Oh yeah, and there are like five million cows painted with pink and green chalk for sale. And another five million Indian men milling around sizing up the cows, patting them, and bartering with the owners for them. It was buzzing and it smelled a little like what east Gilbert smells like in the mornings when the wind from the dairies comes wafting in, except today the smell's source was five feet from our nostrils. The 25 of us walked around for about a half hour, looking at the merchandise (cows and some goats)and being photo-happy. I have to say, taking pictures here is sort of strange. In most tourist spots, you take pictures of cool monuments, buildings, landscapes, landmarks etc. Around here the most intriguing things to take pictures of are the people, their culture and, to be honest, their poverty. The times when you have the feeling "I should take a picture of this, I'll want to remember it" it's usually something unusual or foreign about another living, breathing human being and the way they go about their day-to-day life. It's easy to turn people into novelties here and I'm trying to keep myself from doing it.
They are beautiful people. The way they treat us and the way they treat each other is endearing and full of trust. It was a little alarming to see at first, but men often walk places together holding hands or with their arms around one another. Toddlers and young men do the same. I saw two men standing in road resting their arms on each other's shoulders while they talked. Women seem to treat each other with the same sense of closeness and affection. It really is beautiful to see. In the United States, this kind of affectionate interaction between friends and acquaintances seems less common. I think we tend to be more interested in being independent, especially in public/social settings.
After the cattle market, we took a bus over to the fruit market which is in a different part of Jamkhed. If you forgot, Jamkhed is a rural (lots of people though) town in India, while CRHP is the health project based in its outskirts. Anyway, talking to Dilip, a student in our class who is from India, I learned that fruit markets in India are all essentially the same as the one we walked through in Jamkhed. Vendors line the streets, sitting, usually, amid several baskets of produce. They're often selling the same goods as other vendors nearby, but they don't seem worried about it. It took us about forty five minutes to walk from one end to the other, which should tell you that it was really huge. Just rows and rows of people and their stands. To our dismay, the fruit market was far less sanitary than the cattle market. Although the cattle market has its share of unsanitary spots, the fruit market is in the city center, where the byproducts of city life are everywhere. I noticed one fruit vendor who sat resting against a pile of garbage. Other vendors who sit on either side of the street have at their backs the sewer, which is open and relatively stagnant. Pigs, dogs and cows eat, play and rest in piles of garbage on the roadside. Honestly, the fact that real people live in these conditions hasn't rocked my world yet. I think it's because deep-down I know this isn't my home and that in three weeks I'll be back in clean, quiet provo. I somehow delude myself into assuming that this loud, dirty, chaotic place will no longer be a reality in three weeks, because it will not my reality. I think I dull the experience of seeing other human beings living in abject poverty by allowing myself to think that my pleasant reality is everyone else's reality too.
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