We worked in the fields for the first time yesterday. About two acres of the JSS campus are given over to fields, where the mostly practice/experiment with SRI methods. The experiments are around using SRI with direct seeding, SRI with different indigenous varieties, and SRI with different crops, so far wheat and millet.

We spent about half an hour with gardening claws, iron ones on a large stick, scraping up weeds and turning over the soil in one of the dry plots. After that we spent about an hour and a half in one of the flooded unplanted rice paddies pulling up weeds, which were basically grass. It was hard work, but felt good, although I don't know if it would have felt good after doing it all day.

There was an act passed recently in India to guarantee rural employment, 100 days per willing worker. The pay is 100rps for a day of manual labor. I imagine that effectively sets the minimum wage for manual labor - why would anyone work for less if they could work for more. I also imagine that the previous daily rate would have been even lower, or who would take advantage of this type of employment. 100rps is just over $2, so that should give you a sense of the living conditions in some of these villages.

Afterwards, there was a game of volleyball that we joined in. Dolly was the only girl, and everybody called her "madam". There are also two women (med students) from Germany here - they are in the guest house we had been occupying, and they had been scheduled for that house for some time.

Haven't posted for a while... we spent half of last week staying at the guest house trying to get the Internet people to show and fix the connection there. Turned out to be a waste of time because, a) they never got it fixed and b) we got moved out to another location.

We are now staying at the Ganiyari campus in a room above the lab. We no longer have a kitchen and a TV, but we now have no commute, and 3 meals a day prepared for us. Quite a few of the people who work on the campus live here as well, maybe a dozen families, so we're not totally isolated - although no one but Dolly speaks much English.

Other than that, we're trying to figure out our work routine, what promoting SRI entails, and what our role in that is.

Indians are famous for their unwillingness to stand in line. Whether at the train station or market, its not "first-come, first-served" but "push your way to the front". I don't know where this attitude originates from... maybe its a consequence of the sheer quantities and densities of people, maybe its a reaction to limited quantities of goods and services, and maybe its just the system they choose. Either way, it works as the law of the land.

This system is also applied to traffic. Many of the highways are 1.5 lane roads, where you pass when you can. Vehicles go a variety of speeds, from ox-cart slow to normal driving speed, so this works pretty well in utilizing the entire road and getting people where they need to go.

This morning, however, a set of circumstances arose that were entirely unsuitable for this system. It happened at a railroad crossing. The gates came down, and the cars and buses had to wait for them to be raised again. (Bicycles and motorcycles were able to weave their way through.) The problem occurred when people saw the traffic built up and decided to go around. The end result when the gates went up were two lanes of traffic on each side of the tracks facing each other and at a deadlock. What was already a traffic delay became a fairly intractable traffic jam as the traffic has to squeeze down from two lanes into one, with the one lane itself being blocked by the oncoming traffic. I guess this is usually why we take the route that avoids taht intersection.

Bilaspur has, in the words of a schoolteacher we met on the bus, "no activities for adventurous youth." This means no dance clubs, music spots, or even pubs (there are *bars* which we haven't entered, but they seem to be dives catering to working and lower class alcoholics), so one of our leisure time activities is watching Indian TV. At any given time, Bollywood's most popular actor Shahrukh Khan, is probably on TV on 15 of the 70 channels. Imagine Russell Crowe, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, the "Can You Hear Me" guy, and the Geico Gekko wrapped into one omnipresent personality, and you have Shah Rukh. He is primarily a movie star, and is in many of the top movies, and as a movie star, his mere presence makes a movie a top movie. In addition, music videos here don't belong to an artist/album, thet are associated with the movie for which they were produced, and the video stars not the musicians/singers, but the stars of the movie. He also is a very popular pitchman in ads of all kinds, TV and print. The top woman, Karina Kapur, is all over the place, but is not as ubiquitous as Shahrukh. She has been on top for only a few years, and he has been #1 for about 15. Women in Bollywood, as in Hollywood, have a shorter peak than men, and in India they tend to stop acting when they get married, or at least slow way down.

Follow up on the last post... maybe it was a one day flurry of activity, and its a coincidence, but Dolly's grotesque wax monument of mangled ants seems to have done the trick. Except for a small area of activity in the kitchen, the ants in our house are now few and far between.

Today we ate lunch with Jacob's agricultural assistant, Homprakash, who was going to be showing us how they do the direct seeding (weather permitting). Weather did not permit, but we learned that he had worked with Binayak Sen before coming to JSS to work with Jacob. Coincidentally, as we were waiting for the Jeeps to leave, we started speaking to a woman who was also waiting for a ride, and found out that she was writing a book and preparing on film a documentary about Dr. Sen.

