Author: Christina

I’ve been in India for more than a month now, and have barely shared anything about it here.

I’ve been too busy living.

India has been such an all-encompassing experience for me. It’s unlike anything I’ve felt in a long time, maybe ever.

The best way I can describe it is that I feel so full here. Like my body can’t contain all of the life that is coursing through it.

India feels like that too. Like it is bursting at the seams everywhere.

Food with so many spices and flavors that every bite is like fireworks in the mouth. Trains with people crammed in so that some are hanging out the doors and the last ones aren’t able to get on. Saris and shawls so vibrantly colored that a group of women anywhere looks like a work of art. Smells so intense and varied – incense, sewage, frying food, dust, smog, curry. So many sounds of humanity – horns blaring, tongues chattering, music drifting, coughs sputtering, brooms sweeping, cows mooing. A pervasive sense of spirituality in the temples that are everywhere, the Namaste or hari om with which people greet each other, the religious necklaces worn by so many. Sun so intense that my skin burns through my sunscreen, heat that completely engulfs the middle part of the day. And so much natural beauty: the powerful and sacred Ganges river that courses through the east, the Himalaya mountains in the north, the tropical forests in the south, and the enchanting desert in the west.

India is everything all at once.

It’s too much for some people; it’s too much for me some days; but I’m captivated. I can’t look away, I just want more and more and more.

I started my India trip planning to spend a few days in a bunch of different places so I could see a breadth of the country in the one month I had allotted for exploring India.

But after two weeks, I realized I was too in love with this country to leave after 30 days. And that I would prefer to get to know a smaller number of places in more depth than to briefly breeze through more places.

A few days is nothing to spend in any place. You can see the sights and take pictures for your Instagram, but you don’t get any idea what the place is actually about, what makes the world go round there, what is important to its people.

With a fruit vendor we got to know in Pushkar

A week or so is enough to just start feeling the pulse of a place. Of course you need months or years to really understand all the intricacies, culture and language. But in a week or ten days you can settle in, build a few relationships, notice what a normal day looks like in that place and what people do in the place.

And that, connecting to and learning from people and places, is what creates meaning in travel for me.

So, on that note, here is some of what I’ve learned from the first few places I visited in India.

Mumbai

A supremely varied city (India’s largest), full of amazing energy and even better food. A lot of colonial architecture left here, and so interesting to me to see the way that the tropical climate intersects with these old buildings, covering some of them in vines and framing them in palm trees. It just seems incongruous to me, since I associate that type of architecture with cold European countries.

Mumbai was described to me as India’s City of Dreams.

I definitely understand why. It is a modern city, the Bollywood capital of India and a financial hub, full of businessmen in suits and commuters flooding in and out of trains at rush hour. It reminded me of a tropical New York.

I spent two days doing nothing but walking around the city, sampling the street food and taking in the energy of the city. When the heat got too much for me (the pictures look grey but it was so hot and humid), I took refuge in one of the nicest Starbucks locations I have ever been in. I had a cold drink and wrote in my journal while a group of young women worked on a project for school, some young professionals interviewed some candidates for a job and businessmen came in to get their expensive drinks to go.

Mumbai street food

But Mumbai also has a darker side. Sixty percent of Mumbai’s population lives in slums, in which the conditions of some are pretty rough. I didn’t visit the big slums because again, I don’t believe in treating human beings as objects to be viewed, but I did accidentally wander into a couple of the smaller slums, just blocks from the more upscale parts of the city, and was struck by the disparity in this country.

Of course, we also have a lot of income disparity in the US. We have people living in mansions while so many are homeless or barely scraping by. So I’m not passing any judgment on India – simply observing.

There is a striking parallel existence between an India that is modern and growing fast, with its strong economy making some people very prosperous, and an India in which some people are stuck in poverty, with seemingly little chance of moving upwards. The tide of prosperity is rising in India, but it’s not lifting all the boats.

Still, I liked Mumbai, and it gained a place on my list of “places i could see myself living someday if the right situation arises.” Maybe it’s the wandering spirit in me, but I always assess new places to see if I could ever live there. Just in case.

