Visiting the villages in Indonesia, Part I

Indonesia was different for me from other countries where I had worked, and different also because in Indonesia I was in my empty-nest years, no longer a mother and wife keeping house and managing an active family social life while teaching part-time at the university or engaged in a research project. This had been my lifestyle in the U.S., in Somalia for two years , in Turkey for four years — mother, sometime home-school teacher, wife, housewife and part-time professional working in the environment that was also our home. In India I did not keep house but we did stay for extended periods of time in the homes of Ravi’s extended family; things Indian were woven into our lives. Then the children were off to school and I went to Indonesia as a full-time consultant, a place and culture unconnected in any way to my past or present. For thirteen years, from 1978 to 1991, I did consultancies there for health care programs, each time with a different international organization. Flying in from Ravi’s and my Paris apartment, I arrived in the Jakarta airport (clove scented cigarette smoke in the air) to be officially met and driven to the organization’s office that would be my base and from where I would go to meet my Indonesian colleagues, the persons who shaped much of what I saw and learned about their people and their land.

Fortunately, I liked my colleagues, enjoyed being with them, and will write about that, but first must make sense of the hundred or so photographs of Indonesia scattered over my desk. I rarely carried a camera when traveling; Ravi did that for us, but for my six months long consultancy across Java, Madura, Bali, Sulawesi (known also as Celebes) and Sumatra, probably because Ravi insisted on it, in the Singapore airport stopover I bought a camera and film. It also happened that my interpreter/assistant, Loung Ie, liked taking pictures and I went along with it. He took on the responsibility of getting the film developed for us. Unfortunately, I failed to write information on the back of most of the photographs, so now sit here, going through them, some of me sitting with people in a meeting, others standing with people at a vehicle, others walking with people along a road, trying to remember who they are, where we are. I’ll figure it out, even though I spent only two or three days in each village, then had to move on. I have my fieldnotes and the report I wrote and am matching photos to activities. These were fine people and we were doing good work together, which is the reason I wanted a photo memento of each occasion.

Usually, to get to a particular village I was scheduled to visit Loung Ie and I stayed in the District town hotel or government facility and commuted by government vehicle. On occasion, however, a village family could host us, and such a time was where we took these photos. It was in South Sulawesi, north of Makassar, in the rural area of what had been the Makassar Kingdom and other urban centers the Dutch encountered and also photographed. The village headman and his family took us into their home for two nights and helped me during the daytime with my interviewing.

I have to remind myself that the international organization and/or the Ministry of Health sent me into a village to observe its health care program, not to analyze the people’s social system and economy. Nevertheless, knowing a little background information helps. As the street scene indicates, this village was relatively prosperous. In other villages, houses were built with more bamboo and less wood, and as I have in other photographs, not many villages had so many houses so neatly surrounded with a fence. I talked with the teachers, so knew the village had a primary school, and I heard that besides rice the villagers grew a cash crop, tobacco. Like villages generally in Indonesia in those years, it did not have electricity. Water was from traditional shallow wells.

I did not walk out into the fields around the houses but think these photographs of rice farming taken in Madura, off Java, but would be similar to the way the people of Sulawesi farmed.

with the health care program volunteers

I can attest to the house being a pleasant space for spending time and for sleeping. The gentleman is relaxing under his house in the morning. The girl is sitting on a ramp that leads to the kitchen area attached to the rectangular of the house itself. The entire structure rests on pillars and can be, and on occasion is, picked up and moved elsewhere by as many men as there are pillars. The form and traditional materials of the structure are in a graceful balance, ideal for the climate. The use of wood and glass presents an updated version of the traditional house.

Naturally, I met with the doctor and staff at the District Health Center and recalling all this has me thinking again of how difficult, with even the best practices and intentions, it is to remain healthy in the tropics without the aid of modern technologies. The continual heat allows insects and other disease vectors to breed and grow at rates unimaginable in a temperate climate where a winter freeze keeps much of that in check. And water – In the rather rainy U.S. state where I live, the average rainfall for most months is between 80 and 90mm, 10mm or so higher in March and in August. In Makassar monthly rainfall is near or over 200mm, a bit below 150mm in Sept and Oct. Think of the consequences for malaria and for water carrying parasites. Sanitation is a continual problem. People defecate on the soil where they also walk barefooted, being exposed to intestinal parasites and diarrheal infections. In cold climates people wears shoes, and have since at least the Iron Age, more than three millennia ago. For Indonesia’s preventive health program volunteers promoted the digging and lining of a pit called comberan for disposing of household trash and the digging and construction of pit toilets for sanitation. In America, when I was a child, many, maybe most, rural households had an outhouse, a deep pit under a small one room structure built of wood with toilet seats and a door to close for privacy. As for household trash, before the era of plastics, it was thrown somewhere away from the house and composted into the soil. In the Indonesian villages, floods or heavy rain frequently destroyed the comberan and backed up the pit toilets. Another concern for the health program was hygiene; people washed themselves but soap was expensive and not generally used. (On a later consultancy I saw women using a harsh detergent for laundry, and also for washing themselves, which I thought had to be hard on the skin.)

The headman and the teachers actively set examples for others in the village by adopting the preventive health program’s recommendations, one of which affected my stay with them. The headman had built, attached to the house, a small enclosure over a pit toilet with an important innovation: a floor level pan set in a cement slab over the pit. The pan was made of light plastic and shaped for a water seal called a gooseneck that prevented gases from rising into the enclosure. In this private space, a container of water was included for cleaning oneself and for flushing the toilet. If the price of cement is not too high, if the pit can be maintained and if water is readily available, this is an appropriate technology for a household. From what I read, it is used in parts of rural Indonesia but I find no mention of it in any other country.

Sanitation remains a huge problem in much of the world. The villagers I knew in India and Indonesia were much healthier then than they had previously been and certainly healthier than previous generations. Smallpox was eradicated and the incidence of tuberculosis, leprosy and malaria had gone down. Antibiotics were hugely important for treating infections. Access to modern medications through rural health clinics and doctors with private practices made a difference, as had, in Indonesia, the widespread acceptance of boiling the drinking water, but several basic causes of preventable diseases were still not being addressed.  I once repeated to a village headman what the District Health Center doctor had told me, that 90% or more of the children had intestinal parasites, and asked him why it did not worry people enough for them to take serious action to protect the children, such as wearing sandals, installing pit toilets and insisting on everyone using the toilets. And antihelminth medications were not expensive. The headman responded that formerly a child was a head and a big round belly with arms and legs like sticks, and now children look normal.

In two little boys I noticed the extended belly I was told is a sign of intestinal parasites but said nothing about it to anyone; it would have been inappropriate on my part, so I simply took this photograph to add to my fieldnotes. How very sad. I read that in Indonesia 37% of people in urban areas and 43% in rural areas still practice open defecation. I describe here my experience with this problem in India and wrote here of its devastating effects in India. For solutions to the problem here. For Indonesia here and here.

 

I close with a photograph I took this week of my ani-ani, my one souvenir from the villages. I had seen the small tool lying discarded in a corner of the house and remarked on it, calling it by name. I am not certain how I recognized it and knew its name, maybe from having read, decades before I ever dreamed of being in Indonesia, a famous study (famous among anthropologists) of Indonesian culture. Whether from there or elsewhere, for some odd reason I knew that women harvested rice by carefully cutting the grain off the stalk with a knife called the ani-ani. My host family explained that with the new strains of rice the yield was more abundant and people were harvesting with the sickle, freeing women from their slow, frugal salvaging of every single grain. He and the family were so amused by my recognizing the ani-ani that they gave it to me. —  And nostalgia has me adding a second photo. The people I met and worked with in Indonesia were so kind and hospitable. This is a family I stayed with in Sulawesi.

