9am: Right before I take off for the day, the resident 5-year-old walks into our room.
“What are you?”, he asks in Hindi/Urdu.
We don't understand the question.
“Are you Muslim or are you Hindu?”, he clarifies.
Ah. We explain that we are Isai, followers of Jesus Messiah
He doesn't understand our attempts to explain. There's no frame of reference for this.
“What are you?”, I ask in reply.
“Hindu,” he states clearly. He's Muslim. He's also bratty. ;)
9:30am: I go to my language lesson. My language helper is in intense pain – today is a worse day than most for his chronic genetic condition. Life is hard enough for people living in the West with this condition. For a young man in the slum? There is little to be had in the way of relief.
10am: Our lesson is interrupted by a neighborhood argument between half-a-dozen households which nearly dissolves into a fistfight. The focus of the argument is the trash in the alleyway and the little gullies that carry wastewater down away from the homes. The argument spills over into domestic disputes in individual households we care a lot about. Rose comes over to talk to the wife and be an ear to listen to her. I work on the husband a little. The bad blood from this incident will spill over into following days among other families in the neighborhood.
11am: Rose heads home, but on the way sees a teenage girl crying on the side of the alley, clearly having been beaten. Rose doesn't know her, but decides to stop and sit and talk with and comfort her. It turns out that her father had passed away (true of so many families we know here), and her mother had done the beating.
While Rose is talking to the girl, a woman comes by and starts berating Rose, saying that she knows what we foreigners come to “really” do here, which in her mind seems to be to expose the problems in the basti, looking only at the negative and reporting it to the media, in order to make India look bad to the world. She goes off for a while about how she's does social work and does not stand by letting these negative things happen, but fights for abused children's rights, calls in the police, etc. Rose tries to thank her and praise her for the work that she does, but isn't able to get a word in. A young local mullah comes by and tries to calm the woman down and tells her that we're not like that at all. Rose thinks that the woman may be the mullah's mom.
11:15am: I start cooking “kerela”, or “bitter gourd” for lunch based off the recipe of a friend in the basti. I once saw someone get kicked off a cooking show for terribly messing up this veggie. My friend's recipe is fantastic.
11:30am: New neighbors move in! A couple from the village are moving into our home, right into the room next to ours, with their six children. We think that our 8' by 9' room is small, but manageable. Their room is the same size, except that they don't really have a window. This will certainly make our day-to-day lives a little more interesting. (Later we find that the kids have never been to school, and the next day we'll begin tutoring the 2 oldest children in literacy. The daughter is the fastest learner we've ever seen.)
1:00pm: We go off to tutor more people in the literacy program. Rose has been focusing on women and teenage girls who never got to go to school, while I've been working with kids who are going to low-quality schools but haven't learned to read there. It can be a bit of a struggle – sometimes I'm not sure what makes it harder to learn: the complete lack of an education, or exposure to the extreme rote-memorization learning methods of the Indian school system.
2:30pm: Afterwards I head over to another home where I'm tutoring two children. The tutoring goes well, but afterwards there is a big fight among the children, which isn't dealt with well by the household. It's sad and frustrating.
4:00pm: I get multiple calls from the local NGO that provided us with the literacy program, asking for my feedback. They want to deliver the new version of the study materials to me ASAP.
5:00pm: My friend who is taking medication for psychological issues asks me if I will go to the hospital with him tomorrow. He wants a clear word from the doctor about his long-term prognosis. He feels that since the doctor was educated in English (the language of much higher education here), he can explain it to me better than he explains it to my friend in Hindi. I think the real problem is that this doctor sees 20 patients an hour on his consultation days, and doesn't feel like he has much time to explain anything to anyone. But I agree to go.
5:30pm: We finally get home to rest for a little bit. I work on my language study.
6:30pm: We get a call from our friends across town...who are at the entrance to our basti waiting for us to meet them! We totally forgot that we were supposed to host them for dinner tonight. We don't have enough leftovers, so the husband and I go out to pick up some street food, kababs, the local specialty.
7:15pm: Just as we're settling down, I get another call from the NGO. They have 50 copies of the literacy manuals ready for us, and the driver needs directions to find our place. I go out to meet him on the road and eventually get the materials from him.
9:00pm: We bid our friends farewell, and get ourselves ready for sleep. Yet again, it's been a loooong day.
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