Food, Glorious Food

Some people like Indian food, but I never really have. However I came here to serve not to eat. So now let me take you on a culinary tour of my Indian experience.

The day of food begins with a breakfast including a fruit salad, a bowl of corn flakes, a piece of bread with jam and butter, a milk tea and a banana milk shake. Sometimes I drop a course or mix things up but this is a general breakfast. There’s also a dish called Poha, which is rice with several herbs and nuts and lime squeezed over top, which we tend to eat if we have no fruit. The interesting thing about the fruit salad is the way it transforms depending on the season. When I arrived in India we had oranges, and in the middle we had mangoes but both fruits are out of season and now we have a lot of sweet limes, papayas, bananas and guava.



Because the kids and Nicole have celiac disease, which means they can’t eat gluton, the range of meals is severely limited. To further complicate things Armon is lactose intolerant and Sohayl is a vegetarian. Because one never knows when there’s gluton in some dish, unless you make it yourself, we can’t eat out very often. Sohayl was saying just the other day that he misses taking the kids out in the evening and eating from the street vendors.

At about ten thirty in the morning we have tea and either samosas or kastas. The samosas here are filled with potato and a mixture of other herbs and spices. I usually eat it with a thin red sauce. Kastas are bread pastries, which you use to scoop up a mixture of potatoes, chickpeas and some sort of brown sauce. Sometimes we have Barifi, a sweet made of condescend milk that often has a layer of real silver on top. They hammer the silver into the thinnest flakes imaginable and apparently it’s fairly good for you.



As you can see in the above picture there's an industry of making plates out of pressed leaves. This is a good industry because it employs people, and the plates are bio-degradable.



Of course it can leave a mess, but since most of Lucknow is devoid of garbage cans, that's to be expected.

Lunch usually consists of rice, dahl, subsi (vegetables that usually include potato) and yoghurt. After lunch around three we usually have another cup of tea.



I've also had some other meals such as dosa, a south Indian crepe made from lentils and rice and which is generally eaten with some kind of sauce and potato filling. Another south Indian dish is idli which are small cakes made of lentils and rice and eaten with various sauces.

In Canada, we have a large variety of food: Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Greek, Indian, Fast, British, and that’s only in my small retirement town. In Lucknow, city of several million I’ve only seen Indian Food, Western Food (Fast food) and Chinese Food. Not much variety for someone with international tastes. Still I'm luck to be fed at all and my meals are very healthy.

The other side of food in India is the health issue. When I first arrived here I got sick a few times, but now I've gotten used to it. Strangely enough its safer in many ways to eat from the street shops, because at least you can see the vendors preparing the food. In the restaurants there's no way to know what's going on in the kitchen. But you have to take it with a grain of salt and a bit of adventurous spirit. When you find your sugar is full of ants, you just sift through them with a spoon and hope you catch them all.

Birthday

Well yesterday was my Indian Birthday, and today is my Canadian Birthday. I'm now nineteen.

My host family doesn't really celebrate birthdays so I wasn't expecting or planning anything. The day before my birthday a package arrived from Canada with some gifts from my family. On my birthday Rohit bought me a big bag of chips and around lunch we went to a mall so that Nicole could shop for groceries and I treated myself and Rohit to burgers as a sort of birthday meal. In the evening we went to a Bahai Deepening and the youth suprised me with a cake.

Conference Photos

Here's the wonderful thing about Facebook: I didn't take any photos of the conference, but a friend of a friend of mine did, and thus I bring you photos.



This is a picture of the dining hall at the conference.



Here's a picture of the main conference hall. Dr. Mohajer (Universal House of Justice Member) is speaking.



Here's a shot of the audience.



Here's some people at the lunch line.



Here I am with the youth.

Last Day of the Conference

Well it was a busy week! The last day of the conference we went to the hall late because it was India's Independance Day and we didn't want to deal with traffic, road blocks and parades. We finally arrived in time to hear Dr. Mohajer speak again. After that we had lunch and I spent the rest of the day hanging out with the youth. Last night we had many of the members of the NSA over at our house for dinner so I'm glad to relax on a Sunday.

