Conversation with a Nigerian expat

I recently got my first reader e-mail.  Exciting in and of itself, but she also turns out to be a Nigerian studying in Jaipur, Rajasthan.  We've been e-mailing a bit and I've found it really fascinating.  She was kind enough to let me post parts of our conversation here.

J:  Hey, I'm J, saw ur blog:  "who ran away with her bf to India" thats really funny.  I'm a student in Jaipur so if u ever come to Jaipur maybe we could meet and just say.  I've been here for almost a year and I totally agree with u on every thing.  Incredible India!  :)

S:  Thanks for writing!  That sounds cheezy, but  I'm really glad that you did.  I  know more than just my friends and family read the blog, but it's a great mystery who they are and where they come from and just wonderful to hear a stranger is enjoying it. 

I don't know a lot about Nigeria.  Since moving to India I read a lot more about the developing world.  One of the founders of Tech Crunch spent some time there and had a lot of interesting posts about it (http://techcrunch.com/tag/nigeria/).  How does the infrastructure compare (electricity, internet, roads)?

J:  About Education, what ur saying makes alot of sense.

But honestly, there is no place like home.  I discovered in India u have to pay for electricity as u use it but back home u just pay monthly no matter hw much u use.  Internet, when I left abt 2 years ago was very dull and except u had enough money pay for internet u ur home u'll hv to go to cybercafes.  But right now almost all my class mates are on facebook, my teachers neighbours, etc so I guess its improved alot...trust me.  Roads are same but the governor of the state I'm from is trying his best with traffic lights and less potholes.

I think everything is getting better back home but the kind of news I hear of Nigerians here just makes all the good seem bad and like nothing's worth it.  Thats why they "sent us here" to experience a culture other than ours and bring back something to develop the nation.  But no matter what I prefer Nigeria to the Indian food, mentality(the way they think) and reception of foreigners.  Remember there isn't a perfect place on earth.

I'll tell u a story of what my pastor went through when he first came to India.
Here it goes.....

Price comparison addendum - veterinary care

I pointed out before that medicine is wicked cheap here by US standards.  This doesn't carry over into cat medicines.  I figured the cat had fleas.  I was using flea powder for a bit, but didn't know when she was due and figured flea killing agents on nipples that tiny babies  keep in their mouths was a bad idea.  So they've really got fleas now.  And this is very likely how Cat got tapeworms!  I especially love the little, wriggly egg sacks that get deposited on the guest bed.  (We'll be replacing the mattress pad after this.  Please don't be disinclined to visit!  We like visitors!)  So off to the vet for better flea treatment and worming medicine - Rs. 400.  Or $10.  Still less than at home I guess, but I was kind of surprised.

Mosquito bat

Good things to know about the totally awesome mosquito bat:

It is darn cheap.  I plan to get one for every room in the house.

It is darn satisfying.  I love killing mosquitoes.  This week we have some fruit flies.  It kills them too!

If you are wearing leggings  (they are good to work out in, shut up), it will not shock you through them.  You can rub that bat all over yourself in a fit of bug paranoia.

It holds a charge for AGES.  I plugged it in overnight as recommended, and it held its charge for like a month.

You cannot actually kill all the mosquitoes with it.  It is a sad reality to face.  As empowered as you feel bringing down all those bugs with a loud snap and bright spark, there are always more.

At first you will want to touch it.  I can't recommend or discourage this, as I haven't tried it.  This went away after killing some number of bugs, but the urge is coming back.  If I succumb and shock myself with it, you'll be the first to know.  If you've already done this, please post your story in the comments.

Maybe that was obvious

I'm beginning to think that if you have sensitive skin and abhor heat, India isn't the best place to move!  I know, I'm a genius.  I've handled it so much better than I expected that I don't consider it a big deal, but I am surprised at some of the presentations.

