Jhabua

It has been a bit of a whirlwind these few days!
Friday night I left Delhi at 10 pm to take a 12-hour overnight train (about $22 each way) to southwestern Madhya Pradesh (a state south of here, where we will be conducting our nutrition study in the coming weeks) with Fabian to spend the weekend in Jhabua. About a decade ago, Fabian and his father built a free, English boarding school in Jhabua for the local children, and he takes the train there and back every weekend from Delhi to check in on the school. Caitlin and Julia, who work with our partner, Real Medicine Foundation, also live there, so we all lived together in one house for the weekend.
First of all, the train is quite an experience. The only sleeper cars I knew were the trains in Europe, and these are quite different - again, the rule of 'maximizing space.' The beds flip up/down kind of like shelving units, and it's a bit squishy - no room for personal bubbles! They give you clean-looking sheets to sleep with, and you can order a little meal on the train. There's also plenty of vendors who go up and down the aisles selling junk food, chai tea, and toys. I can't complain because we were in the more 'luxury' cabins with AC; apparently in the non-AC sleepers, there are even people sleeping in the aisles. And despite my longtime fear of the Indian train toilet (even before I knew I would come to India), the toilet situation wasn't all that bad (I noticed on my way home, since I held it for 12 hours on the way there).
We arrived at Mevhnagar station at 10 am on Saturday. I could tell we would be the only foreigners in the region. People were quite interested in watching us move about, and I was interested in watching them walk their goats around on ropes!
We got into a Jeep and rode the bumpy roads for 25 minutes to get to the house in Jhabua. I soon came face-to-face with my lifelong nemesis - the squat toilet. As my only option for the weekend, we quickly made peace!
We got a bit of work done, went to the market, and visited Fabian's school where the kids will be piling in for the new school year this week. What a wonderful place for the kids! I hope they fulfill the dream of getting a pet elephant for the kids!
Saturday night, we had a German feast (since Fabian and Julia are both German) of imported Mini Wini's, potato salad, and pancakes!
Sunday, we discussed some more work issues, then had a great lunch at one of three restaurants in Jhabua. We checked in again at the school to check on preparations for the arrival of the kids, then they showed me the Maharaja's former palace in Jhabua. It's quite run-down now, having been abandoned for quite a while, but figure they could turn it into a fancy hotel with a million dollars or so!
They also took me to the Jhabua district hospital, which used to be a dump but has really cleaned up in the past year. Now it houses a state-of-the-art UNICEF-sponsored special newborn care unit. Unlike in the US, you can walk in and out of the different wards without showing ID or explaining why you're there. We also visited the pediatrics ward and nutrition rehabilitation center so I can get an idea of how malnutrition cases are referred in the field.
Fabian and I hopped back into the Jeep to go back to the train station for our 4 pm train back to Delhi (and I finally spotted my first child taking a poo in public! Yikes - don't walk through a field without watching your step). Seems I can sleep really easily in a moving vehicle, even if it's cramped (a whole family can buy a ticket for 1 seat and squeeze on one cot, I noticed).
Getting back to Delhi at 4 am was also an interesting experience, just taking a rickshaw back to my apartment in the middle of the night (don't worry - I went with Fabian's trusted driver). It's of course super quiet, and homeless people dot the sidewalks, sleeping. Most of them were sleeping on the narrow island between two-way traffic. I haven't quite gotten used to all the smells of trains and traffic and streets, but taking the auto home from the train station I suddenly got a whiff of an especially terrible stench. I thought we must be going past open sewage, but in the dark I started making out little shanty roofs of a slum. I asked about this today and indeed there is a big slum next to awful open sewage.
Had a couple hours of sleep and then a long day at the office today to prepare a grant proposal and get ready for tomorrow's meeting. Tomorrow, Fabian and I fly out at 5:40 am to go to the city of Bhopal in central Madhya Pradesh to meet with state government representatives and discuss our nutrition pilot study, set to take off in a few weeks. A quick turnaround - we'll fly home that evening and get back to Delhi at 11 pm.

Will report on Bhopal later this week!
:)