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Family Photos from Mogadiscio, Continued ….

I took these snapshots to remind me of my daily life in 1963-64 as a mother and wife in a part of Mogadiscio different from Hamar Wein and the Italianate city. The pictures are of the compound and the road, and only incidentally of the house, which I described in “Tales of Mogadiscio.” It had little more than a kitchen area, two bedrooms and a bathroom with basic plumbing, plus appallingly expensive electricity that we used for two light bulbs and a tiny refrigerator. The piped-in water was brackish, so we bought drinking water from a rattling old truck on its rounds in our mahalle. It used at least half the water in its tank to keep the rusted-out radiator full and leave a trail of wet sand as it passed by.

We spent our days at home under the bougainvillea arbor in front of the house and the children played in the compound. The photo is poorly done but it shows the outside wall of louvered wood panels, painted dark green; a chair and table for sitting under the arbor; and a cotton mattress from one of our beds spread across them to air in the sun. The photo of Ravi with Azad and two Somali men shows more of the compound and the house. I explain the scene in “Tales of Mogadiscio.” The children and me on the walkway to the gate. The boy looking into the compound is standing at the driveway gate, undoubtedly more interested in the car than in the foreigners. Ravi had a tiny Fiat 600 so lacking in power that it could not climb one of the steeper hills up to our road. He drove the children to the American primary school supported by the U.S. Embassy and to all the appointments in the city for his research. He was not one, like me, for walking everywhere within walking distance.

 

Our house/compound was in Bondere, a district on high ground, above the city, on Nasib Bundo Steet. At the time it was a road, not a street, and I had no idea of its name. Standing across the road from our compound, near the corner with Gen. Da’ud Street, looking toward the east, I took two photographs. First I caught the wall and gates of our compound, then in the second photo the entry gate of our compound wall, electricity lines, tin-roofed wattle-daub structures, a part of the compound wall and gate across from us. Our house/compound and those around us, including down along Gen. Da’ud Street, had been built by the Italians, and when they left at Somalia’s independence,1960, Somalis and foreigners moved in. The husband/father in most the families living near us was a United Nations professional. Compared with their houses, ours was small and minimally equipped. The personnel of foreign Embassies lived in the city, the higher ranking among them in beautifully appointed houses in gardened compounds, served by Somalis trained to work with household appliances and a modern lifestyle, to drive and maintain motor vehicles. There were twenty-six Embassies in Mogadiscio, population approximately 100,000, and many additionally ran a development program. They, and international organizations, were quite a presence in the city.

Standing across the road from our compound, at Gen. Da’ud St., if I had turned my camera to the west, I could have photographed the compound wall of our friends’ house, an Indian couple, the husband with a firm exploring for oil in Somalia. I often walked over to visit Hanim, the wife, but never beyond her house. I do not recall compounds further on along the road in that direction and was totally unaware of the President’s house. I walked two or three times behind our compound to a large, multigenerational house sitting out there, all alone, to visit with the women of the household. I think they were Yemeni. Pastoral nomads came to the area from the bush, bringing goats and cows and a few camels to the Bakara market, then a bare open area.

I walked once down Nasib Bundo road to the Somali neighborhood. No one spoke to me and I did not linger. I remember only that the houses were wattle-daub and to me it looked like a village. It did have a market place where Asha, the woman who helped me keep house, bought vegetables and meat for me each morning. She was Hawiye, Abgal, the clan of the region. One day, standing at the compound gate, I watched a family walking to the village, its camel padding and swaying along soundlessly, carrying on its back all their worldly possessions. I like this photograph because of what, at the top of the goods, the camel carries. It is a stool, upside down. We have two like this, leather seat and wooden legs. I commented here on a stool shown in the etching of economic activity in 19th century Mogadiscio.

For our second time in Mogadiscio we lived in an ordinary modern house near the Juba hotel, near Corso Somalia. Our compound gate was opposite a mammoth printing press, a gift from Russia, that required more electricity to run than the Somali government could possibly afford. I describe this house in the book and here write in detail about the kitchen and my cooking for the family. Admittedly, as a family we were far more comfortable there than in Bondere, but for me it was not nearly as interesting. I did not bother to take snapshots of the house or the compound.

 

 

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A town, villages and health care program in Rajasthan, 1990

My first visit to Rajasthan, a land of extraordinary architecture and scenery, was as a tourist, on a visit to India arranged totally by Ravi. I wonder how Ravi felt being able, as a professor on a modest American salary, to afford the luxurious hotels that had once been the palaces of Maharajas in this land of Rajas. In Jaipur we stayed in the marvelous Rambagh Palace and visited the fort from there. The most dramatically luxurious hotel of all was the white marble Lake Palace in Udaipur. I enjoyed the hotels, but as a curiosity, not as the emotional experience that it may have been for Ravi. Still, the architecture of Rajasthan is dramatic and wonderful, and a shop filled with Rajasthani women’s folk art caught my imagination, as pictured here.

In 1990, on my second time in Jaipur, I was with the staff of the Indian Institute of Health Management Research, as described here, and engaged to analyze for them a WHO sponsored village level MCH/maternal-child healthcare project consisting of village level centers, each center run by an educated and well-trained Auxiliary Nurse Midwife (nearly all not from Rajasthan) who was assigned to live in the village and be supervised through the District Primary Health Center. I decided, and the Institute accepted, that instead of commuting daily from Jaipur to interview and observe in the village centers, I must stay in the town where the District PHC was located. I had to begin learning about Rajasthan, a visually attractive land possessing a rich, deep history but nevertheless one of India’s poorer states.

The matters that concerned me are expressed in certain statistics, literacy being one of the most relevant. In 1956, when Rajasthan was granted statehood, 18% of its people could read and write, the lowest rate in India. In 1991, the literacy rate for India was 52%, and for Rajasthan, 39%, 55% for men and 20% for women. By 2011, the Rajasthani male literacy was 81%, close to the national male rate, but for girls and women it was 53%, compared with the national female rate at 65.4%.

A second measurable phenomenon with meaning is infant mortality, defined as the death of a baby before his or her first birthday. The Infant Mortality Rate is an estimate of the number of infant deaths for every 1,000 live births. Because factors affecting the health of entire populations can also impact the IMR it is often used as an indicator of national health and well-being.  In 1991, the IMR in Rajasthan was 85. In 2013, it was 47 and 40 for India. In the United Kingdom, it was 4 and in Sweden, 2.

From 1991 t0 2015, the Child Mortality Rate, the under 5s, for India went down from 122 to 48, but India’s gender differential in children’s deaths is the world’s worst — for every 100 little girls aged 1 to 5 who die, 56 little boys that age die. Another sad statistic – In 2012, the Maternal Mortality Rate for Rajasthan was 255 and for India 178. In the U.K., it is 9 and in Sweden it is 4.

A comment — Female literacy empowers, and is an emancipator. The benefits of education for women are many and varied; a prime benefit is healthier children. There is an inverse relationship between female literacy and infant mortality.

