Posted on February 23, 2017 under Thursday Tidbits with 5 comments

The guest of honor

So, a couple of days ago, Sister Archana, the superior of the Daughters of Mary here in Kannyakumari informed me that I would be relieved of my teaching duties on Wednesday. I never question Sister… and I never know what she has up her sleeve. She told me that I was going to attend a Sports Day at a school a couple of hours away. I would be the special guest. She asked me to forward a brief bio and a picture to the school authorities.

They ( the school ) arranged for a taxi to pick me up. I know what you’re thinking. It seems exorbitant to pay for a taxi for a two hour trip but like everything else, taxi fares ( and transportation in general ) are incredibly cheap over here. The driver was a pleasant chap but I soon found out that he didn’t know a single word of English. This suited me just fine as I wasn’t in a chatty mood. I sat in the back seat ( he insisted )  like some kind of celebrity and let a warm Indian breeze blow over my face. It was one of the most enjoyable and least stressful drives I have taken in months. Most of the ride was in a rural, jungle like area and the roads were in great shape.

As we approached the outskirts of the town, I saw what looked to be a road block but it was school officials, the local police, students dressed in track suits, photographers and a guy operating a drone. I thought that maybe they were expecting Prime Minister Modi but no, this was for the “ special guest from Canada.” I assisted in the lighting of the relay torch for the day’s events and we proceeded on down the road to the Holy Angels International School.

The school is located a bit off the beaten path and is a beautiful patch of real estate. Hundreds of students dressed in athletic gear met me at the entrance. I was causing quite a stir. I momentarily looked around for the palm leaves! ( Trust me, there are plenty of them available in this part of the world ).

The school property was festooned with flags ( including Canada’s ), banners and flowers. It was apparent that this was no ordinary Sports Day. I was escorted from the vehicle by the chairman and owner of this privately run institution. I quickly found out that almost all of the 580 students came from very poor families and that this was a not for profit enterprise. I also found out much later in the day that none other than Sister Archana was one of the key architects of this project when she was working in this parish years ago. BTW, in addition to her Phd., Sister has a law degree. She is a very smart and decisive woman.

I still wasn’t sure about my role in all of this but I have learned to simply go along with whatever is presented. The front patio of the administration wing of the building was surrounded by the entire school population. I was directed to take my place at the head table with school officials, the chief of police, and the parish priest. Something caught my eye. Behind the head table, there was a very large banner announcing the Sports Day. And whose mug was front and centre? Yours truly. I was a bit embarrassed by all of the attention. I took my place and we sat as we awaited the torch relay to reach the school grounds.

I glanced at a copy of the program placed in front of each dignitary. Item #12 caught my eye. “ Speech by special guest, Len MacDonald.” I knew I was going to be an observer but did not realize that I was the keynote speaker! I flipped the program over and hastily came up with 10 “bullets.” I wasn’t at all thrown off. I rather relish the opportunity to chat with young people and today’s event was right in my wheel house. The younger children were staring at me like the exotic bird that I have become while in India. I was sitting by the Chief of Police and , as he spoke no English, I wandered over to the kids and engaged in a spirited conversation.

I then heard the familiar strains of a marching song as throngs of students carried flags and marched smartly past the head table. And then it was time for the big moment: the lighting of the main torch. I was called to do the deed. Now this lacked the drama of Muhammad Ali lighting the flame at the Olympics in Atlanta but the school administration went out of their way to make this a very special day for the children.

I made my speech and was presented with a ceremonial shawl ( might have to buy an extra suitcase for my Indian clothing! ), fresh cut flowers and a gift.

Let’s just say that it was a wonderful day and skip all of the details. When I wasn’t handing out medals and doing selfies ( not mine ), I was talking with the students. I showed them pictures from home, including some huge piles of snow! I know that I won’t get a lick of sympathy from anyone but I was wearing slacks and it was 33 degrees and the humidity might have been 150 %. Go ahead. Drift a few snowballs at me. Actually, please drift some snowballs at me!

When I was leaving, they handed me one more momento: a Holy Angels International School coffee cup. Now I have achieved nirvana. I have a reliable source of excellent coffee and my very own coffee cup.

I told a little white lie earlier. My cab driver understood one English word. Actually, it’s not a word but an abbreviation: a/c ( air conditioning ). I asked him to turn on the a/c for the trip home but once we got out on the highway, I was happy to wind down the windows and soak up the warm breezes once more. I gave the driver a tip when I got back to the convent…. for not talking. It’s not often that you have a few hours of utter peace in India.

Have a great day.

P.S. Here’s how charity works. A dishevelled man showed up at the convent early yesterday morning. He tried talking to me but we didn’t know each other’s language. I got one of the Sisters and a few moments later, he had a heaping tray of breakfast and a cup of tea. He was hungry… and the Sisters gave him food.

