Oriya Hospitality

While in Orissa, I vacillate between feeling like a celebrity and feeling like a leper.

First, leprosy. So me and my colleagues get stared at. A lot. Pretty much constantly. Long, intense, unblinking stares. This is not too surprising. Bhubansewar isn't the type of place that gets a lot of foreign visitors. People also take pictures of us. Also fair. I recognize this might be the last time that some of the students and staff on campus will see anyone who looks like us. Yesterday, we showed up at the canteen during prime time lunch hour and had a seat at a crowded table. Almost immediately our neighbors all got up and found other places to sit. Now that hurt a little.

The celeb factor manifests itself more in our interactions with the staff on campus. I feel like they must have been specifically told to do whatever it takes to make us comfortable (much to our discomfort). Here are some examples.
1. We are brought tea and biscuits to our office twice a day, every day.
2. We are the only rooms in the girls hostel that have air conditioning. They installed them right before we arrived for our benefit.
3. When my eye was swollen and I went to the canteen to get some ice, they told me it would take one hour. I said no problem, figuring that they didn't have any made. Five minutes later, I was delivered a plate of ice, and it was clear that someone must of taken an ice pick to some poor, unsuspecting freezer just to fulfill my request.
4. One of my colleagues isn't very comfortable with using squat toilets and mentioned this to our supervisor. The next day, plumbers were pouring cement into one of the squat toilets in the shared bathroom of our hostel so as to put in a standard western one instead.

So it should have come to no surprise to us that the campus tour that our supervisor arranged wouldn't be the typical walk around the grounds type of affair. Three staff members picked us up in this:


Move over Jon and Kate.

The most interesting part of the tour was seeing the tribal school that the university hosts. Ten thousand children from scheduled tribes (indigenous tribes that have been classified by the government as economically disadvantaged) attend this boarding school for free. And free really means free : free tuition, free housing, free food, free uniforms, free supplies. From the outside the classrooms seemed nice. However, the living quarters were pretty cramped with several rows of bunk beds filling the room. For some reason, there were a few kids still there even though it's the summer. A few of them were playing in the playground.


And here are a couple of pictures of the ridiculously beautiful place where I work.