01/23/03

Hi Folks,

I'm just now getting online at a cybercafe in Madurai, South India, the first time in about a week. Keyboards are sticky and online service is slow, even if they're nominally DSL lines. Yesterday, our group visited a small village that makes matches and matchboxes, the whole village, and the pics I got are amazing. Talk about being part of the money economy and still at a poverty level -- these people, many of whom are kids that should be in school, earn about a dime a day for their work. We visited becuse one of our counterparts here has been involved in starting a women's self-help organization in the village, and it was fascinating because these women carry themselves with such dignity and awareness, even in the midst of such adversity. Many have been beaten by their husbands, and are HIV positive too. The foundation support $5,000 per annum that sustained 13 staff and the office has been cut off, and now it isn't clear how it will survive. Here's another wonderfully worthy project if we could find a way to help them.

01/14/03

Hi Christine,

I guess I signed on just in time. I'm responding to you from Cochin India, on the west coast of South India after arriving here by overnight train from Bangalore. The traffic travel in South Indian cities making Thai cities look tame, and I think it is just as well that Karen doesn't now how we're getting around here.The auto exhaust polllution has to be about the worst in the world, I can't imagine
it being worse. But after being here for a week, and with already a thousand stories to tell, it's best to just tell a few. Air India carried us from JFK to London, and then because of a two-inch snow storm, Heathrow was closed and the flight we were on was put 21st in the cue to be de-iced. That forced us to wait 10 hours on the plane, and then another four hours in a terminal waiting room before the passengers got so rebellious that the officialsresolved the question by bussing us to the five star hotel Metropole in London before taking off to Mumbai the following morning. Air India is a horribly run state subsidized airline that really took a bath on this one. It must have cost them about 200 pounds each to put up the plane load. And then when we finally reached Bombay (now Mumbai) the turmoil grew worse. Finally we reached our hosts in Bangalore a day late, exhausted, and ready to start our three weeks studying
globalization and cultural change in South India. Bangalore is the Silicon Valleyof India, and it's the fastest growing city in Asia. Now 6 million people, it is both wealthy and impoverished. the public sector -- streets, water and sewerage, transit, and everything else, are horrendous, but people dress beautifully, are civil and patient, and just as handsome as one would ever imagine. No one knows Peace Corps here of course, it's been gone since about 1970. But people certainly know American politics, and we're being deluged with questions about Bush, about the radical right, about globalization, and all the matters that we ourselves focus on. So, they're right along there with us, and the world is really one by this measure. More when I get home in March, after another month in Thailand. where, again, I'll see Mike Burgess among many others. B.