No Hindi? No problem! Pictures bridging language “disability”.
Today I had breakfast with Mrs. Mukerji. Anu has gone to Delhi for a few days but will be back soon.
Shibani and Pradeep were visiting a possible venue for the Museum School’s annual function (all the children have the chance to perform on stage), so I was my own company in the morning. It was just what I needed to launch into writing drafts of each of my tasks.
Innovation in action: Bags Pradeep folded out of newspaper. They use an ingenious weight bearing strategy.
I had trouble getting to sleep and waking up. I just wasn’t the right kind of tired. I had breakfast, started in on some writing and then started to calculate deadlines for the different “deliverables” of my internship (A guide to OASiS-style thinking, a detailed flow chart for the McMaster Social Innovation Lab and an example problem). I realized there was not a lot of time and I wanted to do so much.
In that moment, I catapulted into another stage of this experience.
A wonderful, layered place, but it is not home
In the morning, I sat outside and watched birds pick impossibly large caterpillars from the trees. Hopping to the ground, they hit them against the pavement to stun them. “Thwack. Thwack,” I could hear from fifteen feet away. India is a wild place. As much as I am settling in and have settled in, every so often I blink and realize that this is not home. It is a wonderful, layered place but it is not home.
Sunday is the Indian weekend. No school and no work (at least for some). After my late night (10:30!) the day before, I slept until 8:30 and to be honest, felt a little groggy. Breakfast came at 10, a potato mash with a bun and mango pudding. Anu told me that normally breakfast is at 11 on Sundays. She wanted to take me to Bhopal’s largest mall, so we went.
I was awake at 6, but Anu was not feeling well today so we did not go for our walk. I used the time to do some more writing. I had breakfast with her and her mother a few hours later. Mrs. M. had clipped an article from the Delhi News for me – a travel guide to Toronto! It was a bit surreal to be sitting in their living room reading an article about home.
Words I learned at the museum
Today the concept of evolution was explained to me by children who knew only a few words of English. I was able to teach them about fifteen English words and they taught me forty Hindi words – ten times as much as yesterday.
A. rang the doorbell at 6:20 a.m. to ask me if I wanted to go for a walk with the dogs. If you can believe it, I was already up. We were out until about 7. It’s strange that in the space of only a few days the streets that seemed so strange to me are becoming more familiar.
I was up at 7:00 a.m. and was feeling pretty pleased with myself until I ran into A., who told me she had been up since 5:30 a.m. doing yoga and chores.
I just walked by a cow eating mangoes from a garbage heap. I’m definitely not in Kansas anymore.
After a night in the swanky but labyrinthal Delhi Airport hotel and a quick but turbulent morning flight, I walked out of the plane, into the rain and onto a bus. We taxied over to the Bhopal airport terminal, where met Pradeep and his wife Shibani for the first time. It was only 22 degrees out. Lovely weather.
Brianna Smrke is winging her way to India to spend time visiting the OaSiS Social Innovations Laboratory.
Social Innovation Simulation 