The Five Days of Dewali: Budhvar and Guruvar

Wednesday, November 7: With no particular Dewali plans, I fall under the sway of an attractive Indian woman with a three-day program. Besides being fetching, she is also infallibly competent (I’ve begun to suspect that I am unconsciously drawn to competent women, perhaps in an attempt to counterbalance my own fecklessness), consummately selfless, a bit overbearing, serious on some subjects almost to the point of humorlessness, and, given the forgoing, likely entirely wrong for me. She is a Seva Mandir employee who spends her free time volunteering at a “Short-Stay Home” for children and women who have been abandoned or battered by their husbands—a government-funded shelter also operated by Seva Mandir. The three-day program is quite simple: Celebrate Dewali with the residents of the shelter. Given such an admirable concept and the prospect of seeing this woman outside of work, how can I say no? And so on Wednesday evening, I pile into a tempo with two other American volunteers, Lindsey and Marissa, and head north of Fatehpura on Bedla Road, to the campus of Vidya Bhawan’s Rural Institute. Seva Mandir’s Badgaon Block Office is located there, and next to the Block Office is the Short-Stay Home.

The shelter is a single story L-shaped structure of perhaps ten large rooms, all opening upon an interior courtyard. We are introduced to the residents, given a quick tour, subjected to an overlong description of the Short-Stay Home concept and its sister government program, the Child Distress Line, and ushered into a common room which will host the night’s puja. Puja is a broad term—literally, respect—that embraces a range of worships activities, almost always including prayer and often a meal as well. At the far end of the common room, a makeshift idol has been erected—it seems a color print-out of a triptych of goddesses has been affixed to a rectangle of white cardboard and draped with a garland of marigolds. A handful of votive candles flicker on a tray before it. This, in my reckoning, is the Dewali equivalent of a stunted, artificial Christmas tree, its branches drooped under a handful of vapid globe ornaments whose synthetic surfaces are unable to reflect even the feeble glow of the tree’s single strand of white lights (and perhaps beneath the tree empty boxes have been wrapped up in tawdry paper and wound with bows).

Slowly and quietly, the shelter’s remaining residents (many of the women have returned with their children to their parents’ or other relatives’ homes for the holiday) file into the common room. One of the Short Stay Home’s residents has attempted suicide that morning, which is proffered as the source of the group’s solemnity—but I wonder if cause and effect haven’t been transposed. The puja begins. The assembled sing and clap half-heartedly while taking turns before the idol in small groups, gently rocking the tray of votives together in a slow, arcing movement. It seems no one knows more than the first verse of the song, and so the singing temporarily sputters out while someone fetches a songbook. The three Americans also get a turn in front of the idol; otherwise, we attempt to keep the beat by clapping—no small feat given the multitude to choose from. “Why do I get the feeling,” I whisper to Marissa, “that in twenty years this scene will be described in some best-selling memoir about growing up poor in India?” We don’t stick around for the meal.

Thursday, November 8: Marissa, Lindsey, and I return to the Short-Stay Home and join a group of about twenty residents, staff, and volunteers who pile into two hired tempos for a ride to a street fair just off of Hospital Road. The fair is a gargantuan neon eyesore and almost exactly what one would expect of a county fair in the U.S., except bigger and without the livestock (the entire country is a county fair in that regard): rides (including a towering Ferris Wheel!), games, assorted gimcracks and gewgaws, and lots of unwholesome food. We spend about ninety minutes milling around the grounds. Balloons are purchased for the smaller children, and everyone has ice cream bars and South Indian food. The kids are permitted but one ride before it's time to head back to the Short Stay Home. I am withdrawn and sullen almost from the time we arrive at the fair, frustrated by the fact that I fail to make even a basic connection with any of the kids; I don’t even try with the women, which, given their circumstances, and given Indian culture too, is probably a wise course of action. Marissa and Lindsey get along much better with everyone. As we prepare to return to the shelter, we're given the option of leaving; the two women have an apartment-warming party in Old City beckoning, and I invite myself. While they say fulsome goodbyes and glad hand the scorned masses through the windows of the hired tempos, I wait impatiently in the auto-rickshaw we have hailed. Along the way, the auto stops at a liquor shop; we purchase cranberry Bacardi Breezers and a couple of 750 ml Kingfishers for me.

