A Town Called Madurai
By Olivia Hay ‘17, Lady Doak College (2017-2019)
Even a month after returning to the US and answering innumerable questions about my time abroad, I don’t even know where to start with Madurai. But perhaps, I’ll begin by saying that all in all, by the end of my fellowship Madurai felt both very close to me and very distant. After two years I’d developed a degree of comfort there. I felt a wash of familiarity come over me whenever I came back to Madurai after traveling for a while. There were restaurants where the servers knew all my favorite orders. When the college had visitors I knew where to direct them for souvenirs and could chat comfortably in a mixture of Tamil and English with the shop owners. One time I jumped in a taxi at the airport, only for the driver to remember me from a previous ride from the airport about a month prior. I was reminded then that despite being a city of 1.6 million, Madurai really was the small town that everyone believed it was.
At the same time, my struggles to improve my Tamil skills exacerbated the sense that I could never fully integrate myself into Madurai. For as well as I learned to navigate life there, it never became home to me in the same way as the city where I grew up, Portland, Oregon or even in the way that Oberlin felt like my own.
I felt this sense of closeness and distance in my work as well. In my first year I struggled to work with the student team at the ISC, who seemed mainly interested in having parties and watching movies. I had much more success planning activities and programs with more substance in my second year after a group of exuberant first year students joined the ISC. I witnessed astounding personal growth for a number of students as I supervised a group preparing for a Model United Nations conference in Chennai, worked with students who wanted to prepare sessions on taboo topics in India, and listened to their thoughtful questions and comments during a guest lecture with two Shansi alumni visiting the college. These particular students never ceased to amaze me in their capacity to see through the sometimes opaque bubble of Madurai and providing avenues for them to engage with the world was one of the highlights of the fellowship.
Spending time with some of my students at the ISC (Prathiksha and Hema left).
But for all the work I put in with my students I understood that I was operating within a social/cultural framework that at times contradicted my efforts. I witnessed the intelligence and zest of some students be continually undermined by families and community members who didn’t recognize their potential or value their perspectives, thoughts, and ambitions. I had to come to terms with the fact that for all the efforts I put in with the students at the college, the problem at hand was so much larger than anything I could hope to achieve. In one particular instance, I tried my best to give a pep talk to a student whose father had changed his mind at the last minute about her participating in a semester of study abroad. We sat together, frustrated and heartbroken.
Interestingly, I found that my closest allies in my struggle to understand my relationship with Madurai were the ones who called it home. It seemed that many residents had a profound cognitive dissonance about the city, allowing them to speak lovingly about it one minute and trash it the next. For most people I met, it was some small detail that seemed to justify their stay there, allowing them to overlook, even momentarily, the dried up river crossing through town, the open sewage, and decade long drought. I once listened to my coworker, Nirmala, complain at the end of a very long rant about the city: “Aiyo, Amma Appa… Madurai is too hot. It’s too difficult here.”
“Nirmala… then why have you lived here for such a long time? Why don’t you leave?” I asked.
She paused.
“Because, ma, only in Madurai the jasmine flower will be so nice,” she said, giggling.
I recently had the opportunity to visit a few admitted students programs for grad schools in the field of international relations and was more than a little surprised at how few people I met had any experience abroad outside of a western context. I was expecting (and excited) to meet more people who had done something similar to Shansi, in particular those who had taken a chance like me and moved to a country they had never been to before or had little prior knowledge of. At that point, I think I was also hoping to just talk to someone who could relate to some of the feelings I was having about returning to the U.S. after two years and even about the initial mixture of thrill and apprehension of moving so far from everything familiar.
I was left wondering at the uniqueness of the opportunity that is Shansi, and in particular the placement in Madurai. I am especially grateful for the chance to work at Lady Doak College because I think it is such an exciting time for women’s education in India. Things are changing fast in Madurai, even just during the two years that I was there. To put it simply, it seems that young women are wanting more out of their education. Increasingly, I saw students for whom a Bachelor’s degree was more than a prerequisite to marriage. More and more students that I encountered had ambitions beyond marriage and far beyond anything achieved by other women in their families. Having the opportunity to work with this particular community has significantly altered my worldview and I feel really privileged to have had the chance to do this fellowship to see firsthand the impact that education can have on young women in places like Madurai. I anticipate that it will still take some time to grapple with the feelings I have about my time in Madurai, but one thing I’ve learned is that the city has a way of drawing people back to it, so I am sure I will return again. I am thankful for the people I met throughout this experience and will carry it with me as I pursue my Masters degree, through my future travels, and in my career.
Thank you, Lady Doak College. Thank you, Madurai. Thank you, India. I hope to be back soon.
Two of my friends from Oberlin, Emma and Victor, came out to JFK during my layover to welcome me back to the U.S.