Sitting in this curtained internet cafe, I have realized that this is the first time in a long time that I have been alone. Which really speaks to the insanely powerful community I've been living in at Logxiksha in Amu Amar, which is outside of Bhadesar, which is outside of Chittorghar, which is about six hours outside of Jaipur. Which means more or less the middle of a green desert nowhere. The people here really laugh belly laughs and offer more dahl all the time...the first night I was here, about twenty of us sat around a cow dung fire cooking special Rajasthani balls of dough. Khemraj, our age-old Marxist director, believes very strongly that the professionalism of modern NGOs distances them from the real spirit of human rights activism. Only recently Karun applied to recieve foreign funding, but most people seem reluctant to embrace the changes it would imply. There are maybe eight or ten of us that all live in our little office and eat out of our little garden. Finally I'm in a place where it's acceptable not to bathe every day. Every morning I go running through gorgeous countryside to watch the sun rise over a lake next to a temple with a banyan tree that's more than two hundred year old. The priest there has one of the best moustaches I've seen and greets me with a jolly "thank you! thank you!" each morning. The guys here are a lot of fun; they're the first Indian guys I've gotten to be friends with without feeling threatened at all--because they're all twenty two and married with two kids. Shyamji, a member of the Bhil tribe, was a bonded laborer with his father from the time he was twelve until he was fifteen when he decided to run away. After his parents died, when he was seventeen, his three sisters and a grandmother came to live with him. Recently his wife (who he married when he was about four) came to live with him, so this twenty year old guy is providing for six people all by himself. Sadly enough, even they, the human rights defenders, see their wives as cooking-cleaning-child-rearing physical entities, and would much rather hang out with us at the office from dawn til dusk instead of spending time with their families.

The only real issue is that they all speak Hindi. The whole "let's laugh at Sandy because she said/did something that didnt make sense" schtick has lost its novelty for me and the fact that my relationships can't really progress much further is trying my patience. I've been living more or less cheek by jowl with a little dude from Assam who speaks English. He is hilariously eager and takes himself and his work extremely seriously. The other day he took me out to 'conduct a case study' of one community where we'd helped with a land dispute case. The Bhil tribe had been living on one piece of land for more than a thousand years, and when the upper caste tribes decided to construct a road for their newly acquired cars, they deliberately plowed through Bhil houses when it was clearly much easier to go around. It was an absolutely absurd site to behold--it was like someone had given a bully a bulldozer. Anyway, it seemed to lend the village leaders a sense of accomplishment and legitimacy to have a white girl following them around with a digital camera and a notebook.

In a few weeks we're going to camp out on the lawn of the Rajasthani parliament in the hopes that they will surrender welfare funding they promised to our district, and after that we're going on a five day camel-cart tour of the area giving lectures on different human rights issues. I'm hoping to be able to find funding for them to start a girl's school here and hopefully Assam and I will get this youth group under way. This bumpy-motorcycle-ride lifestyle really suits me--I could easily be addicted...a dog I have christened Jordan follows me up the mountains on my rugged moonlight searches for cell phone service. And Pakal fusses over me the way Ashley doe back home, dressing me up with nose rings and Mendhi and jewelry that doesn't make any sense to me.

During my night in Chittorghar at the main Prayas office I made friends with Vikash and Prasand Ajit, who stole my heart under the pretense of teaching me Hindi. Prasand is the geography major son of two Rajasthani human rights activists, and can do a mean impression of Shakira. They tried to come to Bhadesar, but sadly they coudn't fit on Khemraj's motorcycle with me and my embarassingly enormous backpack.

I miss home a lot. I have more or less lost any real sense of purpose or direction in life, and certain traumas remain unresolved...I can see how she dumped her boyfriend afer returning from India...we all need so much less than we think we do. It's sad, but freeing, I guess. I don't know. I have to pee. Where is the bathroom? Does it even exist? Where the hell am I?