Dirty Feet

Warning: this entry is not for the faint of heart or stomach :)

So today was the day of dirty feet. It seems appropriate that feet should be dirty really, since I think they are the most unattractive and utilitarian part of the body. So I don’t mind so much that they are dirty, because they are useful. (That is also what makes a foot rub/wash something special, because someone is willing to take that ugliest and dirtiest part of another’s body and do something to make it better… how selfless a footrub is!) Today however, my feet became the kind of dirty that is less dirt and dust and more foul and disgusting. I guess you could say I had untouchable feet and at the end of the day if I could have taken them off of me and left them behind I would have. (this brings me to another concept/question I have often thought about… how can humanity consider one group of people to be untouchable, or to desire to cut that group off? Is it like trying to cut ones feet off and expecting to continue to walk without pain… is it too idealistic to think of society as a whole like one big organism and that if/when we attempt to segregate, cut off, or abuse any group of people we are ultimately harming ourselves?) so… onto my story.
We were asked to go down south to provide a consultation to an NGO that works on tribal and indigenous issues. We set out at around 6am. The roads are surprisingly good in India, albeit narrow. (India does not have a monopoly on narrow roads however, I remember when I lived in Norway the roads were often so narrow you would have to pull over to let an oncoming car go by, and I have encountered many narrow roads in other countries in Europe as well, perhaps it is only in the US where we expect to be able to fit two hummers side-by-side on every American road) What I mean is that the roads are all paved in India, which is quite nice. It allows for higher speeds which also results in higher blood pressure, but we are able to go 150 KM in about 3 hours which isn’t half bad. There is a lot of honking and beeping, and swerving and rapid accelerating or breaking, it feels a bit like toads wild ride, or like a video game, dodging people, cows and dogs, people on bicycles, motorcycles, cows, rickshaws, cows, Sumo TATA’s (HUGE TRUCKS), little cars, cows, water buffalo, cows…. Did I mention the cows? Well, for the past 5-6 days I have had a bad stomach. Nothing major, just a flopping fish that turned into a flopping brick in my belly… just upset. So I have been drinking a lot of water and about 2/3 of the way to our destination I was a bit overripe for a Loo. Luckily our driver was stopping to get petrol anyhow so I asked if there was a toilet. Mohinder asked the petrol attendant in Hindi if there was a woman’s toilet, and he was very specific about it being a woman’s toilet. The attendant emphatically nodded his head and took me and Lisa (from UK) over to the toilet, as I walked in I noticed that it clearly was not a women’s toilet but had only a tile floor, tile walls a drainage hole in the base of the wall and a urinal about 3.5-4 feet from the ground. I backed out of the room thinking maybe he had taken me in the wrong room, but he was insistent that I go back in and close the door, he kept saying the same thing over and over in Hindi and pointing for me to go in and in English to “close the door”. He was very insistent, and well, so was my bladder. I will not go on to explain any more, except to use one word which should summarize the dilemma and explain the beginning of my dirty feet day… “splash” I came out a few minutes later thinking how I would have been better off on the side of the road than in a tile chamber and grumbling about how that man must not have had sisters, or a wife or I wouldn’t even be surprise if he didn’t have a mother! Because, although what kind of toilet is used makes no difference to a man, it makes a HUGE difference to a woman. It is not a matter of taste or opinion, it is not a woman’s way of being high-maintenance, it is simply a matter of ANATOMY!
We got back on the road, went through a quaint little town that had green flags strung all over it, apparently the decorations of a Muslim holiday, and finally we arrived. We took our shoes off, as is polite, at the front of the building and we were warmly greeted, asked inside, offered breakfast and then handed a giant stack of papers. As we went through the papers we realized, we had A LOT of work on our hands. They had not asked us for a consultation on their organizational structure as we thought, but rather to come and write two grant applications which were due the following day. Thank goodness I have done this before, but I would never dream to do one single application, let alone two in just one day! I wanted to get straight to work when I saw how much needed to be done. They began by sitting on a mat on the floor and discussing the organizational structure and applicable laws of the public and private sectors, the UN, International NGO’s, Domestic NGO’s, civil society, International Human