We’re now officially halfway through our trip and we regret leaving so soon… The sun is addicting and there is still so much to see. However, we have learned a lot during our stay and some impressions and opinions have changed.. Being a celebrity because we’re white As you know we’re European, meaning we have white color of skin. And it’s weird to say it but damn right the Indians know it. Right from the start we have been treated and stared at as if we’re Reese Witherspoon and Keanu Reeves, and often we have been treated as such. People want to go on camera with us for no reason (other than posting it on Facebook with their ‘white friend’), everyone stares, people come running after us to as if we can attend their parties, we even had a whole class of schoolgirls just gaze at us for a full five minutes. Just as I’m typing this RIGHT now I can see our neighbour across the street gazing at us while hanging up her laundry.. it’s all very weird. httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/DSC01661-300x225.jpg People at the beach who stopped for a picture with us. This day we went to the beach with the kids from Samugam. It does have benefits.. People are so friendly and helpful, it feels like we have personal assistants ready at every streetcorner. People really find excuses to talk for us for no reason. On the bus everyone want to help us reach our destination and childeren especially can’t take their eyes of us and when we wave at them become really happy, which in return gives us a smile on our faces. It has some cons as well. We get photographed when chilling on the beach, making it feel a bit awkward to be in our swimsuits. They also see us as big, fat, walking wallets. People think we’re filthy rich. As westerner wallets we face higher prices than the locals, who know what is usually charged. Ofcourse in relation to the average Indian person we are super ultra rich (we could afford this a flight ticket to India ofcourse with a lot of help from our parents and the Wereldsupporter program) but in Holland we are nothing more than poor students. Here we sometimes feel like we’re members of a Royal family. We didn’t ask for this lable of ‘superiority’ yet it is slapped across our face and we can’t take it off. I can imagine how people could get very addicted to this feeling and I personally do not see that as something good. It feels somewhat like tens/hundreds of years ago when Europeans were still in power..in fact, sometimes this whole area of India feels like that with their primitive bamboo huts (houses), clay stoves and ancient temples. httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/2012-02-10-06.07.28-300x225.jpg Anbalayam orphanage, our latest project We really got fed up with the latter when we came to our newest project, Anbalayam. Anbalayam is an orphanage for childeren, but also an NGO that organizes projects in relation to Global Warming awareness, HIV/Aids awareness and more. We were supposed to work there as a volunteer, just like our other project, but instead we got a fully catered tour of the organization. The bosses of the organization proudly told us everything about Anbalayam, while we were driven around town together with two very spoiled teenagers in mini skirts from London. The assistants cooked a very diverse meal for us while they themselves ate only their daily simple rice (the British girls did not eat their food….as they found it gross) and when we arrived at the orphanage one child was told to dance for us as if she had to entertain us. We decided not to focus on this project after we spent a full day in front of the computer unable to do anything on their website because of a very lazy and busy manager and painstakingly slow internet. Prices and poverty Don’t be fooled, the average Indian person in this area, and probably throughout the country, is still very poor. A lot of people still live on the street and a lot of people lost their house during the cyclone last month. People have very good jobs when they earn an income of 450 euro’s (30000 rupee’s) a month, the amount our landlord receives as a salary for working for the University here in Pondicherry. This is considered a middle to high wage here and it’s still not enough as he has to support a wife and two kids. Wages start as low as 2 euro’s a month for cleaning ladies and we regular advertisements for jobs for 45 euro per month for office type jobs. The financial crisis and environmental crisis (strongest cyclone in decades) do not make things any better. People are begging and even childeren are begging as they tend to earn more money doing this than adults. I’ve yet to encounter anyone who says their job raises enough money to get around. Prices are a lot lower as well, as we now pay about 2 euro’s per night at out guesthouse. A bottle of coke at our favourite restaurant is 20 cent and a meal about 3 euro’s, while renting a scooter is 1,5 euro for a full day. You get the picture. httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/2012-02-15-17.36.31-300x225.jpg Getting chai at a local shop for 10 rupees. That’s not even 2 cents. It’s quite strange to see this amount of poverty