the giardia medications are also making it challenging for me to really focus. It's gotten better as the day's progressed, but waking up this morning at 7AM was brutal. After a quick breakfast of corn flakes and a banana and a little pink pill that will kill the protozoa in my belly, Sarah and I made our way to the program center by 8:15AM. Hindi class was a little bit too heated for my taste, and I was also very dehydrated despite drinking a full liter of water in about an hour and a half. Our teacher got a little peeved at all of us for not sending him a text when we got home on Sunday morning from the train station, which is just unfair because we got back at 7AM on Sunday and all just passed out in bed with exhaustion. This is also totally something my mom would complain about, which only made me feel entirely belittled and patronized.
Then we had our Hindi breakout sessions, and I could not handle the frustration. I didn't understand what was going on, and the protozoa were just pulsating. Our teacher excused me after I couldn't manage to string together some words to form a full sentence in Hindi (but to be entirely fair, I probably couldn't have made the sentence even if my belly was feeling totally normal). With tears in my eyes and giardia in my intestinal tract, I lay down in the library wanting to get the hell out of that building.
A short twenty minute rest later, I had to go down to the basement classroom to learn about healthcare financing. The lecture was supposed to end at 1PM, but the speaker went over. At 1:10PM, our academic professor told the speaker to start wrapping it up. At this point in the presentation - which was mind-numbingly dull and covered a lot of issues and structures that I've learned about in other courses or read about - two of our teachers stood up and told us all to get out of the basement. I was panicking, as was the rest of the class, because it's nerve-racking when your teachers start running out of a classroom like bats out of hell.
Once we got outside, we were told that there had been an earthquake. Apparently it hit 5.1 on the Richter scale, and the epicenter was about 70 kilometers away. We got back into the classroom by 1:20PM or so. Lunch was supposed to have started, so I was fussy. The speaker kept talking until 1:45PM, which was just painful considering the fact that he was supposed to have stopped talking 45 minutes beforehand.
Lunch was 45 minutes long instead of the usual hour, followed by an hour long student-run synthesis session that was originally scheduled to start at 2PM but - due to the earthquake and the overzealous speaker - didn't start until 2:30PM. Or rather, our academic director didn't start to talk to us about proper cell phone usage until 2:30PM. He told us that we should always have our cell phones on at all times so that they can contact us whenever there is an emergency, which - once again - was just patronizing. He also essentially told us that we should know how intense our excursions are and we get a time to recover on this program and so it's our fault if we're sick because we're not taking advantage of this downtime. This also made me angry and frustrated. We had a less than stellar talk amongst ourselves about sex-selective abortions, in large part because no one really wanted to be there anymore.
We didn't leave the program center until 3:45PM or so, and I got home by 4:30PM. That means I spent a full nine hours in this godforsaken house in a residential neighborhood in southeast Delhi that someone decided would be a great, entirely inconvenient place to have a "program center." The last time I spent nine hours in class was during high school. This is also really awful because our syllabus says we should have gotten out of there at 2PM, not 3:45PM. Additionally, I still have a good two hours of homework to do tonight, and I still have to deal with this giardia crap. (Literally. There is a lot of crap involved with intestinal parasites.)
I signed up for a program because I wanted to get college credit and because I wanted someone to facilitate my time in India. I did not want a program to dictate my every move and to make me so exhausted that I have neither the time nor the energy to leave the house when I do have free time. There's so much to see in this city; there's so much that I want to see in this city. But I can't because I have to write these stupid Hindi sentences. This is a silly thing in of itself because I signed up for a program that focuses on health and human rights, not Hindi.
I feel duped and manipulated and angry and frustrated and sick and tired. I am an independent American twenty-something, and I want to be treated as such. I understand that I am living in India, in an Indian context, so there are certain liberties that I need to forfeit and certain concessions that I need to make. But I feel like I've been doing my best to make those adjustments. Look at my new wardrobe, my 9PM curfew and 10PM bedtime, the fact that I'm doing my homework at all. Living here is hard, and I came here knowing that I would be challenging my limits and my comfort zone, but my American study abroad program should be making things easier, not making me want to punch a hole through the cinderblock walls of the program center.