Udaipur

A beautiful, prosperous city in the Rajasthan region which is a tourist destination for locals and foreigners alike. Some describe it as “the Venice of India.” There are two big lakes, lots of parks, and an amazing palace that takes two hours to walk through.

I met some lovely people here – a couple of young women who were on a break from volunteering at a nonprofit in neighboring Jaipur, a young pre-med American man who shared my love of books and provided some great conversation, and the sweet hostel manager who was trying to learn French and spoke a few words with me each day.

It is a pleasant place, nice to look at, easy to be in, but I didn’t feel much here. No energy, spirit of the city, etc. (Some Indian folks I shared this with later said, “that’s because you were alone. Udaipur is a romantic city!”) Anyway, I spent a relaxing long weekend and then moved on.

Pushkar

The day I arrived here, I shared a rickshaw from the train station with another young woman and when he dropped us off a few hundred meters from our destination, we were confused. But as we started walking, we saw that there was a huge festival going on, completely filling the streets. What a fun way to arrive in a city!

Pushkar is a holy city, with two important Hindu temples and a holy lake. There is supposed to be no alcohol or meat consumed within its limits.

But it’s not an uptight place. The people here are spiritual, they will stop you on the street to tell you about your energy or your chakras, but they’re laid back and friendly. It is a place that a lot of Indian tourists go on a spiritual pilgrimage, and where a huge number of foreigners are staying at any given time.

It felt like a magic place for me – i met so many incredible people here, both locals and travelers. We had beautiful nights of taking motorcycles out to the desert and watching the stars, days of visiting temples and exploring the surrounding area, and evenings spent hiking up to different hilltops to watch the sunset.

I celebrated my 29th birthday here and the staff at the hostel where I was staying surprised me with a cake which we all shared on the rooftop. And as a birthday gift, I treated myself to a massage from a highly-recommended Ayurvedic masseuse. He gave me an amazing massage and then inexplicably also told me some things about what was going on in my mind and some remarkably apt life advice, which he said he felt in my energy during the massage. He said that reading people was a gift he had inherited from his father, who did the same thing. These are the interesting people one meets in India!

I’ll end with this interesting tidbit about India. People here really like taking selfies with foreigners. Random people will just walk up to you and ask you if you’ll take a picture with them. I guess it’s a fun souvenir to show your friends later. When unknown men ask me, I usually say no. But for families or women, I say why not?

Happy Wednesday from me and this adorable Indian family:)

When I first turned up in Greece a few months ago, I had the idea that after spending some weeks there, I would be flying back to Africa to continue the trip that Daniel and I had originally planned. But months passed in Greece and I started to get my bearings as a solo traveler when I learned that Daniel was definitely not rejoining me (he was off chasing love in Italy – but that is his story to tell some day). So I spent some time reflecting on what I would most like to do with my remaining travel months, given the new situation.

And I was surprised to find that I heard Asia calling, not Africa.

Sunset on Goa beach

I so enjoyed the years I spent living in Africa, and I would love to go back and see more countries at some point, but at this time, I decided that I wanted to go somewhere new.

For me, I realized that returning to Africa would be going backwards in a way, retracing steps I’ve already taken (especially because I know I wouldn’t be able to travel in Africa without making a stop in Benin to visit old friends, whom I miss dearly). I would have loved to do it, because that time in my life was so important to me and it also seemed familiar, as opposed to Asia which is completely new to me. But ultimately, I want to move forward, to experience new things, venture to the unknown instead of dwelling in what is familiar and comfortable.

And sometimes you just have to leave the past in the past.

Already five years ago

 

So I chose to continue east instead of going back west. And I set my sights on India.

I’ve always wanted to visit India – I was captivated by the photos and stories from this diverse country for years. It seems like a place that is very real. A place where one can see clearly what it means to be human. And, of course, Indian food is pretty incredible. I always say that at least half of the point of traveling is to eat new and delicious food in different places.

