Rhinos and Monkeys and Crocs. Oh My!

Freaked out for a second. 

“Let’s leave, let’s leave,” begged my mother to the mahout.

A few minutes beforehand, one of the rhinos we were following on our elephant ride through Chitwan’s jungle had charged at us. Thankfully, the elephant’s massive size and the mahout raising his stick in the air stopped the rhino in its tracks. But because we had spotted the rhinos again and were heading in their direction, my mother was about ready to jump off the elephant and run out the jungle if the rest of us were going to stay.

Read the rest of the post, which I wrote for Parakhi.com, here.  

Medicine and Business

Goa: My cousin and I struck up conversations with anyone and everyone in Goa. Here's a part of one with an auto-rickshaw driver who was the sole financial provider for his family.

She couldn't be R's wife :(

Us: So you would like your wife, who has to be Goan, to stay at home?

R: Yes!

Us: But what if she wants to work? You know, open a store to sell clothes to tourists?

R: No, she will have to stay at home and take care of the house work.

Us: But what if she’s a doctor? Would you marry a woman who is a doctor and will be working?

R: Yes, of course, if she is a doctor.

Yup, I was definitely in Asia.  

Backwaters of Kerala.

Kerala: As I walked through Jew Town, a girl who could not have been more than 13 years old stuck her head out of the auto-rickshaw. We looked at each other and I immediately felt connected to her. When I passed by her again 5 minutes later, she, covered from head to toe save her face in conservative Muslim attire, peeked out from behind a woman and quickly and confidently blew me a kiss. Day Made.

Reminder: Whether it's something as seemingly silly as showing affection to a random stranger or serious and nerve-wrecking as making a career switch, step up to the plate and just do it. 

Food carts in Pondicherry beach.

Pondicherry: As a former French colony, Pondicherry has remnants of its colonial past scattered throughout the city, especially in the French quarter. I hadn’t heard this much French being spoken since I was last in France more than 5 years ago. After I got over that initial shock, another wave of shock hit me: there were so many young professional foreigners, as well as Indians who grew up abroad, living in Pondicherry. The situation was the same in many other parts of India. The country had been able to draw in entrepreneurs and other professionals, while 27% of the workforce has left Nepal.* It didn’t seem to matter that they were neighbors or that they had similar cultures. Nepal, with its one major city that experiences up to 18 hours of power cuts a day and drought-like water supply, protests, countrywide shutdowns, an unstable government, and on and on, presents serious impediments to working, learning and living safely, securely and sanely here. India, on the other hand, because of its size, population, economy, education system, government, history—I don’t know what mixture exactly—appeared to be a viable place to work and live in.

  

Temple in Chennai.

Chennai: A friend I visited is a prime example of someone taking advantage of India’s well-established business environment. She moved there for a year to run her father’s company temporarily. The end of the year has come and gone, but she’s not planning to go back to the US any time soon. Instead, she wants to explore other business ventures in India.

Working in India, of course, isn’t without its problems. She complained of random power cuts. She felt that a large number of people lacked a sense of accountability and responsibility, as well as the determination to do the job well. Then there was issue of being a female boss, which seems to be hard for people to fully digest no matter what continent they're in. She’s known to be aggressive in Chennai. When a businessman approached her about how she’s viewed, she shot back that if she had been a man, that same aggressiveness would have been an expected and applauded characteristic of a good boss.

So, I'm dedicating the following quote to Roma, who has inspired me to look beyond the US for a career and no matter where I am and what work I do, full-heartedly believe in my potential. 

“I want every little girl who [is told] they're bossy to be told instead, ‘You have leadership skills.’” 
 

*2011 Demographic and Health survey-Nepal

Admirers? Or Harassers

Since this Sherpa* is no longer in Chile, my now extremely inaccurately titled blog will cover travel and life adventures in other parts of the world . Let’s start with India.

My two weeks there struck a cord with me. Because of men.  

Before India, I hadn't bothered addressing street harassment because I wanted to focus my energy on what I considered more important women's issues, such as rape. But India had plans to change that. Perhaps I was more affected than usual because of the recently highly publicized case of gang rape in India and because I had been warned about men and clothing there. Or maybe I was getting exhausted from seeing relentless attention given to women’s appearance no matter what country I was in. Nevertheless, the following is what I experienced on one of my days in India:  

Feel this, not me.

- I was taking photos by a line of people when a man walked by and stood next to me. I felt something brush my behind. It was so slight I thought he must have touched me unintentionally. I continued taking photos. He walked by again, and again I felt something brush my butt. Definitely intentional.

- At least three groups of men tried to surreptitiously take a photo of me, and not in that I-want-to-capture-the-local-culture-when-traveling kind of way. One group asked if it could take a photo with me when it realized I knew what it was doing. Um, no.

- As I was paying for my food at a restaurant, one of the workers whispered "I love you." I asked him to repeat what he said. His response was something about paying the bill.


Why didn't I do something? Language played a part. Because I didn't speak the local language, I wasn't able to mouth the men off or have a conversation with them. I uttered a few words in English but I don’t know how much the harassers understood.

As an anthropology major, wasn’t I supposed to be culturally respectful? I wondered if by making an issue of what happened I would be that outsider who claims her action is the appropriate reaction.

I began to think I was dressed much too inappropriately, as if my lack of clothing was an invitation for men to stare and touch. Within days I felt I had something to hide: my body. Imagine what years of dealing with this does to a woman.

My workout outfit.
It's comfortable-that's why I wear it.

(To be clear, harassment isn’t a problem specific to India; it happens everywhere, on different levels. In the US, a group of men clapped at me and another group shouted as I passed them on my way to yoga class. I actually looked down to make sure I hadn’t forgotten to put on my shorts because I couldn’t understand why I was getting such strong reactions from strangers. Some may think the men were just having harmless fun, but are their actions harmless when they are unsolicited, unwanted and frequent, and leave the woman feeling uncomfortable and objectified?)

I traveled on in India, uneasy and upset by men’s lingering stares at any exposed part of my body. But towards the end of my trip, I saw a message-filled wall that restored some faith in change, in giving women some power to be more than just sexual things. It appeared new, as if in response to the gang rape that eventually took the life of a young woman in December 2012. One of the messages read:

Tell MEN [emphasis mine] to not go out past 6 pm. 

Do I have the right to opine about a culture of which I am not a part? Maybe, maybe not. But I am also a woman who felt objectified, disrespected, and threatened by men of that culture. And I admire the writer’s message to question simplistic and restrictive solutions, such as limiting women's freedom, to end sexual assault and harassment.

Food on banana leaves-one of my favorite parts of India. 

Note: While street harassment is not sexual assault, I wrote this post to address both. Travelers do not have immunity from being raped. A few days after I left, a Swiss woman was gang-raped in central India while traveling with her husband. I am not saying this to scare women from going there, but rather to help people understand the reality of the country right now and take caution when traveling to India, and really, anywhere. India is an intense, beautiful, and vibrant place that inspired me in ways I will not get into here. So go and discover for yourself what I mean. Or, if you want to be an armchair anthropologist, read my next post about the amazing people I met there. :)

*I am not actually a Sherpa. I don’t have unique hemoglobin-binding enzymes and definitely don’t do doubled nitric oxide production to be able to breathe with ease at high altitudes. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d need an oxygen tank if I were to go above 5,000 meters.