Familiar, though not quite adjusted

Wedding in Chharanagar

I’m at an interesting stage in this trip, as things aren’t really new any more, but I’m not adjusted either. I am doing better with the whole food thing. Tad and I go to a place down the road almost everyday where the food…at least what we’ve been eating…hasn’t been excessively spicy. I’ve been eating mostly vegetarian, as many people here do, but tonight we went to a non-veg place, and I had some deliciously bland chicken chow mein.

Yesterday we met briefly with the urban planning graduate students at CEPT University that we’ll be working with in Chharanagar and discussed our findings from the previous day, during which we produced cognitive maps of the community, spoke with three residents, and identified important locations within the community. We broke into five groups to cover different areas of research about the community; mine is social infrastructure.

Wasim and the family we were interviewing

Family that wanted a photo with me

So then today we went back to the community in our groups with the CEPT students to conduct some more research, and it was kind of an overwhelming experience. In addition to the endless staring and handshakes we received, we met with the community leader and a handful of others. During this conversation, at least three different languages were being spoken, everyone was trying to yell over each, and I struggled to understand Wasim, the CEPT student in our group, who was translating the Hindi into a somewhat hard to understand English. It was a little frustrating because we weren’t able to ask about and get answers to all of the questions we had, but we did learn some interesting things about the Chhara culture…particularly marriage…they definitely told us a lot about that. Hopefully when we go back tomorrow we will be able to collect a little bit more information.