Pahlka Dot

I got an email today from Kiva that began:

Dear Jennifer Pahlka,
Good news: you’ve been repaid!

Indeed, and with karmic interest. Kiva is a non-profit that facilitates microloans from individuals to other individuals in the developing world, helping people start businesses and hopefully escape poverty. I’ve loaned three times on Kiva, and get periodic emails on the progress of the loan repayment. Since multiple lenders fund each project (generally), lenders get paid back once the entire amount has been paid back by the entrepreneur. This particular loan, to a 22 year old Mexican craftswoman, was paid back in a little less than a year. I’ve reinvested the amount I got back; this time I’m funding a 47 year old woman in Tajikistan who has a small dairy and wants to buy another cow. It’s truly gratifying to be able to help, and other than some miniscule interest I might have otherwise made on the money (possibly nothing), it doesn’t actually cost anything.

And speaking of being paid back, if you really want an emotional boost, try donating to DonorsChoose. The concept is similar, in that you choose from thousands of projects to fund, but these are projects in schools, put up by teachers who lack funding. Once the project is fully funded, the funds are distributed, the materials purchased, and the project proceeds. The last one I did was just buying some books for a classroom; some are for computers or science materials, or just a bookshelf. It takes a while for all the steps to happen, so just when you’ve forgotten you contributed, you get a big fat envelope with letters from the kids and pictures of them in the classroom reading the books. My friend Stacy got a similar package from the project she funded, and we both had the same reaction upon opening it: we blubbered like babies. Granted, it doesn’t take a lot to make me cry; really, the idea that kids write thank you notes is enough.

Anyway, I’m not naïve enough to think that I’m saving the world, but I do appreciate what these organizations are doing. Part of me wonders if the whole “direct to an entrepreneur” or “direct to a teacher” thing is a little…I don’t know…Republican, as if we can’t trust the larger organizations who try to help on a more systematic scale. I could angst about it but instead I’ll just give to both types.

But speaking of being repaid, while I logically know that whatever tiny contributions (financial, I didn’t have the balls to phone bank this time) I have made to his campaign, Obama did not actually win the primary FOR ME IN PARTICULAR, but I sure feel like I got a really nice present last week. Then, while I was writing this, I also read this post by Tim O’Reilly, and it’s been feeling a lot like Christmas in June around here.

The first time I was in India was 1994. I had left my job at the Healthcare Forum, where we worked on dummy terminals. There was one internet connected PC in the office with something called Mosiac on it. Aja knew how to use it, and did mysterious things on it. I did not have an email address.

I traveled for a year on that trip, about two-thirds of it in India. The place blew my mind. I fell in love. Colors, chaos, complexity, simplicity, landscape, culture, food, smells, spirituality. It was like tripping for a whole year. We traveled light, and very very cheap. We took trains from stations that did not have computers and so could only sell reservations out of their quota. Sometimes you had to wait a week if you wanted a confirmed seat. Sometimes that was just fine.

I’ve been back once since, in 1999, with Semi. There were internet cafes by then, and I was heavily flirting with Chris at the time and made up every excuse to stop in and see if he had sent me mail. Generally, you would boot up, log on, and just when you’d gotten your mail page open and typed something, the power would go out and everything would shut off. Then you’d fight with the guy at the desk about paying for wasted time online, since you hadn’t hit send. I liked to fight about stuff in India. I thought it made me something more than a tourist, or something.

Now I’m back and I’m writing this from my laptop in brand new Toyota with a leather interior, being driven by a guy in an all-white uniform to my first meeting this morning in Bangalore. Sorry — Bengaluru. Even the names have changed. I’m online with my cellular modem in the car, confirming the afternoon appointments by email. Young men are speeding by on motorbikes with their Oracle Developers Conference backpacks thrown over their shoulders. Cell phones not just ubiquitous, but completely in charge. There is no culture of sending a call to voicemail; every ring and beep is answered immediately. The constant ringing of mobiles complements the constant honking of cars stuck in constant traffic.