I flew from Greece to Goa, India in a 24-hour journey consisting of 4 flights (Greece –> Romania –> Dubai –> Goa). It was long, but the price was less than what you can pay to fly across the US, so it seemed worth the extra time

The plane dropped below the clouds and I saw India come into a hazy focus. Dark green forests alternating with water, and light brown dirt roads and houses of varying sizes. Pollution is bad in India and the day I flew in, it had rained and the smog seemed to be trapped beneath the clouds, so I couldn’t see the ground very clearly. When I finally stepped off the plane in Goa, I had the familiar feeling of walking into a wall of thick, humid, hot air.

Ah, back in the tropics.

I was already sweating as I carried my backpack through the airport, got my 60-day visa for India and my passport stamped, withdrew some rupees from the airport ATM, and pulled out the directions for getting to the AirBnB that I had reserved for that night.

Leaving the airport, there was a rush of taxi and rickshaw drivers trying to feast on the fresh blood of new visitors to their country. They know that foreigners exiting the airport are the most likely to drastically overpay for transportation. You’re exhausted, you have luggage, and maybe you’ve never been to the country (like me) and you don’t know how much things usually cost. Some travelers are offended that people try to take advantage of them in this way, but I don’t begrudge the drivers seizing the opportunity to make some extra money for their families. I’m sure I would do the same, were I in their position.

It was a bit overwhelming, the rush of people, the heat, humidity, and so many new things, but I had some information from my AirBnB host that helped me get the right price to her place in a trustworthy taxi. The fifteen minute ride reminded me of what it’s like to be in the developing world – old cars, bumpy and dusty roads, traffic laws that are more like guidelines, and lots of horns blaring.

Out the window, I watched as we bounced past small shops with packets of useful items hanging from corrugated metal roofs, women in brightly colored clothing, full-sized cows that were strolling along the road nonchalantly, small dirt roads that darted off from the main road, old men hanging out in front of the shops and groups of kids playing barefoot in the streets. My eyes took it all in hungrily, and I felt part of myself relax in recognition of something familiar.

I’ve missed this kind of world.

India is of course quite different from the African countries I’ve visited, but there are some similarities. And in a strange way, being here feels a bit like being home. India feels so much less different from Benin or Uganda than Morocco did, even though India is thousands of miles away and Morocco shares a continent with those countries.

My five days in Goa were spent almost exclusively at the beach. After somewhat accidentally spending the majority of winter in Europe, I was so excited for warm weather and swimming in the ocean, which was gloriously warm and so pleasant for swimming.

Since then, I’ve been to three different cities and I am quickly falling in love with India. I only planned to spend one month here when I arrived – I was hoping to also visit Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam – but I have a feeling I will stay here for the full two months that my visa allows.

There is so much to explore here, I feel like I could spend years traveling India and still not experience everything.

Short post today but here are a few pictures:

Climbing 900 stairs to see a sunrise above the town

So much amazing food here

Mumbai has amazing architecture

Traffic!

Monkeys watching the sunset

Colors

Coconut water straight from the coconut:)

Sunset scene by Pushkar Lake

 

In 2015, when refugees first started streaming into Greece by the thousands, boat after overcrowded boat landing on the shores of Lesvos and a few other islands, I felt the pull to go help. Agencies were calling for volunteers to help keep people safe, and I wondered whether I should go. But I didn’t feel like I could leave my work at the time, which was keeping other people safe. Still, it stayed on my heart and mind for years, as I followed the refugee crisis in the news. Finally, three years later, I found the opportunity to go do the volunteering that had been in the back of my mind since then.

Mytilene, Lesvos

I flew to Lesvos from Athens on a 50-person propeller plane and landed in Mytilene, the main city on Lesvos.

I took the only bus of the day to the community where I would be volunteering, Skala Sikamineas, a tiny village on the northeastern corner of Lesvos. It is one of the closest parts of the island to Turkey, which is why it is a hotspot for refugee arrivals. It has a lot of fishermen, one mini market, one bakery, a handful of restaurants, and one cafe where both old Greek men and young international volunteers hang out. I stumbled out of the bus and right into this café where I promptly met like-minded volunteers and got my orientation from the volunteer coordinator. My first shift was the next morning.