National Conference - Days One and Two

Sorry if I haven’t posted in a few days, I’ve been attending a National Conference for the Bahai Institute. Tuesday was the day before the conference, where people were setting up and guests were arriving. I tagged along with Sohayl, both to help out and to do an on-the-fly business meeting. Poor Dr. Paymon Mohajer has been so busy that the only time we were able to have a meeting on the Pathfinder book was in the car while driving to the conference. I was taking notes while our car dodged cows and motorcycles and bounced over potholes.

At the conference I met up with the youth and we spent the next nine hours making spiral binders. We needed seven hundred binders for the conference and only a hundred were made up to that point. It was actually fairly fun. The work was easy if tedious and so we spent the time chatting and laughing, or when they spoke Hindi, I let my mind wander.

The next day was the first day of the conference. We were in a large hall that could hold well over a thousand people, had a sound system and five large screen projecting the image of the speaker or PowerPoint slides. There were representatives from all over India, and from many other countries around the world. Some of these included Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Australia, Kazakhstan, the United Emirates of Arabia, Israel, and one young lady from Canada. Because there were so many people who spoke different languages, they had headsets on which one could hear translations.

The first half of the first day consisted of three talks, each over an hour long, by Dr. Mohajer, the Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of India, and a Counsellor of India. After these there was a lunch break. At this point the conference was broken up by region and they were to have consultation, but I don't belong to any of the regions and was nodding off so I decided to walk around the grounds for a while. After this I found the room where several youth were similarly resting and we chatted and watched bits of a Hindi movie.

After a tea break around six there was a question and answer panel and another talk. Finally at around nine we had our supper and went home.

The next day opened with two talks, one on Junior Youth and one on Children’s Classes. This was followed by another discussion period, which I once more skipped. At some point Sohayl told me that the Chief Guest was coming tonight, and he asked me to get some people from different countries to present a bouquet to him when he arrived. I asked him who the Chief Guest was and he didn’t know. So I went to the different groups and elicited volunteers to help me welcome this mysterious Chief Guest. There was another panel, at which Sohayl spoke and afterwards I had my little welcoming committee summoned to the stage.

I could tell they were a little anxious, since they didn’t really know what they were supposed to do, and I certainly didn’t know what we were supposed to do. Sohayl came up and ushered us out of the hall towards the gate. There was a six-piece band standing in a line to welcome the Chief Guest. We stood in another line, ready to hand off the still-absent bouquet and shake the hand of the still-mysterious Chief Guest. We waited. The band played. Our line was moved up further. We continued to wait. The band stopped playing.

Finally activity occurred, the band played, a white car drove up, cameras flashed and the Chief Guest showed up. The flowers still hadn’t arrived so we simply exchanged ‘namaste’s’ with him as he walked past. After he had gone by I was grinning at the absurd haphazardness of it all, having just represented Canada to formally welcome a man whose identity I didn’t know. I finally asked Sohayl who said that he was the former Chief Secretary of the government of Uttar Predesh (the state I’m in) and according to Sohayl a ‘bigwig’. As I was walking back to the hall, the guy with the bouquets finally arrived and Sohayl handed me a bouquet and suggested that I present it to the former Chief Secretary. I just walked up to where he was seated, and stepped into the line of important people giving him flowers. Five screens projected me giving him my bouquet and after I had walked away I laughed my head off, at how silly and random the whole affair had been.

This evening of the conference was a public meeting, which was open to anyone. There were two other talks followed by a series of performances. First about twenty little girls from CMS performed a dance in what I assume was a traditional India style. Then the five dance instructors of CMS performed a dance, which was actually less impressive than the first. Next the Bahai youth of Lucknow performed a play. It was in Hindi, but it was sufficiently clear from the actions, and the little Hindi I know what was going on. In the middle of the play two of my friends Neha (who came to Nepal with me) and Cheeki performed a traditional Indian dance, which was of much higher calibre than the others. I don’t know about Cheeki, but Neha has studied dance for several years. All in all it was a fun performance, and no, I didn’t take any photos.