I now sit at my desk, in 2016, age 86, reading my fieldnotes, recalling the District three-man PHC team who went out to the villages to give and follow through on vaccinations (polio and DPT while I was there), work on the government’s family planning and sterilization program, and provide basic health information. One man drove the jeep and the other two were trained health workers, all three from the local area. For them, my staying in the town was novel; other visiting health professionals who had viewed the PHC’s services commuted from Jaipur and for a few days only. Hardly anyone in the town, or even in the District PHC, spoke English. I needed an interpreter but the Institute Project Director had trouble finding one for me. No city girl trained to work as an interpreter was allowed to stay out in a rural area in the sort of accommodations I had — a small building, no water, no electricity, the simplest of plumbing. Finally, at last, Sunny, who had been volunteering in various development projects, heard about my work and agreed to help. He commuted daily from Jaipur by motorbike.

I heard from the Institute doctors who came regularly to the PHC that the three men in the village health team approved of me as a person; they remarked on my being a friend to people of all castes and ages and they accepted my going with them into the villages so I could meet the ANMs/Auxillary Nurse Midwives and observe the MCH program. Still, including me was a bother for them. Considering the PHC’s continual shortage of supplies, equipment breaking down, no maintenance for the jeep, seriously inadequate support and other problems too numerous to list, the men already had enough bothers and difficulties. I remember these dedicated persons doing their best to deliver health services to the women and children who were very much in need of their services but not always understanding the logic behind them.

I took this photo in a District SubCenter village. It shows features of daily life, such as electricity being available there, like in the town but not in other villages. We see a woman engaged in a daily task, while another watches over a man who sits on the veranda. Ordinarily, I saw men sitting together in public places, talking and relaxed, while the women remained at or in the house. A girl is near the house, but again, it was the small boys, not girls, who played outside, running about together. The goats (and is that a calf?) may be with the woman. She would have milked the she-goats. (In Karnataka, a woman in the community I knew raised goats to sell to meat-eating families. On the edge of the Rajasthan town, at the road, I saw pigs running about and being chased away. I assumed Dalits owned them; pork was eaten in many Dalit communities. Middle-class Christians in Goa and tribal people in northeast India ate pork. I knew Hindu and Sikh families who ate mutton, but not often; it was expensive.)

It was in such a SubCenter village that I met Argen Singh, a man from a nearby, smaller village. The PHC team had brought a health information film to show in the SubCenter’s health station but the projector would not start and we went outside to sit in the jeep while they decided what to do next. That was a mistake. It all but invited the usual lot of noisy, unruly boys to rush over and swarm around us. Something similar happened to some degree wherever I went with the team; my presence as an obviously foreign woman caused such a disturbance that it affected the team’s work. I stepped out of the jeep, so the team could talk and think in quiet, and walked over to a central place, to a tea stall at a bench under a tree. The boys dispersed and a few followed me. Since I could not talk with them, they soon were bored and returned to their playmates.

It was nearly dark when Argen sat down beside me and welcomed me to his homeland, speaking fluent English. He was quite good-looking, in his thirties, dressed in turban, a long shirt, dhoti (lungi/sarong wrapped to make a trouser) and sandals. He first asked my nationality and I informed him about the basics, about Ravi, my children and being with the Institute, the latter explaining my presence there. He took this in and then explained why he was there. He was waiting for water to irrigate his fields. The government had dug a deep well, installed a mechanism (I lost the details) over it and apportioned rights to farmers in the surrounding villages for pumping water to their fields. His turn to use a pump was toward midnight. I asked him about his children and he said he had three, then added that he also had 2 daughters. I asked about schooling for the children. He would send his sons on to secondary school but his daughters needed no more than 2 or 3 years in school. He pointed out the importance of women’s work in the home and in the fields; farming was not possible without their work. Besides, girls marry in their early teens and most have two children by the time they are twenty. He did not go on, as some other men had done, to tell me how strong their women are, how much they can carry on their heads, how they can work in the fields even when very pregnant before delivering sons.

He went on to tell me about the recent introduction of irrigation and its consequences. It meant better harvests than ever before, plus more food and increased income, much of which most of the farmers were spending on prestigious elaborate weddings. He asked about American farmers and was astonished on hearing they were less than five percent of the population. My description of modern farming, simple as it was, set him to thinking what would happen if he had a tractor and other machines instead of the family doing all the farm work by hand. I responded by asking him what this would mean for his daughters. Their labor would not be needed in the fields. Truly, would it not be wise to educate your daughters and prepare them for this changing world? Argen looked surprised, was considering my question and about to tell me his thoughts when the team drove up in the jeep, eager for us to be on our way back to the District PHC.

The following day the team was scheduled to visit a village near the SubCenter, and as we drove past fields to reach the village I took photos of the irrigated fields and of women at work. The photo of a woman at the well shows the more usual dry countryside. She is wearing a silver ring on each ankle. They are more than jewelry; they are a store of wealth in a society without banking services for ordinary people. Ravi hated gold jewelry because he regarded it as vulgar ostentation rather than an attractive addition to one’s clothing or a beautiful work of art.

When we arrived in the village we discovered Argen standing there, waiting for the jeep. He had heard of the team’s visit and bicycled over from his village, hoping to talk with me. I set aside my agenda to sit with him under a tree while the three men went off to vaccinate children and counsel the mothers. Argen wanted me to know that the previous night, as he looked after the water being pumped to his fields, he had thought about our conversation. He told me that his children attended the village primary school and he planned to send his sons to the secondary school located in a village about three kilometers away. They would go by bicycle. As a child, he had walked to a neighboring village for primary school and for secondary school boarded with the Physical Education teacher. It so happened that the previous week I had visited the secondary school and talked with the five teachers, but mostly with the one who was comfortable with English.  He despaired of most villagers’ attitudes toward education. He said people prefer to have a child earn 20 rupees a day than go to school. I thought it a miracle, given the poverty I had seen, that any of the children could be spared for an education. He also said something I rarely heard; he said he had a son and a daughter and wanted no more children. More usual was a man accepting contraception or the government’s female sterilization initiative only if he already had at least two sons, and given people’s experience with children dying, plus sons being security in old age, that made sense.

Argen had been thinking about his daughters and the future and decided they should be educated. I was pleased by his tone and his attitude; conversation with him was easy, as if the differences in culture and gender did not exist, and we were about to continue along the theme of the future, of his farming, of his girls’ education, of his future when the team came to tell me it was time to leave. As we said our good-byes, Argen said, most sincerely, that he wanted me to see his village and meet his family and I promised to do so, but with no idea of how I could arrange such a visit.

It was two days later that the Institute, surely prodded by the PHC team, sent Sunny to be my interpreter. Beginning immediately he was in the jeep with us when we went to the villages, and while the team attended to their assignment, he and I went on our own to find the individuals I needed to interview. This was fine, but a bit late. By then I had met with a good number of the ANM women, had observed them and their situation. Another week of such visits was sufficient. Besides, he and I rode on his motorbike and were able to interview women in communities over a wide area around the town, and in an unhurried way. Through Sunny I talked with women and the statistics cited above became real. Meeting with women casually and in conversation, through answers to questions about how many pregnancies, how many children born, how many died, what made them sick, what you did then, the life of hardship they endured slowly became evident. It can break one’s heart. Yet — When Gita, dear brave Gita, whose husband had abandoned her and who struggled alone to support her daughter and herself, heard that I had no mother in my life she reached over and gently touched me, expressing her deep sympathy for my misfortune.  See here for a photo of Sunny helping me interview and connect with village women. He was great.

