Toxic Mayapuri

I've been teaching in Mayapuri (again) for the past six weeks, and loving it. I love the teaching, I adore my students, but Mayapuri itself is a toxic waste dump. Now that I have had the opportunity to visit some of the other slums in Delhi, what I had been told about Mayapuri has been confirmed. It is certainly the worst slum in the worst environment of all the slums that Asha is involved with. I've written about Mayapuri before but on my second time here, I've really started to notice how bad this place is for my students and their health, even by Delhi standards. So what's so bad about the environment of Mayapuri?

Well, Mayapuri is an industrial area, chock-full of factories belching every kind of pollutant imaginable into the air. This place was set aside as a non-residential area, but now there are thousands of people living here. I work in the area imaginatively named Mayapuri Industrial Area Phase II. The main role of this place is to take scrap metal, crashed cars, broken bits of machinery and anything else made of metal, then manually smash it into its component parts for re-sale. The smell from the factories, and the piles of burning rubbish that can't be re-sold (like bits of rubber and soft furnishings of wrecked cars) pervades every crack and corner here. The ground is filthy - who knows how many litres of oil and engine grease have seeped into the dirt? When I walk to work from the bus stop, my feet literally turn black - it's not a metaphor. The photo at the top shows the rubbish dump that is in the middle of the street - small kids pick over this pile for anything salvagable. The second photo is of a worker manually smashing a scooter into spare parts.

And it's not just the usual industrial pollutants. As the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is unfolding, I learnt that prior to that incident, the world's worst radiation accident in the previous five years had been at Mayapuri. In April 2010, one person died and seven were critically injured, when radioactive material arrived in Mayapuri for recycling. The material stayed in the shop for six weeks before the death and strange illness of the workers was investigated. Who knows how many people came into contact with the radioactive Cobalt-60, and what the long-term health impact will be? In a place as toxic as Mayapuri, how can the effects of radiation be separated from the effects of every other industrial pollutant known to science? How will my students be affected in the future?


In my previous blog about Mayapuri I showed some photos of the homes in which my students live. Last week I went to visit a worse area, the squalor and filth of which was unbelievable. This area is called Khazan Basti and is regarded by the Mayapuri slum-dwellers as a slum, ironically. The photo shows some of the homes, along with the permanent standing water with the pigs wallowing in it. I took the photo standing on the railway line, which runs right in front of the houses.

One of my brightest students lives here. It's a completely different thing when you see pictures of the world's poorest people on TV and in the newspapers, to when you know them personally, spend time with them every day, know their hopes and dreams and actually see them as people, not just unsettling images. Mayapuri is a sobering place.

And here are some of the people. The little girls are metal pickers - they start working at the age of about four years, dragging a magnet through the dirt around the factories, trying to find the tiniest scraps of metal for re-sale. If they are really successful, they might earn Rs20 (about 50c) in a day. They don't go to school, although their brothers often do. Education is not valued highly in Khazan Basti.

All of this makes the achievement of some of my advanced students even more remarkable. To come from this sort of environment, to not only complete 12 years of school education, but to go on and study at university is an incredible testimony to their powers of concentration and persistence. The environment in which they live is appalling, but their life stories are inspirational, and that's why I go to work every day. I breathe the awful fumes, and cough all the way home on the overcrowded bus, but I keep going back, because they keep wanting to learn. These are amazing people.

Holi

Holi is the famous Indian festival where everybody goes a little bit nuts and throws coloured powder over each other. This year it fell on 19th March and I was a part of the whole craziness. After dressing in a salwar kameez that I had bought just for the occasion (i.e. it cost about $2 so I wasn't going to worry if it was ruined) I eventually went out onto the street in response to several teenagers demanding my presence. Of course, I was immediately hit with all manner of coloured powder, water bombs and indeed a whole bucket of water. I then took revenge on the little munchkins who coloured me up and proceeded to do the same to them. Damn! Some of them are fast, but as my daughters will tell you, old age and treachery beat youth and vigour every time!

We then called Bart down from where he was hiding on the third floor, to greet him with a load of colour and water. He also managed to exact some revenge. The photo shows Bart and I in front of the home we live in, with the crazy labrador Moju peering over the 1st floor balcony.


Sanjeev, who is the head of the household, then invited me to visit some relatives, riding on the back of his vintage Enfield motorbike. The astute observer will note that neither of us wore helmets. We whizzed about the main roads of Delhi, which were completely deserted, as everyone was hanging around their homes throwing coloured powder at each other. It was an exhilarating ride, made even more so by Sanjeev's claim (like so many other drivers in India) that red lights didn't apply to him!

