Ninja vs Penguin

Penguin August 28th, 2007

90%
After some antibiotics and a good amount of sleep, I’m back at 90%. Still a little tired and weak from lack of food and nutrition, but I’m ready to work again.

I grabbed my moleskin and my pen to journal. Before I could even get through the first sentence, my pen went dry. Fantastic. A writer without a pen. Useless.

Because of the D train, both Wenhai and I had light breakfasts. Bananas, apples, some bread with a little bit of really sweet jam. Not filling, but enough to hold us over.

While we were waiting for the driver to come pick us up, we played a little Rummy 500 and I won, 210 to 70.

Saurees
After dropping us off, the girls went to the market to buy some saurees. They had no idea how to put them on, so they had some one at the office show them.

Saurees consist of three pieces. There’s a blouse that covers the top and a slip to cover the bottom. The actual sauree wraps around the body.

To put the sauree on, first you tuck one end into the slip, and tuck it all the way around, counter-clockwise. Then you leave a good amount of slack before throwing the remaining fabric over your left shoulder. With the slack, you fold about 4-6 pleats, depending on the length of the sauree, and then you tuck this in. Again, with the fabric over your shoulder, you make about 3-5 pleats and then pin it to you shoulder. The entire process is fairly complicated. When they asked how they went to the bathroom, they were told that they had to take it off.

Morning Training
Every morning, we would be training some of the office staff and some of the field officers on how to use Excel. This morning, we had a lot of interested parties, so some of us had two students per computer.

The student I got was pretty computer illiterate. I tried explaining the cells in Excel to him, and that took a good several minutes. When I tried to teach him how to add two cells together, he didn’t know how to enter “+”. This prompted me to try and teach him about the keyboard. If he didn’t even know the basics of typing or using the computer, how could he be expected to learn Excel?

The whole concept of shift was extremely hard to explain when all you can do is point and type domonstrations. Luckily, one of the staff came over and explained the concept to him. As an exercise, I had him type out two paragraphs, not much longer than this one. It took him almost an hour, hunting and pecking the keys.

Finally, I was able to teach him a little bit about the mouse. How to click, right click, and double click. He was okay with the single clicks, but when it came to the double clicks, he kept holding the button a little too long. It seems to be a trend among first time computer users to not fully understand double click. Or at least they have trouble executing it well. He didn’t fully get it, but he made a lot of progress, and I was really proud of him.

After training, Michelle and Alice went to some more villages to take pictures and write down stories for the website. As they gathered more and more material, the site was growing larger. I didn’t know if they had PHP running on their web servers, so the safest route was to make static pages for everything. Hopefully, we’ll still be able to finish everything.

The rest of us tried to figure out what we could do back at the office. Karen suggested that she sit down with Sanjaya to go over the reports. Emmy was confused. She thought, based on the conversation that we had yesterday, that there was no point. It took some time trying to explain how the database, software, and reports were seperate in some ways, and dependant on each other in other ways. I don’t think she fully understood, and it might have been the way that I was explaining it. Without knowing where the disconnect was happening, it was hard to try and rephrase it.

I think part of it comes from our backgrounds. As an accountant, all Emmy cares about is the reports. From her point of view, the reports should dictate the way the software is made. In some sense, this is true, but there’s not much we can do about that now because the software has already been developed. She viewed the reports that needed to be generated as sufficient requirements for software developement. The reports were just a subset of the overall requirements for the software, which were never given to Technosoft.

Trying to feel useful, Karen started looking at some of the reports and the Crystal Reports book that she brought, but without Sanjaya, it would be hard to try and figure out what was working, what wasn’t, and what the report was supposed to be showing. Still she did her best to keep occupied.

Wenhai sat down with Sanjaya to work on some Excel stuff. But they were extremely hampered by the electricity constantly going in and out. Eventually, they were able to burn the file they were working on and move to one of the laptops.

Emmy went outside to with one of the staff to walk around and look at some of the local shops.

There wasn’t much I could do, so I just did my best to occupy my time waiting for lunch. Solitaire, hearts, spider solitaire, typing of the dead, minesweeper, all good distractions. I wish there was something I could do.

Coming to America Early
There had been some talk before we left about leaving India a day early. Emmy, Karen, and I are all on the same flight. Or original departure was going to be Sep 1, 8:30 PM. We weren’t planning on doing any work on Friday anyway, so we thought it might be better to leave a little bit earlier. Emmy had stuff she had to do with her house. And with classes starting, I didn’t want to be too jetlagged.

For the two of us, it’d be pretty easy, because we had direct flights. But Karen had to connect with Continental to get back to Chicago. Being in a third world country, without access to a lot of the information, it would be pretty hard for her get her flight changed.

If we’re going to do this, we’re going to have to do it soon. We only have about a week left.

Something Different for Lunch?
The girls got back pretty late, but they brought food, which made it okay. They had stopped by a new place to get some south Indian food. They had a bag of the sour manto, two bags of sauce, and some rolled fried bread, which seemed to have some veggies in it.

In addition to the southern fair, we got sound chicken clear soup, fried rice, and fried noodles from Penguin. The lunch was one of the lighter ones we’ve had.

