Ira Weise

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Costs Per Month

Rent at Internet Cafe at 15 rupees per hour...........................1050
Timings: 2-6 PM, four days a week, 4.2 weeks
Printed Materials, Maps to internet cafe
50 copies a day @.8 ruppee by 22 days....................................800

Repay RS 6000 scanner & webcam cost over 12.....................500
months (less if internet cafe already has scanner)
Total Monthly Costs.................................................................2350

Monthly Revenue

Number of hires through babajob.com....................................40
Mentor fees................................................................................8000
Connecting fees for 20% of the hirings...................................800
Mentor could phone employers who post jobs
to establish a relationship with them. Mentor
could go door to door to find employers as
well as watchmen who could refer job seekers.

Total Revenue............................................................................8800

Net Income................................................................................6450

Goodwill International had a wonderful celebration of the launch of their new semester of training classes. In addition to songs and a speaker, there were booths which sold some of the handicrafts created by the students. Alphonse Jemonie, the Director, asked Sherry to cut the ribbon on one of the booths. After the ceremony, the students surrounded both Sherry and me and asked us questions about our lives.

I really love going to Goodwill International's office in Viveknagar. In the photo below you can see one of our signs on their entrance gate, and some of the regular "visitors." Goodwill teaches about 100 low income students computers, metal work, and tailoring. The vast majority of their students find employment after their studies. I'm very impressed by the wide array of students who take advantage of their services. They have students from all over India, who speak a dozen languages. Kannada and Tamil, followed by English, are the main languages they communicate with.

Last Wednesday morning we were awoken at 4:30 AM by marching bands and fireworks. We got dressed, grabbed a camera, and went outside to join the festivities. It was the Hindu holiday of Ramanavami which commemorates the birthday of Rama, one of the heroes of the Ramayana, which is an epic Hindu poem like Homer’s Odyssey. .The holiday is celebrated by parades consisting of floats, marching bands (both organized with uniforms, and more impromptu) and lots fireworks. They favor the cherry bomb type, which require that you plug your ears when you see one of them being placed and lit in the middle of the street. We don’t know why the parade takes place in the middle of the night, but it may be the only time that the police will allow it, since otherwise the parade could totally disrupt the flow of traffic. We live in a five story building on a wider street (which is an arterial) so the floats were restricted to the smaller lanes through the poorer neighborhoods, which are only a few hundred feet from our residence. There is little effective zoning here, so although we live in a very expensive apartment, two blocks away are single story buildings without running water. There are lots of cows and goats in our neighborhood as well. Many of our neighbors along with their children were standing on the side of the streets watching the parade.

The floats are built on wooden wagons, which are hand pulled, and are decorated with millions of flowers (just like the Rose Bowl Parade). There are swarms of wasps and bees around each of the floats. In the middle of each float is an enclosed “pooja” or shrine. Worshippers carry a round metal tray with offerings such as coconuts, bananas and flowers. Inside the shrine a priest has some holy oil and candles, and each supplicant lights his or her candle from the priest’s candle. To enhance the visibility of the float each one is accompanied by a gas powered generator on wheels which powers the powerful halogen lights which are mounted on sticks which stick out a few feet from the edge of the float frame. The floats are about twenty feet tall, while all the electric and phone wires are from 16-22 feet tall. Men accompany each float carrying tall bamboo poles with a cross piece of bamboo on the top. They use these poles to lift the wires out of the way as the float passes underneath,

The bands play local instruments, although I did see a few tenor saxophones as well. As in New Orleans, a lot of the young men marchers drink alcohol and dance to the driving drum beat as they march in the parade. There also were several “fire eaters.” Young men walk around with plastic liter bottles filled with kerosene, and cigarette lighters. They take a swig of kerosene, flick the lighter as they spit out the kerosene, and you get a human flame thrower.

For some reason this feels like Alice in Wonderland.