D is for Dysentery Well, it was only a matter of time. Diarrhea comes and diarrhea goes. But sometimes, if you eat at lots of different places, and you get lucky, you can get amoebic dysentery!

I wasn't feeling very well for a few days. Upset stomach but not too bad. They yesterday it hit me... BLAM! I won't go into the symptoms because I bet many of you aren't accustomed to discussing your bowel movements in detail (this would probably change by the way, if you lived in a 'Developing' country). Anyhoo, I keep a small medical jar in my room for stool samples, so I prepared one, headed down to the lab and dropped it off, and spent the afternoon near a toilet. The lab test only found extra E.coli (these little guys are normally there, but can cause problems in high numbers) but my syptoms had greatly worsened during the day, and I pretty much figured it had to be giardia, or amoebas. A local doctor diagnosed it as amoebic dysentary and prescribed me some antibiotics. I am still in possession of a bunch of metronidazole that I used on some over-friendly Guatemalan amoebas a little over a year ago, so i am finally using up those pills as well. The potency has expired, but I bet it will still work.
So last night wasn't so good, but then I slept well, and today has been great. Go allopathic medicine!! If the problem had been less acute, I would have sought some homeopathic or maybe Ayuvedic medicine. Ayuveda is traditional Indian medicine and is very popular around here.

The Indian Prescription for an Upset Stomach
First, when you become ill here, the locals immediately attribute it to 'a change in the weather.' Given, there is a flu season back home, and here, the rainy season tends to cause more gastrointestinal illnesses, but that reason just doesn't work for me. A microorganism got me. Period. Maybe I was depressed, my immune system was low, and this made me susceptible, but really, it wasn't a few drops of rain or a change in the weather from 105 F down to 85 F that put the amoebas inside my gut. Eating unsafe food or drinking unsafe water are next when locals explain to me how I became ill. Now we are talking.

So, what to do? The local perscription: eat only curd (yoghurt) and bananas. For a variation, eat a lentil and rice mixture called Kitcherdee (sp). Plain toast is okay too. And drink nimbu pani (lemon/lime water with salt and/or sugar), to replace lost electrolytes. When I was last sick in Delhi, the family I was staying with fed me Kitcherdee and nimbu pani. The same was recommended to me by the doctor I visited yesterday.

Yesterday was rough. But today has been just fine. Had some plain toast and curd/rice. Even had a chai with a local Rotarian I visited at the Hero Honda motorcycle showroom where he works. At the showroom, I got a test drive on the back of the latest motorcycle, pretty sweet. And the stomach is feeling pretty good. I might even see a movie tonight.

Basically, it is okay being sick here if you have friends, a nearby toilet, and maybe a car or motorcycle so you can go buy the food and drugs you need and make the necessary doctor visits. I was a bit miserable at times yesterday and the day before, but I feel good now. And you really have to get sick every once in a while to appreciate what 'feeling healthy' feels like.


  ¶ 5:47 AM

  Update number 5 (Part 1): More Delhi, Punjab, Indian Hospitality and the Pakistani border Well, I am back in Pune. My holiday went from late April until mid-July, and it is so good to be back "home." My second and final semester begins soon. I ended up spending some time in Delhi, Punjab, Nepal (on one of the most amazing treks), Kathmandu - Nepal's capital, and then back to study more Hindi in Mussoorie in the north of India for 2 weeks. As a quick summary, I'll say this:
1) Delhi was damn hot. But I had a great time with my friend Varun and his family.
2) Punjab was very interesting - the Golden Temple of Amritsar, Vaga Border - the border with Pakistan, and home-made Punjabi food were the highlights here.
And for Nepal, I'll made a second posting because it deserves it. Being in the Nepali Himalayas was like being born again.

As for this post, I'll break it into subheadings to make it easier:

Summer in Delhi:
This absolutely sucks. Let's see... Winter in Delhi brought freezing temperatures and some deaths. Summer in Delhi is miserably hot. The rainy season in Delhi is currently causing wide-spread flooding and while passing though, I saw whole housing colonies in knee-deep water. What a great place to put the capital of the country!
In spite of all this, I had a pretty good time there and I will return with my Mom when she comes to visit in November. After leaving the airconditioned haven of Christina and Richard English-Files household (thanks again for the wonderful time and hospitality), I shifted to Noida, adjacent to Delhi and the home of my good friend Varun Arora and his family. Varun - a friend from school in Pune - and his family showed me that famous Indian hospitality for 10 days or so. We didn't do too much in Delhi except lay around under the fan and watch TV because it was too hot to motivate to move. But we did make a 4-day trip to Punjab, a state to the west, and the richest state in India. Staying with Varun's relatives in Ludhiana, Punjab was quite an experience. (see the section on Indian Hospitality)

