Heya Paul (and all you other lucky email recipients),
On beach patrol the other morning I saw:
12 dead turtles. More or less, I don't remember exactly.
Also, there's lots of stages of 'dead turtle'. Some carcasses obviously count as '1'. If it looks like a live turtle except for the X's over the eyes, then that's One Dead Turtle. But some are pretty decayed. If it's a shell and skeleton, is it still a dead turtle? I say yes. But what about if it's just half a desicated shell? Or even just some shell or bone fragments? Is that still a dead turtle? Clearly there is a cutoff point where it stops counting as a dead turtle and becomes... something else. Detritus? I keep wanting to call it flotsam or jetsam (cuz it's all nautical and stuff), but those aren't right either. Maybe they're just Beach Bits.
Anyway, I saw 12 dead turtles.
Also, I saw 1 dead baby dolphin. Yes, it was a baby... only about 3 feet long and almost completely intact. Very sad. I've got a picture, but it's sort of a downer so I'm not sending it along.
Oh, and also I saw 1 dead human.
It was a little above the high-tide line so I can't tell if it came from the ocean or, um, 'other'. The legs were pretty much down to bare bone, and the feet were missing - clearly bitten or sheared off. The skull bone was visible at the top of the head, but there was still some flesh on the lower part. The torso was sunken in, but no bones showing.
All in all, it put a bit of a damper on the morning beach walk. "Sun rise and beach stroll" is sorta romantic, but "Morning beach walk with sunrise and corpse" isn't. Just like the baby dolphin, I have photos. I have likewise declined to include them now.
So that was last week. This week I'm finally making progress on my main task here: designing and building a monkey enclosure.
The VSPCA has 'rescued' (confiscated) monkeys from (as they call them) beggars and gypsies. I didn't know there were gypsies in India, but apparently there are plenty and they're all wrapped up in the illegal monkey trade. Also the beggars, of which India has a full alotment.
When Jo and I showed up here an Jan 12th, the guy who runs the show asked us what our "program" was. I didn't know what he was talking about, but it turns out that he wanted to know what we wanted to do. They ask for volunteers, but they don't have anything for them to do when they show up. We said we want to work with sea turtles (since that's the reason we came here, what their web site says they need volunteers for, and what we told him in the email we sent). So the guy tells me I'm in charge of designing and building a monkey enclosure. They have 6 monkeys now, but they expect to have many more "soon".
I'm also in charge of designing and building an Aviary to test parrots and see if they're suitable for release.
The biggest difficulty I'm having with these tasks is that I have no idea how anything ever gets done. The natural operating environment for everything here could be charitably described as "chaos". No one tells anyone anything until long after that information would have been useful. No one has any rational (ie: accurate) sense of time or distance. None at all. Everything happens either (1) instantly or (2) late. Late can be anywhere between 4 hours and infinity. People say Thing, and it eventually becomes obvious that Not Thing is true, and they knew it all along. Anyone will give you an answer, but no one can be bothered to listen to questions. Occasionally this is a language thing; but mostly it's an Indian thing. I witness this effect everyday, in many ways, at all levels; but I have one simple story to illustrate.
Jo and I were taking the train here to Vizag. It should have been a 30 hour trip, but it turned into a 36 hour trip. My sense is that's pretty good for India Railways. About 24 hours into the trip I'm getting a little hungry. The train pulls into a large station, and has been sitting there for a good 20 minutes. This has happened twice before on this particular train, the last time the train was stopped for almost an hour. So I get off the train and survey my options for food and drink (bottled water, a traveler's best friend). We're on track 3 in the station, and the main platform is across tracks 2 and 1.
To get there the American way involves walking all the way to the end of the platform so you can walk up and over the pedestrian bridge (why they don't put these bridges in the middle of the platform is beyond me). Our car is towards the (other) end of the train, so it's a non-trival walk. The food and drink vendors are directly across from where I'm standing. The Indian way of getting there is to hop down onto the tracks, cross them both while avoiding the dogs, rats and piles of shit (and here I mean actual shit in a human-waste sort of way), and then sort of hop-vault up onto the opposite platform. It's a whole new level of jay-walking.
