Posted on March 23, 2017 under Thursday Tidbits with one comment

Hauling the boat to shore by hand

 

People power.

Despite its reputation as an emerging economic superpower, there are many signs that India remains in the old millennium. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. How do you keep 1.2 billion people gainfully employed?

Those of us from Western countries have watched the dizzying advances in every industry. Yes, we can make things quicker, cheaper and faster but at what expense. And what about quality? Countries like China are one step ahead of us when it comes to inexpensive, mass produced items.

Because of global competition and thirst for profitability, every company is forced to find efficiencies and in many cases it comes at a cost in the labor market. While not wanting to single out any one industry, we need to look no further than the forestry industry in Canada to see how mechanization has put many people out of work. A job that may have taken weeks by a small crew of men can now be done in hours with a single operator using sophisticated equipment.

India does things the old fashioned way in many of the towns and villages. Every day while walking, I watch the progress of several construction projects. These are incredible labor intensive operations. All of the work to prepare the foundation is done manually. Picks and shovels are still used to prepare the footings. The cement is mixed by hand and transported, bucketful by bucketful to be poured. Very often the wet cement is put in shallow steel containers and the women carry these on their heads.

 The scaffolding is comprised of long wooden poles strapped together with natural raw material. All of this work is carried out in blistering heat. I saw one man carry a 50 kg bag of dry cement up two flights of stairs. It is mind boggling. And a few days ago, here at the convent, four sinewy men moved an old generator that must have weighed a ton. They did it the old fashioned way, slipping steel rollers underneath and moving it a few feet at a time before taking the back roller out and bringing it to the front. It was 36 degrees with high humidity at the time. They moved it a quarter of a mile away.

The fishermen are also amazing to watch. There always seems to be a hefty swell on the Indian Ocean and the crews on the boats are standing the whole time they are on the water in vessels open to the elements. When they get the boats to shore, it usually takes about 8-10 men to haul them out and up on the sandbar, once again using a roller technique to move the boat a few feet at a time.

Ditto for farming. Very labor intensive.

There are many, many examples where a job at home done by one person is done by several people here. A few weeks ago, I found a bakery that makes great stuff and it’s very cheap… a deadly combination for someone with a sweet tooth! There are two people behind the counter. The first person waits on you and the second person packages your goodies. On the other side of the counter, there are two more people. One guy writes the amount of the purchase on a tiny slip of paper. The other guy records the amount in a journal. You don’t get your purchase until you pay the man at the front of the store. He also records the purchase in a journal.

The same thing happens in restaurants. It is not uncommon, even in the smallest of eating establishments, to have 3-5 people waiting on your table. They can’t do enough for you even though it seems like a bit of overkill… until you realize that this is just the way they do things.

And as I mentioned in a story last week, Pothy’s department store must have 200 employees. I’m not exaggerating. There is a sales clerk every 30 feet or so.

Maybe this is why there`s no big rush to have everything modernized. If things became mechanized in India quickly, it could cause massive unemployment. So, while it looks a bit archaic, everything seems to work and the craftsmanship is second to none.

While I love the food and the weather, the best thing about India is its people.

Have a great day.

 

 

 

 

Posted on March 20, 2017 under Monday Morning Musings with one comment

Reunited again… for one hour

 

 

“ Silence and smiles are two powerful tools. A smile is a way to solve many problems and silence is a way to avoid many problems.”

I saw this saying on a bulletin board the other day. There is a great deal of truth in it.

Well, it was quite a week. After a month of teaching English to 14 young girls, the Mother Superior sent me three full fledged Sisters to assist them with their English language skills. Two of them are going abroad to study medicine while the third is taking over as principal of a school. A few days ago, I gave them a big dose of home showing them videos of Canada, Nova Scotia , Cape Breton and of course Antigonish.

We went on a few road trips this week to visit some of the villages where the Sisters do their charity work. We ( Len, Ninian and Carol ) always draw a lot of curious onlookers when we arrive in a village. One of the places we went this week, we were told that this was the first time that many of them had ever seen a white person. We get the royal treatment wherever we go and usually receive a garland of flowers ( or a shawl ), a bindi or two placed on our foreheads and we are sprinkled with flower petals as we are paraded through the village. The first time that this happened, we found it all a bit much but you come to realize that this is custom and you just go with the flow. It is quite moving and beautiful, actually.