The rainy season has kicked in.  The humidity isn't exactly comfortable in some ways.  It feels warmer than it is, but is so dramatically cooler as to more than make up for it.  I welcome the humidity with joy.  Even though the laundry takes forever to dry and my hair always looks kind of weird (can I blame that on humidity?) and there are more bugs and we're all sweating more.  But it should be the end of all my problems.

I find my troubles fascinating.  That's a requirement for having a blog, right?  My fingertips were like paper; dry with little creases, tiny bubbles would sometimes form and break only on the very surface, my fingerprints were shallower.  Much longer and I could have been a spy!  'Cause  I wouldn't have had any fingerprints!  ...  Anyway, the change in weather has brought back pretty normal, supple fingertips for me.  I had some rough patches of skin various places too.  Most lotions are downright ineffective, but Mom brought me several Costco sized bottles of my preferred lotion that fixed that right up.  Pedicures are now mandatory. 

Today I discovered a whole new weird skin thing.  I think it is Miliaria Crystallina, a form of prickly heat/sweat rash.  A little spray of super tiny, clear blisters that don't itch or hurt or anything.  It just looks like I have some dew drops on my arm.  In the time it has taken me to identify them and write this, they are already almost gone.  They were probably kicked off by my new, more intense workout routine.

Should I show you a picture?  Of course I took a picture.  I also take pictures of my more horrifying looking mosquito bites.  It's an unflattering picture of a nearly unidentifiable part of my arm and you may not want to look at my weird skin problems, so I'll put it after the jump.  I'm not  sure the picture is even very good.  I took it with my cell phone and it emphasizes what I think is pretty normal white chick pink blotchiness, but you can see the dew drops too.

Electricity

I sometimes, very casually, wonder about basic infrastructure in India.  In the States when your power goes out it is usually a physical problem that a human has to come out and fix.  Most of the outages we experience here are really short.  I cannot imagine there is a system in place in India to monitor local power in real time.  (Is that a thing?  Compstat for the power grid?  It must be.)  I cannot imagine people are calling the power company to report it.  I really, really cannot imagine the Indian power company has teams at the ready to promptly address any problems. 

I'm obviously pretty ignorant about the nuts and bolts of power delivery systems.  
What is it that puts the power out anyway?  Does where you live matter?  Do hospitals and schools get  better response times and whatnot, exceptions from rolling blackouts?  Should we just get a generator?  Why do our fans make more noise when they are running on battery?

I thought the hot season would bring the worst of the power failures.  What with all those A/Cs running.  I was wrong.  The rainy season is the worst.  The power goes out every day now, several times a day, for much longer than ever before.  That's not the worst though.  A power outage is alright.  It's a bummer to lose the internet and the air conditioning, but we have a battery back up.  And it powers essentials like the fridge, ceiling fans, some of the lights, and one lone outlet.  Now we seem to be getting reduced power from the grid - not low enough to kick on the batteries, but not strong enough to fully power the fridge, A/C, DSL modem, or incandescent bulbs. 

I had reckoned halogen fixtures were the norm because they are cheap, but they also don't pulse and fade in a half-powered moment.  Which is annoying, really annoying.  I may be easily annoyed.  It's the little things I miss.  Like not feeling as though I'm showering in a cheap motel as a train goes by in a bad horror flick. 

Useful services in Pune (and beyond)

One of the harder things to adjust to here is not being able to use the internet to find shops, restaurants, services, etc.  For a country that's always in the news for its booming IT sector, the average Indian and average business here just plain doesn't use the internet.  I'm glad that hasn't translated to a doorstep piled high with YellowPage type directories.  Fortunately there is JustDial.  It doesn't have much in the way of reviews or detailed information about products and services, but is nontheless a vital resource.

Do you like having things delivered?  Then you would probably like India.  Using JustDial of course, I found a pet shop in my neighborhood.  I called to confirm that they had cat supplies (dog supplies are more common) and to get better details about where they are located (addresses aren't always that helpful here).  But instead of getting that information, they asked what I wanted and delivered it to my door within the hour.  The wine shop, the small local grocer, probably just about everybody will deliver.