We arrived safely at Sanjeev's cousin's house, and were immediately pelted with water and colour as we were dismounting the motorbike in the street. It was Holi, after all. I was then introduced to another Holi tradition: bhang. Now this is a milk drink with bits of green stuff floating in it. I smelled it and asked if the green stuff was marijuana. No, they said. It's just like alcohol, they said. Drink up, they said. So I did. The photo shows me holding a glass of bhang in one hand and the coloured powder in the other. So we all drank a couple of glasses of bhang and then Sanjeev and I headed back to our house to collect Bart and the kids, and go to a party in the park.


It was after I had had something to eat, and done a few dances to Punjabi music, that I started to feel, well, a bit odd. I hadn't had any alcohol, but started feeling, well, pretty drunk. I asked Sanjeev what bhang actually was. Was it a drug? No, he said, it's just a herb we drink at Holi. Are you sure it's not marijuana, I asked. No, he said, it's just a herb. And then I remembered the Hindi word for marijuana. Is is ganja, I asked. Oh yes, he said, it's ganja. Oh great, I thought. So it all went a bit downhill from there. I was completely stoned and was having trouble working out whether what was happening was real or I was in fact dreaming. The photo shows me sitting with Bart, as I was asking him to reassure me that he was real, and not a dream. He was real, he assured. He was a Dutchman, after all, so he knew a thing or two about cannabis I think (or maybe I dreamed that bit).

After having several completely inane conversations with pillars of the community and trying really hard not to looked stoned, I felt capable of walking again, so Sanjeev and Bart escorted me home. Sanjeev made several phone calls, and I understood enough of his Hindi to know that he was asking people for an antidote to bhang. The answer that they all gave? A shower and a sleep. So that's what I did. After being shown to my room I gave myself a shower, all the while wondering if this was real or a dream. I decided that it was real - after all, why would I dream about showering in Delhi? I'd done that plenty of times before. I then put myself to bed for four hours and woke up refreshed and ready to start the party again.

So if my daughters are reading this, remember what you're Mum told you: never ride a motorbike without a helmet and never take drugs. Unless it's Holi. And you're in Delhi. Then it's OK.
:-)

New Delhi, same-same but different

On 6th March I found myself back in New Delhi - exactly the same but completely different.

The last time I had lived in New Delhi I had shared a flat in Vasant Kunj with other Asha volunteers. This time I moved in with a Punjabi family in Saket, in south Delhi. It is a huge 4-storey place with innumerable rooms. The family consists of a grandmother, father (the mother lives in New York), an adult son and 15-year-old twin daughters, plus three live-in servants. There are seven guest rooms, so the household sometimes consists of as many as 18 people. It is wonderfully busy, with people coming and going all the time. At present, the regular guests consist of myself, a Dutchman named Bart and an American named Katie. Most evenings, some or all of us meet on the rooftop terrace, and there are often up to five local teenagers there too. We all chat about the day and watch the sun set behind the Qutub Minar, the tall tower in the photo. It's a 12th century Moghul monument surrouned by mosques and ruins.


The photo shows one corner of my room - it's so huge that I can't photograph it all at once. The room contains three beds and a private bathroom. Very nice.

We have all our meals with the family. Breakfast is usually eggs and toast while dinner is Indian. There are nearly always three or four kinds of curry or dal with flat bread called roti. It's vegetarian every day except Sunday, when there is some chicken. The food is outstanding and the home is wonderful!

Bangkok

On my way back to India I arranged to meet a friend with whom I'd previously travelled in India and Nepal. Jennie was travelling from India to southeast Asia, so we agreed to meet in Bangkok for three days. I love the way this travel magic works.

We'd both been to Bangkok before so we weren't particularly interested in doing the 'usual' tourist things. We were wandering about when we came across a lake that hired out double-headed duck paddle boats. We couldn't resist this bit of silliness so we hired one and paddled about. We were startled to discover that there was a colony of enormous monitor lizards living in and around the lake. We watched them eat whole fish and birds, lick blood off their faces and generally just look rather threatening. The video shows the slow swagger of these massive creatures.
We then tried to return our double-headed duck boat to the jetty, where the woman in charge helpfully took our picture. But after much babbling in mutually unintelligible languages, wild gesticulating and pointing frantically to the jetty (us) and the other side of the lake (her), we realised that the woman from whom we'd hired the boat had been very pregnant, and this one wasn't. We'd tried to return the boat to another company, in another place. Ah - all double-headed duck boat hire places look alike to me!

Our next stop was the Bangkok Snake Farm, where we saw many snakes (no surprise there) both alive and dead. Not for the faint-hearted.

We visited Jim Thompson House, which is an amazing complex of ancient Thai buildings collected together in one place by an American silk trader in the 1960s. The photos don't do it justice - this is a truly beautiful home. If I am ever a gazillionaire, I'd like to create a home like this. It was perfect: light, space, greenery, ancient sculptures, clean wooden lines, fascinating objects from all over Thailand.

