Semester at Sea! Spring 2011

Day 54
Welcome to Chennai, India. Today was the first day in India. I was woken up at 7am by the smell of India. But after a while it isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. I had a trip at noon, so I thought that it was best that I didn’t get off the ship when we were cleared. In India you have to give yourself 30-45 minutes of lee way whenever you plan on going someplace because everything they do is in slow motion and there is so much traffic. And at the port, when we get off the ship, we weren’t allowed to just walk to the gate and go around town, 1. Because the India government said it wasn’t safe for us and 2. It was so far. So there is a 24 hour shuttle that takes us from the port to the front of the gate. At the gates it takes forever also, because you have to check in with your passport every time you leave and come into the port. So anyways, at 12 I had a trip for one of my classes; it was called socioeconomic problems in Chennai. We took an hour bus ride to a rehabilitation center for people who had lost their homes in the tsunami in the year of 2004 and didn’t have enough money to support themselves and their family. This center was set up by the government. Everyone in the ‘slums’ seemed happy to see us when we walked through. They were all waving and asking how we were. We weren’t allowed to take pictures because they didn’t want us photographing how poor they lived. After we walked through, we went to a local school to meet some of the children, they sang us their version of the ABC’s, as we sang ours, and then they told us that our president was Abraham Lincoln. Haha. The trip was interesting, but nothing exciting, considering it was for a class. Later in the night, I had another trip planned, it was the welcome reception. We went to a hotel and we were greeted by drummers. We all got flowers around our neck and when we went in, we got henna on our arms, we were able to purchase some Indian clothing, and we enjoyed some India food. All while this was taking place 3 women put on a dance for us to Indian music. It is interesting to see how other cultures are pursued.  After the welcome reception we signed out and we were able to go out on our own. Taylor, Ashley, Steph, Carl, Dan, & I all decided to go out for a little bit. After an hour we headed back. There are these ‘taxis’ in India called Rickshaws, they are on 3 wheels, 2 in the back and 1 in the front, and there aren’t any doors, it has a seat in the back that fits 3 people, and then the driver is in the front and then there is a roof, but no windows or doors. So we knew that we had to try this out… ‘When in India’. While we were on our way home we were all squeezed into 1 (we found one that held all 6 of us). After we had been driving for a while, thinking that our driver had no idea where we were going, we finally started noticing some familiar places. And as we were going up a hill we started to slow down. So I jokingly said “I hope Ricky can make it up the hill”. Next thing I know, the driver is asking us to get out and the two boys and the driver are pushing the rickshaw up this hill, we are all dying laughing. When we get to the top of the hill the driver gives it a big push jumps in and tells us to jump in, we get in thinking that the rickshaw had trouble making it up the hill, next thing we know we are ‘coasting’ down the hill until we come to a complete stop… we ran out of gas! The driver gets out and says ‘5 minutes’ and runs off. So it is now midnight and there are 6 of us stuck in a broken down rickshaw in the middle of Chennai. After 15 minutes we don’t think he’s coming back and we get ready to call flag down another rickshaw, when finally we see the driver running over with a water bottle in his hand filled with gas, we start to believe everything is okay. He funnels the gas into the rickshaw and begins the many attempts to start it. In order to start it, you have to use a rope, kind of like the way you start a go cart. This took about 5 minutes and then finally our rickshaw was started and we were ready to go. We finally made it back to the gate after an hour and a half of dealing with our rickshaw. It was a great first day and such a great story.  Just as a side note, when riding in the rickshaws you never stick any parts of your body out of it because you chance them getting taken off and the traffic in India is HORRIBLE! There aren’t lines on the street so they just drive around. If you have time, youtube traffic in India and you will understand the commotion in which we are dealing with.

Day 55
Today was started off by negotiating some prices for the rickshaw. Ashley, Taylor, Amy, Laura, and I wanted to go shopping in some silk markets for the morning. We asked our driver to bring us to a market. When we arrived at this shop, we told him that this wasn’t where we wanted to go. We remembered from our pre-port (the meeting the night before we enter a port, that tells us the do’s and don’ts of the area) that when we get into a taxi make sure we remember that when he is bringing us to our destination he will most likely stop along the way at someone he knows shop and see if we are interested in buying anything. After we looked around to be nice, we just said that we wanted to go to the mall because we all had to be back early for trips. All 5 of us squeezed into a normal rickshaw, I was sitting on Ashley’s lap and Laura was on Amy’s. It was interesting. We got to a plaza and walked around and did some shopping. Later in the day I had a service project. We went to different YMCA facilities. The first one we went to was a high school for children that were living in the slums and have absolutely no money. These children were from the age of 5-15 and they were both boys and girls. At the end of the ‘classes’, what we call grades, they take an exam in order to ‘graduate’ and move on. The teacher was telling us that for the past 7 years they have had a 100% passing rate, which is crazy because schools in the United States have never had that. When we were there the children were in school, some of them were in classes learning, and others were taking exams or studying. They were doing all this in a very small room with little to no air circulation or they were taking their exam or studying on a hard concrete floor. The high school was set up from donations that were given, originally the government provided some of the money but then backed out of it. There are 1100 students in the high school with only 29 teachers. They have normal school days from around 9am-330pm and they have one month off which is from the end of April until the end of May. The next place we went to was another high school. This high school looked more like a school and the ages of the children ranged from 5-17. While touring the school we went into a classroom and got to ask questions to some of the students. We asked how many of them were planning on going to college after school and almost all of them raised their hands. They were in the process of studying for their big exam at the end of the year. The exam runs from March 28- April 11. At the end of the school day they remain at school and study. The next place that we went to was a destitute home. Here were all boys, which explains the meaning of YMCA (young men’s Christian academy). These boys were also from families that didn’t have a lot of money or from families who have 1 or none of their parents left. These boys stay at the destitute and take classes during the day. They have school from 9-3, play from 330-530 and have study time from 6-8. When we got there George (our leader) asked us to introduce ourselves to the group and he repeated it to them in their language and then they would clap for us. After our brief introduction we had an hour to play with the boys. Some of us went outside and played soccer, ‘futbol’, and the other half stayed inside and played games. These boys only got to see their families on the weekend. There were 4 barracks for the boys and there were 25 boys in each barrack. We got to see their rooms and where they keep all of their things, there were two boys to each bed and there were at least 10-12 beds in each room. After this George brought us to his house, he lives in the same area in which the destitute home is. We went inside and met his wife and 1 year old daughter. We couldn’t stay long because we had a long ride to dinner while factoring sitting in traffic for a very long time. We got to dinner around 8pm. We were at the head YMCA, and we ate dinner with the CEO. We ended up eating rice with curry, and lamb, but I stayed away from the lamb and stuck with the soda and rice. He told us how it got started and what their goals are. It was interesting to see how the YMCA here in India differs from the YMCA at home. The YMCA at home is a mixed gender area with brand new facilities and the YMCA in India is just for men and contains a pool table, ping pong table, and a volleyball net. All of the places that I mentioned were set up by the Madras (what it used to be called before Chennai) YMCA and is run through donations and not much government spending.