Including just about any restaurant.  (Not the Hard Rock Cafe, no sir, they are too good for that.)  You may have difficulty taking advantage of this if you don't speak Marathi or Hindi though.  I've been told by more than one neighborhood restaurant that they don't take English orders, even though it seems like a list of food shouldn't be that hard.  YumKing to the rescue!  We love, love, love this service.  There are a fair number of Pune restaurants on the site and it's very easy to use.  It only shows you restaurants that deliver to your area, warns you if they aren't open at the moment, and delivery is free!  McDonald's has online ordering too, but that is more like a curse than a blessing.

We also love BigFlix, which is available in several cities throughout India.  It is pretty much just like NetFlix.  Major differences being:  the suggestion algorithm, if there is an algorithm at all, is not very sophisticated; there is some streaming, but not of English titles; they tried to emulate NetFlix I think, but the  second icon that looks like it will add a movie to the top of your queue, adds it to the bottom just like the normal 'add to queue' icon; I hear they have brick and mortar stores too; they hand deliver and pick up your movies the very next day.

Indianisms, from useful to hilarious

Prepone - Like postpone, but to have a meeting earlier rather than later.
Upgradation - To upgrade, obviously.
Do the needful and the same - "Here's the form.  Please do the needful at your earliest convenience and return the same."
Contest - To run in an election.
Intimated - Contacted personally.  "You will be intimated by customer service shortly."
Haan - Pronounced like a nasal ha, it means 'yes'.  Usually 'haan, haan, haan'.  Okay, okay, okay.  Acha, acha, acha.
Bas or ho gaya - Enough.
Chelo - Let's go.
Peg - A shot of liquor.
Coolers - Sunglasses.
Cousin-brother and cousin-sister -  Just being gender specific, I think.  There are a lot of these compound familial relation descriptors.
Eck, do, teen - One, two, three.  You don't really need to know more than that, do you?
Lakh and crore - Hundred thousand and ten million, respectively.  "You totally want to have like one crore of his babies."
Double/triple - As in 'our phone number is 8408271 tripple 9' (that is not our number).  Or 'No, see in this case is spelled s double e.'
Only - Along with its usual meaning, used instead of 'just' and often at the end of the sentence.  "How's the concert so far?"  "I don't know.  I got here only."
Gymming - Going to the gym.  "You look great.  Have you been gymming?"
Mugging - To memorize.
To pass out - To graduate. 
Rubber - Some of them are really just British English.  Like duster for blackboard eraser and shift for moving house.  When the students ask me for a rubber, I'm pretty sure they want an eraser and not a condom.

The firang

I noticed that in talking about our trip to Lucknow and Delhi and the wedding, I didn't talk a lot about how people react to the obvious foreigner.  I must be more self conscious about my reactions to their reactions than I am at being the center of attention.  Now that's saying something.

We stayed at a hotel on a busy road in Lucknow.  Sometimes we stood outside to wait for one of Brij's eminently gracious family to pick us up.  Passersby on foot, bicycle and motorized vehicle alike would slow down to look at us.  I've adjusted to lingering looks and whathaveyou in Pune, but I still noticed that it was more pronounced in Lucknow.

The metric system

I'll admit I haven't gotten used to the metric system.  The nutrition facts on packaged food are similar here, but the serving size is apparently (and sensibly) mandated;  It is always 100g.  This is a pretty inscrutable description for me though.  And it never tells you how many servings are in the package, forcing me to do math.

If you have trouble with the metric system too, xkcd can help.

My greatest fears realized

Okay, I'm exaggerating again.