Interviews
After lunch, the Michelle and Alice typed up the stories that they had collected so far. Meanwhile, Wenhai went through Sanjaya’s Excel file, converting all the dates so that they were consistant. Some dates were in mm/dd/yyy, others were in dd/mm/yyyy, and there were even some using just yy. Excel doesn’t contain any easy function to detect this, so it was a long tedious process of going through each row and checking them against the data around them.

Karen and I took interviews of the staff. The staff were excited and scared. They weren’t used to speaking so much English, so they were really nervous. They all said that their hearts were beating real fast. Some of them also thought that they were being interviewed so that they could keep their jobs. I think this really affected their answers, because they were all glowingly positive.

Karen got most of the staff that could speak English fairly well. The subjects I had required a fair amount of translation. I couldn’t help but think back to the scene in Lost in Translation where Bob is at the shoot and the director is telling him stuff, and the interpreter reduces it to a few words.

Interviewing was a bit tough. I would ask a question and get an answer that was completely unrelated. I would ask another question. And I would get the same answer. Michelle, Alice, and Emmy had come up with the questions. I think when they were developing them, they didn’t realize that the nuances in the questions may have been lost of them. Afterwards, we were told that they thought we were asking the same question over and over. It would make sense that we were getting the same answers back.

Bengali Children’s Songs
Tomorrow, we’d all be visiting the orphanage, where they would be presenting something to us. There would be villagers from everywhere coming out to see the foreigners.

We didn’t want to just receive, so we had to come up with something that we could present to them. The options we had were, sing a song, do the body worship, or come up with something else.

We were limited, because we didn’t know what would be available to accompany us. We were pretty sure there was no guitar, so singing would have to be acapella. Not that we knew how to sing acapella. If we wanted to do the body worship, we had to figure out a way to play the song. We couldn’t rely on the laptop, because it wouldn’t be loud enough.

God is good and provided a third option. One of the staff was a Christian and said that he would teach us some songs. It turns out, it was the same guy that I had taught how to double click! Small world.

He sang one of the songs, and we were all just lost. We wouldn’t know where to begin to write it down. Hamadri took him down stairs to write it down. We were surprised when they came back with three songs. We looked at each other, unsure whether we’d be able to do it. But we vowed to do our best.

As he sang the songs, we looked at what was written on our papers. We all started searching for pens or pencils to mark up the lyrics. We had to change the romanization to something that we were hearing.

Afraid that we would lose the melody to the songs, we all grabbed our digicams and took video of him singing. There was also one song that had had motions. Luckily they were easy, but still, we wanted to do our best so we got everything on video.

It seemed like an eternity, but we were able to get the songs down to a point where it was good enough. We could continue to practice later.

Singing on the Bus
On the way back, we did our best to practice the three songs. Some were harder than others, and we kept losing the melody. But we did pretty good and I think we were able to sufficiently memorize them.

It must’ve been a sight, to see a van roll by with a bunch of foreigners singing in Bengali. At one point, a truck honked at us, and we joked that it was because of our awful singing.

Now, I can add Bengali to the languages I have successfully butchered.

Dinner, Testimonies
This was the first time that we’ve been able to have dinner together as a whole team. This whole week, Emmy was too tired to come out. And yesterday, I was too sick to come out. It was nice to sit down and fellowship as a team.

Since we had a small lunch, we ended up ordering a lot of food. Alice had a bowl of soup and chocolate ice cream. Which was hilarious because the guy asked if she wanted it together. As in, did she want the ice cream in the soup. I think he was amused by the juxtaposition of the hot soup and the cold ice cream.

During the day and along the car ride back, we all got bit by a ton of mosquitos. Wenhai had brought some White Flower Oil. It’s this Chinese medicine you put on bug bites to stop the itching. I’m not sure how it happened, but Michelle managed to knock the bottle off the table. When it hit the floor, shards from the cap flew everywhere. Luckily, the bottle was still in tact, but the cap was pretty much ineffective.

After dinner, we went around and shared about our testimonies. The trend seemed to be, that even if they went to youth group or grew up in the church, it really wasn’t until college that they found their faith. This is not to say that youth group or a youth program isn’t important in the development of their faith, but goes to show the importance of college in a person’s personal development.

Internet
Then it was off to the internet cafe to connect. While we were waiting, a young man came up to us and started asking a few questions. He asked us what we were doing, so we told him about CSS and microfinance. When I told him that I was a technical consultant, his face lit up and he offered his hand, declaring that he was an engineer too. It was hilarious that we could connect with a total stranger based purely on our career background.

I knew the internet cafe was ghetto. Of the three computers that we had tried so far, only one CD drive worked. The other two failed to read the CD. Even the one that worked, the button was missing and you had to push your finger into the hole to get the tray to eject.

It was nice to spend some time on the thread and pretend I was back in the states. I eventually got in contact with Ninja and we were able to chat over Gchat.

Humidity Kills
We got back to the apartment, and I began to unload some pictures from the CF card to my laptop. After about 30 pictures or so, the CF reader just stopped. The lights went dark and the drive couldn’t be read. I had left the CF reader out on our table, so my guess was that the humidity got to it.

I’m going to have to be more careful with my other electronics. I don’t want my iPod or my NDS to die before I get back to the states.

-Penguin

• India: Quick Update (2)
• India: Day 9 - Boom (2)
• India: Day 8 - The Lord’s Day (2)
• India: Day 7 - The Orphanage (1)
• India: Day 5 - The D Train (1)

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