Skala Sikamineas – out the window of the volunteer house

I was part of the land crew for an agency called Refugee Rescue, and we had two jobs: one, to watch the sea from above and spot any refugee boats that entered Greek waters, and two, if a boat was spotted, we would open the transit camp where the refugees would stay until they could be transferred to the main refugee camp on Lesvos. We distributed blankets, hot tea, and helped everyone get dry clothes to replace anything that was wet. And we also got to distribute toys for the kids, which was so lovely! (And prior to that, the Hellenic Coast Guard and other official boats would be notified and either they or the Refugee Rescue boat would meet the refugee boat and escort the people safely to shore.)

Looks pretty but it was FREEZING

Why is this work even necessary? International refugee policy and migration routes are ridiculously complicated and ever-changing subjects, but here’s a simplified summary. When refugees flee their homes in Syria, Afghanistan, or other countries due to unsafe conditions there, many of them aim to resettle in the European Union, where living conditions are better and their families will be safe. They make their way overland from their home nation and end up in Turkey where they try to cross by boat to land in Greece, where they seek asylum.

(The process of seeking asylum is a political request that an individual puts in, saying that the country they have left is unsafe for them, and asking for permission to resettle in a new country. It’s a time-consuming process and not all people who request asylum are granted it.)

The distance of sea between Turkey and Lesvos near Skala is fairly short (only five nautical miles), but the journey is dangerous, which is why boat spotting is important. Most refugees cross on dinghies, small boats made of rubber with an engine attached, and most crossings are at night. The dinghies that arrived on Greek shores while I was there contained 35-60 people each.

There were a surprising number of small children on the boats, including a 4-day old baby.

(I never personally saw a dinghy in my three weeks, but this photo was taken a few years ago by Boaz Arad from IsraAid. This agency was on Lesvos doing great medical work while I was there.)

Lots of things can go wrong on a journey across the Aegean. Most dinghies take at least an hour and a half to cross, though sometimes it can be faster and sometimes it can take up to 3-4 hours. The engine can stop working on the boat, stranding the people in the middle of the sea. The weather can change, as it did one night that I was working and a boat came into Greek waters during a thunderstorm – it had been calm when they left Turkey but by the time they made it to Greece, they were totally soaked from rain and there was lightning in the sky. The boat can develop a leak and start taking on water, and eventually sink.

And, something sinister I learned while I was there is that though the smugglers who organize the boats provide life jackets (which of course the refugees pay an additional fee for, on top of the huge fees they are already paying for the service of being smuggled – sometimes people’s whole life savings), they are often fake. Fake life jackets look real, but when they get wet, the material inside absorbs water instead of repelling it, and they will end up dragging a person down instead of floating them.

So the danger of attempting a crossing is quite real.

Fake life jackets cut open to reveal the inside

The volunteer work we were doing was important, but it was not glamorous nor fast-paced.

Two of my colleagues watching for boats around midnight one night

It meant a lot of nights spent standing out in the cold and wind (yes, Greece is cold in the winter time too), scanning the sea through a night vision camera or binoculars, looking for refugee boats. Most nights, nothing happened. But every night, it was possible that we would see something and so we had to be out there and alert.

An official boat patrolling the Greek-Turkey border, seen through the night vision camera

We did night shifts that went from 10pm to 7am, which were spent on an exposed promontory which had a good view of a large section of sea. Working in teams of three, we watched the sea throughout the whole night in shifts, each getting a couple of hours to sleep in the car, huddled under blankets, when it wasn’t our shift.

It was highly unpleasant on some nights, trying to keep the [very expensive] camera and your body steady in huge gusts of wind, waiting out rain for hours locked in a soggy car with two other exhausted people, etc. The sea looked pretty unfriendly in the dark, especially when there was no moon and there was wind or rain.

It gave me a lot of time to think about how desperate and scared I would have to be to decide to put myself and my children in a boat in the middle of a frigid, windy night and try to cross that scary sea.

I took this photo around 3am one night during my shift. I was sitting out at our viewing point, having my 5-minute break between scans. I was thinking about the refugees who were likely hiding in the woods somewhere in Turkey, trying to decide if tonight was the right night to attempt a crossing. I had prepared a thermos of hot tea to bring with me, something to try to keep a bit warm, and when I looked at the little saying on the tag, it just hit me straight in the heart with its relevance to what I was doing.

Indeed, we are one soul, you and me.

