ere ere pau sa, tu la deto pai sa (come come rain, I give you money)

I have been in India 8 weeks now. I finally understand the Indian idea of working hard.
A hard day work can look like getting up around 7 am, make chai, prepare dinner, eat something, leave the house to go to work around 10, start work at 11, have your tiffin (dinner brought from home) between 1 and 2 pm and finish at 4pm. Go back home, rest for an hour, cook dinner and sleep. It is possible that the women work harder than the men..

To me this looks more like a day of in the Netherlands. I have the feeling that even on my day of I was able to produce more work than the people do here while working hard. I have to bare in mind though that the temperature here is quite high in dry seasons and during the monsoon the humidity is, I guess, far above 70%. To sweat you don’t have to do anything, just have a bath and try to dry yourself.. So everything is adjusted to this climate and in a hot climate you take it easy and your biggest worry is to drink enough.

My problem has been that I was still moving on NL speed. Now I have not that much that I can do by myself. I rely on other people now to get the things done that I want done, and now I seem to have a lot of time to do nothing. Or even when I am doing something, it feels like I am not doing much. I wonder what the impact of this laid back, easy going, all the time in the world approach will have when I get back. ..

I have to tell you, I did see 3 tigers last week, when I was on Jungle Round. Very nice looking and one of the last chances to see them, because now everything starts to be green ad get leaves, grass grows, water stays in the waterholes inside the forest and the tigers will not come out during the day anymore.

This morning I worked hard, joining a jungle round on foot. Every morning this is done. Nanauri goes in the forest with another guy (always 2 to be safe) and they check for pugmarks of tigers and leopards. Also they check if there have been any poachers or other strange markings. After a walk of 2 hours we got back this morning and the work was done. Of both, leopard and tiger we found a pugmark and made a drawing with the exact location of where it was found. Can you imagine this being your job??!!

Oh yeah, before I forget. I am working on my assignments too. I have 1 assignment for the Forest Department to do problem inventory, 1 assignment to find out about how people feel about moving out of Tadoba and 1 assignment to get a good view of the positive effect of the SCF handicraft project on the use of the forest. The first one I changed in the second one, because the FD did not want me to do anything really and I thought the 2nd one would be interesting. Now the FD wants me to stick to my original plan, so back to nr 1 and the 3rd one I decided on after I was told that the second one would be almost impossible (permit, work, rain ,etc)

Further the monsoon period has started. Some funny red creatures, local name gosei, are the sign for the start of this time in the year. Don’t worry that there hasn’t been that much rain yet, it will come. Till now most rain has fallen during the nights. I am happy with that, because then I can do thing in daytime. The humidity is the problem though, if it rains a bit more the temperature will drop and the humidity should be a lot less. I am so looking forward to that…

July start visiting schools and doing my problem inventory in the villages in and around Tadoba I hope. Still waiting for permission on paper to go around by bike…