Benares! What do I say? We arrived here just about two weeks ago (!!) after a very long, very Indian, overnight train ride. We chained down our bags and were stuffed a bit like sardines in to little berths piled one atop another. We were woken up by the violent shaking of the train, arguments in the hallway, and one of a million different hawkers yelling their product's name. We drank chai from little disposable clay vessels and tossed the cups out the door. We had an Om Shanti Om dance party - much to the amusement of our Indian compartment-mate. And then, many, many, hours later, we arrived in Benares. Back to the heat. Back to the crowds. Back to the dust. Back to sensory overload.
Thankfully, it took hardly any time at all to realize that Benares is not Delhi, as we had feared. Benares has the same traffic, the same dust, the same smells and the same pollution, and yet it is different. Delhi was a bit like living in the presence of a monster - unpredictable, unfathomably large, and too intimidating to be lovable. Benares - while there are certainly places I far prefer over others - is more like a person - with its own heartbeat, personality and flair. It can be finnicky, but there are always beautiful places to be found, friendly people to talk to, and adventures to be had.
We spent our first two nights at our program house, which is directly on one of the ghats (more on ghats in a bit), and is beautiful. We have two floors, a garden, and a balcony that overlooks Ganga-Ji (the Ganges River). Over the next seven months, the program house will be the place where we eat breakfast, listen to speakers, have sleepovers and do any other group activities. Our nights at the program house, despite its beauty, were a pretty brutal reminder that we are in India - where resources can be scarce and infrastructure poor and, as far as Benares goes, that means there isn't power for much of the day and frequent power outages the rest of the time. Our power went out in the middle of the night both nights, signalled to us by the horrible sound of whirring fan blades winding to a stop. It took mere seconds for our room to turn in to an oven, precluding all chances of us having a good night's sleep. Instead, tossing and turning. And sweating. And tossing. And turning. And very little sleeping.
Since then, however, I have very few complaints (other than the frequency with which I get dehydrated - it's so hot here!). We spent our first week visiting all the available service sites, wandering through the roads and alleyways of Benares, sitting on Assi Ghat, watching a fire pooja from a boat on Ganga-Ji, avoiding collisions with cows and herds of water buffalo (difficult), frequenting a cafe called Open Hand, making Samosas, watching Bollywood movies, and attending Hindi class with the venerable Virendra-Ji.
Here's a run-down of what our Benares looks like. Bordering one side of the city is the Ganges River, along which, running from north to south, are the 88 original ghats. Ghat, in Hindi, means stairs, which is exactly what they are. Each ghat is a very wide set of stairs which descends down in to the river. When the river is high, during and after monsoon season, many of the stairs, and even what appear to be small building-like structures, are under water. (That is the case right now, although the water level is receding quickly, which means that soon we'll be able to walk the length of Benares along the river - Yay!) The ghats are primarily where people go to bathe in Ganga-Ji (which, by the way, is an inviting milky brown color, full of pollution, parasites and the ashes of cremated bodies - and the odd corpse as well), but many of them are also gathering spots - to eat, to shop, to watch pooja (a Hindu prayer ceremony) - but, for the most part, to simply sit, talk, watch the river, and be with other people - or just yourself. Despite my rather graphic description of Ganga-Ji, it is a beautiful river - to sit by or to take a boat out on. It's wonderful to see the river act as a communal meeting place, a public space that brings people from all over a huge bustling city together. And the fact that the common draw is nothing but the river definitely imbues Ganga-Ji with a certain magic.
Now for important locations: The ghat that our program house is on, Bedhaini Ghat, is a small ghat in a residential area that is reached by a series of alleyways leading from the main street. My home (more about my host family in a bit!) is in the same neighborhood, just a little bit further down the alleys. Alleys that, unfortunately, are commonly blocked by cows which, like all cows in Benares, are completely oblivious to other traffic, whether pedestrian or motorized. Other than my house and the program house, also in my neighborhood is Tyler's homestay. Just a five minute walk away, near Tulsi Ghat, is Mackenzie's homestay. Further down the road, no more than ten minutes from my house is Assi Ghat. Assi is our main hang out area, where there are bookstores and cafes, as well as Nick and Ada's homestays. Assi Ghat is a larger, more lively ghat, with restaurants, vendors and poojas, and is always full of people and various goings-on - definitely a great place to hang out (if you can ward off the little kids trying to sell you things and ignore the locals' stares). South of Assi Ghat are several important things: Virendra-Ji's house, where we have Hindi class, Lanka, an unbelievably busy shopping street, where you can go to buy anything from bikes to clothing, Allen's homestay, and beyond that, Will's homestay.