 

Posted on February 21, 2017 under Storytelling with 3 comments

I think I have my wires crossed.

North Americans are prone to taking things for granted. We never think twice about our electrical supply until an ice storm renders us incapacitated. It’s bad enough not being able to watch our favorite sitcom or browse the internet, but not being able to make a cup of coffee or tea? Incomprehensible. We expect to turn on our taps ( one marked H and the other C lest we get confused )  and to have an endless supply of hot and cold running water. Our garbage is disposed of on a weekly basis.

Not all countries enjoy the same level of certainty.

When I entered the convent ( as a guest and not a noviciate! ) at the end of December, 2016, I was escorted to my room. It is located in the B@B operated by The Daughters of Mary, an order of Roman Catholic Sisters. There were two switches outside of my door. One was a doorbell and the other was the main power supply to the room. I was told to always leave this switch in the on position.

My room is similar to what one might expect to find in a hotel or B@B. It is large and spacious with an Indian bathroom. Power outages are very common in this town and in many parts of the country. I was told to expect multiple cuts in the power supply but not to worry because a generator would kick in maintaining power to the overhead fan, a small light in the main room and the bathroom. All of this sounded great.

I was then directed to the air conditioner. I am not a big fan of A/C but thought that I should know how to operate it in case things became uncomfortably warm. I’m a big fan (!)  of simple electrical devices. I like an on/off switch and nothing else. I have been known to suffer long periods of sobbing, trying to get a television, with two different remotes, to turn on. My host showed me the remote and took me through a sequence of steps that might as well have been the code to detonate a nuclear missile. I’m not great with gadgets.

The bathroom required some specific instructions on how and when to extract hot water from the shower, and how to operate the taps. My brain was starting to explode with all this new information.

Oh yes, I was also informed that the internet connection was spotty in the building. I came to discover that I had a better chance of seeing Halley’s Comet than getting a clear internet signal. This didn’t pose an insurmountable problem as my host told me of the wonders of tethering, using a second cell phone possessing data.

After a week or so, I started to notice some minor flaws with the electrical. Yes, as promised, there were frequent power interruptions  but when the building would lose power, I was finding things that were supposed to work, weren’t and vice versa. I also started to notice “incongruities” with the hot water in the bathroom as hot and cold water came out of different taps on different days until no hot or warm water was available.

In one of the more embarrassing events of my time in India, I was showing a guest to their room in the B@B and was going through the explanation of how the electrical worked. The overhead fan, which was one device that was supposed to work in all conditions, wouldn’t budge and the bathroom light wouldn’t work. I told them that that I would, forthwith, send the maintenance people over. By the time they arrived, the guest, an Indian citizen, had figured things out and all was well.

This left me scratching my head. Apparently, when there are problems like this, you can reactivate the system if you know the sequencing of the various switches in the rooms. There are 16 switches in the room. I secretly wondered how long it would take a mechanically challenged sort like myself to interpret “ the secret code.” I thought back to a statistics course I took in grade 10 and mulled over “permutations and combinations. It’s a good thing that I didn’t spend a lot of time on this exercise because there are thousands of possibilities.

Everything reached a head one day. After several days of cold showers , no internet ( the tethering didn’t work in my room ) and one full blown power outage when nothing would work, a full scale investigation was done and I am overjoyed to say that by days end, all was well.

Except it wasn’t.

Luckily the electrician hadn’t left the premises as I patiently (!) explained to him that the fan and bathroom light weren’t working. He calmly went outside my room to the main power supply, turned it on and off a couple of times and , presto! everything worked. Gee , why didn’t I think of that.

When I arrived in India, I bought a small purple flashlight, for emergencies. Over here they call it a torch. It is stunning in its simplicity. There is an on/off switch. The next time the power goes off, I’ll just grab the torch and resist the urge to call the electrician. And then go off to my cave and light a fire.

 

Posted on February 20, 2017 under Monday Morning Musings with 3 comments

Tearing a strip off a politician

“Sweet surrender, is all I have to give”

Sweet Surrender – Sarah McLachlan

It’s official. I’ve thrown in the towel. I have completely and utterly surrendered to India. It has been building up for months. We have butted heads. Every now and then, I think I’m getting the better of her but she is a force to be reckoned with. India controls me. She’s the boss.

In this space, I have written repeatedly about this great country and how it is vastly different from the country I call home. It is a country full of contradictions. While I can’t promise that I won’t speak on this subject again, I think it’s time to let go and talk about politics or cricket from now on. By the way, the sports pages in The Hindu is all cricket all of the time. Occasionally they mention Lebron James or Tiger Woods’ back spasms in tiny print on the back page, but the rest of the 4 pages is devoted to cricket. I sat down one evening and watched a small portion of a match while three Indians eagerly tried to explain the subtleties of the sport. I was none the wiser when I left.

