Namaste, friends and strangers!

Well, it has been a pleasant (if increasingly chilly!) week. I feel a little ridiculous complaining about the cold in India, but without the luxury of indoor heating it can get positively frosty inside the marble-floored Ganga Mahal. Although everyone here expects us to Canadians to laugh in the face of Indian winter, I delight in joining the camaraderie of complaining about the cold, offering my, “Bahot tanda he, na?” to which my colleagues heartily agree (while attempting to stifle their laughter at my Hindi).

This Wednesday, I ventured with Neetu (one of the SEP staff) to Katesar, the community across the Ganga in which WLC runs many of its programs. The purpose of my visit was to conduct more sewing machine loan interviews, but while there I also took the opportunity to sit in on a Balwadi (children’s literacy class), an ALC (adult literacy class), and an SHG (Self Help Group) meeting. I always enjoy these types of trips to WLC project areas, because they afford me the opportunity to observe a variety of different WLC programs all at once. In this way, I’m able to gain a holistic understanding of how the organization operates in any given community (and to top it all off, I can scarcely enter any community without being invited into countless homes to be served biscuits and chai).

Indeed, many WLC programs are interconnected—often when one family member gets involved with one aspect of the organization, other family members will become interested in joining other programs. Today, for instance, I had the pleasure of encountering the mother of Pooja, one of my English students, at the Beauty Parlour in Tulsi Kunj. Maduri, Pooja’s mother, initially connected herself and her family to WLC by joining an ALC. Her three children are now all on WLC scholarships, and all three attend the Tulsi Kunj Tutorial Program daily. Now, Maduri is a student at Tulsi Kunj’s Beauty Parlour Program.

The Beauty Parlour Program is one of SEP’s income generation initiatives for graduates of ALC’s. There, students learn how to perform manicures, pedicures, massages, and all manner of other beautifying and pampering procedures, in the hopes that they will eventually be employed by beauty parlours, thus placing them in a position of financial independence. Lately, I have been spending lots of time at the beauty parlour in order to create an easy-to-use handbook of all the Beauty Parlour’s procedures. Hanging out at the Beauty Parlour is always great fun, as the girls there (most of whom are in their late teens and early twenties) are always eager to chat with me (in a mixture of broken Hindi and broken English), place bindis on my forehead, and repeatedly ask me whether I am married.

All in all, a good week. I look forward to seeing how the Banarasi winter unfolds.