Old City is Udaipur’s tourist hub and a warren of claustrophobic streets and alleyways, small crafts shops, cafés, and chalk-white apartment buildings. It is my first time setting foot there, and I am immediately charmed. Along major thoroughfares, as throughout the city, the street is bedecked with a thick, sparkling canopy of tinseled garlands and lights—a canopy so thick, in fact, that several times over the course of the weekend I have the sensation that, rather than being outdoors, I have wandered onto some vast warehouse movie set. The apartment’s entrance is off of an alley, and the fireworks being set off outside reverberate so loudly against the walls of the surrounding buildings that they are bomb-like in their aural ferocity. This feeling, too, will become a leitmotif of the weekend: shutting my eyes and imagining without trouble that I’m in a war zone.

The apartment is on the third floor and has been newly rented by Henrik, a young Swede with short, hipsterish hair and long sideburns. We trade small talk and sip our drinks for a bit with the other guests—a Brit, three Indians, and two other Americans—before adjourning to the roof of the building, which is six stories all told. The view from the roof is generous: Old City seems less a labyrinth than jigsaw puzzle from this height. In the west, looming above everything, is the enormous facade of the City Palace, an imposing structure that attests to the Rajput (or is it simply Indian?) obsession with grandeur. It is strewn with white lights for the holiday. By the time we reach the roof, a fireworks show has already been in progress above the Palace for some time; when we leave a half an hour later, it has only gathered in intensity. At least a half dozen other displays of equal radiance are competing for the city’s attention in the skies above Udaipur, and it is a protracted battle, one that will be waged into the darkest hours of the night.

I cannot fail to appreciate the tableau before me: demigod's eye view of the prostrate city, fireworks above a palace, exotic, picturesque India at hand--and yet I cannot enjoy it. The feeling of undeserved privilege, an admittedly foolish one, rises within me uncontrollably. India cannot join me on the rooftop; if anyone should own this prospect, I think, it is them. It is their holiday, after all. We only gawk at its native voluptuousness for cheap, vicarious thrills, I think, like an old white man leering hungrily at the twirling brown bodies during a classical dance performance. For similarly foolish, although perhaps more complicated reasons, I am uncomfortable among the expatriate crowd, which I somehow convince myself is a decadent bunch of ne'er-do-wells, rather than a group of young people trying very simply to enjoy a world and a life far from any they have known in the past. As everyone heads off to dinner, I part company, and given the pleasant air, effulgent sky, and nearly full bottle of Kingfisher in my hand, decide it will be best to walk. Tomorrow is Dewali Day, and the long weekend awaits.

The Village Stay: Capturing Dhala

Dhala, according to the 2001 government census, is composed of 237 households and a population of 1,206 people, 92.5% of whom are tribal. The village literacy rate is 38.8%; only one-quarter of the village’s women can read and write. Of the village’s working population, 95.2% are employed in the agricultural sector, 77.9% as cultivators of their own land. According to the census, the village has two primary schools, two medical institutions, and two markets. I consider every bit of this information suspect. Imagine the difficulties inherent in collecting accurate census data in a country as large and diverse as the U.S. given, among other challenges, the multiplicity of languages spoken in homes and the geographic dispersion of the population. Now imagine the task of the Indian government, which must enumerate a population nearly four times greater than that of the U.S., with a literacy rate of only 65%, in a country where more than 1,600 languages and dialects are spoken, where infrastructure generally ranges in quality from bad to nonexistent, and where communities may be nestled in the mountains at more than 18,000 feet (Ladakh), become literal islands during monsoon (Kutch in Gujarat), or are menaced by Naxalite or Maoist guerillas inimical to any representative of the government, however provisional (the Northeast). Alone, the idea of accurately capturing a creature as loose and disorderly as Dhala seems daunting. Yet, in some sense, this is precisely what I am hazarding.

Dhala has been selected for the pilot, not for any reason of dire need, or because it represents in any sense the “average” village in which Seva Mandir works, but because, in theory, it offers a higher probability of success than most of the other 600 villages in Seva Mandir’s purview. The relationship between Seva Mandir and Dhala is longstanding, wide-ranging, and considered particularly fruitful. Seva Mandir has worked with the village extensively on the development of its watershed, an initiative that encompasses many activities; it has assisted with a horticulture program in the village; it has aided the community in creating a seed bank; it has worked with villagers through the government’s Joint Forestry Management program to restore government-owned forest land adjoining the village; and, as in most of its target communities, Seva Mandir is operating a balwadi in Dhala and has initiated a Gram Vikas Kosh (village development fund) managed by a Gram Vikas Committee there. This isn’t a complete accounting of the collaboration between Seva Mandir and the community; it represents only my incomplete knowledge of the extent of that collaboration. The idea, of course, is that familiarity, comfort, and a demonstrated willingness to undertake and follow through on largely externally generated initiatives will increase the likelihood of success, thus justifying expansion, the ultimate aim of any pilot project.