For those who don't know, Dr. Binayak Sen was just recently released from jail after being held without bail or trial (or even proper charges) for just over two years. The offical pretense was that he was aiding Naxalite rebels, but the real reason is that he was speaking out against human rights violations comitted by government sponsored militias fighting the Naxalites. Both sides are engaged in guerilla warfare, mass killings and other atrocities. Dr. Sen served as an advisor to JSS (not sure the whole story), and I believe he was a classmate of some of the JSS doctors as well.

Totally unrelated, Dolly has suddenly transformed into an excellent cook. She has always been good, though generally reluctant, and her bhindi and eggplant on consecutive nights were both among the best dishes she has ever prepared. I don't know if the vegetables are tastier, the spices are fresher or better mixed, or if its just a matter of an Indian girl being possessed by the spirits of her native lands, but I am willing to surrender cooking duties and stick to washing the dishes.

In the last few days we have been at war with nature...

The first incident occurred at the hotel, when Dolly came out of the shower. She opened her suitcase to get her clothes, and then screamed and jumped on the bed. She had seen a mouse. I dragged the suitcase into the hallway, and started emptying it, and when it was mostly open a small mouse jumped out and scurried into the room next to ours.

Later that evening we were playing cards on the bed, when Dolly screamed again. She had seen the mouse run under the bed. I looked under the bed and at first didn't see it, but after looking closely, I found it was hiding between the bedpost and the wall. I went to the other end of the bed and gave it a sharp shove... then called the front desk to get rid of the dead mouse.

Yesterday we had two chipaki incidents. The first happened when we got home and Dolly found a small one on the bathroom bucket. I lifted up to the bathroom window, where it jumped out. Later that evening another chipkali went running on the wall in the living room. I went to chase it out the front door with a broom, but it ran all over the house until eventually I got it out the back door.

Today brought a plague of ants. We had seen some in the apartment, but not enough to really worry about. Today, however, they appeared in great numbers from their holes by the door frames. We tried killing them with detergent and bathroom cleaners, and that got rid of them for a while. Then they came back. We tried killing them by thwacking them with the stiff broom. That killed many of them... but soon they were back. Right now Dolly is buring them with a candle and dripping wax on them. It started as an attempt to seal off their holes, but that didn't quite work and it turned into just killing them out of spite. Tomorrow someone from the office will come look, and/or we'll get some proper pesticides, never mind that we're trying to promote organic farming and save the world from the dangers of those same pesticides. We can't live in an anthill.

We aren't in our permanent home yet, but we made a big step into more comfortable circumstances. Until we find an apartment we are staying in a guest apartment in the same colony as the doctors. This means, among other things, that we now have a kitchen and we can leave for work half an hour later.

This first morning we left for work, however, the jeep got stuck in the mud less than a km down the road. A crowd gathered and offered advice on how to get it out. We placed stones under the tires, people helped push, but the jeep just sunk deeper and deeper. Eventually, we gave it up and the doctors hopped on a bus and Dolly and I walked home to work from there (and try to get the internet working).

I would now like to purge my system by venting about Hotel Sharda. First, when we first arrived, it was nice. Clean and air-conditioned, and more than what I expected for 650 rupees (about $13) a night, and some of my frustrations were undoubtably a result of the total of about 2 weeks of hotel living. But the small things do stop being small and start growing in size. The doorbell for the room made an absolutely horribly buzzing sound, a noise appropriate to be used as additional negative reinforcement during electroshock therapy. Every time we ordered something from room service, it was rang probably four times... once to deliver the food, once to pick up the dishes, once to bring the bill, and finally one last time to bring the change. Many of these times were in the later evenings or early mornings, when those kinds of noises are especially unwelcome. And sometimes they would ring it just to see if we wanted anything... but at least they mostly stopped that after a few days and us explaining that if we wanted anything we would call.

The food at the hotel was the most convienient dinner option, as we could call them up and they would bring it to the room. Often we would get home at 7 or 8, and were tired and preferred to stay in. The problem was that the food was pretty mediocre and only vegetarian, so every night it was a question of whether to go out and get something better, or stay in the room and relax while we waited for the food to come.

But now, thats all over, and we're getting settled nicely. We can once again eat home cooked food, and make our tea and coffee the way we like it. And now, our doorbell is a pleasant sound of birds chirping.