Some of you may have seen the picture I posted a few days back of me and an old guy ( OK. Two old guys! ). He lives in a tiny house in a slum along with his adult ( mid 50’s ) son who recently developed paralysis, the son’s wife and their four children. They have no electricity or running water. They invited us in for a visit. Candles provided the lighting. We visited many homes and while most were in pretty bad shape, they were all immaculately clean. Many of the homes have thatched roofs which have holes in them. The slum is next to a swamp and a railroad runs within 50 feet of their homes. It is hard to imagine that grinding poverty like this still exists.

We were heading back to the vehicle when one very old woman gestured to me to come and see her home. Her door was a piece of plywood leaning against a dilapidated structure. I used my cell phone flashlight to guide the way as it was dark outside. Her hut had a cement floor. There was a fire pit in the corner and a pile of branches and sticks. There was nothing else. Not a stick of furniture, a chair or a bed. The few pots she owns for cooking were hanging outside her home. Pretty sobering stuff.

The evening ended on a high note when we visited another village where several children did some traditional dancing. Ninian and I joined in causing quite a stir. It was just the tonic that we needed.

Something very interesting has been happening lately. Because I have been in this part of India for three months, a number of locals know who I am and where I’m from. It turns out that several young, educated men are looking at Canada as a possible new home. There are only so many employment possibilities in this country of 1.2 billion people and wages are generally not very high. In the past few weeks, I have been approached several times to see if I could assist them with visas, letters of introduction and jobs. Of course, I am ill equipped to do any of these things and am quick to point this out so as not to create false hope. As our population ages in North America, I can see a future for many of these bright young Indian citizens.

On Saturday, we visited one of the 11 orphanages run by the Sisters. It is literally smack in the middle of a jungle. When we got out of our air conditioned vehicle, we could just feel the intense humidity enveloping us. It is an orphanage for boys and most of these children have been abandoned by their parents. They sang and danced for us. They are also in dire need of indoor plumbing… $1000 would be enough to install an indoor toilet. When they need to “ go” in the middle of the night, they have to walk through the darkness.

Snakes. Because I live in a mostly urban area ( although the convent is about 1 kilometer from town ), bumping into a snake is not that common. Yesterday, as I was walking back from mass at the leprosy colony, a very large snake crossed the road in front of me and, man, was he moving. I estimated that it was 15 feet in length and about 3-4 inches thick. I wasn’t frightened as I was not directly in its path. But I immediately thought about those young boys at the orphanage wandering around the outhouse in the dark of the night.

I continue to be grateful for my lot in life and feel very blessed to have good health.

Have a great week.

P.S. Two musical notes. While visiting an old age home yesterday run by the Daughters of Mary, I was honored to sing “ The Lord is My Shephard “ to a dying woman.

And at the orphanage adjacent to the Sisters main convent in Marthandam, I met up with little Ashwin, the sweet young boy who used to live at Stella Maris with his mom. He cried when I first picked him up. Ninian and Carol suggested that I get my guitar out of the car and play him a song. He gradually stopped crying was clapping steadily to the music a few minutes later. Perched on his mother’s shoulder, he blew us a kiss… and the world was right once more.

Posted on March 18, 2017 under Storytelling with 6 comments

My saving Grace

Anybody who has been a parent has a potty training story.

Looking back, training a young person to use the toilet is child’s play compared to some of the other challenging aspects of child rearing. But it takes a lot of time and patience to teach a toddler the niceties of where and when to expel body waste… preferably not in a busy dentist’s waiting room or in a lineup at the grocery store.

Many of us thought we would do our bit for the environment and decided to go the cloth diaper route. That charming experience lasted about as long as the gestation period of an opossum : 12-13 days. Of course, our parent’s generation had no choice. With large families and always a couple of youngsters in diapers, seeing a long clothe lines full of them was common. On the coldest days of the winter, they would be as rigid and hard as a rock, standing at attention like a guard.

Disposable diapers are not as environmentally friendly and are costlier than the real thing but most of us threw in the towel ( the cloth diaper ) and “pampered” ourselves. Even dads could figure out how to affix one of these to a smooth butt. We all went through a period, especially with our first child when we wondered if they would be crossing the stage at high school graduation wearing a diaper, such was the slow progress in figuring out how to use the toilet.

