Dear all,

It again is good to be receiving your emails. I will try to respond to you individually sometimes; I do read all of your emails and appreciate them.

During this adjustment phase, I've been taking Hindi lessons in the morning. Hindi is spoken mostly by the educated, people in northern India, and those mostly living in urban areas. I've been touring the city and having meetings about development and religious/cultural issues.

As I experienced on my first trip to India in May 2004, India is an onslaught for the senses. Walking down the street shopkeepers yell for attention, an elephant walks by and children in rags beg for food/money. Trucks/autos/rickshaws scream by with blaring horns and spewing black smoke as open sewers leak onto the street during rain. A cow stalls traffic while a camel transports a load of cargo. Street festivals halt traffic as the processional, complete with a band and stereo, freely take over the road. And I could go on....

But I did join in one of the roaming religious festivals one day. I learned they were devotees to Lord Shiva (oversimplified as the Hindu god of creation/destruction) celebrating their upcoming pilgrimage to a mountain in Kashmir called "Anar Wat" (my phonetic translation) which melts into a formation called a Shiva Lingam (a phallic symbol roughly emphazing the creative aspects of the deity). On my way I visited temples and noticed a billboard promoting HIV/AIDS awareness among businesses. Just about every profession was symbolized through some construct of the AIDS ribbon.

My classes with Prof. Boyd Wilson have been very useful to my experience already and will be very helpful when I start my volunteer work in the community. I brought along my books/notes/tests from his class and have already loaned them to my fellow new volunteers who do not have a background in Hinduism/Sikhism/Buddhism. I took them all to a 400 year old Vishnu temple (Hindu all-pervasive god) for their first temple experience. Another volunteer has a good background in the socioeconomic and political history of India, so we exchange information.

As for the title of this email, one of the site coordinators signed the whole group up for dance lessons with a local youth group that donates all performance procedes to poor people. And most of you know I don't like dancing...we are set to perform, yes perform in front of hundreds of people July 28 after practicing twice a week for an hour til then. Oh man. It's so fast. It's torture for me. One young guy joked, "Will your hips are stubborn." The instructor says we're doing fine, but her face just looks horrified.

Today I had my first village experience too. We drove 55 km on a highway and then through a bumpy road through desert/deforested areas. Rural Rajasthan has chronic droughts and the crop yields are not so good. We were guided by an NGO that specializes in water harvesting. They build small dams progressively down a hillside to collect water for farmers. Villagers here speak Mewari, a local dialect, so even other Indian in the city cannot understand them with Hindi. But I viewed their mud/brick houses and fields being plowed with a wooden hoe and ox. We also viewed a well now built from concrete for clean drinking water - without the concrete people were suffering from muddy water and guinea worm (a horrid disease in which long worms painfully emerge from all parts of the body). We were the first foreigners they have seen. Through translation they asked how much milk our cows make, what food we eat......OK the power just went out and my computer is running on battery that lasts two minutes!!!

Keep in touch everyone!

Will