Myself, the refugees who are crossing, the people who live in Skala Sikamineas… we’re all the same. We’re all human. We all want the same basic things in life – safety and freedom for ourselves and our families, enough to eat, a roof over our heads, employment that pays enough to live, etc. I happen to have been born in a stable country with no war, to a privileged family, and that puts me in a position to help. These folks on the boats happen to have been born in a country that is unsafe for one reason or another (and I won’t get political, but our government had a lot to do with the reasons that some of these people are fleeing their homes) and that puts them in a position of needing help right now. We were born in different places, but we are one.

Those are my sisters and brothers. We are two sides of the same coin. We are the same.

Lifejacket graveyard

Shortly before I left Lesvos, a few of the other volunteers and I drove a short distance from the spot where we watch for boats to see this ‘lifejacket graveyard,’ an unintentional monument to all the refugees who have passed through Lesvos in the past few years.

The life jacket graveyard is just a pit in the ground, not far from a cute tourist town called Molyvos, where life jackets started collecting, and now there are thousands upon thousands just disintegrating in the elements. There are pieces of dinghies and different flotation devices mixed in, and a bunch of boat motors arranged near one edge like tombstones.

It was powerful to witness.

When I first got out of the car and took in the magnitude of all those people who left their homes and everything they knew to make this dangerous journey, the hairs on my arms stood straight up and I got goosebumps all over.

One of the other volunteers said, “the feeling I get here is the same feeling as when I visited Auschwitz and saw all the shoes left behind.”

The crisis continues.

The volume of refugees that cross through Lesvos these days is diminished from what it was in 2015 when the crisis began. The European Union is paying Turkey quite a bit of money to try to prevent refugees from crossing into Greece; there is a Frontex patrol boat on the border at most times, as well as a NATO warship patrolling the border, in addition to the Turkish and Greek coast guards. And yet, people continue to cross.

Once they arrive in Greece, they spend months or years trapped in Moria, the main refugee camp. It is like a prison where they must stay until they are either deported back to Turkey or allowed entry onto mainland Greece. (I didn’t visit Moria because I didn’t have any work to do there and I don’t like to treat humans like animals in a zoo to be viewed, but click here for some good photos and reporting on the camp.) Overall, the presence of a huge number of refugees on Lesvos was much less obvious than I thought it would be, because they are all contained in the camp.

But people continue to arrive. I just saw an update from friends who are still there, and they had four boats land in the last 27 hours, with nearly 130 people on board.

There are also boats landing on the Greek islands of Samos and Chios, and a growing number of refugees crossing into Italy from Africa. A huge amount are moving overland to Jordan and effectively resettling there, which is rarely mentioned in the news. And of course there are other refugees and mass migrations across the world.

Most countries don’t want to take in any more refugees, but it’s not safe for them to return to their home countries. And remaining in subhuman conditions in refugee camps is also not a viable solution.

I don’t know what the answer to this huge issue is, but I do know that this work both shook my faith in humanity and renewed it.

The coordinator for the agency I volunteered with posted a picture of a dinghy that arrived on Lesvos one morning and ended her description with the hashtag, #Godisdead.

I can understand why. Bearing witness to the suffering of so many people, the terrible things they encounter that force them to leave their homes, the arduous journey they take, the treatment they receive by some people and authorities along the way, the animal-like conditions in which they exist in Moria camp, and the likelihood that in the end they will be deported anyway…it can make you question why any God would allow this.

But on the other hand, as I got to know the community I was living in, I learned about how the residents of this tiny village reacted when refugees suddenly started showing up on their shores in droves. And that buoyed my spirits and my hope for humanity.

The few hundred people who live in this village were there when the refugees first started arriving, and they rose up to help their fellow humans, doing their best until the international NGOs and other assistance arrived months later. The women cooked and helped care for the children, the local café donated food and drinks, and the fishermen were nominated for a Nobel prize for their work rescuing people from boats in distress. (Here is a beautiful photo collage by the Guardian showing the incredible work of this community.)

It’s so beautiful to know that despite what we see reflected in politics, the basic human impulse is still to help others.

And that is what I’m going to try to keep in my heart from this experience.