But I won’t surrender until I tell you about a short road trip I took last week with two of the Sisters and my friends from Ireland who run the B@B. We were on a fact finding mission looking at some new technologies and small business opportunities for the Sisters to help fund their charitable works. On the drive up, we saw one of the largest land based windmill farms in the world. We looked at solar power as an electrical source for the convent and solar powered fish drying technology.

Because it was a two day jaunt, we stayed overnight in Madurai at a retreat centre operated by Catholic priests. It is a magnificent facility… world class really. This is in stark contrast to the poverty that we see on a regular basis and one of the things that some of us find troubling and perplexing. I decided to delicately broach the subject with one of the priests. The money for the retreat facility did not come from parishioners. Private foreign donors not only built the place but also subsidize the operation. Groups come from all over Asia and Europe to reflect and spend time in a peaceful environment. They pay to attend.

So, where does the money go? A few hundred yards away is a private Catholic boys’ school. But this is no ordinary private school. The students are poor… very poor, in fact. All of their educational costs are paid by the retreat house and the benefactors.The fathers of these children are quarry workers. You can see the quarry far off in the hills behind the retreat centre. These men spend 10-12 hours a day breaking rock with a hammer and chisel. They get paid about 100 rupees a day. That’s roughly $2.00 Canadian. The day we were there the temperature rose to 33. Father told me that this was one of the cooler times of the year. Think about this.

The moral of that little saga: don’t judge a book by its cover.

After a reasonable sleep, I got up at 5:00 to go for a walk. I have been managing to average about 12K a day since I came to India. I wandered down the hall to the front door of the building but it was locked. I checked out several other doors in different parts of the building with similar results. I was beginning to wonder if some cult had captured us. I waited patiently (!) until 6:00 when an attendant finally freed me from my imprisonment. I later discovered that there is a pack of 13 very large , very angry, very dangerous dogs that frequent the retreat house between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 in the morning ( my guess is that they are not seeking spiritual guidance but rather human flesh ). Guests are locked in in order to keep body and soul together.

After my walk, I jumped into the shower and jumped right back out. Ice cold water. I know that hot water is a luxury in many parts of the country but I figured that the retreat facility would have lots. Oh well, no big deal as I am used to this.

As I was publishing a story that day, I decided to charge up both my laptop and iphone which were perilously low on power. A minute after I plugged them in, the power went out and stayed out all morning.

 After breakfast, we hung out waiting for two businessmen to show up to give us the specifications for the solar panels. We were originally supposed to meet at 9:00 a.m. so that we could get back on the road for home. They notified us the night before that they had to change this to 11:00 a.m. Well, 11:00 came and went. Ditto for 12:00. At 1:00 we decided to have lunch. Our group ( mostly me ! ) were getting very antsy. Around 2:00 we decided to hit the road. At that moment, one of the businessmen arrived on the scene, terribly apologetic. He and his partner ( travelling separately ) got caught in a protest in the city and traffic stopped dead for hours. It was far too late to start the meeting. My “patience meter” was running a bit thin.

We had to go under an overpass to get on to the divided highway. Cars were zipping along. It is common to see cows just about anywhere but until this moment, I had never seen one under an overpass. He was grazing on some posters. Just about every poster in India is about politics. I reckoned that this cow was chewing the arse off some politician.

It felt good to be out on the divided highway. We were cruising along nicely when up ahead we saw some cows on the road occupying the passing lane. Par for the course. There was a young man who seemed to be tending them. He had his bicycle parked cross ways on the dotted line. Cars were going by at 100 km. an hour. Just sayin’.

Moments later we encountered a bus sharing our side of the highway. Problem is he was going the wrong way on the divided highway. This too,  is as common as cows. After a while, none of this seems odd.

India. I am yours. You are the boss.

That evening, I sat with Ashwin watching Tamil children’s videos. When he fell asleep in my arms, all of the small irritants of the day vanished and reminded me what’s really important.

I was deeply saddened along with many others to hear of the passing of Stuart McLean. I had my 15 minutes of fame in 2002 when Stuart did a story about me. I also had supper with him one evening in Port Hawkesbury along with my niece, Audrey Hibbs. I am preparing a tribute to Stuart which will appear on my website in a few days time.

And , speaking of stories, I have one coming up tomorrow about electricity or, more accurately, the lack of it.  It’s called, “ At My Watts End.”

Have a great week.

P.S. In case you missed it, I posted this video a few days ago with an update on the water taps at the leprosy community. Check it out. https://youtu.be/IpauIlDlFXU