My homestay is with a wonderful family, the Agarwals, who live in a huge blue house deep in the alleyways near Bedhaini Ghat. My host mom is a teacher at a local school and my host dad is a stock broker by night and saree shop owner by day (Literally. He works really crazy hours because he needs to be in his office when the New York Stock Exchange is open). I have a host brother, Shobit, who is away at college in Lucknow, as well as a host sister, Shubhi, who is in tenth grade and is super nice and helpful, speaks amazing English, and always checks my Hindi homework for me. My parents, on the other hand, hardly speak any English, so luckily I get to practice my Hindi with them. My Hindi is still more practical than conversational so getting to know my parents has been difficult (and I'm also hardly ever at home because of my insane schedule), but I come home every day able to say exponentially more, so I have faith that I'll be chatting away with them soon. Even with the language barrier, my family has been so sweet to me and constantly reminds me that their home is my home and their family is my family.
This past weekend, we all got placed in our service sites, and started work officially on Wednesday. Ada and I are working at Guria, an organization that combats sex trafficking, particularly child sex trafficking, as well as second-generation prostitution. They also work to reduce the social stigma against sex workers and their families. Guria consists of the office and the Non-Formal Education Center, both of which we'll be working at. The Guria Center is located within the red light district of Varanasi (the first child-prostitute free red light district in India, thanks to Guria's actions) and acts as an after-school center for the children of sex workers in the area. The center uses art, medidation, games, and other methods to provide the kids with a safe, happy place to spend time in. They also hope to indirectly influence girls to not resort to prostitution as they get older. (Disclaimer: Because it takes four rickshaws and over an hour to get from the office to the center, and Ada and I don't have bikes yet, we've only been to the center once, but we'll be there more soon!) The office obviously has to do a lot of fundraising and grant writing, but their main project is the rescue of trafficked girls and the prosecution of the traffickers and pimps. Although India has many laws against trafficking, the enforcement is abysmal, and the police are often being paid off by the traffickers. Guria certainly has its work cut out for them. To give you an idea of how severe the problem is: (Ada and I were reading statistics) in 2006 in India, only 5 people were convicted for buying girls for prostitution, 19 for selling girls for prostitution, and 14 for the importation of minor girls, despite the fact that reasonable estimates put the number of child prositutes in South Asia (and India is certainly a hub) at a million. So you can understand why Ada and I are really excited to get involved!
As for my schedule, we have breakfast every day at the program house, after which we all head to our respective service sites. After a full day of service work, we have Hindi for two hours, and then it's home for dinner, and up early again the next morning. In terms of getting to work, Ada and I have an insane commute that consists of shared auto-rickshaw from Lanka to Cantt Train Station, another shared auto-rickshaw from Cantt to Kachari, and then a bicycle rickshaw to Guria. Getting a shared auto-rickshaw at any of the above locations can be a nightmare. Ada and I are typically swarmed by a crowd of rickshaw drivers, all insisting that we have to take a private auto as opposed to a reserved one, all trying to rip us off (some guy yesterday tried to charge us 225 rupees for a route that usually costs 50...we've also had drivers blatantly ask for less money from their Indian passengers and then tell them not to pay until after we've left so that we won't see how little they're paying), and all taking forever to understand where we want to go (half the time, speaking in Hindi seems to actually complicate the situation). Despite that complaint, Ada and I luckily know what typical prices are and how to stand up to the rickshaw drivers that insist on more (I've gotten really good at saying "I pay x amount every day!" in Hindi), so it's not that we've been getting ripped off, but the whole process can seriously take a toll on your mental state. Sometimes, though, you get nice rickshaw drivers who soften up once you start talking in Hindi (two days ago, an auto-rickshaw tried to charge us 50 rupees for a route that normally costs 10, so we went with a bicycle rickshaw, and when I paid him 10, he insisted, "no, 20, the other guy wanted to charge you 50," but when I kept insisting on ten and said, in Hindi, "the other guy was crazy!" he found that really funny and laughed and agreed to 10), or, rarely, ones that will charge you the actual going rate, no questions asked (and give you back change when you expected to pay more).
