Valentine's Day in Delhi

This commercial day of celebration even reaches across the corners of the land and into the heart of Delhi. There are heart balloons and posters all around. I will spend my V-day still recuperating from a cold, and probably with the hotel clerks that will be knocking on my hotel room door asking if I need anything. I have figured out the three ways that they will leave you alone: do not answer the door, phone the reception desk and request some peace, or turn on a little do not disturb light next to the doorbell of the room, even then it is not certain that there will be peace. At least I know that I will never be lonely in this country.

We went out for lunch on our day of rest a couple of days ago. We were in a nice restaurant and the food was really good. Kit went to the bathroom and I was looking through the Lonely Planet India book. I was trying to avoid eye contact with the Indian guy that had sat down at the next table. He made me jump though, when he finally tapped my elbow and said with a very Canadian accent " Can a take a quick look at your book?" I started to laugh and apologized to him... I just wasn't expecting that accent to come out of him.

His sister and him had been up t0 the Punjab State to visit their Mom and Aunt and had gotten stranded in Delhi for 3 days because of the weather. He started laughing at himself when they started asking us for things to do in Delhi...two Punjab Indians asking a couple of very white women for tourist advice in India. It was a good chat. I realized in the short time I have been here that I was avoiding eye contact with everyone! Including some Canadian trying to boorow a map!

We are struggling with the group of participants we have right now. The six day Leadership development is based on the premise that the participants have had the five day PDP. THis is not the case. Many have never heard of the strategies we are using, and do not speak English... it has meant that we will have to combine different elements of the different workshops and we end up improvising and changing some of the itinerary and material we are using. Some brain work and a few tap dance moves, a few spins on my head and voila! We have ourselves a workshop.... I can honestly say that after this experience I think I could do a workshop in my sleep in any language. :)

The male-female cultural boundary has been interesting this session as well. The majority of participants are younger males with varying needs: show-off their extensive knowledge ( which really is not that extensive), refuse to ask a question or speak in English in fear of looking dumb, and consistently compete for attention. It is the scenario at tea time that Kit and I will have 7-8 males encircling us. Today, however, was a new experience, one of the men asked me to talk on his cell phone to a friend of his. I took the cell phone and was interrogated by a woman on the other end...she informed me that Srimohan could not speak English very well and wanted to know all of this information about me. It did make me laugh. It gave a whole new meaning to third party communication. It could be worse, I could have a group of particpants that wanted absolutley nothing to do with me!

This week will end and then we will have evaluation meetings to go through. I hope to make it to the Taj Mahal in Agra next week before I leave for Tamil Nadu. I also want to go to the Mahatma Ghandi Museum here in Delhi. But first, before we do the tourist things, we will have the Indian shopping experience: Gulshan is this wonderful woman that works in the AIPTF office and she is taking us shopping tomorrow. It should be fun.

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