Week 1 thoughts

This experience has been quite overwhelming, especially because I have been doing all of this alone. As each day passes I am feeling more comfortable. I just don't know if I can take three months over here. 

I am really glad I am getting exposed to all of this. It is opening my mind to things I could have never conceived in America. It is also allowing me to appreciate to the nth degree how fortunate I am to live in America. I know there may be problems in America but after coming to India I feel so lucky to be an American citizen. This is one of the major things I want to preach when I get back home- how awesome America is!!!

Here are some quick thoughts I extemporized after coming back to my dorm tonight. I hope it gives you an idea of what I am seeing and dealing with.

I was out kicking a soccer ball around today to try and draw some attention to myself (I wanted a buddy to play soccer with). I just got a bunch of weird looks (I can understand why…a random kid kicking a soccer ball by himself in the middle of a giant field??). I then proceeded to go on a run in my yellow running shoes. I began stretching by the side of the road and if you didn't know what everyone was looking at you would have assumed they just saw an alien...... and I was that alien. It was like they had never seen anyone stretch before…. or they were just looking at my weird running outfit and shoes (a good possibility). 

Another interesting observation- I went running way out in the agriculture fields. Out there as it was getting dark there were two to three women running around each field with metal drums yelling. They weren't doing this because they were crazy, they were doing it because they were scaring the birds away. They don’t do this at night. Canons take their place at night. During the night you can hear cannon like sounds come from all the agriculture fields. In many of the fields they put small explosive cannons to scare animals away from the crops. Animal depredation adds a margin of error when doing crop research; Cannons and scary people are the best and most cost effective way of preventing this.

Also, this is a high security place I am learning. You can't take a wee without someone noticing. There are guards at about every corner on the campus (the whole campus is 3,000 acres, but the main portion is about 300) and you have to have a security badge on you at all times. At least I know I am safe. I am feeling much more comfortable here but I still need to find people to hang out with. The walls in my room aren't as interactive as I had originally hoped. I guess I have to go make some real friends.

I found out my project today. I am coming to find out they are training me to become a geneticist and vegetable plant breeder. I am getting crash courses in Mendelian genetics and I was shown a crop of mungbean in a quarantine green house that is supposed to be the crop that I will be working with. I will be cross breeding two different varieties of mungbean with the hopes of creating a Bruchid (Beetle insect) resistant plant that can tolerate a diverse array of environments. 

The one thing that is extremely neat about all of this is I am at the crop research mecca. This is where all the new and innovative crop technology and plants come from. This campus along with some others (around the world) are directly responsible for the green revolution that happened in the late 60's and 70's (exponentially increasing our capacity to produce large quantities of nutritional food). It is amazing the types of ideas and work they do. That is the one thing I love about this place....... I just hope I can make some friends that I don't have to talk with, via neolithic sign language.

I hope that gave you an idea of what is going on in my head and what I am experiencing.