A blogger??

I am not much of a net person. Ok, I often read the news online, I use facebook and youtube, but I don’t have twitter and I don’t usually read blogs, except a few from my friends. I often prefer to print something or sketch the map from google maps on a paper (I know I know, terrible, isn’t it?!), rather than walking with my phone in front of me, as if it was a compass and it was guiding me to the North. Also, after writing a 300 pages thesis, I swore I would never write another word on Word. But well, my current situation is not exactly “normal” for me.

I am away from my country not for a job, nor an internship, but for volunteering. The school where I am volunteering is great, but I am the only volunteer and almost the only foreigner in the school. Tourists here come and go, so I don’t have much chance to make friends. Apart from skyping with my family and chatting with the previous volunteer, I don’t have opportunities to share my thoughts and feelings.

Also, I am living an experience that is quite unusual, and I would like all my friends and relatives to be part of it. When people ask me: “How was your experience in India?” How can I answer in a few words? Impossible! It is much easier to tell them to read my blog. Not only they’ll understand what my experience was really like, but also they’ll find out many more things about India and maybe also about me than they would ever know by talking to me for a short time.

So here I am, a blogger in the end! It is true that I often say that I would like to write a book during my lifetime, but I usually picture that as me sitting at a wooden desk, facing a lake surrounded by evergreen trees, in a very calm surrounding and writing with a pen or an old typewriter. And I would be writing about romance and love and happy endings.

But I don’t think that I’d be a good writer because I like to be short and go straight to the point, so my books would probably be 10 pages long, rather than 1000 pages. A blog is probably perfect for me: short posts, freedom to change them and the feeling that I can do anything I want with it, I don’t have to submit it to anyone or get it published. So fingers crossed and let’s see what kind of blogger I am!

Welcome to India!

Whenever and wherever you travel to India, the first impact is always the same: sticky humidity, crowds, awful traffic (the indian rule for horns requires a separate post) and terrible poverty. But then you’ll see the women wearing sari, the men with colourful dots on their forehead meaning that they recently prayed in a temple, the stunning hindù temples, and colours everywhere: green palms, green banyan trees, green, yellow and red bananas, dark yellow mangoes, orange papayas, yellow pineapples, white jasmine flowers, red hibiscus.. wow!

You will notice that even in extreme poverty, people have a dignified aura around them, which I always find fascinating. You’ll see that little girls holding their younger siblings wear golden earrings, and their mothers, who struggle every day to feed their families, always wear golden bangles and keep their hair tidy in elegant plaits.

The first days in India are a shock. I don’t know how other people reacted but me, I started wondering why was I so lucky to be born in a Western country, did I deserve all that I had, why had I never noticed how many amazing things I had around me, why I never thought of saying Thanks for everything I was given. And especially, why was I so lucky and not that young thin beggar on the street, with eyes like a deer and beautiful hair? Was I any better than her?

After a few days in India, I decided that these are questions without answer, just like Why am I alive, etc. I built a wall around me and stopped comparing myself with the people I saw around me. I decided that maybe I was born in a rich country to be able to travel to a developing country and do something to help. That is why I came back to India a second time, as a volunteer.