I'm in!

On the living front:
I spent my first night at the apartment last night and it felt nice waking up in my own place! My first night, I was inaugurated with two short power outages, a ton of bugs flying in right when I opened the door and turned on the lights, and a clean place. Power outages happen pretty often here, but in my experience so far, most of them have only lasted 10-15 minutes. The longest one I've experienced was several hours during the day, but most are short. I am SO glad I spent the time over the weekend cleaning up. It helps a lot with settling in. Not to mention my roommates helped move all my luggage over too, which was so nice of them. And one of them helped me clean on Sunday which was awesome.

The bugs are relentless here! I'm starting to get used to them, as long as they're not on my stuff or me:) Remember the ants I posted about earlier? Well after killing some of the bugs that flew in (which landed on the floor), the ants went crazy all over them. At first I was kinda grossed out and then I was kind of amazed. I watched them for a good 10-15 minutes doing their work. They're busy little suckers. They remind me of really stressed out people running around with a million things to do. By morning, the bugs that flew in that I killed were gone as were the ants. I assume the ants must have carried them away somewhere, outside I hope :)

A couple of hours after I moved in, I heard a knock on my door. Of course it was dark outside and I'm all by myself, so I jumped when I heard the knock and contemplated for a few minutes whether I should open it because I didn't know who it would be. The second bedroom looks out to the front porch and I don't have a seeing eye hole on my front door, so I use the second bedroom as a way of scoping out people. I saw some kids and thought it was the girls from upstairs, but it turns out it was my neighbors from a couple houses down. It was a mother, her 3 kids, and her niece. They came over to introduce themselves to me, which I thought was so nice and comforting. Apparently her kids had told her about the new foreigner who moved into the house down the road and they told her that they should all come over. The kids are the real eyes of this neighborhood :) I invited them in and we chatted for a bit. The kids were so curious and cute and the mother was really nice, open, and friendly. It was a good feeling for the first night.

I can hear the family upstairs most of the time. Mostly muffled voices and them walking around or moving chairs, but I like it. The girls from upstairs came down and introduced themselves to me over the weekend when I was cleaning. I'm a deep sleeper and hearing the noises is comforting because I know I'm not completely alone.

Today I purchased some pots and pans, so now I can start trying to cook some Kerala dishes! One of my favorites is this breakfast item called kulkutta (pronounced, cool-cutta). I've probably butchered the spelling. They're steamed rice balls with coconut and sugar inside. They're made with rice powder mixed with boiled water and some salt and ground coconut and sugar. You roll it all up into a ball and then steam them. They are soooo good. Love them! The ground coconut here in general is really good and is mixed with a lot of different dishes.

There are little noises I have to get used to and like most houses here I imagine, there are sometimes little gecko type lizards that crawl along the walls. It's kinda fun to see them scurry along. Sometimes I see two of them scurrying along together.

I also woke up this morning to a crying baby kitten trapped in the work area room. The room is just outside the kitchen where a washer would be if there was a washer. I'm not sure how the kitten got in there. Perhaps it snuck in during the weekend when I was cleaning because I had the back door open. If that's the case, it was there for about a day:( I used a broom to direct it out the back door. Poor thing was so scared, but I didn't want to pick it up because a lot of the cats here are feral and carry a lot of diseases.

On the work front:
Things are going really well! I very much enjoy this project! It's complicated, challenging and fun. There are so many components to this project. Most of the time I feel like I'm flying by the seat of my pants and figuring out things as I go. The good thing is that I have a fairly good understanding of the basic framework so the planner in me helps set all the deadlines and then I just run with it :) I conducted my first focus group today with a group of about 23 micro loan borrowers, all women, at a branch about an hour away from the office. On the way, we wound through many different neighborhood areas in Thrissur and passed by some rice fields. There are a lot of small streets here and there are not always street signs available so people give directions by using landmarks. Perfect for me because I'm a landmark person :) When driving to different places and you don't know where you're going, the trick is to start heading in the direction of the place and then stop every so often and ask people along the way where the place is. You get there eventually and this generally proves to be the best method because some times places can be pretty hidden. I also saw a sign on the way that said "EFC" which stands for Eastern Fried Chicken. Ha! The KFC of the east! To all my KFC lovers out there, I've found your spicy counterpart.

When we got to the office, which was across the street from this place I saw was giving karate lessons, it was loan disbursement day so a lot of the women were there ready to collect their loan disbursements. (I wish my office wasn't so far away because I think it would be fun to take some karate lessons.) A co-worker came with me to help translate and I had all my sample products with me. We laid them out on the table and while some women were getting their disbursements others were sitting and listening to our presentation and answering the focus group questions. It was really fun and interesting. I got a lot of good initial insight about the clean energy products we are wanting to distribute and create loan products for. I also learned a bit more about the operations of the organization which was great! I will be conducting focus groups for the rest of the week in Kerala and I will also get to go out in the field and meet the different self-help groups with the field officers which will also be really interesting. Next week, I will do the same thing up in Central India (a totally different world from Kerala is what many people have told me).

I had a really embarrassing moment last week when I presented my first management meeting in front of all of the area managers of Kerala. I was wearing a v-neck t-shirt (one of my favorites) and I had no idea that it was too low for Indian standards until the next day when one of my roommates made a comment! When my roommate told me, at first, I thought, "Ok. No problem. No more low cut shirts" and then I came to realize that it was the same day of the meeting AND they posted pictures of the meeting to commemorate the launch of the Micro Energy Program. I was mortified! Here's the foreigner that doesn't know any better. I ran into my roommates room that night and showed them the pictures. We all just laughed about it because what's done is done, just don't do it again :) I told them that they HAVE to tell me next time I do something embarrassing BEFORE I go out in public:)

From then on, I've learned that a big part of Indian style dress for women means covering up your breast area because people at the office have even started commenting that they like that I've started wearing Indian style clothing. My roommate also told me that people from the office have also come up to her to ask her if she said something to me, which she did thankfully :) Anyway, we had a good laugh about it together because I told her I got some comments too. They're actually still the same clothes I brought, but instead of wearing the scarf around my neck where the two sides hang down in front, I wear my scarf so that the two sides hang down the back and the part that dips down in front covers the top half of me. Nothing too tight and nothing that reveals too much. Dressing the local way is a way of gaining respect here, so I am VERY glad that I made this mistake early on before meeting the self-help groups. I wonder what other embarrassing things I'm doing :)