I had two major fears about coming to India and they may seem trivial because they kind of are.  Those fears were of paralyzing heat and bugs.  Part of the reason these were my topmost fears is that I didn't think there was much I could to do about them and I can't see getting anything in return for coping with them.  Running away to another country without a job or anything?  Scary, or wildly irresponsible, but I get to live  in India!  Witnessing incredible poverty, animals that aren't cared for and whathaveyou?  Hard, but character building, right?  Plus sometimes I get to help and that is awesome.

So I was scared of bugs and heat.  The heat has turned out to be bearable.  It affects my activities, but I'm not dying or anything.  I don't think I've even seen a cockroach.  If I am particularly brutalized by mosquitoes in a short period of time, I do go a little whacko.  That's mostly unfortunate for Boaz.  The spiders are especially scary because they all jump, but there aren't a lot of them.

There weren't a lot of them.

Casual price comparisons

A couple people have asked me about it, so here are some very personal, anecdotal, imprecise comparisons of prices in India vs. the States.  The basic  trend is that things you don't really need are expensive/similar to price in the States, absolute essentials and labor are cheap.

Pharmacy - I find this is the most dramatic.  I never get a receipt, so I don't know what individual items cost.  Last time I went to the pharmacy I got 2 tubes of antifungal cream, 4 toothbrushes, and 40 Xanax.  It was under $4.  My copay for a month's supply of name brand prescriptions was $45 in Seattle.  I think Lotrimin is like $8 and what is a toothbrush, $3?  So it would have been somewhere around $75 for me at Walgreens.

Phones, phones, phones

Getting a cell phone here is a pain in the ass.  After many struggles with AirTel, Idea! finally seemed to be the winner with a phone that has been in service for over a month.  It has now been shut off due to yet more paperwork problems or something (like mismatched signatures).  Frustration abounds.  Not having a phone for myself was bad enough.  No phone at all is totally unacceptable.  Prepaid sim cards are kind of the way to go here and I think it may be time to just ask Shama (our maid) to get one for me in her name.

Starting to get hot

Apparently it reached about 95 degrees today.  I had class, so I was out at the hottest time of day and in small, unairconditioned, unfanned rooms filled with warm little bodies.  Fortunately I wasn't miserable.  Unfortunately it means it is still going to get much hotter.

Mornings in India

Things in India get started a little later.  Boaz's office sends a shuttle for him and other expats in the morning that doesn't even arrive until 9:20 and he's the first pickup.  Some shops are open about 9 on weekdays, but most things don't open until about 10.  Malls, restaurants, etc. never open before 11.

I like to sleep in, so this seemed totally awesome for a while.  It's almost eerie, like waking from a coma in a zombie apocalypse, if you go out at 9am on a Sunday.  (I've been watching a lot of zombie movies while I've been sick.  Maybe too many.)  Those rare days that I want to get an early start become a waiting game, assuming I remember that nothing is really open.  A few times I've headed out early, but only been able to do 1/2 my errands because everything else was still closed.

Sick again!

I don't usually get sick this often, so I'm pretty grumpy about it.  Probably I can look forward to getting sick a lot more here.  Not only are the viruses foreign, but now I'm doing volunteer work in a building that sees 250+ kids, from who knows how many schools.  Dengue fever hasn't been ruled out yet either.  Our stuff has been processed by customs and will hopefully be delivered soon.  Being stuck in an uncomfortable bed all the time doesn't help with the grumpiness. 

First class?

I did my first classes today.  They went really well, I think.  I hadn't actually prepared enough material for them.  The other volunteers had emphasized not expecting too much from the classes.  It makes sense.  This is an extracurricular for them and they only see us twice a week for an hour at time.  But all of my classes were pros at reading as a group, at least phonetically.

Housie was big hit.  I caught myself doing a lot of India no-no's.  I pointed at children to call on them, I patted a kids head.  Nobody called me out, but even I know that these are rude behavior here.  There's a lot of learning to go around on both sides I think and we're getting to where we can share that with each other.