I could not forget my promise to Argen, and one day, toward my last day in the town and the guesthouse, I decided to hire a jeep and go to his village. Sunny had no objections, and in fact, thought of it as an adventure. The day being a Sunday, a weekend day, and the PHC team not working, we did not inform them but saw no need to do so. If only I had known what a series of hassles and a potential disaster would lie ahead for us.

The first step was finding a jeep, with driver, to rent. Sunny located a man, maybe the only one in town, who both had a jeep and knew how to drive. Ordinarily, he charged 250 rps to take someone to the area where I wanted to go, but wanted 300 rps from me. Sunny objected and talked him back down to the usual rate, primarily because his jeep tank was nearly empty, the petrol station was closed and we would have to drive a distance to buy petrol from another man who had it in cans and would sell it to me. I saw the front tires of the jeep had no tread and the driver was not carrying a spare. I had Sunny tell him to get one or the deal was off. It took some time, but we waited and he returned with a tire in the back seat. At last we were on our way, and naturally, he got lost. As we drove, people along the way asked us for a ride and I agreed. It was not only a neighborly thing to do; they gave us the correct directions to Argen’s village. Sunny informed me that the driver intended to charge for the rides and I forbid it. He was furious with me.

We arrived at Argen’s village in the afternoon to discover he was not there. One of his daughters had broken her arm and he had taken her by bullock cart to the another village. Fuller information was not provided. It seemed we had reached Argen’s house but no one came forward to present themselves as his kin. Two women stood on the veranda among older girls and boys, watching us, and a man, who did not identify himself, spoke with Sunny. We probably looked totally alien to them, presenting ourselves in their midst without warning and without an obvious objective. When we asked exactly where Argen had gone no one knew but one boy did tell us the direction he had taken.

The driver let me know he was tired of this and insisted we go in that direction to find Argen. It seemed a reasonable idea and the boy hopped into the jeep to guide us. We drove for only a few minutes before I, at least, realized Argen had gone in a bullock cart, that we were in a jeep, and to follow him on the path where the boy was leading us meant heading into an irrigated field, on very muddy soil. I shouted, “Stop!,” repeated by Sunny. Barely in time to avoid a disaster, the driver backed up onto dry land.

By then a number of women had come to see what was happening and I talked with them, and took this photo of a sweet girl whose name I did not learn. One woman had six children and one died. Another had nine and three died. As in some of the other villages, they had no dai, no traditional midwife, and saw no need for one. When I asked what is done if a birth is difficult, they answered that god provides but sometimes the husband takes the desperate woman by bullock or camel cart to a hospital. From the description of one child’s death it was, most likely, from tetanus but they did not know of the vaccination — and the discussion continued. I have in my fieldnotes one man asking about a cure for barrenness, assuming, naturally, that it was solely the woman’s doing. After a while, Sunny and I walked across the fields to an irrigation pump, and electricity. No tractors yet, but electricity this near.

We returned to the house, chatted a bit with the woman and older girls on the veranda and I asked if I might take pictures. (If Argen had been there I would have asked about the house and when it was built.) The girls conferred quickly and gestured to tell us they had to go inside to get ready for the camera. I was used to this. Most people preferred changing into nicer clothes and combing their hair before being photographed. These girls, however, had a different idea of how to present themselves well. They went inside to find food and bowls for posing in the act of eating. They wanted it recorded that they had an abundance of food, and it made them special. (Notice – shoes for the boys but none for the girls, and think of the consequences for their health, as told by Dr. Mohan, here.)

There was no hope of seeing Argen that day, or since I would soon be leaving Rajasthan, on any other day. I left with a few photographs of his village and possibly of his children, but not of him. Once again I had found and lost a friend. Friendship in the expatriate life is often on my mind. The only additional event of the day to report is on the drive back to town we did have a flat tire. I was not confident the driver would know how to change it for the spare, but he and Sunny figured it out.

I end with a photograph that reminds me of why I was in the town and in the villages. These are the MCH program’s Auxillary Nurse Midwives, most from Kerala, a state in south India. Another photo of ANMs is here. In many Kerala communities, unlike almost anywhere else in Indian, girls could attended a school of nursing and nursing was a middle-class occupation. Furthermore, women held jobs and moved about in public places. In 1990, Kerala had, and still has, India’s highest female literacy rate, currently over 92%, and India’s lowest infant and child mortality rates. In 2004, the average number of children per woman for Rajasthan was 3.7. For Kerala, it was 1.7. For India, 2.9. Replacement, when population growth begins to stablize, is 2.1.

The Kerala women in this photograph have the dupatta draped over the head but pulled back, away from the face, showing the hair, in contrast with the more conservative mode used by the Rajasthani women. The standing women illustrate the two different styles, and by implication, two different psychologies, two different Indian cultures.

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Images from a town in Rajasthan, 1990

Once again going through family photographs, taking them out of boxes, deciding which ones to save and how and where,  I discovered those I took while staying in a town in Rajasthan, engaged in an assignment for a Jaipur-based health research Institute. I was there for work, to observe and write a report on the Institute’s village level maternal-child health care, MCH, program that it was managing jointly with the staff of a District Primary Health Care Clinic based in the town. I focused primarily on the villages but my curiosity about the town and its people comes through in the snapshots.

During the initial phase of the study I stayed in a Jaipur hotel and spent my days at the Institute, learning from the staff, reading in the library and going with the medical team when they drove to the Clinic and from there out into the villages to deliver services and oversee their various programs. After a few times accompanying them on these journeys in the Land Rover I decided, despite being told that really, no one lives there, for the study I must reside in the town, near the Clinic, must become familiar with the environment, the local health care personnel and how health and medical services were being delivered.

This posed a problem for the Institute. The town had no hotel, and apparently, no family with a room to rent to a foreigner. However, the local elite maintained a small building that had once been a colonial period guesthouse; they kept it as a place to hold ceremonies, especially important weddings, and they made it available for the Institute to house me. I assume the guesthouse had been built by and used by the British colonial administration to house its officials coming temporarily to the area on duty. Twice, in the 1960s, when Ravi and I visited his nephew who had completed college and was being trained in remote rural Districts for the Indian civil service, we stayed for a few days in bungalows rather like this guesthouse. I wish I had learned the history of this one but too much was going on for me and I forgot to ask. An engraving, here, shows the sort of British colonial officials who may have stayed in the guesthouse and why they did so.

The guesthouse had two long, narrow rooms, both empty, with smooth hard floors and freshly painted walls, and it stood on high ground in a compound surrounded by a low wall, fronting on an unpaved road with mostly pedestrian traffic. A charpoy/string bed covered with a cotton mattress and sheets supplied from a “tent colony,” a business that rented out the accoutrements for holding a wedding, was brought and set in the back room. Off this room was a bathroom that looked as if it had once been quite modern; it had a sink with faucets and a toilet. However, although water went down the pipes, no longer was water piped in. A chokeedaar/watchman lived next door and every morning his son brought me water to drink and a bucket of water for bathing and flushing the toilet. He also arranged for a dhobi wala/laundry man to wash my clothes. The building had no electricity, maybe never did. I had brought a battery-run lamp with me. In the morning, once dressed, I walked out the gate to the small stall where a man sold his freshly made coffee. It was delicious.

The post-office was not far away and I checked in regularly in hopes of finding a letter from Ravi, who was back home in Paris, or from the kids, and felt comforted in knowing that a telephone, the only one in town, was available there. To the side of the postmaster’s desk, in the Suggestions box, was a bird’s nest and when I remarked to the postmaster on a bird flying into it he informed me, “I know. That is his home.”

