Let me start by saying this is the second time I have typed this -- the first time I lost the entire thing before I could post it. However, I am retyping it again so that I can keep anyone who is interested up to date with what is happening with me in India.

I won’t say much about the trip here other than that it was very, very long and I spent most of it unconscious. We flew from Minneapolis to Chicago, Chicago to Frankfort, Frankfort to Bombay, Bombay to Bangalore, and from there we traveled another forty minutes in a crammed (and I mean crammed) small van.

I feel like I should digress briefly to talk about that forty minute drive, which was an exceptionally heavy and emotionally exhausting experience. As we drove down that narrow, unpaved road I saw hovels, mansion-like complexes, rice fields, garbage, temples, dogs and cows (I‘ll talk more about the cows and in a later blog). I saw people riding bikes, people gathered at storefronts, people praying, people lighting trash on fire and people herding sheep and goats; and the thing is I knew nothing about them, nothing. I didn’t know what their names were, what they did today, what they were going to do, where they came from, where they were going. The shear weight of my unknowledge was unbearable. The separation: to leave a place of definitive predictability, precision, comfort, and arrive in a place that was completely unknowable was, quite frankly, more than my psyche could handle.

Truth be told, if it had taken us a second longer to get to the Visthar campus I may have broken down completely. But Visthar (which means “expansion” in Sanskrit) is very different than the rest of Bangalore, and the campus serves a variety of purposes. Its main purpose is as a girls school and rehabilitation center for the daughters of Davidasi, which are a sub-caste of women in India which are basically the temple prostitutes (note: davi is the Sanskrit word for God and dasi is the Sanskrit word for slave, so they are literally the slaves of God). This girls run a shop on campus where they sell a variety of things that they make (cookies, journals, etc). There is also a small paper plant on campus where they make there own recycled paper -- Visthar prefers to use materials that it can make itself, for example most of the buildings are built from mud bricks constructed on campus. Visthar also serves as a facilitator for a variety of courses such as the one I’m a part of. Languages spoken on the campus include but are not limited to Hindi, Kanata, English, Tamil, French, and Urdu. Visthar also runs a small publishing company.

Visthar is not a large campus, however, and there are relatively few people here. It’s a very peaceful place, a Shambala or Shangri-La if you will. Our electricity, internet, and hot water have been in and out, but that’s alright I don’t mind. It is also quite isolated, but there are several villages within walking distance. To give you an idea of just how isolated it is (or incase you want to come visit), this is the only map with directions to Visthar that exists.

If you want to know anymore about Visthar they have a nice website at www.visthar.org

On a completely different note, there are five old bikes on the Visthar campus that we can take and ride into town or the villages. When I say old, though, I mean really old, not just your brother’s hand-me-down Schwinn. They have no gears and the brakes only occasionally work, but they do have nice little bells. Anyways, some friends and I decided to take the bikes into the village one evening, and so we hopped on them and took off. It was pretty difficult going since we were going uphill, and the road really wasn’t worthy of being called anything more than a hiking trail. I, however, felt that I was having an exceptionally difficult time, but because I have always been “athletically challenged” I just figured it was me being out of shape or something. As I was floundering in my inability to complete the simple task of peddling my bicycle an Indian man passed me walking the other direction. He grunted something incoherent at me and pointed to my back wheel. It was only then that I realized that my back tire had been flat for the entire ride.

That’s about all I’m willing to write about for now, it’s getting late and I’m tired of typing. I do, however, have this nice little picture of me giving a cliff bar to some poor children in Bangalore. *aren’t I just wonderful*

Jesse Klein

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