One, perhaps subordinate aspect of my mandate in Dhala is to observe the behavior, the practices, and the habits of the villagers, particularly as they relate to water handling, storage, and use. And even if it isn’t an explicit part of my purpose, I can’t help but observe every aspect of their lives that I am privy to, and I am privy to much of the village’s public life, and even some of its private. Of course one can’t really come to know much of a place, however small, in a mere five days. Yet I hope I could speak about some things with a measure of confidence, at least in a conditional sense, after my stay.

I learn that Dhala is, in my admittedly uninformed accounting, well-off, at least by the reckoning of rural southern Rajasthan. In the course of my perambulation, I am amazed at the number of wells that I encounter that have been outfitted with rudimentary lift irrigation systems—a diesel motor drawing water through detachable plastic piping. Seva Mandir has managed only with great difficulty and expense to install about forty community lift irrigation systems (and those only benefiting a fraction of each community) over the last ten years or more. But in Dhala, it seems a significant number of households (or more likely groups of households—several share use of the largest wells) have enough capital, not only to acquire the components of systems—a formidable enough expense—but also to make regular purchase of the expensive diesel fuel that is necessary to operate the motors (the prohibitive cost of diesel has resulted in the abandonment of several of the community systems that Seva Mandir has installed). Mechanized irrigation is a luxury that few farmers and communities can afford, and its potential economic rewards are considerable: not only does it result in increased yields, but it also permits farmers to plant two, and even three crops each year. Many farmers in Udaipur District, perhaps the majority, plant only one—a maize crop during kharif, the season following monsoon.


The irrigation issue is illustrative of, to my mind, a central truth of life in agrarian communities, and indeed, perhaps of life in the developing world as a whole. Existence at subsistence level is a quagmire; without economic security or savings, one can only hope to remain where one is, scrabbling for purchase in boggy soil. At subsistence, one cannot plan for or invest in the future in any way, and thus is doomed to indefinite scrabbling; more likely than the appearance of some sturdy branch of capital with which to begin climbing is sudden hardship or disaster—drought, flood, the illness or death of a family member—which inevitably leads to sinking. I think the logic of microfinance is founded on such ideas—that a microloan can provide enough purchase to permit one to begin to climb—but whether or not it is effective in practice is debatable.

In any event, the presence of irrigation systems shouldn’t serve as a gloss on the very real material poverty that exists in Dhala. Electricity in the village is nonexistent. Homes, with few exceptions, are constructed largely of mud brick, though it is not unusual for a wall or two to be made of concrete. Toilets or latrines are completely unknown. This last fact is of particular concern in a community that relies almost exclusively for its drinking water on open and often unprotected (without a wall or with an incomplete one) wells bunched around a low-lying watershed. During the torrential rains of monsoon, most everything in the village not rooted in place is washed downward, into the watershed and wells—plant matter, soil, and human and animal waste included. In addition, several of the wells that the village utilizes for drinking water teem with small fish and, most objectionably, frogs whose bodies are broader and thicker than my fist. The community has ten handpumps—covered tubewells that reach deep into the water table, where the water is largely safe from any form of contamination—but two are broken, and five aren’t utilized for household use because the rusting of their pipes has rendered their water unfit for consumption. I drink from one of the remaining three in use, and wash up at another—in both cases the water has a distinctive metallic taint.


I believe that isolation may also be considered a form of poverty. The village has but one phone, which is incapable of making outgoing calls, and cell phones are useless there—there isn’t a signal for miles. Transport is limited. I’m only aware of (which is to say that there are very likely others) one person in the village who owns a vehicle, a motorbike which is housed nightly in the balwadi. To leave Dhala one must walk, bicycle, or catch one of the few jeeps or auto-rickshaws that daily ply the only road into the village—and the road itself dead-ends close to Dhala’s southern edge. The nearest town is at least ten kilometers away, and the nearest settlement of any size, Jhadol, at least thirty. Without electricity, news arrives, if it arrives at all, not by radio or television (which, questions of quality aside, are the most accessible forms of media) but via a newspaper purchased in town—provided, that is, you are among the 38.8% of the population able to read.