My housing needs were met, but a second need took an additional week to resolve. The doctor, nurses, paramedical personnel in the Clinic all spoke English, as did a few of the townsmen. For buying food and moving about I communicated with gestures and the few Hindi words I knew, hoping they were understandable in Rajasthani. Interviewing, however, was another matter; I needed an interpreter and no woman interpreter was willing, maybe permitted, to leave home and stay with me in the guesthouse. Finally, a young man, Sunny, was persuaded to take the job. He did not stay in the town but came nearly every day to meet me at the Clinic and somehow acquired a motorbike to give us greater mobility. He was an excellent interpreter, very well informed for one so young, and fun to work with. Before he arrived I went into the villages with the Clinic teams, learned about how other services, such as vaccinations, as well as those of the MCH program, were delivered, and that was useful, but with Sunny’s help I was able to interview, to observe more freely and fill the time between interviews learning more about the women’s side of the culture. An amusing photo of Sunny is here.

I go through the thirty or more photos I took during those few weeks and regret not having written notes on the back of each to remind me why I wanted to record that particular image. I was not an avid taker of photos. Ravi bought all the cameras we used over the decades. I took pictures of him and the children. As a tourist, rather than take a photograph of a famous place or building I wanted to remember, I bought an artistic postcard picture of it and have hundreds of the postcards stored in shoeboxes. I wish now that I had taken photos of public buildings in the town and had written a note on the back of each describing it.

Actually, I saw little of the town. The location of the guesthouse and the Clinic oriented me toward the road, as did finding a place to take my meals. For me, eating in India was a continual problem: I am allergic to red pepper and mirchis, those miniature hot green peppers Ravi loved. Both hurt my stomach for hours, keeping me awake at night, and I hate the burning sensation on my tongue. Very few cooks in India could comprehend this, but I did find one person, a man from Nepal, who believed me. He ran a “hotel” at the roadside, a food stand furnished with benches and tables. Most of his customers were truckdrivers, men stopping to eat and rest, and if the stories were true, for alcoholic drinks not available in the town. This kind man, like me an outsider, made chapattis for me, and yogurt and nicely spiced vegetables he bought from a woman who had turned her gardening into an opportunity to earn an income.

Sunny and I visited a fortress a few kilometers from the town. The wall was nearly gone and although the fort had fallen into disrepair, children were attending school inside. My memory of the buildings across from it are vague but I remember camel carts coming through the settlement, bringing goods from other regions and doing trade as they must have done in the town until recent years. And camel carts continued as family vehicles. I had the impression that motor vehicles on the paved road had replaced camel caravans and pulled development from the center of the town to the road.

I took this photograph of the town from a back window of the guesthouse. Looking out and seeing the tank, or maybe it was a lake, it occurred to me that a walk around it would be a pleasant way to enter the town, like the men I saw coming and going to the area. Dressed and ready for an adventure, I ventured behind the guesthouse and stopped, never to go there again. The reality was that the land had become a large, private toilet for men, not a place for strolling and appreciating nature.

I did take photos as I walked about in the town, but most are of dry, dusty roads and did not turn out well. This one may be of a market place in the center of town and shows a bus and a truck coming in from the road. I do not remember seeing an automobile in the town. The other photo is of a pleasant street scene.

A man who spoke English, one of the town elite, once invited me into his home, and although the hoped-for easy conversation with his women did not happen, he did not mind my photographing from that rooftop to other rooftops. I like the rooftop living. Ravi took this photo of us as guests of a family in Lucknow. In Uttar Pradesh, the houses were open, with high ceilings designed for hot weather, but winter days could be chilly. When visiting Ravi’s cousin in Lucknow, I welcomed sitting on the roof with her, being warmed by the afternoon sun. In this rooftop scene in the town, the woman seems to be hanging her laundry. I also photographed another rooftop because of something I had not seen before; cowdung patties were spread out to dry and many were neatly stacked, ready to be used as fuel for cooking the family’s meals.

I think this is a mosque.

One day, not engaged in work and alone, as usual, I walked into town to find a festival in progress. Decorations were everywhere. Crowds of people were gathered to watch a drama being performed by cute little girls dressed in beautiful costumes. I wonder if the figure standing above them represents Krishna, and if the girls are Gopis. Without an interpreter I could only guess at what was happening but the excitement and pleasure of the crowd were contagious and I kept snapping one picture after another. I tried, and failed, to capture in a photo the particular spirit of the Rajasthani man, caught here  in the picture of a boy – dashing and handsome in his elaborate, colorful turban.

One morning, on leaving the guesthouse, I discovered a family camped on the road at the wall just beyond the gate. A family of very thin adults. The mother looked painfully thin. I stopped, stood watching them, and to my surprise, they totally ignored me. Ordinarily, in India, if I made any gesture at all toward being friendly, people at least tried to talk with me. This family was different, and something about them brought to mind an article I had read as a student in an anthropology class. It was on the Lohar, a nomadic people of North India who moved from place to place as ironworkers but also as petty traders, fortune tellers, laborers. For an article in the National Geographic, Lost Nomads, here for text and here for photos.

The Lohars’ ancestors are also ancestors of the gypsies in Europe, “gypsy” because it was believed they had come from Egypt. They were a nomadic people, one of whose encampments Vincent Van Gogh painted in 1888.  Research on the language of the gypsies, or as they call themselves, the Roma,  traces them back to Rajasthan, with borrowed words indicating that they migrated across Persia and stayed in Anatolia for hundreds of years, all the while remaining separate from the local people. From today’s Turkey they moved into the Balkan area, specifically Bulgaria, and around 1,100 CE began dispersing further west. The language was not written until the 20^th century. A recent genetic study of the European Romani adds an additional source of information on their origin. It finds that an initial founding group departed from the Punjab close to 500 CE, continued west, married among themselves, and still marry blood relatives more often than do the Indians and non-Romani Europeans analyzed in the study. Genetic analysis shows that certain Romani, those in Portugal, Spain and Lithuania did mix with the local population in the past, then a few generations ago returned to marrying among themselves. I am not the only person who, when watching the Spanish gypsy flamenco dance, thought of its similarity to the Indian kathak dance.

I first saw gypsies, cingane (pronounced chingané), in Ankara, circa 1970. The tinsmiths were cingane, as was the man with the dancing bear, described here, toward the end of the essay. My colleague, Hasan, who had grown up in a village, told me that he remembered cingane camping nearby and breeding horses with donkeys to produce mules, and on the side running gambling sessions for the village men. In Paris, in the early 1990s, I encountered Romani women and children begging, aggressively, on the streets and in the metro. Efforts to settle them were rarely successful. The Romani were always marginal wherever they lived, but in earlier, pre-industrial societies, as tinkers, entertainers, casual labor, they held an important niche in the economy. In the 20^th century they suffered discrimination and persecution, and remain today in a very troubled situation.

For the family camped in front of the guesthouse, I saw them each morning and evening for a week or so, keeping house in the open. I have a second photo of the man holding up a worn men’s tailored jacket, as if examining it. In Ankara, the eskijiler, dealers in old things, walked through the streets calling out to buy items people wanted to sell. They dealt in second-hand goods. Maybe the man I photographed did the same. Then one day the family was gone, without a trace and no one to tell me where they came from or where they went.

Next — the women with whom I talked, through Sunny, and going into a village for a visit with a family.

