A Day in the Life...

Added pictures of our trip to Pune in the previous post...

Things are settling in to a nice routine here at Jamkhed! This week are learning more specifics about certain issues and the training that is involved for the Village Health Workers. We've spend a lot of time on Women's issues since that is a MAJOR problem here. It is pretty unbelievable how women are still treated in this society. Luckily the project has been able to change some of the problems through education but there is still a long way to go. One of the biggest problems is sex determination - people finding out what the sex of a fetus is and then getting an abortion of its a girl. This has led to astonishing numbers, there are now only about 700 women for every 1000 men. If a girl is born she is basically treated horribly, eats last, doesn't get to go to school, has to work, and then is married off at 12-13 so the family can get rid of her. Then she is treated bad by the in-laws family and if there are any problems with childbirth or she has girls, she is sent back home and treated badly by her own family. We've listened to stories of women who were beaten, burned, tortured for no reason at all. These women talk about it like its a normal occurance and that makes it even more sad. Of course all of this stems from poverty. Anyway, I could go on but I'm sure its depressing to read.

So, I thought I would give a little insight into my typical day at Jamkhed.

7am - walk/jog with a few of the other ladies

8am - breakfast

9am - my attempt at meditation, pretty hard...

9:30am - 1pm - class or village visits

1pm-3:30 - lunch, rest, study, read

3:30 - 5:30 - class

5:30 - 7:00 - go into village, study, hang out

7:00 - dinner

7:30 - 10 - hang out and chat, ping pong, board games (yes, that is what we do at the village...we've gotten pretty good at Jenga and have moved onto cranium)

10:30 - read and bedtime!

The days actually go by fast and I don't seem to have a lot of free time. I thought I would have so much time to read the books I packed but really haven't! That's about all I have to report at the moment. The pictures here are mostly from village visits and one out my building window.