Culture, Curry, and Crying

DukeEngage: Hyderabad 2010 has officially hit the two-week hump.

If you Google that phrase, you won’t find any hits (mostly because I just made it up), but from my limited experience, it’s a good milestone to have. Once you’re two weeks into a new situation (different school, different house, different continent), things begin to transition from novel to familiar. Two weeks in, our daily lives have become routine, ritualized: we all (except for Sunhay) know which light switches and appliances work; we recognize storefronts and signposts on the way to school; we can recognize basic words in Telugu and have begun to communicate effectively with the kids. The more time we spend here, the less Hyderabad feels like a destination and the more it feels like home.

This phenomenon is an integral step towards cultural immersion, and one we’ve been looking forward to, but that’s not to say that we haven’t noticed a downside to this insight. To caveat: I don’t believe that “familiarity breeds contempt.” Rather, this familiarity introduces us to a new set of complications, both new issues that have arisen or problems we were formerly too enamored to see.

For example: for the past few weeks, we’ve been energetically bounding around the city, limited only by traffic speed and heat exhaustion. This weekend, though, Cinderella’s clock struck midnight: no fewer than seven of us have been ill in one way or another. Some of it, I’m sure, is from close interaction with dozens of sniffling little kids; for the rest, we blame the food. Our constitutions, formerly so receptive to the new dishes we were sampling, collapsed under the weight of a strictly-Indian diet (and, we assume, the strength of food-borne bacteria).

However important it may be, though, our tumultuous health is the least of our worries: Pepto and Excedrin work wonders. A more pressing problem we’ve come to discover is that the kids have fallen from the honeymoon stage as well. Gone is their absolute wonder every time we walk into a room; discipline problems are escalating at an exponential rate. Not that the kids are bad– they’re still adorable, and most of them are trying their hardest to please us– but more and more often, they’re talking during class, asking to get water every two minutes, or running from the room at the slightest opportunity. Yesterday, I actually had to comb the area for two little truants. After searching in the bathrooms, down the street, on the roof (they seriously climb up there), I found them asleep under a pile of backpacks in the unused classroom.

I don’t want to overstate these problems: illness and discipline are two issues I came to India knowing I’d have to face. But I don’t want to understate them either. Both are worrisome and difficult obstacles to overcome, and I’m excited by the challenge (of the latter, at least). I’ve loved these past two weeks in Hyderabad, and I’m excited to be getting to know the city and the culture. And clearly, we’re all willing to work for it.