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Ravi, the Indian Diaspora, and an American wife in India

I had thought until recently that my writing about Ravi’s life journey from Benares to Paris via America would be of interest to Indians who have joined the Indian diaspora in this country. Now, though, I rather doubt it. He and his brothers and sisters were not part of a migrant stream, not even of the brain-drain, and the Indian diaspora began in the mid-1960s, when he was mostly outside the States.

In 1951, in Bombay, having received the American Fulbright scholarship, Ravi chose to do his studies at the University of Wisconsin, thereby increasing to four the number of Indian students on its entire campus, in all of its many Departments, with no Indians living in the surrounding city. In 1900, according to the U.S. Census, 2,545 “Hindus” born in India, Sikhs, had settled in the U.S., in the far Northwest and California. In 1950, apparently, there were too few Indians to bother counting.

In 1952, in December, a week before school closed for the Christmas vacation, Ravi came with friends to the restaurant where I worked and we had our first conversation. The next day we met in the university library, pictured here, and his aunt, nicknamed Baby, was with him. She was lovely. The following day I made lunch for him, fried eggs and toast, in the apartment I was sharing with another girl. A few days later I took a Greyhound Bus from Wisconsin to Ohio, a ten-hour trip, to have the holiday with my grandparents. Classes resumed after the New Year, in the first week of January. My grandparents had never been near a university and could not imagine what I was doing there. They wanted only for me to be happy and for that being married was essential, so Granddad asked if I had a fellow in mind. He was wondering why I had left them and why I wasn’t interested in that nice Christian boy next door and didn’t I realize that at twenty-two I was getting on in years. I decided to tease him, “I’m dating two fellows, a Jew and a Hindu. Which one should I marry?” He thought for a moment. “Stay with the Hindu; Jews are too different from us.” To Granddad, Hindu was only a word; it had no meaning whatsoever. I should have mentioned to Granddad that the Jewish fellow’s aunt agreed with him; she did not want her nephew marrying a shiksa, a non-Jewish girl. (I describe my grandparents’ house here as a picture of working class life in those years.)

In 1953, in June, Ravi and I married. We intended to finish school, both of us, then move to India to make our life together in his homeland. I committed myself to a land that was a total unknown to me and to everyone I knew. I had no family, other than my elderly grandparents, to advise me differently.

As I wrote in the previous post, Ravi became American by accident. His brothers, on the other hand, had every intention of coming to the States. They came because, with Ravi living here, they could; the path had been opened for them. I wonder what stories Baby took back with her. The brothers came as students, young, confident, with images of America from the Hollywood movies they had watched in Bombay theatres.

I now think of Ravi and his brothers and sisters as one generation of two families who had been on the move for several generations. Papaji grew up in Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, was sent to the English-medium Benares Hindu University, Uttar Pradesh, where he met up with modernization influences, gave up his Brahmin identity for an Arya Samaj name, and never returned to Jabalpur. Papaji married Didai, an educated, English-speaking young woman whose father was Lingayat from Solapur, Maharashtra and her mother Brahmo Samaj from Calcutta, Bengal. The father had studied law in London, England, returned home, practiced law in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, married, moved to Bangalore, Karnataka, established and ran a successful printing press. Papaji’s and Didai’s first two children were born in Karachi (now in Pakistan) and were raised, with the later five, in Benares/Varanasi and in Bombay/Mumbai.

Benares is to the east of Jabalpor and on the same rail line as Patna. It is on the Ganges, upriver from Patna.  Note that Jabalpur and Solapur were at main stations of a train line. This is not irrelevant; members of the family were mobile and they were city people. (scroll down, here, for more on the railroads)

Also, both sides of Ravi’s family were from three faith communities, the Arya Samaj, Lingayet and Brahmo Samaj. I came to think of them as reform movements within Hinduism, like Protestantism in Christianity. The families valued education, for daughters as well as sons, and the men were middle-class professionals and businessmen. Marriage was within the Hindu tradition but across caste and across regions, states, languages. Imagine the variety in origins of Ravi’s aunts, uncles, cousins. Ravi crossing the Atlantic was one step further out into the world, and others in the family followed.

I have written about Tej, here. He was the brother who lived with us when the children were small, for three years, and then moved to London. We helped a second brother come in 1958 to finish his degree in mechanical engineering. On graduating, he immediately found a job with a major engineering firm and soon married an American woman. The third brother, a physician, came on his own, with his Indian wife, finished his M.D., qualified as a cardiac surgeon and became American. He came in a time before Indian doctors were being recruited to practice in low-income rural areas. The fourth brother, a mathematician, lived with us for two years, 1960-’62, got into computers early, married an American woman. All three fit well by personality and talent into their professional niches; each adapted easily into middle-class American life. They did not live near one another but arranged to visit back and forth and to have holidays together. All prospered. No divorces. We sisters-in-law got along well. Only one brother went back to India, and that was after retirement, in the mode of a tourist.

By 1995, upon retiring to the U.S., Ravi and I met Indians everywhere, in every occupation, and discovered flourishing Indian communities in all the cities. The diaspora was in full force and he enjoyed being part of it. For Statistics on Indians in the U.S. here.

In 1955, when Ravi and I had been married for two years, moving to India was still very much a possibility, and I had my first informed discussion of what that would have meant for me. It was summer, I was again working in a restaurant, earning and planning for the fall semester, and learned that a well-known anthropologist, Oscar Lewis, who had just published his ethnography “Village Life in North India,” was teaching a course on our campus. I asked him if I might attend his lectures and he welcomed me in, especially after I told him my husband was Indian. A number of times, after class, we had coffee together and he told me about his time in India. He had known a few Indian husband/American wife couples there and in each the wife eventually left and went home. He offered no explanation; he thought maybe I had some insight into such a marriage. I had none to offer. It was before Tej had arrived and before we had a baby. I had known of several young American women who had married a student from a South American country and returned home after a year or two but had not talked with them. I assumed it had to do with the husbands philandering, and the Indian students I met did not seem that sort. I believed, based on nothing, that I could easily live in India.

Five years later I could have been better informed on why a young American woman of my generation living in India with her Indian husband might have left and gone home. For my M.A. thesis in anthropology, I did a two-year study of a Mexican-American, or Chicano, community in an American city. The thesis title is “Family Roles in a Mexican-American Community.” By then I understood something about relationships between men and women in a patriarchal society and a woman’s limited, circumscribed decision-making power. Still, Chicano boys and girls socialized together and a person chose his/her own spouse; I had not met up with arranged marriages and that degree of control by the older generation over the young. I wonder if I could have handled being a wife in a culture I did not understand, where I had no natural allies and where various persons in my husband’s family might complain to him about my behavior, especially in how I was raising our children.

A few years ago I wrote the following note to a friend –

“In 1974, when I was back in school, Pedro, a student from Peru, introduced me to his girlfriend. He wanted her to know me because my husband was from a different culture and I was happy with my marriage. He wanted her to see that marrying him would be fine.

”Pedro was a handsome young man, very bright, fair-skin, light brown hair, of European descent. He and I studied together and he told me things about his family that reminded me of what I had observed with large, close-knit wealthy families in Ankara. His girlfriend was still an undergrad, pretty, blond, enrolled in the library science department. She seemed to be very innocent and vulnerable. Even though Pedro loved her, was honest, kind, had a good family and excellent career prospects, I worried a bit for her future in Peru. Over a twenty-year period I had seen more than a few marriages between an American woman and a man from a traditional society fall apart if they moved to his country. The woman returned home, alone, after two or three years.

“One day the girl and I met in the library and she wanted to talk. I told her a little about life as an expatriate wife, said she would be in a country with no family of her own, without her friends, in a culture not her own. I suggested that she take her library training seriously and complete it. With library credentials she would be employable with governmental or business organizations. She may not need financially to work but a job gives colleagues, a way to make friends and another view into the society. If she chose not to work, that was all right, too, but she would have the security of knowing she was employable. She listened without comment.

“I did not in any way disparage life in Peru, Pedro’s culture or his family. I thought I was being realistic about her future situation. The research projects I developed for myself in Somalia and in Turkey and later the consultancies I did probably saved my marriage, and my sanity. My view on a woman working was hardly unusual in the 1970s, even in Peru; among the urban educated elite everywhere women entering the professions was generally accepted. The girl told Pedro what I had said to her and he was furious with me. He never spoke to me again. Apparently, she was already his fiancée and he had already introduced her to his family and friends from back home. I learned later that she decided not to marry him. He suffered both a broken heart and embarrassment before his family.

“Feeling very guilty for interfering in their lives, I confessed to a friend what I had done, to a woman who as an undergraduate student had married a student from Afghanistan and made her life with him in Kabul. It was in many ways a comfortable and interesting life for her but when he died of a heart attack at fifty years old, she left as soon as she could and returned home to Chicago with their two children. She told me she would have said to the girl exactly what I said. That thought comforted me but I still feel sad about it all. If only I could have talked about it with Pedro … …”

In 1978 I began doing consultancies in primary health care and family planning for WHO, UNICEF and other organizations, several of the consultancies in India. For months at a time I was living in India, had Indian colleagues and reported to Indian managers. I enjoyed it and thought I could have adjusted to a life lived in India.

Twice in India I met an English woman who was living there with her Indian husband and children, one in Delhi and one in Jaipur. Both women seemed all right. The husband of one was a professor and they lived on a campus. She was involved, and happy, with a group of local women fighting for women’s rights. The other woman lived with a mother-in-law and various relatives in the same house and she expressed problems no different from those I heard from Indian women in her situation. It is not an easy one for a young woman; I know three who divorced and faced the inevitable humiliation and social shunning that followed rather than remain a daughter-in-law in a joint household. I wondered at first why the English woman stayed on, then took into account how I had met her. She was the secretary and office manager for an international organization. Employment gave her connection to a larger world, respite from domestic obligations, an income she controlled, a certain degree of autonomy.

Many years later, I proposed to Ravi that we retire in Bangalore, here. I still wonder what life would have been if we had moved to India. For me, it is the most interesting country in the world. Delhi was exciting. I felt comfortable in Allahabad. Jaipur is so attractive. And, of course, Bangalore. Ravi had family everywhere and I had friends from within the family, like Baby, and from where I had worked. And several individuals in a wealthy family had offered to help me with an education and primary health care project I dreamed of doing in a low-income area of the city. Oh well. The “what ifs” and “would have beens” of a woman in, as Ravi would have understood it, her fourth stage of life.

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An Ideal, and Totally Unachievable, Ending to Life on This Earth

While I continue pondering on my Part II for “The Keeper: the Legend of Omar Khayyam, Part I, ” here,  I will respond to a Response recently posted on my essay, Transitioning into Old Age from the Cross-Cultural Expatriate Life, Part I, here.

The Response is from Jane, and as in her previous Responses, what she writes is interesting and informative. I always enjoy reading about her experiences; she relates them to mine and adds a new dimension to what I have written. In this Response she is concerned with aging and institutions for the elderly (in the U.S.) and compares her unusual “senior residence” with the usual, less agreeable accommodations where most elderly live when they can no longer manage alone or with family. She describes and comments on the states of health and decline of residents in her apartment building, which set me, in this fourth stage of life, to reflecting on my own decline. Like Jane and most people I know, I want to go quickly, preferably dying in my sleep, but that is unlikely to happen. I dread growing old in a body that functions well while the mind is lost to senility, the old person moving about randomly, or wandering off, causing huge problems for the caregiver. Or would it be worse to stay mentally alert in a broken, dysfunctional body, feeling humiliated by the need for care that no one can enjoy giving or receiving?

The One-Horse Shay

Thinking about Jane’s observations, I recalled a long, droll poem from the 19th century, first published in 1858, that depicts an ideal, and totally unachievable, ending to this stay on earth. I may be the only person whom it reminds of human aging, but even if the poem does not register with others this way, it is still worth reading for the pleasant glimpse it gives into the past.

The poem, available here, is “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” by Oliver Wendell Holms, Sr., a famous American based in Boston, Massachusetts, New England. He details, whimsically, the making of a small horse drawn carriage that will last for 100 years and then fall apart all at once.

“Deacon” is a title given to a man who volunteers as a church officer and assists the Minister of the church, serving with him on administrative duties and taking on some of the Minister’s duties, such as helping the poor and elderly. The church, in this case, is probably Calvinist Presbyterian.

18th century sedan-chair

The one-horse shay in the poem is a light, covered, two-wheeled carriage for two persons, drawn by a single horse, an American adaptation of the French chaise that New Englanders called a ‘one-hoss shay’. The chaise had evolved in France from the sedan-chair to a wheeled vehicle.

A one-horse chaise

The Deacon’s “Masterpiece” is a one-horse shay in which he has all the parts made equal in durability so that none wears out faster or more slowly than all the others; all parts weaken at the same rate, so the mechanism becomes uniformly decrepit and finally, after one hundred years, on the day of the great earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, suddenly collapses in a heap. How wonderful if our body parts were so carefully, precisely fashioned and fit together so we could gently deteriorate, then finally come apart in one grand and final moment.

Perhaps the verse spoken by the Deacon could use a bit of translating. This is my rendering of the 19^th century New England dialect into standard English —

But the Deacon, being such a respectable man, used a gentle sort of coarse language,
With “I swear” or a blunt “I am telling you,” that
He would build this shay to be best in the town
and the County and all the country around;
It should be so built that it couldn’t break down!
–“For,” said the Deacon, “it’s very plain
That the weakest place must stand all strain on it;
and the way to fix it, as I maintain,
Is simply just to make that place as strong as the rest.”

Cabriolet, by Pearson Scott Foresman

Incidentally, I discovered the origin of the word “taxicab.” Here, under Etymology in taxicab , is the origin of “taxi.” It’s from French, taximètre, a tax or charge, metering or measuring distance. “Cab” derives from the 18^th century French cabriolet, a light horse-drawn vehicle with two wheels and a single horse. With its covered carriage for two occupants and rear platform for a groom, it became a carriage for hire.

 

Now — I return to discovering and trying to understand the Persia of Omar Khayyam.

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Discovering Cultural Differences – Part II, Experiencing Life at Different Latitudes

I was sorting through a box of family photos and found this photograph, wondered for a moment what in the world it could be, then remembered when and why I took it. A chain of memories followed. First, an explanation of the picture.

I took the photograph from the living room of our apartment on the Place du Panthéon in Paris. The Place, and how we came to live there, is described here and a picture of Ravi and me in the living room is here.

The Lycée Henri IV, a famous Paris high school, is shown in the lower center of the aerial photograph, behind the Panthéon.  It’s the four-story buildings set around three courts, a paved area for sports, and a large garden on rue Clotilde. Our apartment building is across from the Panthéon, on the corner with the cars in front, seven stories high and rooms under the Mansard roof. There were two apartments on each floor and ours was along rue Clotilde, not on the Place. We lived in the sky, on the top floor of a building on high ground, the Montagne Ste.Geneviève, with a view over the Lycée garden and the rooftops of Paris. The sounds most often heard were of children playing, not of traffic circling the Panthéon. The windows of our living and dining rooms were glass doors opening onto narrow balconies. In summer at sunset the light was magical.

The Panthéon faces onto rue Soufflot and opens to the west, as does the church, Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, alongside the Lycée, across rue Clovis. The Lycée’s tower was inherited from the Abbey of Ste. Geneviève that originally stood on that royal ground. For my photograph, I pointed the camera toward the northeast, to the horizon, including the Lycée’s dormer windows and chimneys plus a nearby large building in the foreground and Paris in the distance.

It took some thought deciding on the date of my strange photo. I remember the circumstances and believe it happened in early July, 1990. A friend and his wife were staying with us so they could honeymoon in Paris, and hence a camera in the living room; they were continually taking pictures. We were standing at the window in the late afternoon, admiring the view and I was telling them that in the previous summer at about this time, at sunset, I had seen a building on the horizon struck by the sun, as if set on fire, and pointed to the area where I thought it had been. Suddenly, as I spoke, the fire blazed again, an explosion of light, and I caught the image before it faded into a glow.

I recalled an article in The New Yorker magazine about an incident in the same genus as mine and located it in the March 30, 2009 issue, p. 23. Trevor MacDermid of Brooklyn described what he called his celestial occurrence, a patch of light that came briefly through a window onto his bathroom wall at about 6:00 p.m., and again the following year on the same day, at the same time. It happened at the vernal, spring equinox. He introduced his readers, at least this reader, to the grander and more public celestial occurrences to be observed in New York City and in other cities with streets laid out in a grid.

The most dramatic has to Manhattanhenge, referring to Stonehenge in England and the massive stones arranged to align with the sun on the solstices, June 21 and December 21. In Manhattan, east-west streets lead to a clear view over the river to the horizon but their alignment is slightly off a true east-west for viewing the summer solstice setting sun. Instead, the ball of the sun descending on the horizon is best seen, to spectacular effect, when looking down the high-rise canyon on May 30^th and July 12^th. 

Chicago streets are laid out north-south/east-west. At the equinoxes, on September 25 and March 20, the setting sun lines up with the grid system, a phenomenon known as Chicagohenge.

Another person fascinated with solstices presents us with wonderful photographs here of sites that mark them in different cultures across the world.

Most of the people I know, however, are totally unaware of solstices and of equinoxes, and this, I feel, is a sad loss in our lives. For millennia knowledge of these fundamental celestial events was part of the culture. They were observed, used as a calendar indicating when to plant and to harvest and to perform ceremonies; they were deified and worshiped. In France, until the time of the Revolution, a celebration was held for St. John the Baptist on June 24^th. It was a Christian ritual designed to replace the Celtic pagan Feux de la Saint-Jean celebration on the 21^st, but people continued to light bonfires to the Sun on the solstice eve and pray for it to protect the crops and the harvest. And the Scandinavians have the day of the midnight sun.

Recently, since 1982, June 21 is the day for the Fête de la Musique in Paris and hundreds of other cities around the world.

Ancient vernal equinox practices that celebrate spring and renewal, such as colored eggs and the bunny rabbit, have been incorporated into the Christian Easter. The American Groundhog Day derives from a German practice related to a day between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, as described here. I can think of no ceremonies held for the fall equinox. For the winter solstice we have rituals and beliefs pre-dating Christianity that have become part of Christmas celebrations. I like this comment on it.

Whatever awareness I have now of solstices and equinoxes and the movement of the earth around the sun came to me slowly as I adapted and learned while making a home for my family in different latitudes of our planet, both at the equator and in the temperate zone, in Mogadisico, Ankara and Paris. Traveling to see the sights, or even a long stay in a foreign land to visit or to work, as I did in tropical countries, does not inform in the same way as living there, keeping house there, participating with the local people in the daily routines.

I grew up in a Temperate zone, with four seasons, in Ohio and Pennsylvania (latitudes 41°N and 40°N) and moved to Wisconsin (43°N) the summer I turned seventeen. This state, further north and at edge of the Great Plains grassland, has a continental climate with long, cold, snowy winters and warm to hot summers. Ravi grew up in the Tropics, in Benares, Bangalore and Bombay. We met, married and taught at the university in Wisconsin. Both of us were city dwellers, had spent our childhoods in school and with adults whose work, interests and leisure activities had little to do with the natural world. Neither he nor I were inclined to be out in nature, hiking, camping or even going often on picnics.

From Wisconsin, Ravi and I and the children moved to Mogadiscio, to living at the equator. For him, the environment looked familiar. For me, it changed the way I saw the world. (More of that later.) Next we lived in Ankara (39.9°N) for four years. The technology and the culture were unfamiliar, but not the climate nor even the food, with some differences, all positive, like yogurt as part of the diet.  After Ankara, the children and I lived in Chicago (41.8°N), the windy city on one of the Great Lakes. Ravi went to Paris and I joined him there in 1976.

I was not prepared for Paris. In Chicago I had begun what I thought was a new career, in health care, and here I was, again setting up a new home in a new place, to be repeated three more times during our twenty years in Paris. The children were in college but often at home, along with a steady stream of visitors and friends staying with us. I worked periodically as a consultant evaluating and planning primary health care programs in developing countries. All that, not Paris or France, was on my mind. Eventually, though, I did look at a map and realized that Paris (48.8°N) is considerably further north than my previous temperate climate homes. Hmm, so that is why my houseplants were not happy during the winter months. Short days, less sunlight. (But why were the ceilings in two of our apartments so high? High ceilings are for a hot climate or a public building.) At one of Ravi’s conferences held in June, whoever organized it failed to take the summer solstice into account and Scandinavian colleagues did not show, did not think they would be expected to attend. They were busy at home celebrating the longest day and shortest night of the year. Attending a conference in Oslo (59.9°N), on the first morning I woke to the light in the window, dressed and went downstairs to find no one else around. It was 2:00 a.m.

Paris is different from southern France (Cannes 43. 5°N and a Mediterranean climate) and Parisians are different from the southern French, surely in part because of differences caused by different climates and environments. It surprised me that Cannes and Wisconsin, with very different climates, are at nearly the same latitude.

I now live in North Carolina (35.7°N), near major universities and a high-tech industrial park, at the western edge of an area bordering to the north on Virginia, in a local cultural area that is more similar to the Mid-Atlantic States than to the American South. I still feel like a Midwesterner, nostalgic for Chicago, for its great architecture and art, then I remind myself of the long, cold winter there and of the springtime here, long and warm. I have taken to gardening, to understanding the land around our house, the soil, the water, sunlight and shade, to thinking of latitude when selecting plants, considering whether each will be an annual or a perennial for me. This is our first home with air-conditioning. Summers here are hot and humid and life would be most uncomfortable without air-conditioning. High-tech industry and the new economic development would be impossible without it. In the north, cold was the barrier against residential density, urban life; our native Americans never overcame it. Replacing wood fires with coal for heating was the 19th century solution, used until fuel-oil after World War II and natural gas today. Industry was based on coal and iron ore. As a child I assumed that dirty air and the smell of burning coal was perfectly natural.

Next, a note on living at the equator and working in the tropics, where religious celebrations, Islam and Hinduism, follow a lunar rather than a solar calendar. It was a time full of surprises and much to learn. –

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