Rights Law etc… As I wasn’t sure how this applied to the grant applications and have sat through many a classes on these topics (and look forward to many more in my graduate program), I endured it for awhile but was happy when I got my hands on one of the grant applications and snuck off to a computer to get it started. It became apparent that we were going to be there awhile. It had to be in Rome the following day, and every minute would count, I found myself checking time zones and calculating every minute. It turns out that the extra half hour in the Indian time zone was going to come in handy! I recruited one staff member to come sit with me and explain their programme and projects for the purpose of the grant. His English was very difficult to understand as was mine for him I think, so it was a slow process. They had some of it pre-written on a piece of scrap paper but as I have found thus far, Indians, when writing in English have a tendency to use strings of big words regardless of their meaning, in order to make something sound educated or professional, until the reader looses all meaning of what is trying to be said. It was quite a process and we went from tangent to tangent eventually making our way to center and getting some good headway on the application. The announcement of lunch was a welcome break! I asked for a toilet at this time and was lead out to the courtyard, on my way a group of monkeys in the trees above were pointed out to me and I stopped awhile to watch their antics, the woman who was escorting me looked up at them and pursed her lips as though trouble had just rolled into town. As we got closer to the closet with the toilet on the other side of the courtyard, I realized that since my shoes were at the front door and I was now in the back of the building that I was going to be expected to go into the toilet bare footed! I looked down at my bare feet, and down at the floor in the toilet and took a big gulp, held my breath and ran in, leaping last minute over a track of little red ants just inside the doorway. Thoughts of an army of chanting germs went floating through my head, especially considering the fact that it was a squat toilet and the floors there are always affected by… well, “splash”… of every kind. When the chanting germs gave a big HOORAH after I stepped in, then I was certain that holding my breath or closing my eyes was not going to change the condition of my feet when I left the toilet closet. Please give me some latitude, I had a double major in Microbiology at University, so I do have a scientific knowledge of what was really on the floor in that room. And this is one of those cases where it is better to be ignorant…but I was not. I also think that since I have only been here for a week and a half, that my sensitivities are still high. Give me few more weeks and I will be dancing around the toilet barefoot without a second thought :) As if my imagination wasn’t enough trouble for me while I was in the toilet closet, those crazy little monkeys began to throw green mangoes on the tin roof that echoed loudly and really just made me laugh at the whole situation… I would be laughing much harder at the crazy little monkeys just an hour later though.
All 12 of us, 9 from the Tribal peoples NGO and 3 of us from ours ate on a giant rug on the floor, the food was good as usual, and I ate my first chicken since arriving in India. A few bites tasted yummy, but then I realized I didn’t miss meat all that much. With so many interesting things to do with vegetables and so many interesting vegetables to do it with, I have not been bored eating the local fare. My goal of learning how to cook Indian food, may unfortunately, never come to fruition. They rarely cook the same thing twice and I am never around when the cooking is being done, not to mention I’m not sure I could ever find all these ingredients outside of India… there is still time though. After lunch I was escorted back out into the courtyard to wash my hands in a big cement water trough that was used for all water purposes, from washing dishes, to washing clothes and hands. Having finished my washing I stepped back and felt something moist spread under my heal and up through my toes… removed my foot and realized that I had just stepped squarely onto a large fresh pile of Monkey Poo. Yes, I just said Monkey Poo and that makes me laugh. I was laughing then too, but I had Monkey Poo on my bare foot… what can one do but laugh, in a moment like that, on a day like that, when every disgusting thing imaginable would encounter my feet. Monkey Poo. There I said it again and feel rather like a child for doing it, but if you have to have it on your foot you might as well get full use of the phrase… hey at least I didn’t use it as the title ;-)

P.S. Yes, we got the grant proposal done late, late at night and almost sent to Rome…I say almost, because in the exact moment we sent it via email, there was a powercut. I just had to think of the Monkey Poo to make myself laugh again, washed my feet and called it a night.