49 days, 23 hours, 34 minutes...

...until my plane home lands in Minneapolis. Meaning that 56 days, 4 hours and some-odd minutes have passed since I arrived in Bangalore. A lot of times I feel as though time is inching by, but then at other times, such as a few minutes ago when I realized that my last post in my blog had been a month ago, I feel as though time is flying. Now that I am past the halfway point, I am sure time will start to breeze by.

Anyway, I thought I would give a quick update on the events of the past month for the benefit of anyone interested as well as the benefit of my future self.

The event of this past month figuring most prominently on my mind right now is my having developed an allergy to Bangalore, Visthar or some combination of the two. I think it might actually be that I'm allergic to some part of the sheets, blankets or mattress that I sleep on at Visthar because whenever I sleep here I get massive bumps all over my body that look like mosquito bites that itch like crazy. On four occasions, one side of my lip has swelled to comic proportions as well (there are clearly other aspects of my appearance that could be considered comic in that picture as well...I had just woken up). Once I get my most recent pictures onto my camera, I will upload a picture from my most recent lip-swelling incident. The other side of my lip is the one swollen in that picture and it's about twice the size of the left side of my lip now. I would think that these bumps were just over-sized mosquito bites, but I have not been bitten by mosquitos and don't always itch. The bumps are always there when I'm in Bangalore, but they get much larger and itch like crazy when I'm sleeping. The result is that I sleep very little at Visthar. The best part of my vacation in Pondicherry was my ability to sleep all the way through the night. I wonder if the bumps on my body and the swelling of my lip are separate phenomena, though, because two of my lip-swelling adventures happened when I was away from Bangalore while the bumps are an exclusively Bangalore thing. Maybe the lip thing is a food allergy...hmm...possibilities!

Anyway, strange allergic reactions aside, let me provide a quick update on what I've been doing recently. Our second course, entitled 'Globalization and the Ethics of Development' (the first had been 'Identity, Resistance and Liberation') finished last week. To start the three-week course, we had a weeklong field visit. Half of the group went to Tamil Nadu (a southern state) while the other half went to Wayanad district in Kerala, another southern state. I was in the group that went to Wayanad. We mainly looked at issues of development. We had meetings with several tribal communities, one of which is being aided by an NGO-funded health project, another of which is at risk of being displaced by a useless dam the government has built. We also visited a variety of schools and healthcare institutions. Once we were back in Bangalore, we expanded on issues of globalization and development with a particular focus on how globalization affects development in the areas of health, education and agriculture through lectures and field visits.

We had Monday the 19th of October off from class because of Diwali and a lot of the group used that long weekend to go to Goa (a beach town) or on a safari in Kerala. I was one of three who chose to stay behind. I had a fun and relaxing weekend highlighted by dinner and fireworks at the house of David (Visthar director) one night and a performance by the Bandhavi girls another. I was responsible for writing the class blog the week that ended with Diwali. You can read it here if you are interested: http://cice.blog.gustavus.edu/.

It is now late morning on Thursday here. Nadeau and I got back from Pondicherry (see previous post) very early yesterday morning. The rest of the group will be getting back from their various break adventures on Friday and Saturday. I need to use this extra time to think about a final project for the semester. I still don't know what I want my project to address. It is important that I decide now because on Sunday, we will be leaving for a month-long journey to North India and we won't have much access to the internet or to books, so I need to bring some of those resources along with me so that I can start work on that project.

We will get back from the North on December 2nd, and the last two weeks here will be a frenzy of preparing and presenting final projects and papers for the final course on Religion and for the final project for the semester before we leave for home early in the morning on December 17. I miss home dearly, but I am sure that once I am back, I will wonder where my time in India went.