deaf alphabet…

This is Ravi, he is an ex-orphanage kid. Many years ago he ran away from Delhi, jumped on a train and ended up on the streets of Vijayawada. He was eventually picked up on the train station where  he was living rough by the orphanage and has been with them ever since. He has been teaching me to sign as he is one of the most sociable people i have ever met and also he is deaf. If you want to learn the alphabet you can follow him signing below. It is the English version as taught in the deaf schools here in India.

I am struggling to learn some Telugu (the main language of Andhra Pradesh) so i was not keen to start learning another language…but Ravi kind of pushed me into it and in doing so has done me a huge favour as i have found it incredibly useful so far.

off again…

andhra sunrise

alas…am no longer in India, just getting through the mountain of material i accumulated there (so there will be more India posts a bit later), was relieved to leave with minimal fuss unlike last year where the whole school turned up to wave me off leaving me profoundly moved and profoundly embarrassed…not that i got off scot-free…

andhra sunrise

I managed to keep it together to say goodbye to my house mates, the small girls of luisiana home (just)…but then back at the main office, the Italians (visiting dentists and paediatricians) made such a fuss and then my older students turned up to say goodbye and of course i started to howl…which was a cue for each of the Italians to have their photo individually taken with me all red and tear stained and with me shouting “stop stop, this is a nightmare!!!!” in italian, and them snapping away…meanwhile one of the Indian staffers looked on singing “smile…though your heart is breaking…” It was indeed bitter sweet…pretty funny, even i was laughing in between sobs…Then just to pile things on a bit more, they sent some of the little girls in the car with me to see me off at the airport. One turned to me and said “don’t cry Marga” and i was off again…arghhh

goodbye beautiful Indian moon

in search of the red barber…

…ah the red barber, i had such plans for him… i wanted to interview him, maybe even make a small documentary…but i was always very busy with the kids and it was hard to get someone to come with me to translate…

Finally, near the end of my stay i managed to arrange for Dalayya to come with me to speak with him. As luck would have it, the very moment we arrived, a very loud publicity car parked in front of his shed booming a commercial about pesticides…the car remained as did the soundtrack drowning out all possibilities of conversation. I have to say that in the 6 weeks i was in Buddavaram i never saw this car…except for this one time when i was trying to record an interview…oh well…

things i did manage to ascertain:

being a barber is a family trait handed down to him
the business is his
he decorated the shed himself
he likes red
his brother is also a barber
it costs 20 – 30 rupees for a haircut
it costs 10 rupees for a shave

the red barber’s brother – also a barber

As a thank you for all the times i photographed him and his patience and good humour, i took him a copy of one of the photos. Next time i passed i saw he had pinned it up. I was chuffed, you can see it in the photo below on the right…

See my flickr page for full red barber set so far

buried in a rice field…

Early morning walk discovery…a Christian cemetery in the middle of the rice fields.

It looks ancient but judging by the dates on the graves it is not. Its just that the humidity seems to cause everything to decay that much sooner…appropriate in this setting i guess. Had to traverse one of the many “toilet” paths to get here…not nice

drying rice on the graves…

photoshop boys…

All the work the boys do on photoshop is quite vocational around here. Apparently it is big business in this part of India to create special photo albums for people with tinted/manipulated colours and effects added. I gave them some of my photos and told them to do whatever they wanted with them:

my photo above: and now below Satyanarayana’s version:

again above is my photo and below Raja’s version is below:

above is my photo and Sunny’s version is below: