2009

When I was at school I was a keen student, and a well-behaved one (boring! I hear you shout, and yeah, guilty as charged). My only vice was a tendency to daydream. For example, I remember on many an occasion thinking about the year 2000 and what it would be like to be around at the end of the millennium. This was quite an exotic thought, not least because I would be 25 by that time, an age that seemed impossibly grown-up, and therefore eons away.

The millennium duly came round without the notable passing of eons, and now, by heck, 2009 is here and I still don’t feel that I’ve aged notably, well not mentally at least.

This thought struck me when I was waiting on the bells at Jackie’s party in Edinburgh. And I guess I had a more thoughtful (and less drunken) new year than usual. In fact, the whole holiday season was much less about partying – and much less about ‘me’ – compared to the last couple of years, and that was a really positive thing.

I just got back from three weeks in the UK. This was a time to catch-up with friends and my family and to take a break from work and feel refreshed for the year ahead.

It was a really enjoyable three weeks, the highlight of which was spending time with my nephew and niece, Rowan and Colette, and with Kirsty, Gordon and my mum and dad. I love life in Sydney, but it’s hard being so far from family. And though I’m excited to be back in Sydney, it was upsetting to leave Scotland.

Christmas Day was very memorable, and it reminded me that Christmas is really about the kids. Rowan’s radio-controlled helicopters, flying saucers and insects caused mayhem, while Colette played happily with Peppa Pig DVDs, books and miniature dolls. Brilliant! (And as soon as my internet connection starts behaving itself, I’ll upload a few photos).

Otherwise, my memories of the trip will be of doing plenty of travelling, spending quality time with friends (too often in the pub, which has given me a beer belly to work off in January!), and how inhospitable the UK is in winter. The cold was just as disturbing as I’d feared and what’s with nightfall at 4pm? Some days it was so dull and gloomy that we never switched the lights off!

And so now I’m back in Sydney. January in Sydney is a fantastic time at least. The festival starts today, the 10th, and I’m booked up to see some great acts, including Mr Scruff and Cinematic Orchestra. Otherwise, the main focus will be work. Hope to hit the ground running with some interesting projects in January. More news soon.

dollar a week

In Australia, $120 buys you a designer t-shirt. In Laos, it can help you train as a carpenter, allowing you to provide for your family. In Australia, $21 gets you a ticket to the movies and a tub of popcorn. In Sudan, it can put a mosquito net around your bed to protect you from malaria – a disease that is likely to kill you. In Australia, $1 is spare change. But in Uganda, it can change your life.

Just wanted to stick on a link to another great poverty relief website. I think this site does a fantastic job in expressing one of the most stunning facts about poverty - solving poverty isn't about making big sacrifices, if each of us gave just a small amount, we could end poverty, now.

Rebekah Nolan is a colleague of mine at Opportunity International and I’m so impressed with the work she’d done writing this site.

And a site written by young people for young people is a great idea - just a shame it makes me feel like an old-timer. (Thanks Rebekah!)

Click on the link below to find out how a dollar a week can make a difference.

Counting Down

I leave for the UK in just 5 days. This will be the first annual leave I've taken all year. That I've survived this long without a holiday must be a reflection of how much I enjoy the job. However, I'm definitely hitting the wall now.

Like an under-prepared marathon runner hitting the 24 mile mark, I'm now struggling towards the finishing line with wobbly legs and a nodding head.

And in the holiday spirit, I spent all weekend in 'Maximum Socialite' mode on the premise that i am going to miss out on the xmas party calendar in Sydney. Ping-pong at 5am, an ex-girlfriend of (a very young) Russell Crowe, a half-hawaiian Bjork lookalike and a French molecular biologist may all have been part of the weekend. Or perhaps it was all just a weird dream.

In any event, I'm once again packing bags, catching up with washing and dreading the jetlag.

And what's this about 16cms of snow...???

A Great Week in India, and an Unsettling Week Back Home

I meet clients for the first time! This group of women in Chennai, Tamil Nadu (on India's SE coast) meet to make a repayment on their loan and find out about the benefits of co-operation.

I’ve gotten quite a few messages asking if I’m safely back from India. Thanks for that. I am in Sydney, and quite safe. From here the attacks on Mumbai seem almost surreal, but they will have a very real impact over there. This is a tragedy for India as a nation. I feel this will change things a lot, and in ways we can't yet predict. I worry that India could become a new focus for terrorism.

India can be proud to be the largest democracy in the world, and proud that, generally, religious tolerance is extremely high. There are over 150m Muslims in India. But ironically democratic freedoms will make it all the harder to contain terrorism.

For myself, and Opportunity, this development is upsetting and could - potentially - have real implications for what we do and how we work in India, though I wouldn’t want to make swift judgements. We don’t tend to travel to Mumbai much – I’ve only been once – whereas we travel a lot to the other big cities.

On my day off I went back to my favourite tourist site in Delhi, the Qutb Minar. It's sad to think that I will have a niggling doubt in my mind the next time I visit a tourist site in India.

It’s been a strange week indeed. As I finally feel completely settled and happy at work, the organisation suddenly (post credit-crunch) seems set for upheaval and ‘paradigm change’. I won’t say any more about that now. Though it’s no more than coincidence, I have to mention that, on the brink of summer, the weather in Sydney has gone wintry. Everything has suddenly gone a bit odd… I think it’s time for a break. I’m looking forward to my trip back to the UK.

I promised a review of the Bond film.

It’s great.

There we go.

I have to mention a couple of things that tickled me about the screening though. Not that it was in Hindi – thankfully I managed to book the English version – but that there was an interval in the middle, as Indian tradition dictates.

Asking women clients some questions (through an interpreter).

This threw me! Bond films are the ultimate in movie escapism. But switching the movie off half way through, turning on thumping Bollywood music and sending out a bloke selling chai in paper cups from a large canteen did a good job of destroying that sense of escapism! And all this coming after a tense chase scene across Italian rooftops. I had to laugh – it was the ultimate in surrealism.

Sorry, this picture is very blurry. The woman on the left is a member of a tribal community in rural Andhra Pradesh. These people have a very traditional way of life and it would be very unusual for her to come to even the smallest of towns. It would be even more unusual for her to meet a foreigner. I felt a little embarrassed about taking her photo. Not a typical tourist event.

I’ve now seen the last two bond movies at the cinema in Belize and India. Does this qualify me in the same jet-set league as bond himself…?

No?

I can do the accent…

These photos are from the second week of the India trip. After 9 days in Delhi, I had a pretty hairy travel plan for the rest of the second week. With the help of our Indian team, I somehow managed to stick to the plan and covered another 4 cities in the last 4 days. Exhausting doesn’t begin to describe it. But it was a great experience. I met clients for the first time – a group of women who have borrowed money from one of Opportunity’s partners in Chennai, and another group of women who have taken health insurance from an amazing NGO working near Hyderabad.

Meeting another group of clients. These women are members of a health insurance scheme for the poor, which allows them access to health care. When I talked to the women it was clear that their priority is their family. They want insurance to protect their children.

It was great to be truly ‘out in the field’. And it was a real privilege to have the opportunity to ask these women questions – through a translator – about how their lives have been changed by the loans and insurance that they have received, to be able to ask them about their hopes and plans for what they might do in the next weeks, months, years to improve their lives and more importantly (for them at least) improve the lives of their children.

I also saw some people in far less optimistic circumstances. In fact I saw people living in some of the worst conditions I’ve ever seen, even worse than on my last trip. I saw the utter destitution of slums in Delhi where the poor are forced into prostitution because there is no alternative but starvation.

I found this extremely hard to take.

I didn’t feel as frustrated as I have in the past. And I don’t feel any need to point fingers now. There’s no point in people beating each other up over this. But it is very sad. And there’s something wrong with a global society in which these things are allowed to persist. But some people are trying to do things about this. I hope Opportunity can support these people.

This lovely couple run a 35-bed hospital in a small town south of Hyderabad. Poor clients can access quality healthcare there.

There was so much packed into that week. I could write a lot more. I might save that for some day in the future, and some other forum, when there’s been more time, much more time, for all these things to sink in.

I was exhausted by the Friday night when I got on the plane at Cochin for the long flight home. But it was a ‘good’ exhausted. I’ve got plenty of work to do yet to make the most of the trip. If I can get this done in the next two weeks before I leave for the UK it would be the best end to the year possible, whatever might be coming up in 2009…

This little guy is just a few days old. This light treatment will protect him from jaundice.

Amid all the turmoil, it's possible to forget that amazing work is going on in India, work that we need to support, even as things get 'tough' at home.

Bride Wanted. Convent Education Preferred.

Vishnu

Today I had my ‘day off in the middle of the trip’. In high spirits and curiosity I sought cultural stimulation from two sources. I might have stretched that to three but it took me just 10 minutes on the first night to conclude that the 70 TV channels available in this hotel are all appalling (and 3 of them were Hindi versions of Big Brother).

Firstly, I visited the Qutub Minar, which I reckon is the most attractive visitor site in Delhi. Photos will follow. And secondly, as has become habit on these visits, I turned to the Hindustan Times classifieds section, for a gander at the Matrimonial ads.

As an entire section of the paper, this is home to a host of intriguing cultural insights. Here's a good example:

Alliance invited from a well settled, well educated Brahmin boy, preferably from Delhi, for marriage with March ’83 (168cm) very fair, slim, charming, beautiful, convent educated, MSc Economics graduate, belonging to a well established Brahmin family. Please send photo, biodata and horoscope details.

Krishna

This format is by no means standard with a good proportion of the ads focusing particularly on the spouse sought, while others wax lyrically on the aesthetic appeal of the would-be celebrant proferred, these latter type often consisting of 5, 6 or more synonyms of the word beautiful.

Touchingly, some of the ads can veer from comical to heart-breaking in one sentence:

Looking for a well educated effluent (well i'm full of it!) tall boy (furnish me with a groom?) belonging to a rich family, upper-caste preferred, for marriage with 30 years, 5' 5", qualified, very fair & extremely beautiful girl (i'd need to see a photo) of a highly educated and affluent (so they do know how to spell affluent - the plot thickens!) family. Innocently cheated in first marriage.

Check that last bit. Awwww. :(

Brahma

Two examples are probably enough. But I did have a good skim through for other highlights and turned up these gems:

• slightly healthy (ie not dead???) with pleasing mannerisms (now if that doesn't set your imagination racing...)
• 32 (looks much younger) - seriously this appears a lot, and always in brackets as if to be read sotto voce!!!
• with slight stammering problem – well I guess that’s something you’d want to know before you got to the vows…
• greedy people must not contact at all – to reduce the cost of the wedding banquet??
• convent educated - haven't they seen St Trinians???
• son, never married, 38 but looks 27-28 - well i guess thats the benefit of never being married!
• girl with modern and traditional values - I think this might be the Indian equivalent of 'a cook in the kitchen and a vixen in the bedroom'!

Kali

Seriously, I find all this fascinating. Though arranged marriages are not nearly as universal as they once were, they still account for a significant proportion of marriages in Indian society.

And, I mean no disrespect. These ads are funny because the terms appear so esoteric to the uninitiated. But of course when something becomes familiar, you no longer think of it as esoteric. The average singles column offers just as much bemusement potential for the novice. Who is this ‘Mr Right’ that everyone wants to find, and what exactly constitutes a ‘good’ sense of humour???

And maybe what makes all of these ads more humorous is the fact that the ‘human-ness’ is – by convention – truncated from the language of classified ads. Go to the ‘motors’ section and you’ll find wordings such as ‘Car for sale. One owner. Comes with manuals and full service history,’ rather than ‘I’m selling my car. I’ve had the car since new and once I’ve hoovered all the grit and fluff out from under the seats I’ll be fishing out the manuals and including them with the sale.’

So we get passive-verb laden gems like ‘convent educated’, ‘alliance invited’ and ‘innocently cheated in first marriage’.

Shiva

If I were looking for a wife through a newspaper ad, I’d like to put all the nice bits of the language back in. It'd probably go something like this:

Hi ladies (‘parents’ for the Indian version of the ad). I’m on the look out for a young – or at least a fairly young looking – lady with a big heart and a curiousity to find out what we’re supposed to be doing on this crazy planet (though not through horoscopes). I’ve been single for a couple of years now, though I have dated often (amusing stories will be shared in the event of marriage, though full service history has been lost in transit). A wilfully quirky sense of humour would be a real bonus as my humour on occasion seems very odd to the largest part of the population excepting a few mates who are as ‘eccentric’ as I am. I’d love to meet someone who is honest and open because those things matter a lot to me. And my experience suggests that the sort of person who appeals to me is passionate. It doesn’t matter what you're passionate about (a love of drum ‘n’ bass would help - is that too specific?), and in fact I would be especially taken with someone who could make me share their passion for something that I would have thought I’d avoid like the plague. But I’m never going to another Julia Roberts move as long as I live…

Ahhh crap. That’s gonna cost me a gazillion rupees. Oh well, it was a nice thought. The search for a soulmate will have to continue to bypass the mainstream media. I am still curious about the convent education though…

Coming next week – a review of that Bond movie and notes from rockstar tour of Southern India.

Ganesh