After this we were waiting for supper, which was rather delayed. I hung out with various people and spent some time enjoying the night breezes. At one point I went with Rohit to the kitchens, which were the most fantastic kitchens I have ever seen. It was sort of a court in between two buildings, with a floor of rough stone tiles, and walls of chipped yellow. The ground was littered with gas canisters and a pile of charred wood chips. Men were cooking bread in steel barrels, and sitting about several fires making rice. A sterile white light lit the whole scene, and all was covered with a wonderful layer of grit, charcoal and rust. Tableaus like that carry a sense of reality, and a kind of earthy contentment you just don’t get from a microwave.

After supper we finally climbed into the car in a state of exhaustion. Poor Nicole had another meeting to attend, so we left her behind. And we realized when we were nearly home that we had also left the house keys behind. And the office keys were locked in the house. We thought that perhaps Nicole was at Sohayl’s mothers house so we drove there. No one home. We continued to drive around until we found a public phone. Sohayl phoned Nicole up and she said she would meet us at the house. We drove back home, now very, very tired and laid down to sleep on the marble porch of their house. Luckily I had my dupatta (the scarf-like part of my outfit) to use as a pillow. For anyone out there who thinks that one requires one of those mattresses where you can electronically adjust the level of firmness and two feather pillows to get a good night sleep – well I can tell you that a perfectly comfortable and restful sleep can be achieved on a slab of marble and a thin piece of cloth. At long last Nicole arrived and we flung ourselves into our beds.

I’ll update you on the last day of the conference once it has finished occurring.

Flowers? You Shouldn't Have!

One thing anyone who wants to go on a year of service should keep in mind, is that you will end up in places you never expected to be.

Like yesterday, when I attended a seminar on classroom management held by our Australian volunteer, Dr. Boris Handal (sp?). I certainly have no interest, indeed I have distaste, for the field of education.

In Lucknow there is a sort of franchise of schools called CMS (City Montessori School - however they are not remotely Montessori) which was founded by a Bahai named Mr. Ghandi (no relation to the famous Ghandi). In the school certain teachers are designated teacher trainers who are supposed to keep up to date on new teaching methods and share them with the rest of the faculty.

So this seminar was for the teacher trainers and I found my self in very distinguished company of teachers, some of who had their doctorate. And of course both Boris and Sohayl have thier PhDs and are very distinguished in their fields. And then there's little ol' me with my high school diploma and an employement record that includes McDonald's and a corner store.

When refreshments arrived, Sohayl, Boris and I received ours in nice china with a gold trim, while everyone else got their's on paper plates and plastic cups. Then at the end of the day they gave us each a bouquet of flowers. It was very strange to meet with that kind of hospitality when I have no qualifications and wasn't adding anything to the seminar - in fact I was using up precious tea!


On another note my grandma Nanny is sick and in the hospital, so please send her your prayers!

Phone rings, door chimes, in comes...

Life has picked up a bit of pace because of some company that's come and coming. Sohayl's brother, Paymon (sp?) Mohajer, his wife, and their three kids have come from Israel to visit. Paymon, is a member of the Universal House of Justice, the head of the Baha'i administration.

There are three other Mohajer kids - cousins of Rachelle, Armond and Arastu - who we see often, so now there are nine kids running about the house.

Tomorrow a professor from Australia is coming to help Sohayl with the math book of the elementary school curriculum that he's working on. Since the Pathfinder book is temporarily on hold, while Paymon evaluates it, I'm working on the language book in the curriculum. Since I have no background education, except thirteen very boring years of it, it's an interesting experience. I'm reading some books on early childcare education to at least get a feel for the subject.

But hey, it's all service and good life experience.