Almost week four!

Halloooo

I can't believe I have been here for three weeks now! That is nearly a month! Time has flown by!! I am enjoying myself tremendously - until i think about work and get all hot and bothered that is...

I started volunteering today! Although I say 'started', really we got lost twice while trying to find it and ended up taking a rickshaw and realised we were well out of the way!!! Ug. I make it a thing to always make sure I find my way to interviews etc in good time and without asking the way because I have a thing about showing assertiveness and initiative - and being competent enough t0 make my own way. But no, we got lost a LOT and was all rather embarrassing. So we finally turn up and after a ten minute meeting get to go home again until 2pm tomorrow! Wooty! My kind of working... hehe. I am to help initially with teaching materials for a class that someone teaches english to. This worried me a bit really because stuck in a room writing 'leaf' under a picture of - a leaf - isn't going to help my research much. But then, I thought that this is just an initial job while they work me out, and also I am not really to question much until Dec 17th - my unofficial review day as I would have been there for a month by then. If all is not going to plan - I haven't been able to do any research of any kind, then I will see about cutting my hours and also volunteering for somewhere else - I have two other agencies here in mind who I will talk to anyway but not until after new year...

I then had a panic about what I would find out in Chennai anyway seeing as this area wasn't really affected by the tsunami. But then on reflection realised it was in fact affected and could just ask around about waht happned, who was affected, who helped (INGOs?) and in what way, and what the status quo is - has everyone been rehoused now? (I know there was an issue with fishing people being taken away from the site of their villages and placed on the edge of a vile shanty town 2km inland... for aaaaaages - are they still there I wonder? Or in spanking new houses or whattie? I shall investigate!) So that direction of nosiness could be an 'in'. ('In' to what?!! How can I have an 'in' to knowledges I can't yet predict or define?!! Strange...)

Am still having terrible dilemmas with my theoretical point of view. I am just happily eclectic. To the unhappiness of everyone else. And when I try and justify my eclecticism I do sound barmy because the theories do contradict each other. But but but. I wonder if I should leve it until I have finished... but then I think 'hmmm, but doesn't it affect how I am meant to do my interviews and things? If I am a positivist, for example. then I would set up my interviews to have minimum bias etc for optimum rsults. But I am not one of those! Interviews are interactive! therefore I am.....' at which point I dose off. I wish my Sup would tell me the answer. I am sure he knows it, but is waiting for me to figure it out. I can't! I need books! i need a LOT of textbooks. And I have none. :0(

I am also fretful about what kind of info I am meant to be seeking. Am I meant to couch all my info in some kind of ethnography?! To give it some kind of context? Because if so, I am very bored already. I love other cultures but relaying them in tedious, ritualistic, objective detail is just so awful. I don't care about matriarchy vs patriarchy/dowries/inheritance stuff. Whatever, whatever. I hope i don't have to. But I don't know. when do I know? I hope this thing unravels itself as expected and I am not on the plane home crying because I know nothing. Nothing!

Good news though, my friends are coming to Goa on the 5th Jan and I am heading down for partay partay! and I was thinking of taking a long leisurely journey back via bus and train through karnataka and the ghats (cool, green mountains and beauty and forest and loveliness) but that would mean a two week holiday... I would get back around the 17 Jan and only have three and a half months left! eek! I think I really need to go to Sri Lanka and extend my time here. truth be told, I have no inkling to want to go home. Here is too ace. Ah! we had the lovliest lunch today - we went to a real local-local place on our road and sat down and there was no menu so we said 'meals'? and he said 'yes, yes, meal!' and wandered off and came back with massive banana leaves that he plonked in front of us and showed us to spread water on it, then two waiters came along and put two different curry dishes on them, and lots of rice and there was our meal! It was unlimited as well; I was stuffed but think I am looking a little too lean because they insisted on giving me more food. And the main waiter was like a really fussy old grandad and made sure we knew what we were doing (we didn't) and told us things and generally made us feel right at home. It was so lovely to be looked after like that!! So many Indian people we don't know have looked after us, really gruffly but with sincere kindness that doesn't ask to be thanked. Ahhhh. Human kindness.

After our 'volunteering' DB and I walked for about an hour in the neighbourhood the agency is based at and generally are getting our bearings as we stay here. We just love it. I am working in the evenings, working out plans and writing out my thoughts in my (really bizarre - I bought it here, it seem to have a picture of 'heaven' which is a vietnamese fisherman on his wee canoe, heading toward to *giant* swans kissing each other in a sunset. very lurid and frightening) 'fieldwork' journal, and asking myself a lot of questions I don't know the answer to. With optimism I could say 'yet'. At the moment though, I am just pretty scared. oh well, if I wasn't scared of knowing nothinig i would have no impetus to go and find anything out eh?!

And with that nugget of wisdom I shall thee leave...

x J