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WILLIAMS-IN-INDIA
Volunteer Lab Rats

Three Weeks in a Village

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Each of us went to a pre-selected village. I lived in an old British bungalow. You stop and Gaudino points down the road and says, “Your village is a mile down that way. We’ll see you in three weeks.” You meet a Chowkidar and develop a routine of going into the village each morning. And […]
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These Dak Bungalows had been constructed for British district officers who rode around and dispensed justice and so forth. You had this bungalow which was pretty cool with five or six servants. I remember my Chowkidar would go out and shoot ducks and boil them for meals. I tended to hang out, there was a […]
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In my village the first few days there were severe language limitations, so there was just a lot of observation. And then you’d meet people in the village that spoke some English. I remember there was a fellow in the telegraph office that spoke English and a doctor. And so to the extent that they […]
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He let us alone and I think he maybe had mixed feelings afterwards whether he did so in too great a degree. But I think he had a lot of faith in the group as a whole. And I know he had great faith in the power of India. He believed in the creation of […]
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I didn’t live in a Dak Bungalow. I had a host family. I lived in a stone building in a field. The family was considered a very progressive farmer. He and the division government were drilling a deep water tube well. That was entirely a happenstance but it fascinated me. In addition to helping harvest […]
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It must have been Hyderabad, it must have been the village in the south. It was like middle-class Indians, just outside the village itself and this guy was a power engineer and they invited me out to their house and the next door neighbor’s daughter was looking over me moonily, and I was told she […]
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My village was very remote so basically to get to the main road you had to walk about three miles through corn fields and then if you wanted to go to the district town you could then get a bus. And the people in my village complained that they hadn’t seen any district officers since […]
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Anyway, last November I returned to this village and I had not been there in 35 years and 10 months. I literally had to coerce the driver to take me up there. And I parked the car and I walked into the village and within minutes a woman who was 12 when I was 19 […]
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