I am stuck by the poverty of the village most viscerally when I confront the health of its children. It is not merely that some are underweight, malnourished, anemic, that their bellies distend, though this is certainly troubling enough. In fact, it is the comparatively smaller things, the milder manifestations of an endemic malaise that I find most troubling. For example: virtually without exception, all of the children of a certain age—let’s say under seven—that I come into contact with (and remember, the village preschool serves as my quarters for the entire stay), sniffle, cough, and have a perpetual apostrophe of snot hanging from one or both nostrils. They are dirty, their hair is matted and unkempt, and their clothes are soiled. One gathering on the porch of the balwadi is perhaps the most pitiful assemblage I have ever encountered—one small boy’s eyelashes are so caked with mucus he can open them no more than a squint. Who will take a damp rag to this boy’s eyes? Who will wipe these children’s noses?


The children play in the dirt among the cow dung, the goat excrement, the chicken shit, and any other ordure that might reach the ground in an agricultural community; inevitably their hands find their way to their mouths. One of the basic tasks charged to children in the village is the collection of cow dung for fuel and fertilizer. While still in bed one morning, I watch the four children who live in the house across the street (one of the wealthiest households in the entire community) gather cow dung in the general vicinity of their home. The youngest, a boy who cannot yet be two, assists, dutifully carrying a great clump in his tiny hands. He has lost a wide swath of hair to some skin disorder; the previous afternoon I have watched him squat not ten feet from his house to release a stream of diarrhea. I hesitate to suggest that it is a monstrous negligence on the part of parents that permits such insalubrious behavior and then seems to ignore its consequences. Parents are busy with the often exhausting labor of caring for their fields and their animals—they can’t keep an eye on their children every second, and so the burden of minding is often taken up by older siblings or geriatric relatives.

And I feel the greatest problem may be one of ignorance: ignorance of how illness is communicated, how disease is contracted, what may be done to forbear against infection and sickness. Though I am working under the aegis of Seva Mandir’s Natural Resource Development Unit, the clean drinking water pilot is a health project through and through. The fact that some people in the village acknowledge only a nebulous connection between the cleanliness of their water and illness is a huge barrier to successful implementation. How does one convince people to adopt technology and commit financial resources toward realizing clean water if there is no acknowledgement of a problem? Most of the villagers aren't in the habit of washing their hands with soap and water after defecating; this is especially troubling considering they don't employ toilet paper or eating utensils either. What use is purifying water if dirty hands will be heedlessly plunged into it during transport or storage (as I observed time and again during my stay)? It seems clear that implementation of the pilot will be as much about education and changing behavior as it is about making suitable technology available to the "target population." And, ignoring questions of the propriety of such a focus, development has been famously unsuccessful at changing behavior. Model community or not, following my stay in Dhala, the challenges to successful implementation of a pilot are obvious. The question, then, is whether I will be up to them.

The Village Stay: Kalulal

Upon reaching Dhala, I am relieved to discover that my arrival has, in fact, been anticipated by at least some of the village’s inhabitants. More importantly, Seva Mandir has made arrangements for my room and board in advance; it has also identified someone to assist with my work. In fact, my accommodation and assistance will flow from the same source: Kalulal (above at rear, reclining on the porch of the balwadi). Kalulal is familiar with and to everyone in Dhala. His knowledge of the village—its people, resources, history, and fortunes—is substantial. He is active in the community: he sits on committees, maintains records, and speaks freely and authoritatively at gatherings. He is well regarded in the village, and though he can be imperious with children and others beneath him in age and standing, he is seldom defied. He commands respect. He is, all things considered, likely my best medium for learning Dhala. During my stay, he will serve variously as guide, intermediary, protector, sidekick, lackey, procurement agent, host, roommate, and mother hen. And as with any person with whom one spends enormous amounts of time, he will inspire within me equal measures of fondness and exasperation.

Kalulal, I learn, trims his fingernails with a scythe. His voice, which begins at stentorian decibels, can reach an astonishing, bowel-shaking plangency, as when calling up to a distant household while trudging through Dhala’s bottomland. Even his yawns, though plainly exaggerated, can stop the heart for a moment if not anticipated. He is very tall for the village, six feet or slightly over, and his feet are enormous, larger than mine, their bottoms cracked by decades of sandaled locomotion. He’s likely in his early-to-mid-forties—his black hair, so fussed over in the mornings, is tinged with gray, and his face is etched with the shallow lines of early middle-age (age, however, is difficult to estimate in the village; everyone looks older than they are). He is the voluble sort, given to a declamatory style of speech in groups and a rapid, garrulous mixture of Hindi and Mewari (the local tribal language) in normal conversation. His knowledge of English, however, doesn’t extend much beyond the curiously inopportune employment of “thank you,” and a basic knowledge of numbers.


