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.