Monday, July 6, 2009

Wolfpack



Nine am sharp, I was told by the broken-armed airport greeter guide. Be in the hotel lobby and prepared for the six hour bus trip from Delhi to Jaipur by nine am. Sharp.

Mathias did not go into the hotel with me. Turns out, he was participating in a different program saving turtles or something in the mountains and would be staying in a different hotel meant for his fellow project mates. As a strange sort of happening, thirty four people had made the same decision as Mathias to participate in the Himachal volunteering program and only three had decided to go with the Kanjar Community volunteering program. And while I am certainly biased, I will say that I had personaly thought that working with discriminated and impoverished children in the desert is probably more hardcore than the yoga-lesson and tiger-sight-seeing loaded Himachal turtle program.

Relieved to escape our cramped car escourt, I was checked in and riding the 3x3 square foot elevator (with a bellhop and my stuff both uncomfortably pressed up against my sides) up to my room by 4:30am Indian time. As the twenty room Hotel le Heritage opts to utilize old fashioned circle locks and keys in place of card reading e-locks, the bellhop ruthlessly held the door buzzer and awaited whoever was inside to wake themselves up and open the door.

Thirty seconds or so later a bearded man opened the door in his underwear and let me in. It was Rick Devoss, of Council Bluffs, Iowa. Another guy, fully extending his arm to avoid getting out of bed, flipped on the light. His name was Magnus Andri. There was a strange sort of silent pause as the three of us (I the only with more than one clothing garment on) looked at each other, the bellhop, and the two single beds pushed side by side in the middle of the room, each individually trying to figure a solution to the inevitable conflict of the three dudes two beds shortage.



When I was in the second grade, I would walk on the painted lines of the LC playground with a friend just about every recess. Together, we would imagine battling monsters and finding nuclear codes to defeat criminal masterminds and all sorts of adventures. Although briefly drifting somewhat apart over the next decade or so, we had plenty of fun messing around on the same little league baseball team, the bench of our little kids' basketball team, at the endless middle school wrestling and high school track meets, basements of the Brads, and the college town bars around Iowa. That friend was Rick Devoss, who then stood before me at 4:40am in some random little hotel room in New Delhi, India. Within a week, we'd be team teaching math and English to a rowdy group of rural Indian children.



The only non-Iowan non-Indian in the room, Magnús Andri Pálsson was the six foot, blonde haired blue eyed guy (later: "What does a typical Icelander look like? Well you're looking at him") trying to explain to the bellhop the beds-to-males ratio problem he apparently wasn't noticing. Already in India for two weeks prior, the twenty five year old was able to settle for an extra blanket and pillow. Growing up obsessively watching American movies to rid himself of the 'terribly awful sounding' accent typical of Icelanders, the former-taxi-driver former-aluminum-smelter had found himself to be a born traveler after a six months backpack through South America. Finished with Europe, he figured to start his next continent with India. After watching his country's economy collapse (suffering massive banking crises) earlier in the year, Magnus boarded a plane, spent a few weeks in the mountainous north of India, and now found himself occupying the same bed as two travel weary Americans.

The three of us comprised the whole of the Kanjar Community Project volunteer staff.

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