Indian Hospitality
From what I have seen, Indian Hospitality is amazing. They bascially treat their guests as kings and queens. They feed you until you nearly burst and even then one must be very firm to resist the 5th helping of food they try to serve you. Don't try to help in the kitchen. That's an American thing and doesn't apply here. From my experiences in India thus far, I would say being a guest means being overfed wonderful, home-made food, sitting with the hosts(usually the whole family) and having long discussions, being shown around the house and maybe around outside as well, and basically being pampered at every step. I've learned a lot about what hospitality can be -but don't think you'll get out of doing the dishes if I cook the meal... just kidding :)

Punjab and the Golden Temple
I have a more profound respect for the Sikh faith now after visiting both their homeland (Punjab) and their holiest of places (The Golden Temple of Amritsar). Here's my rudimentary understanding of the Sikh faith:
he Sikhs don't believe in a god as I understand it. Instead, they have 10 Gurus (or teachers), whose teaching are recorded in one holy book. The final Guru made it clear that the teachings are to be worshiped, not the teachers. And maybe the teachers are sort of worshiped, but they are not seen as gods. The Sikhs had to become militant to protect themsevles from the zealous Mughal emporer Aurangzeb who sought to wipe them out. Since that time, wearing a turban and never cutting the hair, carrying around a small knife, wearing a holy type of underwear and silver colored bracelets became the 5 basic external practices of all Sikh males(and some of these apply to the females as well).

Varun's cousin Guarav, drove us from Ludhiana to Amrisar, stopping to feed us a freshly made indian sweet called "Julebi." To make Julebi, you squeeze a long string of dough into a boiling pot of Ghee (clarified butter)creating a stringy pretzel shape, then remove it and dip it in a boiling pot of a sugary liquid.
As with many of the Punjabi foods, you might as well be taking a syringe and injecting a mixuture of butter, oil and sugar into you veins directly - but you wouldn't get the divine taste that Punjab cuisine is famous for.
So we drove to Amritsar and saw the Golden Temple -what a place! It's a huge complex. The temple itself is completely covered in gold, inside and out. Many, many pilgrims go there everyday. In the large mess where we sat on the floor and ate, 20,000 people are fed free meals daily. And the've been doing this for around 150 years.

Border with Pakistan
Vaga border is not too far from Amritsar. People flock to this place to see the ceremonies surrounding the daily raising and lowering of the Indian and Pakistani flags. At the border, on either side, are two sets of stadium-type seating arrangements. India's side was much larger. On the Pak side, the men and women sat seperately. I expected this would be a place of quiet contemplation where both sides could come together, see each other face to face and see that they are the same (the Indo-Pak partition was only around 50 years ago). Man was I wrong. Both sides waved flags, and spurred on by soldiers, they chanted nationalistic phrases like "Hindustan, Motherland!" to the tune of blarring patriotic music. This happened on both sides of the border. It never ceases to amaze me how effectively Patriotism and Nationalism are able to hijack ones senses of reason and compassion.

Okay, I have a lot to say about Nepal so I will put that in the next posting. I spent 3 weeks doing a trek around the Annapurna mountains, north of Pokhara. IT WAS UNBELIEVABLY BEAUTIFUL and I would reccommend it to anyone who likes to hike and has ever even remotely considered going to Nepal. Oh, it was sooo good. You have to come back and read the next posting once I put it up....  ¶ 12:29 AM

  Drunk Man from Yemen. Two nights back it happened again. The same drunk man from Yemen who was here in this internet cafe a few months back giving me a hard time returned, full or liquor again, and also full of good, non-sensical rage against America and the war on Iraq.
Here is an exerpt that I typed as he spouted in slurred, but decent English for the whole cafe to hear:

"Down with USA, down with the White
House. All Americans should go to Iraq so we can put
them in cans, like fish (tunafish). Here i'll give
you my website... www.ifuckwhitehouse."

As he yelled this gibberish, I sarcastically agreed with him "Yes, of course, we should all be canned like fish," and what not. Then I stopped him and told him he should be able to seperate the actions of a government from the character of the people, and went on to explain that I didn't vote for Bush, i am totally opposed to the war and that it really is a terrible thing. So he gave me a hug and decided to leave alone. The two new friends from Sudan I had made an hour before here felt bad about what that man had said. I have met only wonderful people from the Middle East and probably largely because I oppose the Iraq invasion, I have gotten on well with all of them.

Actually, it was pretty funny. I just feel lucky that I don't get that more often.
When coming to the internet place that evening, I met a guy from Sudan out front. He has lived most his life in Oman and just finished an intensive English course. I am the first American he has met, and we had a great talk. Really nice guy. Wants to go to Ethiopia and study Hotel Management. Bought me a Nescafe and then later surprised me with some food and a fruit drink as I was emailing. The same thing happend a few months back with an Iranian guy I met here who insisted I come to his house where he cooked me Iranian food for lunch. I am just receiving a very warm welcome from folks all over the world. Thankfully, these guys were not of the same mind set as the young Indian man who propositioned me on the train!
  ¶ 12:17 AM

  Answers to Common Questions... I decided to spend my precious time on this list of questions and answers probably because I have lots to Hindi homework to do. Procrastination :)

I get lots of different questions from folks back home, and I know I probably haven't answered even half of them. If you think I should add any to this list, let me know.