when there is a white community of Aurovillians next door who built a huge golden ball in the middle of nowhere in order to build ‘the perfect community’. They might have been wiser to invest it in other causes, we think. Indian customs, habits and traits. As we are living here longer, we start noticing habits, traits and customs we did not recognize before and which are definitly worth pointing out. India equals chaos. There is no structure and they seem to like it that way. Power outages are regular as power lines are a mess, the streets are full of rubble, the traffic is complete anarchy, the busses are overcrowded with people hanging on to the outside, there is trash everywhere and there are a lot of funky smells coming from everywhere. Hygiene is not a priority here. Hands are used to eat with, but only the right hand, as the left hand is considered to be dirty because they wipe their butt with it after going to the toilet. There are not trash bins anywhere to be found and I don’t even want to know where the sewer ends up. I think people kind of ‘gave up’ on the latter when the cyclone hit and scattered rubble and trash all over the place. As for the animals, the cows live on the streets from the garbage people leave there. As are dogs and cats who we are not allowed to touch as they have flees….but some are really cute. We have a new friend outside our house who is always extremely happy to greet us, but he might be a bit retarded as he walks funny. We give him food as Indian people are mostly eager to slap them away from their food. Cats seem to be mostly active at night and make god-aweful sounds. We also had a huge spider in our home yesterday which our neighbor told us to be venomous!! httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/2012-02-12-17.33.44-300x225.jpg We saw an elephant, and it blessed us! Part of Indian tradition of a very powerful temple. As far as people go, we do recognize that not unlike rural parts of Holland, there is a lot of gossiping going on here. Neighbors all seem to talk about each other, and we stopped counting the times we’ve been told ‘not to tell this’ to anyone. We are kind of dissapointed by the fact that some people are not as honest as they seem and we thought them to be. Even when working for the greatest causes you can imagine (helping the most poor people in the World) we see some organizers being more concerned with their own ego instead the focusing primarily on the faith of these people. This sucks as we had hoped not to find that in this place. It seems that this is spread across all of humanity.. When working, we always have this European standard in mind. We now know we have (I don’t know if it’s good or not) adopted the ‘time is money’ mentality. When working we like to see some kind of planning, a schedule. Work should be efficient and structured and in India, well they’re not any of that. When looking at Indians at the office we can’t help but feel that they work really slow and sometimes don’t know what in Shiva’s name they’re doing. We saw a so called “accountant” move his desktop-icons on his computer for a full hour, accomplishing absolutely nothing. Maybe the European standard is extremely high but we can’t help but feel like we want to go back to that standard, just to feel fulfilled that we have accomplished a lot at the end of the day. Closing.. This morning we’ve been preparing our trip to Goa to chase some cocohuts. We’ll be leaving on Monday at noon. Our time here in Aurobeach is coming to an end, and we will really miss this place. As I’m typing this again I feel like I have missed much I could discuss, but time is precious in the East and we’re off to Pondicherry to do do some serious shopping. Until next time! httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/2012-02-15-16.36.36-300x225.jpg Enjoying ourselves in Auroville’s Tea Garden. httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/2012-02-15-16.06.06-300x225.jpg Fisheye view of a beautiful lake near our village. httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/2012-02-10-06.09.12-300x225.jpg Cute gypsie kids. httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/2012-02-15-18.19.30-300x225.jpg These are some of our neighbours. httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/2012-02-11-15.13.19-300x225.jpg Out for dinner with some fellow volunteers. httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/2012-02-11-15.19.33-225x300.jpg Pondicherry by night. httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/2012-02-15-15.21.44-300x225.jpg We be cruisin’ on the muppet. httppublic://blog/screen_shot_2012-03-30_at_19.44.59_pm_0.pngwww.genesisdesigns.nl/wereldsupporter/wp-content/uploads/DSC01641-300x225.jpg And last but NOT least, our tiny, polluted but lovely beach . **Question of today, which we want YOU to answer:** *Steffie can not go to the beach in her bikini. People will take pictures of her too much. We also have had a bad experience where an Indian teenager touched the breasts of one of the older woman volunteers. Why do you think they behave this way, and what would you do to prevent or counter this behaviour?'*