The worst parts of our mode off transportation? Being squished in the back of a rickshaw with creepy men, inhaling horrible fumes, being deafened by blaring horns, near collisions (for example) between your feet and menacing, sharp metal poles, and, a total travel time one way of an hour plus. (A lot of these problems, thank goodness, will be alleviated when we get bikes.) Even worse, on a bad day, when there are monsoon rains, commute time: two hours. Ada and I were unfortunate enough to have this experience on Wednesday, when, after a terrifying experience with a rickshaw driver who drove like a maniac in an off-roads vehicle, we ran in to a massive traffic jam and were told by our driver to get out of the rickshaw and find our own way because there was no point in sitting in unmoving traffic. Ada and I were several miles from our destination and didn't really have a plan, but it was obvious that our only choice was to walk onward through the traffic. Let me clarify the meaning of "traffic" in this instance. There is always traffic in India and I described it in detail earlier in my blog. At the moment, however, "traffic" means a storefront-to-opposite-storefront traffic jam, with the space in between filled by a tightly interlocking jigsaw puzzle of auto-rickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, bikes, motorcycles and cars. And nothing is moving. The reason for the traffic jam? The lakes covering the road. So off Ada and I went, zig-zagging back and forth between all manners of vehicle, squeezing through impossibly tight spaces, and trudging through mid-calf deep, dark brown water, colored by dirt, poop, urine and a lot of trash. The weaving and squeezing and trudging went on for at least a mile and half, after which my pants were soaked and covered in filth and my white dupatta splattered with bacteria-infested mud. If that doesn't sound that bad to you, at one point there was a dead dog in a bag sitting next to us in the water as we trekked though it.
I'm glad to say that we made it through, and I've discovered that I love Benares enough that all the terrible things I've mentioned in this blog post have no impact on how I feel about this city and about being here. It's always interesting, always fun, and always an adventure. The challenges add spice to my experience - as well as a lot of fuel for laughing at the craziness of it all.
Thankfully, it took hardly any time at all to realize that Benares is not Delhi, as we had feared. Benares has the same traffic, the same dust, the same smells and the same pollution, and yet it is different. Delhi was a bit like living in the presence of a monster - unpredictable, unfathomably large, and too intimidating to be lovable. Benares - while there are certainly places I far prefer over others - is more like a person - with its own heartbeat, personality and flair. It can be finnicky, but there are always beautiful places to be found, friendly people to talk to, and adventures to be had.
We spent our first two nights at our program house, which is directly on one of the ghats (more on ghats in a bit), and is beautiful. We have two floors, a garden, and a balcony that overlooks Ganga-Ji (the Ganges River). Over the next seven months, the program house will be the place where we eat breakfast, listen to speakers, have sleepovers and do any other group activities. Our nights at the program house, despite its beauty, were a pretty brutal reminder that we are in India - where resources can be scarce and infrastructure poor and, as far as Benares goes, that means there isn't power for much of the day and frequent power outages the rest of the time. Our power went out in the middle of the night both nights, signalled to us by the horrible sound of whirring fan blades winding to a stop. It took mere seconds for our room to turn in to an oven, precluding all chances of us having a good night's sleep. Instead, tossing and turning. And sweating. And tossing. And turning. And very little sleeping.
Since then, however, I have very few complaints (other than the frequency with which I get dehydrated - it's so hot here!). We spent our first week visiting all the available service sites, wandering through the roads and alleyways of Benares, sitting on Assi Ghat, watching a fire pooja from a boat on Ganga-Ji, avoiding collisions with cows and herds of water buffalo (difficult), frequenting a cafe called Open Hand, making Samosas, watching Bollywood movies, and attending Hindi class with the venerable Virendra-Ji.