Technology has changed India, but not tamed it. You still can’t find anything. Buildings must go up daily, by the look of things, and they are sometimes assigned numbers, but not sequentially, so they are no help in finding the building you are looking for. Addresses commonly read like this one:

#1132, 4th Floor, 100ft Road
Above Food World, HAL 2nd Stage
Indiranagar, Bangalore - 560 038

As far as I can tell, the only helpful pieces of information in this address are the neighborhood (Indiranagar) and Above Food World. People know where Food World is. Google maps can sometimes tell you where you are, generally, but even if it knew your exact location, don’t ask it to tell you how to get from one place to another. Navigating in Indian cities is simply beyond Google’s algorithms, and it doesn’t even try.

Information in India still resides in people. The landscape and economy are not designed to allow for easy extraction into databases. There are no Yellow Pages even. Luckily, there are a lot of people, so even though there is a lot of information, you can, as AskLaila is doing, hire a LOT of people to catalog your lots and lots of data. AskLaila has 4,000 outsourced workers going door to door gathering detailed data about every local business in the 5 biggest Indian cities. Can you even imagine how much work that is? Chain stores are starting to come to India, but it’s still overwhelmingly mom and pop shops. But even that doesn’t describe how insanely fragmented retail is here. I don’t know how much of the retail scene is comprised of street stalls, but I’d guess… a lot. Stalls that are seriously about the size of the average suburban American walk-in closet. Maybe AskLaila is limiting themselves to stores with four walls, but it’s still a gargantuan task.

The Indian middle class seems better educated and harder working than the American middle class, but the sheer number of people in India is still the characteristic that hits one over the head. (Stat from ShiftHappens presentation on Slideshare: the 28% of the population of India with the highest IQs is greater than the total population of North America). Jobs that would be staffed by one person in the US have six or seven here; there were literally seven women staffing the desk at the business center at the Grand Hyatt in Mumbai. I was the only customer for most of the time I was there. Each of them helped me: one got me an Ethernet cable, one got the scratch off code card, one opened the door, one took my credit card, another wrote up the receipt. Not all at once, mind you, but consecutively, so it took the same amount of time as it would have it there’d been one staff. And many of the poor still seem to be engaged in mind-bogglingly Sisyphean tasks; women who sweep dirt streets or endlessly mop bathrooms, moving the layer of dirty water around after each customer makes fresh shoe prints on the wet floor, and ensuring that one of the two stalls is busy at any given time, being mopped.

As I write this, the windows in the car are up, which is probably for the best as the fumes from the idling cars can’t be good for you, but I miss the smells of India. People always think I’m joking when I say that, but I don’t mean the toilets. I mean the way the air smells of blooming trees, things burning, and dust. People aren’t burning cow dung cakes or those little briquets like they did once, which is maybe a good thing, but I really liked the musky tone they added to the air. Even though the smells have changed, they still evoke that whole year, and everything it meant to me. It would be silly of me to miss the India of my 1994 trip, and I am really enjoying being here as something other than a tourist, engaging with Indian entrepreneurs and business people, a potential participant in the economy, less of a voyeur. Not sure who’s changed more, me or India.

Clem found this is the bush outside Susan & Mathis’s house. Dead. Lots of death this week. If you look closely you can see the tiny sharp tongue that protrudes from the tip of its beak. We want to save it and hope it doesn’t start to stink. I wonder if it has so little body mass that it won’t really rot. If it starts to smell, we’ve decided we’ll bury it the backyard.

Clem could not go to sleep tonight. I’m sure she was exhausted; she was a fragile, teary mess today from the moment I picked her up from school, angry at me for the slightest perceived affront and for nothing at all. She actually said she was tired at one point, which she NEVER does. The five year olds in her class all got to take a walking field trip to the library today, and that may have tired her out. Also, she got to sleep late the previous night. Whatever it was, the kid needed sleep.

First she decided that it couldn’t be bedtime because it was still light out. That is the one thing that really sucks about summer. It’s hard to argue with that notion, and yet, they need to go to sleep. Then she decided we needed to sleep with our heads at the foot of the bed (yes, I still go to sleep with her, I know…) and everything needed to be rearranged. Then she decided that she was hungry, no, STARVING, STARVING TO DEATH, and absolutely had to eat. (Mean Mom said Tough Luck.)

