March 2, 2024

9/10ths of the way

Entering the final week of the GCIL program, my days now mostly consist of sitting in the third floor conference room working on my group’s final project. Putting in long, sometimes tedious, hours with the rest of my Sensing Local group, I find myself missing any day where we got to go outside. However, I am also excited to see the idea we have had for this whole program start to get some legs and come together. Yesterday and the night before, Lucy and I worked on designing the map and interface for our walkability app prototype. I woke up with my eyes sore from how intently I had been staring at the screen of my iPad while I worked on our map, but motivated to finish the prototype we were putting together.

During these long hours, I have also found myself reflecting back on so many moments that I hope I don’t forget in the coming years. I think about the hours we spent on the bus at the start of the program, our weekend trips that inevitably left half the program sick, hours spent playing golf and other card games, riding in autos, and my favorite lentil dish I tried here, dal makhani.

With that, off the top of my head, here is just the start of some of the memories I hope I don’t forget in the coming years:

-First, street cows. Somehow in all my preparation to not be surprised by India, I didn’t factor in seeing a brown, well-looked-after cow standing peacefully on the corner of a busy street on the way to Cubbon Park during the scavenger hunt on our first day
-A young girl in the slum who, during the course of our visit, changed from her school uniform into a red Kurta embroidered with little mirrors with matching pants. She watched us with a quiet intensity and while shy, when she was pushed forward by some of the women in the community, spoke standing tall to tell us her name and that she wanted to become a doctor
-At the Zostel in Hampi, playing call and response with the pet parrot and Frodo the bulldog trying desperately to eat the beans off our breakfast plates
-Laying in Nana or Quinn’s hammocks on the roof of UTC in the mornings watching endless numbers of birds circle higher and higher until they disappear into the blue sky
-Sitting on the top roof at UTC, watching the sunset with large fruit bats, hawks, and various other birds and bats flying close around us.
-Beach gymnastics and body surfing in Goa and Pondicherry
-Eating all of Sensing Local’s cookies and making cups of coffee in the kitchen at the office in between meetings with Naveen and Ankit, and working on our presentation and audit
-My initial frustration with creating a lake audit for Sensing Local at some point turning to interest as I got the sudden urge to jump out of the auto every time I drove by a lake and do an audit
-Spending hours throughout the program lying in the grass at Cubbon Park, fighting bugs, watching parrots, and occasionally reading a page of the book I brought.

While for the most part the next week is going to be filled with more long hours of work finishing our GCIL project, I am looking forward to going to my first cricket match on Sunday. My goal is to understand one rule of the game by the time I leave India, which is proving to be one of the biggest challenges GCIL has posed for me this far.

For all future students, this really is a bootcamp camp like Julian described it and with anything, you will get what you put into it.

I am excited to go back to Seattle and see my friends and family, but I also know I am going to miss Bangalore in more ways than I realize now. In many ways, I wish I could switch places with past me and do these three months of “school” all over again.

By Fiona