Mosquitos

I was kind of hoping mosquitos wouldn't become a real problem until summer.  Not so.  Most nights one or two manage to hide somewhere in our bedroom until we turn out the light.  I then get up and turn on the light and hunt them with my electric mosquito bat.  This is not very efficient.

Last night one mosquito managed to get me twice on my back, once on my elbow, twice on my hand, and TWICE ON MY FOREHEAD.  Fortunately it looks like malaria isn't very common in urban areas, like Pune.  Dengue fever however is.   A well and truly determined mission to find a mosquito net will commence tomorrow.  I've checked several places already without luck.  I also hear geranium oil is an effective repellent.  I'll be trying that too.

Tonight we are trying some sort of chemical that plugs into an outlet.  "Insert the liquid dispenser into the electric mosquito destroyer machine."

The instructions indicate to both install it away from windows and fans with doors closed and to open doors and windows while in use.  I assume this means to plug it in for 30 or so minutes with the doors closed, then air the room when actually in use so that you don't get more cancer than you're already getting from all of the pollution here.  But neither of us is happy to be sleepy and not in the only room with furniture for 30 minutes before bed.

A whole new world of troubleshooting

Yesterday I nearly smashed my hairdryer to bits for refusing to work.  Don't worry, I restrained myself.  It was one in a long line of little tiny things that were just not going right that day.  Eventually I realized we had lost power, which is particularly common on Thursdays.  We have a battery backup system and the light in the bathroom was still working, so it wasn't obvious.

Our washer has also not been working.  The repairman came in this afternoon and maybe the 2nd thing he checked was that the water supply was on.  It wasn't.  This felt a lot like the time my garbage disposal wasn't working and the first thing the repairman did was push the reset button.

Communicating

A heck of a lot of people in India speak at least some english.  When I have to communicate with people that don't speak much english, it's usually to buy something or get somewhere.  Pointing works pretty well. 

The biggest challenge I face is being careful about how I say yes or no.  Yes and no are fine, but myriad synonyms like sure, please, uh-huh, enough, plenty, more, nods and head shakes are my automatic responses. 

Head shakes and nods are no good.  The Indian head wobble is used instead of both.  As far as I can tell the wobble mostly serves as acknowledgment (yes, no, I heard you, I'm thinking).  The intensity of the wobble is meaningful too, but it never specifically means yes or no out of context.

Getting things done in India

Moving to India people emphasize the great need for patience.  And of course the corruption, especially in the form of bribery, is infamous.  These things are both totally true.  Maybe because I was mentally prepared for those things, they aren't what struck me most.  What strikes me is how many people seem to be required to do anything.  Maybe it is a result of overpopulation and underemployment.  Or a stronger sense of community, things are just always done in groups?  And the inefficiency doesn't even stop there.

When we were having the house painted, Anil and another man to whom I wasn't properly introduced were both supervising the 3 or 4 men that were actually doing all the work.  It took them nearly a week to paint two bedrooms and the terrace.  They also didn't do anything to protect the floors.  I'm sorry I didn't think to get pictures of all the paint dripped on the marble.  Surely scraping it off later was a laborious task.  Back home a college kid probably could've done it in a couple days. 

We bought some used AC units.  The first time I went to inspect them, there were about ten piled in a small office/shop in a building that was under construction.  There was no electricity there and I wanted to see them in action.  Accomplishing this display involved about 8 people:  A couple men to move the AC units back and forth, the owner, our real estate agent, the guy that drove me to the building, the guy that owns the AC units, a couple guys to sort out what exactly to plug them into. We couldn't settle on price on the spot.  The man who owns the AC's mother had to be consulted.

You can see lines of people bent over with tiny brooms all over the place.  Lines of people are pruning greenery with their bare hands anywhere that the landscaping is well maintained.  Lines of men and women are carrying rocks to build new roads and fill potholes.  No wheelbarrows or anything.  Almost nothing is mechanized.  And efforts to do so are often met with strong opposition in the name of saving jobs.  It's incredible.