Looking Back, and to the Future

After three days of delaying the original extra meal plan for various reasons (not all of which I felt were necessary), we are finally going to start today. Honestly, I’m thrilled. With the way things usually go in India, I fully expected to start this sometime next week, but I was wrong. Today we’re starting with peanut butter sandwiches. I figured I would take a typical American packed lunch with an Indian twist: chili peppers. They want spicy, I’ll give them spicy. Not to mention delicious. If you’ve never had spicy peanut butter before, I highly recommend it.

Here’s the plan for the extra meal in a week:
Monday: Whole-wheat nachos
Tuesday: PBC
Wednesday: Fresh seasonal fruit
Thursday: Spicy peanut butter sandwich
Friday: Bean burger with bun
Saturday: Pancakes with syrup
Sunday: Fresh fruit
Total Cost = 1665
That’s 1665 rupees for 30 girls for an entire week, converting to roughly 36 USD. It’s hard to feed one American on 36 dollars per week, let alone 30 girls. Also, I wanted to add more fruit, but I doubt it will be received well. People here just don’t eat enough fruit, and even having it two times a week may be even too much. We’ll see if I can’t make some impact here in the next month.

In other news, I finally put together some nutrition lesson plans for next week. I have learned by now that the majority of people here have no idea what they’re eating on a daily basis. Yet that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As mentioned before, the common diet is so healthy that it doesn’t require much tweaking. What do need improvement are the dietary and fitness changes that have been brought on by Western influence.

This phenomenon has been seen all over the world over the past 50 years or so. There’s a peaceful group of native people living in harmony with their environment, like Inuits or indigenous Africans, until Americans or Europeans come in with cars, computers and candy bars. Suddenly people are working less and eating more. In America, this happened gradually, over about 200 years or so, and while we are far from well-adapted to our diet and fitness (being the most obese country in the world), we’re not way off either. Rapidly developing societies like India are prone to accept all of these technological and diet advancements all at once without adapting their culture along with it. The result is people eating more food and more unhealthy food while driving their motorbikes and cars everywhere. Less work, more food… you do the math.

To help combat this, I will be teaching them about exactly the kind of nutrition is in the food they eat every day: whole-wheat products, dairy, lentils, beans, potatoes, rice, tea, spices and refined cooking oil. I will also teach them how to read a nutrition label so that they can be more aware about processed products in their diet. We’ll see how much of this gets through to them, and how worthwhile it can be.

While waiting to make the peanut butter sandwiches today (I’ll be teaching the hostel’s cook all of these dishes, which are very easy anyway, so that she can make them on her own after I leave), I thought I would go back and reread the blog of the MSU student who was here last semester. It’s funny how much you learn and adapt in just a few months. I read these words and sentences that meant nothing to me last semester, and now I feel so attached to his experiences. He has pictures on his blog of KLB and the students here, and I can see them and say, “I know who that is!” He uses some Hindi words and talks about places with which I am now completely familiar. But even though I can recognize that I’ve come a long way in such a short time, I also know that I have much farther to go.

1. I would like to make this extra meal plan a permanent part of the hostel menu.
2. I haven’t done a lot of work in the canteen, and Malkeet expressed to me today that he is not interested at all in making anything else besides samosas.
3. While I have finished the first part of the nutritional analysis, I need to follow up with another one detailing the effects of the changes I have made.
4. I need to figure out exactly what I am doing for the end-of-semester project that will get me the credit I need to graduate. This could be anything from a standard research paper to a portfolio of my writings about cultural observations to an extended version of my nutrition analysis. It’s expected at the end of April.
5. Together with Global Student Consultants, we have to prepare more accommodations for the 5 or more students who will be joining me in the summer. We also have to work on placements for all of them so that they will have something to do when they get here.
6. I really need to learn more Hindi. My trip to Mussorie got postponed, which is fine, but it looks like I will be getting my scheduled Hindi lessons with the other MSU students in May. Again, that’s fine, but it’s really hard to learn a new language when there’s nothing to study. It’s all by ear, and my memory sucks.

Well, that’s my to-do list for the immediate future. Again, wish me luck.