Then she decided she needed to think. So she announced that she needed to think and got up and got into the rocking chair, which she declared is now her Thinking Chair, and sat and rocked for a minute, sucking her thumb and thinking. She would not tell me about what: it was secret. Then she declared that she thinks best upside down, and she proceed to place her head on the seat and press up into a very precarious headstand – remember, it’s a rocking chair –and think upside down for several minutes. I should not have indulged this but it was too shocking and adorable to stop. She had a running commentary going designed to convince me that this was something she does frequently. “Sometimes I do this because the blood goes to my head and it helps me think…Sometimes I have to put my hands on the arms of the chair to steady myself…It’s hard to stay up on your head sometimes because the chair moves a lot.” The whole thing seemed very Pippi-inspired, but we haven’t read Pippi in months, and I don’t think it was ripped off entirely from her playbook. Despite the commentary, she did find some quiet moments and appeared to think about something, and after a bit she came down and got back in bed. She still thrashed around for far too long, but eventually drifted off.

Demerits for spazziness, but points for style!

We put Bean to sleep on Tuesday. She had an infection and then kidney failure. I was typically tuned out to her distress over the weekend, but I woke up on Monday morning and she was lying motionless on the hallway carpet, and the reality that her last days were here hit me. I was not a great kitty mommy to her; she was always “Chris’s cat,” and he did all of the feeding and litter-changing and parenting to her. He got her in college, 20 years ago…his whole adult life. There was a time when she would come to me in the mornings; I would wake up and go to the bathroom, and as soon as I was sitting on the toilet she would be there, waiting for me to put my hand down so she could rub her cheek against it in a way that said she was petting herself, and I was just a convenient object offering the right amount of resistance. But that consistency was nice, and it’s weird to me that I never really noticed when or why it stopped happening, except to say that I always took her for granted.

After tests on Monday which came back really bad, we took her in on Tuesday to be euthanized. She had been unable to move and barely able to lift her head for a couple of days at that point. I said goodbye to her and apologized for being pretty bad kitty mommy to her. I probably didn’t really need to be that for her; Chris was such a devoted and loving dad. We took her body home and Chris waited while I went and got Clem from school. Clem got to pet her body and say goodbye, and then we wrapped her in an old cloth (a monkey printed sheet that was wrapped around the cushions of a loveseat my mom had when I was a kid, so older than even Bean) and put her in the hole Chris had dug out back right next to where Bool, her brother, is buried. We each put in flower (a giant red cactus bloom) and I read One Art, one of my favorite poems. Then Chris filled in the dirt, and we planted a Sweet Box over her, a shade loving plant I’d never heard of before, but one we found on a walk down to the garden center earlier that day. It’s a winter blooming plant, so we’ll need to check on it in January and maybe we’ll get some nice blooms.

Clem has taken it well. On Monday, when I told her that Bean was probably going to die, her questions indicated a lot of anxiety about her own death: Will I know when I’m going to die? Will I be afraid? What if I die when I’m a kid? (That one was painful to hear.) By Tuesday, she seemed to have worked most of that out, and was engaged and sensitive to our feelings, but not overtly sad. It’s only been in the last year or so that Bean has even let Clem pet her, but I do think she was attached to her. Clem showed no anxiety when petting her dead body, and was very sweet and supportive during the burial. When I told her she’d died, Clem’s second or third question was “What day and year is it? We should write that down,” which oddly was pretty much what Andre said when I told him too. I guess the instinct to mark time comes early. Clem made a sign for Bean’s grave. She really liked making something for her.

Goodbye, Bean. We’ll miss you.

Bedtime, after reading the first couple of chapters of Little House in the Big Woods:

“Mommy, what does butcher mean?”

“Well, when you butcher a hog, you kill it and cut it up so you can eat it.”

“Yes but what does butcher mean?”

“It means kill and cut up.”

“Oh.”

Pause.

“Mommy, when you’re dead, can you think?”

“I don’t know, baby, I’ve never been dead.”

What my dad and stepmom left on the fridge after their visit, originally uploaded by jenpahlka.

My dad and stepmom were here last week for a visit. They are awfully cute and sweet. It was great having them here, and Clem was completely delighted. She misses them.

ClemFashion, originally uploaded by jenpahlka.

Clem really has her own sense of fashion. I like how she works the camera too.