I am fond of Kalulal because he makes my work simple as no one else has in India. Dhala is a loose clustering of around 300 (give or take fifty) households sprinkled without pattern over hill and vale; it is bounded to the east and west by hills too rugged and steep to permit expansion, and thus has a sprawling (if indeed such a word can be applied to a settlement so dominated by agriculture and natural space), north-south orientation. In two days we span the entire village on foot, visiting its every well, handpump, and waterhole—sixty-six in all—and traversing many dusty miles in our rambling (forgetting, too, the vertical distance covered in its rolling terrain). We do this during the hottest part of the day, in the pitiless sun of southern Rajasthan, beginning each morning between 10:30 and 11 and returning between 4:30 and 5:30 in the evening. Except for chai stops in the afternoon, we consume nothing but water and pilfered sugar cane while we work (and Kalulal much less water than me; the man, I determine, is half-camel). It is hot, filthy, wearying toil—and the tedium is perhaps the greatest hardship. My routine is practically invariant: I note the type of water source, whether it’s being used for household use (“Drink?” I ask Kalulal) and, if so, the approximate number of households utilizing it for that purpose; I record its longitude, latitude, and elevation; if it is being used for drinking, I test its water for dissolved salts; and if it’s a major source for the village (i.e. being used by more than ten households), I take a sample for further testing of dissolved metals.

Kalulal leads me with solicitude, without complaint, and with a sort of tireless grace, traversing the paths, ridges, fields, and streams of the village with both vigor and ease. What may have taken a week to orchestrate and complete in Udaipur, we finish in two days. In the afternoon of the first day, we pause to rest in a small copse of saplings, and Kalulal removes a sandal, places it on the ground behind him, nestles his head on it, and falls asleep. It is a rest well-earned, and, truth be told, I feel I am more in need of it than him.


I am fond of Kalulal because he provides for my comfort, ensures that my needs are met, because he feeds me (though it’s his wife who does the cooking). I don’t say he shelters me, because I don’t sleep under his roof; as I have already revealed, during my time in the village I sleep on the porch of the balwadi, and he sleeps next to me. I admit this arrangement irks me—it’s enough an affront to privacy that I must sleep outside of one of the most prominent buildings in the village (as I would well learn over the next few days, the balwadi serves not only as Dhala’s preschool, but also, given its central location on the village’s only road, as general community way station, de facto town hall, playground, and social club), but must someone also sleep beside me every night? I remember what Trushna Patel, an American-born Indian, told me, before I left Washington D.C., of her experience of life as a visitor in an Indian village: “People will watch you sleep.” I thought that she must be exaggerating, but here in Dhala, in fact, Kalulal looms, if not to watch me sleep, at least to guard my sleep. It is this stifling paternalism that will prove most exasperating during my stay; although I know that it arises from a laudable sense of duty, propriety, and concern for my wellbeing, I can’t help but chafe at Kalulal’s domineering behavior—it finds its way into virtually every aspect of our relationship.

Kalulal furnishes my bed, sheets, and blankets—more of the last than I can possibly use—and I sleep more comfortably than in Udaipur. The first night, as we prepare to turn in (it’s just past nine o’clock), I lie in bed and hold a superfluous blanket with a quizzical look (pantomime and facial expression being essential forms of communication in Dhala), unsure of where to stow it. Kalulal rises from his bed, takes the blanket in one hand, throws off my heavy comforter with the other, covers my bare legs with the blanket, and throws the comforter back over me, patting it down snugly. I think, at twenty-eight years old, I have just been tucked in. Sleeping on the porch proves much like open-air camping, only with more comfortable bedding, a less generous view of the stars, and the chirping crickets interposed with bleating goats. (Also, I can’t remember the last time, if indeed ever, I’ve encountered the world utterly devoid of artificial light, of whatever origin—it is something to be experienced.)

My first morning in Dhala, Kalulal takes me to bathe at his well. He fills a rusty bucket with water from a handpump; I strip to my underwear before several onlookers (I count one other man, three boys, and two women at some remove—I don’t know whether the women are watching), crouch down and begin to splash myself from the bucket in a manner that I think expresses a proper appreciation for the scarcity and preciousness of the resource in a water-deprived region. Kalulal stops my splashing, hoists the bucket, and unceremoniously dumps its contents on my head. I am temporarily blinded and sputter (and am reminded of bath-time as a child, when my mom or dad would gently hold me beneath the faucet to rinse my hair after shampooing; sometimes my head would be too close to the front of the tub, and part of the faucet’s stream would run unimpeded over my face, inducing a temporary suffocation); I hear chuckles. Later in my stay, while we bathe in a stream, Kalulal interrupts my mild splashing with a heavy dousing from the practiced flinging of his cupped hands—“thank you,” he tells me when the torrent is finished.