Here's a run-down of what our Benares looks like. Bordering one side of the city is the Ganges River, along which, running from north to south, are the 88 original ghats. Ghat, in Hindi, means stairs, which is exactly what they are. Each ghat is a very wide set of stairs which descends down in to the river. When the river is high, during and after monsoon season, many of the stairs, and even what appear to be small building-like structures, are under water. (That is the case right now, although the water level is receding quickly, which means that soon we'll be able to walk the length of Benares along the river - Yay!) The ghats are primarily where people go to bathe in Ganga-Ji (which, by the way, is an inviting milky brown color, full of pollution, parasites and the ashes of cremated bodies - and the odd corpse as well), but many of them are also gathering spots - to eat, to shop, to watch pooja (a Hindu prayer ceremony) - but, for the most part, to simply sit, talk, watch the river, and be with other people - or just yourself. Despite my rather graphic description of Ganga-Ji, it is a beautiful river - to sit by or to take a boat out on. It's wonderful to see the river act as a communal meeting place, a public space that brings people from all over a huge bustling city together. And the fact that the common draw is nothing but the river definitely imbues Ganga-Ji with a certain magic.
Now for important locations: The ghat that our program house is on, Bedhaini Ghat, is a small ghat in a residential area that is reached by a series of alleyways leading from the main street. My home (more about my host family in a bit!) is in the same neighborhood, just a little bit further down the alleys. Alleys that, unfortunately, are commonly blocked by cows which, like all cows in Benares, are completely oblivious to other traffic, whether pedestrian or motorized. Other than my house and the program house, also in my neighborhood is Tyler's homestay. Just a five minute walk away, near Tulsi Ghat, is Mackenzie's homestay. Further down the road, no more than ten minutes from my house is Assi Ghat. Assi is our main hang out area, where there are bookstores and cafes, as well as Nick and Ada's homestays. Assi Ghat is a larger, more lively ghat, with restaurants, vendors and poojas, and is always full of people and various goings-on - definitely a great place to hang out (if you can ward off the little kids trying to sell you things and ignore the locals' stares). South of Assi Ghat are several important things: Virendra-Ji's house, where we have Hindi class, Lanka, an unbelievably busy shopping street, where you can go to buy anything from bikes to clothing, Allen's homestay, and beyond that, Will's homestay.
My homestay is with a wonderful family, the Agarwals, who live in a huge blue house deep in the alleyways near Bedhaini Ghat. My host mom is a teacher at a local school and my host dad is a stock broker by night and saree shop owner by day (Literally. He works really crazy hours because he needs to be in his office when the New York Stock Exchange is open). I have a host brother, Shobit, who is away at college in Lucknow, as well as a host sister, Shubhi, who is in tenth grade and is super nice and helpful, speaks amazing English, and always checks my Hindi homework for me. My parents, on the other hand, hardly speak any English, so luckily I get to practice my Hindi with them. My Hindi is still more practical than conversational so getting to know my parents has been difficult (and I'm also hardly ever at home because of my insane schedule), but I come home every day able to say exponentially more, so I have faith that I'll be chatting away with them soon. Even with the language barrier, my family has been so sweet to me and constantly reminds me that their home is my home and their family is my family.
This past weekend, we all got placed in our service sites, and started work officially on Wednesday. Ada and I are working at Guria, an organization that combats sex trafficking, particularly child sex trafficking, as well as second-generation prostitution. They also work to reduce the social stigma against sex workers and their families. Guria consists of the office and the Non-Formal Education Center, both of which we'll be working at. The Guria Center is located within the red light district of Varanasi (the first child-prostitute free red light district in India, thanks to Guria's actions) and acts as an after-school center for the children of sex workers in the area. The center uses art, medidation, games, and other methods to provide the kids with a safe, happy place to spend time in. They also hope to indirectly influence girls to not resort to prostitution as they get older. (Disclaimer: Because it takes four rickshaws and over an hour to get from the office to the center, and Ada and I don't have bikes yet, we've only been to the center once, but we'll be there more soon!) The office obviously has to do a lot of fundraising and grant writing, but their main project is the rescue of trafficked girls and the prosecution of the traffickers and pimps. Although India has many laws against trafficking, the enforcement is abysmal, and the police are often being paid off by the traffickers. Guria certainly has its work cut out for them. To give you an idea of how severe the problem is: (Ada and I were reading statistics) in 2006 in India, only 5 people were convicted for buying girls for prostitution, 19 for selling girls for prostitution, and 14 for the importation of minor girls, despite the fact that reasonable estimates put the number of child prositutes in South Asia (and India is certainly a hub) at a million. So you can understand why Ada and I are really excited to get involved!