But as it turns out, the head conductor is standing about 20 feet away from me on the platform. I walk over and ask him how long the train will be in the station, and if I have time to walk Across the Bridge (as I say this I am pointing to the pedestrian bridge) to the Other Side (hand motions towards the other side) to buy some food. The guy listens to me. He then surprises me by answering in perfect and only slightly accented English; "Ahh..." (he consults his Conductor's Watch) "The train will be leaving in 15 minutes. You have plenty of time."
Now, I've been in India long enough at this point to distrust any answer. This one is pretty clear, and it's obvious the guy understands me, but I've taken up the habit of re-affirming anything anyone tells me. "So..." (I look at my watch, it's 5:20) "The train will be leaving at 5:35?"
Conductor: "Yes, the train will leave the station at 5:35"
Me (looking at watch): "Ah, yeah, so that's in about 15 minutes?"
Conductor (looking at his watch, which I notice has the same time as my watch): "Yes, in 15 minutes"
I smile, and he smiles at me and waves me along in the general direction of the bridge. So I go, and even though you have certainly guessed where I'm going with this I will finish the story. I jog to, up, over, and down the bridge. It takes me 2 minutes and a little sweat (Tamil Nadu is HOT) to get to the vendor's booth and I'm just about to ask for a bottle of cold water when I hear the train whistle. Turning around, I see the train moving. Paniced, I push and shove through all the people waiting on platform 1, glance quickly up and down the tracks, jump down into no-man's-land, avoid the worst of the obstacles, vault up onto the next platform, shove through all the people waiting for a train on track 2, sprint to match speed with my train, and swing myself up into a car. It was sorta like in the movies, and I would have been more impressed with myself if I hadn't already had to run to catch my departing train 3 weeks earlier (which is a better story, though less illustrative of my point).
Normally, one would suspect that the conductor was having a little joke on the foreigner; but this stuff happens all the time.
For me, these things are the hardest part of India. The beggars, the horribly disfigured, the street orphans; the pollution and garbage; the unhealthy food and water - any of a hundred other things. All of them suck, and it's hard, but I'm living with it. They're part of the deal. There are a lot of very poor people here, and those things are just part of the package. The two really hard things for me are (a) the waste due to some pathological inability to communicate useful information, and (b) something that I have a hard time putting a name on, but which I can describe with an example.
Second class railway passenger car bearths seat two people on one side and four people on the other (these seats convert to 3 upper and 3 lower bunks for sleeping at night). There are about 12 rows of berths in a car. As I'm sure you're aware, it can get quite hot in India. So they have fans in the cars. They're mounted overhead. For each row, there are three fans; one pointing (roughly) towards the 2-person side, one roughly straight down, and a third sort of towards the inside of the 4-person side. These are full-on caged fans, about 18 inches across, with 2 speeds ('off' and 'high'), and they blow pretty much straight down. So that's 3 fans per row, and 12 rows, so that's 36 fans. All mounted on the ceiling and blowing down. It would be hard to fit any more fans up there. There are no vent holes. No fresh air anywhere behind any fan. The hottest, sweatiest air in the car is right there behind the fans. It's the most idiotic thing I've ever seen (well, no, that's not true. it was the most idiotic thing I saw that day). One fan in a window, or on the ceiling with a vent behind it, would be 10 times as effective as 36 fans stirring the air while 36 electric motors add heat.
Though the design of the car is obviously dated, some of them look almost new. They are still making these cars exactly this way. In what I would guess to be at least 25 years, it seems that no one has ever said "Wow, that's completely ineffective, let's not do it that way". I see stuff like this all the time every day. For my first 6 or so days in India I spent a lot of time marvelling at it. Now it's just tiring.
I know that a visitor to America might see things that were insane, and have no clue why we persist in such stupid behavoir. But there's just no way we come even close to India.
Anyway, we saw a corpse last week. Jo, Asha (from Canada), Alice (Germany), and I stood around it and were quiet. But then we moved on. Later we all commented on how it had affected us less than we thought it would. The guy who heads the VSPCA was in the office when we got back. I told him about it, and asked if we shouldn't notify someone, like maybe the police. "Yes, of course! The police must be notified." After a 20 second pause where he completely failed to say anything like "...and so I will call them now", I said "Um... so should I call them?" - "No! They'd only ask you questions. You should definitly not call them."
So no one ever called.
Cheers,
Jack