Kalulal’s family feeds me well and to excess. Kalulal refills my dishes ad nauseam, despite my exclamations of “enough!” in Hindi; without first offering, he sprinkles liberal amounts of salt on my food, too. One night he seizes my bati (incredibly dense balls of wholemeal flour) and crushes them in his left hand, so that I might dip them in dhal. I consider this a strange and double trespass: I can’t imagine another Indian, much less an American doing such a thing. Perhaps, I reflect, by the end of my stay he will push food directly into my mouth, completing my infantilization.

So it is in Dhala that I am obliged to trade independence and privacy for the opportunity to do useful, if not vital, work. Ultimately, it is a trade I am glad to make, and besides, my simple presence in the village is of far more interest and importance to its inhabitants than the fact that I sleep where anyone might see, or that I bathe half-naked before an audience, or that I am not permitted the freedom of an eight-year-old boy (in fact, they might think it strange if this were not the case). My very presence in India, of course, is likewise a trade-off, though one much grander in scale than that made in Dhala. It’s also a bargain whose ultimate value is less certain, as is true of many of life’s decisions. One must learn to deal with uncertainty, I think, or how else can one get on? I only wish acknowledging this truth regarding the unknown made it easier to grapple with. The battle rages on.

The Village Stay: A Gulp of Perspective Before the Plunge

In the interests of the success of the pilot project—my pilot project—I must come to know Dhala. If one of the first truths of development is that one size does not fit all, a related, and similarly hoary and hallowed bit of wisdom is the injunction to know the (local) context in which one is working—this is one way of avoiding the temptation to fit one size to all. Thus, my visit to Dhala had, at its heart, the goal of acquaintance with the community. It was, and continues to be necessary to both develop an understanding of the village context as it directly relates to the form and composition of the project (i.e. location, nature, safety, and reliability of water sources; sanitation and water handling, treatment, and storage practices; attitudes toward user fees for access to safe water), as well as, on an interpersonal level, to become familiar with the people of the community as individuals within the target group with whom and for whom I will be working (and on whom much of the success of the pilot will ultimately hinge!). And thus, my focus for the time being is needle’s eye narrow: Dhala village, population 1,800 (?), of Bishiwara Zone, Jhadol Block, Udaipur District, Rajasthan State, India, Asia, the World, the Solar System, the Milky Way, the Known Universe.

My first night in Dhala, as I reclined on my bed on the porch of the village balwadi (nursery school--the pink building in the foreground of the photo above) and watched the hills draw darkness close, my mind returned to a question that has often crept into my private moments in India: How is it that I’ve arrived at this waypoint in life? The question is heavy, freighted with ramifications, off-shoots, and follow-ons; it is a full interrogation of a life, its passions and decisions—and not suitably addressed here. But how does a sports-mad kid from rural Indiana come to find himself in a remote village in rural India? Of all possible career paths, how does he land in international development? And of all the myriad landing points in a discipline as broad as development, how and why a single clean water pilot project? It is this last question, or one particular aspect of it, that seizes my attention for the moment.

Three summers ago, while part of a team evaluating a small dams project in Kitui District, Kenya, I kept a journal of sorts, at the suggestion of my internship supervisor, in order to facilitate the composition of a final report of my experience—the report was required to receive credit toward my Master’s degree (I finished neither). On June 27, 2005, I had my first meeting with the rest of the team: Henry Rempel, team leader and professor emeritus of Economics at the University of Manitoba; Charity Nyaga, a Kenyan gender and community development specialist; and Hilda Manzi, a Kitui native, recent college graduate, and agricultural specialist. That evening I wrote:

Already, after one short day of meetings, I am impressed by Charity and Hilda’s insight and knowledge, especially Hilda, who must be younger than me, but must know more of the political economy of Kenya, and of Kitui district particularly, than I know of, well, anything. She said: “My one goal in life is to one day help the people from where I come. That is what I want to do.” Let there be 10 million, 50 million Hildas in Africa, and all over the developing world! She is educated and erudite (rare enough coming from “underdeveloped” Kitui), but she also wishes to work for the wellbeing of her own people. No brain drain. Not only must more be educated, but they must want to remain in their own countries and not be lured by the riches and temptations of the West. That is how poverty and misery and sickness will be defeated. Not by the World Bank and its 3,000 development economists. Right here with the little girl growing up in Kitui District. Maybe I should take that to heart. What place do I have in development work? I don’t think I could ever be a Hilda or a Charity, or know what they know, intuit what they intuit. It would take years, and few of us mzungu will commit our lives to one foreign piece of land, one foreign population of people, one foreign culture. As selfish as it may sound, I know I won’t. I want to help everyone, to lift all 2.4 billion out of poverty this instant! I don’t have the patience or fortitude to commit my life to lifting 500 or 1,000 out. And that’s how it will happen: 500 or 1,000 at a time, over many years, with excruciating diligence. Hilda can do that, and I don’t think I can….Maybe I should direct my energies toward easing the way for more Hildas, rather than pretending that I can do and know what she does and knows.

But on some level, I am now attempting to achieve precisely that intimacy of knowledge and precision of focus that I said I wouldn’t, or couldn’t, or shouldn’t. In just one or two months, I hope to have learned a single strand in the shaggy mane of existence of a single small village in India, that I might then be able to, if not lift that village out of poverty, at the least improve its health, and thereby its quality of life, to some tangible, appreciable degree. Given the foregoing passage, it may be that you expect me to puzzle at the presumption inherent in such an undertaking; in fact, I feel the expectation is perfectly reasonable, if even a bit conservative in its timeframe (but perhaps my superiors are factoring in their own plodding, and after all, as has been made maddeningly clear time and again, I am almost wholly dependent on them for my progress).

It is the narrowness, the 1,800, that invites pause. Although success of the pilot will spur expansion, it is still a drastically attenuated focus for one who once claimed, only in half-jest, the desire to end poverty in the world—a desire that, quixotic as it may be, must demand a macro rather than micro perspective. In other words, a commitment to global poverty eradication first demands a focus—to return to an earlier formulation—on the policy and management side of development, specifically that residing at the very tip of the international development superstructure, a height from which the vast majority of funds descend (leaving aside developing country governments for now)—the major bilateral and multilateral donors. This in opposition to a focus on the implementation side of development, where the nitty gritty details of improving the lives of individuals—ten, fifty, 500, 1,000, 1,800 at a time—are toiled and fretted over.

Yet for the time being, I am content to prostrate myself in the nitty gritty, at the globe-spanning base of that superstructure. I am content to learn Dhala, and only Dhala—its local context, its geography, and its inhabitants. There was, after all, good reason to be lying in a bed on a nursery school porch, half a world from home, pondering the logistical challenges inherent in visiting every water source in a sprawling and formless settlement splayed over the austere charm of India’s Aravalli Hills. The thought perhaps wasn’t comfort enough to sustain goodwill throughout my time in Dhala, but it was necessary comfort—and yet it seemed likely I would also need a good host, guide, and mediator if my stay were to be both productive and pleasant.

The Village Stay: Excitement and Trepidation En Route

It was with a mingling of excitement and trepidation that I departed last Thursday for the village of Dhala, the designated site of Seva Mandir’s clean drinking water pilot project, an initiative for which I have assumed the primary responsibility. My stay was to be of six or seven days duration, I wasn’t sure which, as, along with many of its other details, the length of my visit had not been given much definition (or seemingly, concern) by my superiors prior to departure. The date of my departure, in fact, had changed twice before Thursday, and I wasn’t entirely certain, as the Seva Mandir jeep juddered its way to the Jhadol Block office, that my arrival in the village would not be greeted with surprise and confusion—that was certainly how news of my plan was received by workmates at Seva Mandir. Would I be staying at the Block office? At the Zone office? Why did they want me to stay in the village? Was it safe (this coming from a woman who had served as Volunteer Coordinator for four years)? Was someone coming with me? Had I confirmed my plans with the Block Office? I could handle life in the village, I thought, so long as I had something to eat and a place to sleep—and yet neither seemed assured. Hence the trepidation.

Trepidation, also, because perhaps I couldn’t handle life in Dhala, even with provision of necessities. I thought back to my first and only other experience of a “traditional” village, three days and two nights passed in misery in some blighted settlement in central Côte d’Ivoire more than five years past. My first night in this village, whose name I have forgotten, ranks among the worst in my life—in fact, purely on the basis of comfort and restfulness, I am prepared to say that it was the worst. Although I somehow managed a few fitful minutes of sleep on that godforsaken occasion, my sleepless nights before and since have, without exception, been more pleasant. My “room,” (I should say our room, since I shared it with another student from my program) was squalid, murky even in the light of mid-afternoon, and of indeterminate provenance. That it was designated for storage seemed the best guess, but it might have been quarters for the mentally defective relative who had been harried into the bush for our visit, or perhaps it was the guest room that had never been finished?