In the evening, we did the obligatory tourist thing of drinking on Khao San Road. Jennie and I were immediately attracted to a bar with a huge sign saying 'we do not check IDs', with every waiter wearing a T-shirt with that message. This was funny because (a) NO bars on Khao San Road check IDs, and (b) Jennie and I are both well above the drinking age. In fact, two-thirds of my daughters are above the drinking age! We were sitting there drinking VERY STRONG cocktails, as the sign informed us, when Jennie was hailed by an Australian man - it turned out that she'd met him in Malaysia a few weeks earlier, and here they both were on Khao San Road in Thailand at the same time. I love the way this travel magic works!

We chatted a bit, well a lot, and something made me think that I ought to know who this chap was - he claimed to have 'worked in Australian politics' but was otherwise vague about his background. A few days later, when I had his full name, I Googled him - well, what else do you do? It turns out he was a disgraced former Queensland politician who had been facing charges there over sexual harassment and workplace harassment. He had lost his seat even though the voters had swung towards his party everywhere else in the state. And the best part? We knew he had been living in Malaysia since September, and were rather tickled to discover a newspaper article asking where he had been since September, when he had apparently 'fled the country'. Part of me felt like contacting Crikey to reveal his whereabouts, but in the end, Jennie and I just decided to have another cocktail ......


So what else do you do in Bangkok after you've paddled in a double-headed duck boat, visited a snake farm and caught up with an Australian former politician on the run? Of course, you go to the zoo to see a Kenyan Boys Acrobatic Team. And that we did.

The Kenyan Boys were entertaining, to say the least: semi-naked, covered in oil and pelvic thrusting the whole way through the show. Some day I'll show you the videos, but this is a family blog, so let me just leave you with a photo of me with one of the Boys. Look at that six-pack.


The rest of the zoo was almost as entertaining. Jennie somehow managed to get shat upon by a penguin with a bad case of diarrhoea, through a gap in a glass enclosure. The photo shows the aggrieved Jennie, the offending penguin and the dirty window!


Finally, we were rather confused about all the pictures of pandas, panda signs and jolly little panda souvenirs that were on sale. There are NO pandas at Bangkok Zoo folks, don't be fooled. Well, except for the ATM, which was shaped like a panda. Since this was the closest I was going to get to a panda in Bangkok, I took a photo of the ATM. And here it is.

Canberra

On 2nd February I returned to Canberra for a month, to count my children, sort out my finances, write some papers and try to work out what I was going to do with the rest of the year, or indeed the rest of my life. I stayed with the extremely lovely Philip and Iris, and their gorgeous son Jeffery, aged 10 months. My room faced the road where extraordinarily loud roadworks began every morning at 7am. I am convinced that Philip and Iris put me in that room to ensure that I did not overstay my welcome. The photo shows me with baby Jeffery standing near one of the wretched machines that disturbed my slumber. Jeffery is extremely cute and my plan had been to smuggle him with me in my cabin baggage when I left, but sadly I discovered that he weighed 7.2kg, which is over the limit, so I had to leave him behind. I spent many happy evenings with Philip arguing about whether or not all Christians had to be pacifists all the time (him - yes, me - no) and whether eating camembert at room temperature made me more bourgeois than him.


I spent time with my wonderful daughters Lyndal, Michaela and Elwyn and was delighted to have the opportunity of watching the latter two play baseball. Their team is coached by a former professional baseball player who has played in the US, and they thrashed their opponents comprehensively. Whether it was the outstanding coaching, or the running skills developed by the team during the soccer season, we will never know. The photo (right) shows Elwyn and Michaela enjoying sisterly love. Well, maybe Michaela is enjoying it! The photo below shows Elwyn having more fun.


Since my academic career, if I ever have one, will depend on publications, I spent many hours writing papers for peer-reviewed journal articles. To date, only one has actually been published but the others are due out this year. Hopefully, in the academic world there will be many references to Day (2011) in years to come. Sigh.

I spent an enjoyable weekend in Melbourne with my extended family, including numerous cousins of varying degrees. It was also very special to meet Bailey again. Bailey is a labrador who had been our family pet for the first five years of her life, when we gave her to my cousin Rachel, who offered a home with many children and loads more attention than she received at our place. Bailey, who was named after an ancestor that went down on the Titanic, had a much happier life journey than her namesake and looked fat and contented, as labradors should be.

Then there was a franctic round of paperwork to deal with. I applied for, and received, my new tourist visa for India and also applied for a Person of Indian Origin (PIO) card. If I'm succesful, I will be entitled to bypass all the visa requirements for India in the future. I also examined my PhD carefully and discovered that it was wrong - my discipline was Biological Anthropology, not AnthropologyAnthropology [sic]. I began the tedious process of getting that fixed.