Common Questions

1) Who are you? Answer: I am Colin.

2) Is it true that you are actually a brand name in India? Answer: Yes it is. In India, I am a window cleaner named "Colin: cleans to a shine," (much like the window cleaner "Windex" in the USA).
Usually I can point to a bottle of blue "Colin" on a shelf in a person's house and this makes learning my name much easier for many.

3) When are you coming home??? Answer: I think around mid-February. I finish school in mid-November, then plan on traveling India, and heading through Thailand and Singapore on the way home.

4) Can I come visit you? Answer: YES YOU CAN! Email me and let's work something out. If I don't reply, please email me again and give me a hard time. Sometimes I get way behind on emails and forget to reply. If it just won't work this time, I have no doubt that I will be back here many, many times, so we can plan something for later.

5) What do you do when you are riding your motorcycle around the city and you are faced with a herd of water buffalo coming right at you? Answer: Gawk, then go around them, carefully. If you hit a cow, you might just get mobbed - there are ALWAYS plenty of people around to form a spontaneous mob. If you hit a Buffalo, the mob won't be there, but probably neither will you because those animals are big and a collision will send you flying.

6) Do you miss your friends and family? Answer: Absolutely. Luckily, I have good access to email just about every place I go in India, and from Pune, I can use an Internet phone... so I can stay in contact with my family.

7) Why are your updates so freeking long? Answer: Well… I was looking for a different experience when I came to India and I found it. I am surrounded by such an ancient and vibrant culture that never ceases to fascinate me. I want so desperately to be able to share this culture with you, my family and friends, though my updates. In the end, this is not possible because you really have to come here to India and experience it for yourself. But if I can ignite a spark within you that drives you to come and experience this place, all the work I put into the updates and the many other emails home that I write will be worth it.

8) How do you feel about the impersonal nature of mass group emails? Answer: Good question. I want to stay in contact with everyone who receives this email. Some people I haven’t spoken with in a long time. Some of them I have only met once or twice but they have had an impact on my life so in sending out updates, I am saying that I want to maintain that connection.

I feel that there are so many problems in this world because of the lack of such connections. I was sent here to India by The Rotary Foundation to establish more of these connections, to increase understanding between different cultures, and in doing so, to increase Peace in this world. The more places I visit, the more I see that people are basically the same no matter where you go. People are basically good. A small fraction cause problems, but there are reasons for these problems that can be addressed. Learning this exposes the lie of the “big dangerous world” for what it is. And knowing this makes you feel a common connection to all other humans, making the world a better place.

This isn’t a world of US versus THEM. This is a world of US versus OURSELVES. And learning this is the first step to stopping our destructive patterns and creating a more peaceful world.

9) Finally, are you enjoying yourself? Answer: Immensely. Life here in India for me ranges from quite luxurious and relaxed, to incredibly frustrating, depressing and even overwhelming at times. But at the end of the day, I don’t regret coming here for one second and I would recommend a visit to India to anyone who is even remotely interested.
  ¶ 10:39 AM

  Okay, today is July 1st, 2003 and I am testing out this free internet posting service for the first time. If this works, then I will kiss the huge and impersonal updates I do goodbye, and then just do more frequent updates here that anyone can check whenever they are curious. Moving from push to pull technology... because I care. ;)

I am in Mussoorie, Uttaranchal right now for 10 more days of Hindi classes. I was here back in November/December for 5 weeks, and it is really nice to be back. So many great folks, a good language school, great cool weather up here at 2000 meters as the monsoon approaches. My birthday was yesterday. Number 28, Yeehaw!! Firmly into the upper 20's now. Mom, Bri, MK, Keith, Karen and Kyler, it was great to hear from you all by phone. Dad, Kev and Jam, we'll talk soon from Pune hopefully.

So on the 10th I plan on going to Dehradun, just down the hill, and staying with my good friend Erica Stillo who's living and working there for 2 years (Erica, I haven't run this by you yet, but hopefully this is okay). Then on the 11th, i make the 6 or 7 hour train ride to Delhi, one night there and then to Pune on the 12th.

My second semester at the Univ. of Pune should begin in mid-July sometime... it would be nice to know when, but that's just not the way things work around here :) My first 6 months in India were very tiring at times, but my recent trip to Nepal and then here to Mussoorie have left me completely rejuvinated and ready to tackle greater India again.
  ¶ 10:44 AM