Giardia is kicking by behind, and the giardia medications are also making it challenging for me to really focus. It's gotten better as the day's progressed, but waking up this morning at 7AM was brutal. After a quick breakfast of corn flakes and a banana and a little pink pill that will kill the protozoa in my belly, Sarah and I made our way to the program center by 8:15AM. Hindi class was a little bit too heated for my taste, and I was also very dehydrated despite drinking a full liter of water in about an hour and a half. Our teacher got a little peeved at all of us for not sending him a text when we got home on Sunday morning from the train station, which is just unfair because we got back at 7AM on Sunday and all just passed out in bed with exhaustion. This is also totally something my mom would complain about, which only made me feel entirely belittled and patronized.
Then we had our Hindi breakout sessions, and I could not handle the frustration. I didn't understand what was going on, and the protozoa were just pulsating. Our teacher excused me after I couldn't manage to string together some words to form a full sentence in Hindi (but to be entirely fair, I probably couldn't have made the sentence even if my belly was feeling totally normal). With tears in my eyes and giardia in my intestinal tract, I lay down in the library wanting to get the hell out of that building.
A short twenty minute rest later, I had to go down to the basement classroom to learn about healthcare financing. The lecture was supposed to end at 1PM, but the speaker went over. At 1:10PM, our academic professor told the speaker to start wrapping it up. At this point in the presentation - which was mind-numbingly dull and covered a lot of issues and structures that I've learned about in other courses or read about - two of our teachers stood up and told us all to get out of the basement. I was panicking, as was the rest of the class, because it's nerve-racking when your teachers start running out of a classroom like bats out of hell.
Once we got outside, we were told that there had been an earthquake. Apparently it hit 5.1 on the Richter scale, and the epicenter was about 70 kilometers away. We got back into the classroom by 1:20PM or so. Lunch was supposed to have started, so I was fussy. The speaker kept talking until 1:45PM, which was just painful considering the fact that he was supposed to have stopped talking 45 minutes beforehand.
Lunch was 45 minutes long instead of the usual hour, followed by an hour long student-run synthesis session that was originally scheduled to start at 2PM but - due to the earthquake and the overzealous speaker - didn't start until 2:30PM. Or rather, our academic director didn't start to talk to us about proper cell phone usage until 2:30PM. He told us that we should always have our cell phones on at all times so that they can contact us whenever there is an emergency, which - once again - was just patronizing. He also essentially told us that we should know how intense our excursions are and we get a time to recover on this program and so it's our fault if we're sick because we're not taking advantage of this downtime. This also made me angry and frustrated. We had a less than stellar talk amongst ourselves about sex-selective abortions, in large part because no one really wanted to be there anymore.
We didn't leave the program center until 3:45PM or so, and I got home by 4:30PM. That means I spent a full nine hours in this godforsaken house in a residential neighborhood in southeast Delhi that someone decided would be a great, entirely inconvenient place to have a "program center." The last time I spent nine hours in class was during high school. This is also really awful because our syllabus says we should have gotten out of there at 2PM, not 3:45PM. Additionally, I still have a good two hours of homework to do tonight, and I still have to deal with this giardia crap. (Literally. There is a lot of crap involved with intestinal parasites.)
I signed up for a program because I wanted to get college credit and because I wanted someone to facilitate my time in India. I did not want a program to dictate my every move and to make me so exhausted that I have neither the time nor the energy to leave the house when I do have free time. There's so much to see in this city; there's so much that I want to see in this city. But I can't because I have to write these stupid Hindi sentences. This is a silly thing in of itself because I signed up for a program that focuses on health and human rights, not Hindi.
I feel duped and manipulated and angry and frustrated and sick and tired. I am an independent American twenty-something, and I want to be treated as such. I understand that I am living in India, in an Indian context, so there are certain liberties that I need to forfeit and certain concessions that I need to make. But I feel like I've been doing my best to make those adjustments. Look at my new wardrobe, my 9PM curfew and 10PM bedtime, the fact that I'm doing my homework at all. Living here is hard, and I came here knowing that I would be challenging my limits and my comfort zone, but my American study abroad program should be making things easier, not making me want to punch a hole through the cinderblock walls of the program center.
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