We all naively counted up the savings we would realize when the disposable diaper days ended.

And even when we thought that our child was fully trained, there would always be a small accident.

Shopping is like potty training for men like me. The only difference is that I still keep having “ shopping “ accidents at the age of 65.

After a couple of particularly challenging weeks in India , I decided to have a “ time out” day and head to a town nearby to do some shopping. Things must be bad when I will willingly and knowingly head to a large department store but desperate times call for desperate measures.

After all these years, I know a thing or two about shopping and I have my own “ code of conduct.” #1. Stay home. Do not go shopping. #2. If you absolutely must go, make sure you’re accompanied by a woman. # 3. Repeat step #1.

I “ doubled down” on step #2 and asked two women to accompany me to Pothy’s , a seven floor glass and steel emporium of merchandise in Nagercoil. I know exactly three words of Tamil and one verse of a song in Malayalam, the two languages spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu. These two women would act as my fashion consultants and translators. We entered the modern, air conditioned building and I swear that half of the population of Tamil Nadu was working in this store. I have been known to wander aimlessly through Walmart without finding a solitary salesperson.

I was hoping to add to my extensive wardrobe ( three shirts, a pair of shorts, 5 pairs of underwear and a bathing suit ) by adding a new spring wardrobe of Indian clothing. It didn’t take long for the women to find me a new white kurta , even though most of the offerings made me look like a priest. Then it was on to a pair of pants to complete the ensemble. These kinds of pants are loose fitting at the top but narrow and bunch at the bottom.

A pair of maroon colored pants was recommended and I went into the change room to try them on. I found it very difficult getting the pants over my heels but I am a determined shopper if nothing else and I tugged and pulled until I got them on. I modeled them for my two friends and the sales clerks. I got the “two thumbs up” from all quarters. I re-entered the change room and found out that getting the pants off was far more challenging than getting them on. So difficult in fact that I had to go back to the sales clerk and ask him to come into the change room. It was quickly determined that these pants were not coming off in a conventional manner.

I was paraded through the store amid stares and grins from the other clerks. I was marched into the alterations room and the head seamstress carefully removed enough stitches from each pant leg to allow me to remove the pants. I walked back to the change room looking like I had purchased a bargain pair of pants from Frenchy’s , with pieces of thread dragging behind me on the floor.

The checkout procedure was interesting, to say the least. Another clerk ( not the one who sold me the goods ) walked me over to a table to secure an invoice of sorts which I was instructed to then take to the cashier. My merchandise was then shipped to another location ( the pick up spot ) where I would go once my bill was paid in full. I quickly found out that the credit card machines in this ultra modern facility are not synchronized. Regrettably ( through translation) I discovered that they only accepted “international “ credit cards on the 2^nd. and 7^th. floors. I was on the 3^rd.

Another voucher was produced and I was off to pay my bill. The good news is that my card worked flawlessly but when I saw the clerk grab a fistful of rupees ( 500 or so ) to hand to me, I knew something was amiss. He had entered the incorrect amount and I ended up getting “ cash back.” All of these transactions were carried out in Tamil. I knew right then that my shopping trip would have lasted maybe 30 seconds if I had come to the store unaccompanied.

 As my new kurta and pants were being altered one floor above, we decided to go to the fifth floor to purchase a few pairs of shorts. You guessed it. When I went to pay, I had to go two floors above to pay and then come back to claim my goods. My final purchase was a new backpack and this was on the 6^th. floor. There were many trips up and down stairs and escalators to pay and then secure the items that I had purchased. True. They had an elevator but I have seen molasses flow uphill quicker than the one in this building.

After having afternoon tea at a nearby restaurant ( called a “hotel” in India ), I bade farewell to my two fearless accomplices and took a bus back home. I decided to model my new threads for my friends only to discover that the maroon pants had not been altered. Thankfully, my shopping buddies’ mom was a seamstress and a few days later, Grace had me back in business.

Now that I have had some “Pothy training” I just might go back to this store someday. But I won’t be shopping. I will be standing in the middle of the sari floor admiring the thousands of beautiful dresses.

 For me, shopping should only be a spectator sport.