I had many meals with my daughters, drinks with friends, meetings with bank managers and chats with bureaucrats of every kind. I officiated at Elwyn's school swimming carnival, helped move Michaela into her father's garage, dumped my excess possessions into storage and bought new underwear to replace all that had been destroyed by being smashed against rocks in laundries throughout Asia. Then it was time to leave. I promised to write more often and update my blog regularly. OK, the latter turned out to be a lie.

On 3rd March, I headed to Bangkok, en routte to India, for Round 2.

Diving in Timor

OK, it's been brought to my attention several times that I have not updated my blog for two months. So here goes. I will attempt to bring it up to date.












In January 2011 I completed my Advanced Open Water Diving Course in Dili, East Timor through Dive Timor Lorosae. I can't speak too highly of the staff at Dive Timor, or the quality of the diving. They were both awesome! Each night, after diving or working, there was always a crowd of people to socialise with at the Castaway Bar, which is connected with Dive Timor. There was great food, good wine and terrific company.


After I completed the course I went on to do a number of other dives, just for fun. I saw giant clams, beautiful sea slugs, the occasional ray, gorgeous coral and amazing coloured fish. Yet I was told that the visibility was comparatively poor and that it was much better later in the year. I will have to go back!








I don't have an underwater camera, so to give you a taste of what I saw, I have shamelessly downloaded these photos from the Dive Timor Lorosae website, which has copyright.

Liquisa and Maubara

In between volunteering at Alola and going scuba-diving with Dive Timor Lorosae, I managed to spend a day 'sighseeing' west of Dili. My friend Hannah and I managed to gently persuade two Portuguese naval officers to take us along with them on their daily trip to Liquisa, where they worked.

Paolo and Augusto are working to reconstruct the hospital at Liquisa, which is about an hour's drive west of Dili. The photo above shows a view from the back of the main hospital building, where the shell of a destroyed building can be seen. On the other hand, the main building has suffered not from violence but from neglect. The photo on the left shows the front of the restored main building of the hospital, with Augusto on the doorstep. The inside has been completely re-tiled, re-wired, re-plastered and re-painted. Paolo and Augusto hope that it will be finished soon, but on the day we arrived, as on other days, all the workers had simply failed to turn up for work. Someone was getting married apparently, or someone had a problem with transport, and they just all took the day off. This was unfortunate for the reconstruction of the Liquisa hospital, but fortunate for Hannah and I, since we now had two ready-made tour guides, with no work to do.

First we headed for the beach. Liquisa formerly had a beach resort, but like so many of Timor Leste's economic activities, this was destroyed during the independence struggle. The beach was clean and pleasant, although Hannah was put off by the black sand. We were assured that this was from the nature of the volcanic soils, not from anything sinister or dirty. It's curious how we associate the colour of the sand with the quality of the beach - in Dili the sand is white, but the water is filthy since raw sewerage pours into it and container ships offload their waste into it. In Liquisa it's black, but clean, yet somehow is less appealing.

We explored Liquisa a bit. This was the scene of much bloodshed during 1999 and the town was used as a set in the film Balibo in 2008. We visited the now-destroyed Indonesian army officers' mess, which has a shallow lake behind it (shown left). This was a place where allegedly the Indonesians threw Timorese, bound hand and foot, to be eaten by crocodiles. I can't say whether that's true or not, but it is certainly a fairly spooky place.

We then moved on to Maubara, several kilometres further west. Maubara was infamous for being the place where the Besi Merah Putih militia group was formed. This group of Indonesian-backed Timorese was implicated in much of the death and destruction that occurred in 1999. Maubara had once been a Dutch colony, and they built a fort here, before swapping it with the Portuguese for Flores Island in the 17th century. The fort, and its cannon, still exist. The photo on the right shows one of the cannon pointing out to sea, past the small souvenir stands on the beach.

After snorkelling on a coral reef, then having lunch in the gardens, we were about to explore the fort when the Portuguese Defence Attache showed up at one of the souvenir stands. Since Paolo and Augusto were supposed to be working in Liquisa (despite the fact that no Timorese workmen had shown up that day), our Portuguese friends thought that discretion was the better part of valour, so we high-tailed it out of Maubara and up to the old Portuguese military headquarters on the hill. It felt a bit like wagging school (playing truant) and spotting a teacher in the street, then running away to avoid detection.

The photo has a bit of symbolism for me. The military headquarters, which had once been magnificent, had been restored in 2000, then fallen into disrepair. Now someone has a plan to make it into a hotel, but progress is slow. The photo shows a once-glorious building, now falling apart, with Timorese workmen sitting on the verandah waiting for instructions, or supplies, or plans, or more workmen, or something or other else, to get them going. There was nothing happening. The photo was taken by an expat (me) in the company of other expats (Paolo and Augusto) and we were each struggling with the complexities of assisting the Timorese to re-build Timor-Leste. It's a long, hard struggle and full of disappointments, but in the end, it's got to be worth it.