Living in Behea

Now that I'm about to leave, I'm finally having the hard-core field RA experience that I imagined I would have the whole time here. A few days a week for the past few months, and continuously for the past two and a half weeks, I've been living in Behea (except for a very pleasant 12 hour jaunt to Patna and back with McManus). As I may have mentioned before, Behea's a small town bisected by a railway line and a major road that cuts through the district, so it's a bit more bustling than neighboring towns.

We have an office/residence here, which has three rooms: one sleeping room, one work/storage room and one bathroom/"kitchen"/storage room. The only food in our kitchen right now is a box of Corn Flakes and powdered Gatorade, just to give you a sense of the priorities in my life right now.

Seema, Radhika and I share the sleeping room, although they've been in and out so I've had it to myself some too. We each have a cotton pad covered with a sheet on the floor for sleeping, and bednets hanging from nails in the wall which protect us from the hordes of mosquitoes at night.

There's also a fourth roommate who comes in during the night and makes himself at home - a  bandicoot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesser_Bandicoot_Rat), which is basically a super aggressive large rodent (also called a "pig-rat"), who's munched on Seema's hands and feet and left droppings next to the toilet. Oddly enough, he only does his business there, which to me indicates some form of higher intelligence. If you take the time to read the wikipedia article, you'll notice a particular gem in the third paragraph: "They are also seen as a threat to infants, as a group of bandicoots can easily attack and devour a human child." Apparently Seema's hands were so soft and youthful that he just couldn't resist the temptation. Needless to say, we're working on getting cots to get us up off the floor and reduce our likelihood of being devoured.

Our office has some pipes for water but they've only worked a few times since I came, so most nights I go to the चापकल (chaapakal = hand pump) and fill a bucket with water. Apparently we have a bad chaapakal (not that I have much basis for comparison), because the water is super dirty* and quite difficult to pump. I had a few days of feeling gloriously powerful and triumphant pumping my own water, until I happened to look up and see a hornet's nest a few inches away from the chaapakal. Now I only pump water at night, when they're less active. And I studiously avoid eye contact.

Behea doesn't have grid power, so we bought a small generator to get power in our office for fans, lights and (most importantly!) our computers. Despite the fact that I now have these bulging biceps from using the chaapakal (I wish!), I'm not yet strong enough to turn on the generator and have to summon a strong male colleague - usually Nikhil. To turn on the generator, you take a hand crank, attach it to the generator, and basically swing it around and around with all of your strength while holding down another part of it, and then jump back when a cloud of exhaust gets pumped out into the air. When Nikhil does it, it's like a dance routine, with these beautiful flourishes at the end. I've never been able to get it going fast enough for the engine to catch, unfortunately. It's extremely frustrating to do the weak, dependent woman thing, but honest to goodness, that generator is really tough!

An additional skill I've picked up here is bucket bathing - it always perplexed me, until I finally got smelly enough I had to do something about it. Basically, you have a big bucket and a little bucket, and you fill the big bucket with water and use the little bucket to pour water over you. Simple enough in principle, but my hair is now waist-length, so it takes a whole bucket of water just to wash it (and about half a bucket for the rest of me).

So that's our little home - it feels a bit like camping, and thinking about it as fancy camping (A toilet! Electricity!) keeps me from getting all whiny-American about it. Because although there are certainly particular comforts that would be nice (refrigeration, running water, etc.), it really has everything I need.

*For a quick comparison - we've had a water filter in our Patna apartment for 9 months, and the top filter which traps sediment is a bit gray and murky, but still works fine. We brought the same kind of filter here for our office, and within a week and a half the top filter was dark brown and so filthy that new water could barely get through.

P.S. I've only taken one photo of actual surveying. I know that down the line I'll regret this, but every time I go into a respondent's home, camera in hand, I lose my nerve. My apologies.