As for my schedule, we have breakfast every day at the program house, after which we all head to our respective service sites. After a full day of service work, we have Hindi for two hours, and then it's home for dinner, and up early again the next morning. In terms of getting to work, Ada and I have an insane commute that consists of shared auto-rickshaw from Lanka to Cantt Train Station, another shared auto-rickshaw from Cantt to Kachari, and then a bicycle rickshaw to Guria. Getting a shared auto-rickshaw at any of the above locations can be a nightmare. Ada and I are typically swarmed by a crowd of rickshaw drivers, all insisting that we have to take a private auto as opposed to a reserved one, all trying to rip us off (some guy yesterday tried to charge us 225 rupees for a route that usually costs 50...we've also had drivers blatantly ask for less money from their Indian passengers and then tell them not to pay until after we've left so that we won't see how little they're paying), and all taking forever to understand where we want to go (half the time, speaking in Hindi seems to actually complicate the situation). Despite that complaint, Ada and I luckily know what typical prices are and how to stand up to the rickshaw drivers that insist on more (I've gotten really good at saying "I pay x amount every day!" in Hindi), so it's not that we've been getting ripped off, but the whole process can seriously take a toll on your mental state. Sometimes, though, you get nice rickshaw drivers who soften up once you start talking in Hindi (two days ago, an auto-rickshaw tried to charge us 50 rupees for a route that normally costs 10, so we went with a bicycle rickshaw, and when I paid him 10, he insisted, "no, 20, the other guy wanted to charge you 50," but when I kept insisting on ten and said, in Hindi, "the other guy was crazy!" he found that really funny and laughed and agreed to 10), or, rarely, ones that will charge you the actual going rate, no questions asked (and give you back change when you expected to pay more).
The worst parts of our mode off transportation? Being squished in the back of a rickshaw with creepy men, inhaling horrible fumes, being deafened by blaring horns, near collisions (for example) between your feet and menacing, sharp metal poles, and, a total travel time one way of an hour plus. (A lot of these problems, thank goodness, will be alleviated when we get bikes.) Even worse, on a bad day, when there are monsoon rains, commute time: two hours. Ada and I were unfortunate enough to have this experience on Wednesday, when, after a terrifying experience with a rickshaw driver who drove like a maniac in an off-roads vehicle, we ran in to a massive traffic jam and were told by our driver to get out of the rickshaw and find our own way because there was no point in sitting in unmoving traffic. Ada and I were several miles from our destination and didn't really have a plan, but it was obvious that our only choice was to walk onward through the traffic. Let me clarify the meaning of "traffic" in this instance. There is always traffic in India and I described it in detail earlier in my blog. At the moment, however, "traffic" means a storefront-to-opposite-storefront traffic jam, with the space in between filled by a tightly interlocking jigsaw puzzle of auto-rickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, bikes, motorcycles and cars. And nothing is moving. The reason for the traffic jam? The lakes covering the road. So off Ada and I went, zig-zagging back and forth between all manners of vehicle, squeezing through impossibly tight spaces, and trudging through mid-calf deep, dark brown water, colored by dirt, poop, urine and a lot of trash. The weaving and squeezing and trudging went on for at least a mile and half, after which my pants were soaked and covered in filth and my white dupatta splattered with bacteria-infested mud. If that doesn't sound that bad to you, at one point there was a dead dog in a bag sitting next to us in the water as we trekked though it.
I'm glad to say that we made it through, and I've discovered that I love Benares enough that all the terrible things I've mentioned in this blog post have no impact on how I feel about this city and about being here. It's always interesting, always fun, and always an adventure. The challenges add spice to my experience - as well as a lot of fuel for laughing at the craziness of it all.
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