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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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