Tonight our student workers all left us, riding away on the backs of Vespas and motorcycles in the midst of a group of our Indian students. They returned for dinner but weren’t up for more (especially the women who had a late night the evening before with their “guests”). So it was a quick dinner, some talking with the business students, then off to bed. Tomorrow will be a long day for them with students leading classes in Audacity, an audio software, and Photoshop, a photo-editing program. I'll spend the day grading after greeting the students in the morning.
The women had three new visitors this night. The first they named Monty. It was a large gray rat. They corralled it in the back room, opened a door, and believed it escaped. Then it was followed by two of the business students. Andrea and Jen were polite to the end so they didn’t mention the rat to the newcomers.
Tonight’s walk took us down the street running in front of the residence about 10 blocks in the dark (including the middle of a milk farm with cows bedding down on the road) to a busy major street. We were more exploring than anything, although hunting for Coke Light was part of the motivation. It turned out to be great fun for everyone.
We passed one of the dichotomies that is India. There was a new 12-story condo development sited amidst a plethora of tiny one-room shacks and a pile of rubble. Father Vinayak says Indians who come to the US consider our cities “boring” because all the houses look the same. Ahmedabad is anything but boring, I can tell you.
Suddenly we wake up to find the Jesuit residence and open St. Xavier dorms are filled with Marquette students – and not our team, either. These were from our business school on a marketing tour looking to offer low caste Indians and Tribals practical advice for operating micro-businesses in India. There are six women, two men, and two faculty members.
Classes started so we’ve been very busy since. I had a first in the middle of a lecture on storytelling when one of the students raced for the door holding her mouth. She barely made it outside before she was sick. She returned. The lecture continued. Suddenly, she raced for the door holding her mouth. She threw up. She returned. Later she was very apologetic.
That’s another thing about the Indian students. Their politeness is almost beyond belief. When they enter the room, they each will offer a “Good morning.” And they apologize constantly.
After dinner, a walk was in order. It was New Year’s Eve, and we couldn’t go to bed at 8:30. Since it was dark and the students were tired, we headed off for a short walk that, like that afternoon, turned extraordinary. Because the students trust in their leaders, they let me set the route, and I started down a couple of the major streets nearby. The wealth of stimuli of an Indian city prompted two of the students to talk about how “there’s so much here that my mind is having trouble processing it.” This came while walking past a variety of commercial establishments amidst a throng of people, most of them openly staring at our group as we walked along a lighted street. There were clubs, restaurants, many closed shops, art for sale, people sitting around fires, beggars, dogs, vehicles racing by with constant horns beeping adding to a world of sounds and smells totally unfamiliar to us and constantly changing. Then things got weird.