We slept on neat piles of enormous sacks (the fabulist in me wants badly to tell you they were sacks of grain) tightly sealed and filled with a tough, unyielding substance that recommended them as punching bags. We had brought no bedclothes and were each handed a large mosquito net and bid goodnight. I balled a t-shirt under my head to serve as a pillow, and as there was no means of hanging the mosquito net, draped it over myself as a cover; nonetheless, I was hounded, worried, and ultimately devoured by mosquitoes throughout the night. Though the village as a whole was without electricity, its school was on the grid and happened, that Friday, to be hosting a party whose music throbbed without cease deep into the night, stabbing indiscriminately into every corner of the village. Finally, at some ungodly hour, a precarious quiet descended as the party dispersed and the revelers all filed home (with no small amount of clatter and clamor)—but that quiet, so longed for, would be regularly broken for the remainder of the night by the wailing of the baby in the next room (and in truth, the baby sounded as if it were there with us in the chamber of horrors, as the wall separating our two rooms didn’t fully extend to the ceiling).

Dawn came as a gift, since it meant that I would never longer be forced to attempt sleep, to grasp vainly at that state of peaceful surrender that invites slumber. No matter that my allergies, already piqued in the night, would reduce me to a sneezing, sniveling mess for the rest of the weekend, or that the first order of the new day, following a hike of some distance in the soft light of dawn, was to swill chapalo—corn wine—from enormous calabashes in a circle of old men: my village experience had already been irrevocably ruined by that first, abysmal night. I entered the weekend hoping that in a few weeks I would receive an agricultural service assignment in a similar setting; I left believing that I’d never be able to hack it for six weeks in such a place.

Trepidation, also, because I felt the ever ponderous weight of responsibility descending upon me, a weight, I confess, that staggers me more than most. The substance of this visit was to compose a major part of the needs assessment portion of the project—the research and information-gathering phase that would inform the design and implementation of the pilot. I was to visit every water source in the village—every well, every handpump, every watering hole—dutifully recording its location with a GPS device (which itself was a minor source of anxiety—though not a technophobe, I often bungle electronics’ basic functions, and what’s more, the device was borrowed, and I was liable for its condition), performing spot tests for dissolved salts (the water in the village, it turns out, would be uniformly softer than that of Udaipur city), taking samples from major drinking sources for further testing, while also observing the water handling, storage, and treatment practices (if any) of the villagers. After nearly seven weeks at Seva Mandir, I was finally being asked to take a significant step toward beginning the pilot; I could blame past sputtering and inertia on others, but if my village stay proved nugatory, it would be difficult to point fingers elsewhere.

To be sure, progress, or the promise of progress, brought excitement as well; only I couldn’t say whether that excitement prevailed over my anxiety. I had a tangible desire to escape the city (where I had been confined for the previous three weeks), and an implacable need, bordering on desperation, to do something—anything—concrete toward beginning the pilot project. My stay in Dhala would relieve the restlessness mounting on both accounts. But what if it were a failure? The odds favoring such an outcome seemed outsized, at least in proportion to the relative simplicity of my mission—the most basic of tasks here has often proven inordinately difficult to carry off, and the number of variables involved in this endeavor—logistical and operational—seemed therefore particularly inauspicious. Perhaps most portentous was the fact that once in the village my lines of communication would be severed absolutely—no one in the village spoke English, and its only phone was incapable of making outgoing calls. I would be at the mercy of Dhala’s inhabitants, who, it seemed, might very well be ignorant of my visit and my mandate while there. I felt, no doubt in a moment of weakness and dramatic excess, that some manner of reckoning could very well be at hand.

Fortunately, two days before my departure, in a quest to marshal enough empty water bottles for sample collection, I mentioned my plans to the In-Charge of Seva Mandir’s Natural Resource Development Unit (one of two In-Charges to whom I answer, but not the one who had assumed responsibility for arranging my village stay—I’ve come to realize that the floundering of my project is partially due to the lack of communication and coordination between these two); within an hour he had requisitioned both Arun and Ronak, another NRD Unit staff member, to accompany me to Dhala, where they would lead a discussion regarding the community’s seed bank and introduce me to the village. This partially assuaged my anxiety—even if Dhala wasn’t prepared for my arrival, at least I would have someone to explain my presence and to hurriedly cobble together a plan of action for my stay. But I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t come to that.