Of course, this didn't prevent us from being able to skillfully pack ourselves, our luggage, AND our translator, Sohan, the newest member of our troupe, into a standard (small) sized tuk tuk. Sporting a baseball cap, tennis shoes, and a pressed collared shirt, the skinny thirty something Jaipur native had been an IDEX guide for some years before meeting us via human tuktuk compacting that morning. The project manager of IDEX Kanjar Camp Jhalawar since the program began accommodating foreign volunteers three years ago, Sohan is a typically quiet, respectful guy with a subtle sense of humor and a love for all sports Indian (cricket, carrom, badminton, etc). The children of the villages his project oversees run out to cheer him whenever his 100cc Hero Honda motorcycle is heard approaching the school house.
After another round of orientations and Hindi lessons, we broke for lunch with the Himachal volunteers (chatted with some punk-hardcore looking Spaniards and a few Dutch girls whose skin had already started to lose the ongoing battle against the relentless Indian sun). As we waited for our transport to the Jaipur train station, the electricity, which had been faulty all morning, went out for good, taking the fans and minimal air conditioning with it. The three of us sat and chatted with the workless IDEX staff, a group of about ten Indian yuppies whom care deeply about the positive work they strive for (running most of their projects year round) and comfortably accommodating the occasional foreign volunteers who can be placed within these projects (and bring with them foreign dollars and publicity). They conceded that electricity in Rajasthan, even in Jaipur (India's hopeful future world class city), was notoriously skecthy.
We also talked about the Kanjar communities, with one of the senior employees letting on that it was one of his favorite IDEX initiatives, the near future expansion of IDEX into South Africa (apparently South Africa and India have many overseas economic ties; think US-Germany), and how earlier work within the Kanjar villages, spear headed by UNICEF, was abruptly called off due to political reasons (the state minister thought the presence of international aid orgs in her districts would negatively reflect upon her leadership and ruin her future aspirations within the national political sphere). And while the communities have clearly suffered from the aid snub, the IDEX staffers noted that UNICEF is terribly corrupt at the grass roots/implementation level anyhow.
The seven hour train ride from Jaipur to greater Jhalawar was not, as I had really really hoped, anything like the movie The Darjeeling Limited (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman play reunited brothers of a dysfunctional family traveling India on a passenger train... a Wes Anderson movie, it's good). As it is with most things here, the train ride was filled with many distinct sights, sounds, and smells that made my first ever train experience, if not Andersonian funny, very enjoyable. The entire ride featured peddlers and buskers walking the aisle of the cramped train car: old turbanned, Gandhi robed, Rajputs singing and beating drums/steel bowls (even though we were traveling in a sleeper class?), ladies selling crappy toys, young men and boys selling tea and all kinds of homemade fragrant snack foods. When we pulled into a station, kids would run up to our windows, begging for money, cows could be seen eating trash, strange and often offensive odors would fill the air, and moping/frantic/tattered/stoic/harried/and plenty of other types of people could be seen filling every bit of floor space on the platforms. After four weeks here, you really get used to all the hustle and bustle, sensory hodge podge, but on my day two train ride it was all just too much for my mind to ignore and I didn't nap a minute the entire trip.
The highlight of the trip was probably the miles I spent standing in the open car doorway, watching the desertous landscape zoom by and wondering if our train would be bombed like in Lawrence of Arabia (the setting was certainly right for it). I talked with a pair of well to do salesmen about China (because I suppose I am Chinese). I asked them who built some of the enormous mountain top temples and fortresses all along the rail lines, and got the half ignorant half obvious answer of 'many people long ago'. I wondered how much poorer or better off the average Indian citizen of today is than his ancestors who carved these magnificent medieval relics but my thoughts were interrupted by a singing transvestite who would not stop pestering the three of us until I gave him twenty rupees not to curse us.
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