Hey Everyone,

I’m sorry it took me so long to get an email out. I havn’t had internet access for the past week and a half, and I finally found an internet cafe. Thanks for everyone who wrote me, and I’m sorry I don’t have time to write individual responses.

First off, I would just like to say, IT IS HOT. It gets over 100 degrees and it is humid! Right now I am in a small town called Auroville on the coast of southern India. The town was developed about 45 years ago by the UN and the Indian government to try to create a place “free of national boundaries”. The whole idea is that the city belongs to no country and that they can make their own rules. I’ll write my own impressions on it later, but for now I’ll just say that it is definitely a cool place to be. I am taking this two week course on arches, vaults, and domes with this crazy french architect who is obsessed with vaults. I sleep in a vault, I eat in a vault, and I take classes in a vault. The man’s house is even a vault! There are about 20 students in the class, most of whom are Indian. There is 1 other American, 2 Canadians, and 2 Frenchmen. The class itself has been amazing. The work is challanging but fun, and a lot more engineering and math intensive than I expected, considering that almost everyone here is an architect. The first week was all theory, and we each designed our own free-standing vault. (I never knew so much went into designing a vault – It took me three full days!) This week we have been actually building arches and domes. Today we went to the site of one of the buildings that the architect has designed. It is a temple right on the beach. The previous temple had been destroyed in the Tsunami, so it was pretty amazing to go out there and see it.

The past two weeks have been very emotional for me. It has been a while since I have been to India, and I had forgotten about the level of poverty that exists here. Travelling to the worksite today, I saw how a majority of the 900 million people are living. The saddest thing that struck me was not the condition of the houses that they live in (which is terrible), but the fact that there is no trash collection. It’s difficult to concieve, as we take advantage of things like this, but just imagine if all of the streets around your house were covered in trash. Dried up lakebeds are used as trash dumps. It is hard to walk anywhere, as you are literaly walking on garbage. Another thing that we take advantage of is animal control, which they don’t have. And there are animals everywhere! There are cows, oxen, chickens, hens, goats, and stray dogs roaming around everywhere, even in delhi. Imagine seeing an ox crossing the road in the middle of a major city. The other day I was in a town outside of Auroville and I saw a goat that had rabies (I think). It was just standing there completely still, foam around the mouth, and its eyes were rolled back in its head. It was one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen. I sleep in a room with 4 other Indians, all who are in architecture school in Mumbai.

There are no showers – we just have a bucket and a faucet. There are also no toilets – just holes in the ground. And no one here uses toilet paper, which has been quite difficult for me! I actually got pretty sick last week. I have been drinking purified water, but I don’t think the purifier we have is good enough. Auroville has a central purifier that is about a 5 minute bike ride from where I am staying, so I go there now to fill up my bottles. To get around, we rented motorbikes. Ok my time is almost up, but I would just like to say that despite my rather negative email, I have been having an incredible time here. I will just close up with a funny story – I have already been electrically shocked twice since I have been here! Both times were when I was taking a shower at the place I was staying at in Delhi. When I approached Raja (my father’s cousin) he said, “don’t worry about it, we’ve gotten used to it!” Its definitely a different way of life here. Anyway, I hope everything is well, and I will email you when I get back to Delhi on Sunday!

Jayson

PS: My cell phone company texted me a free joke after I activated my cell phone:

A young child wrote a letter to Santa Clause that said, “Send me a brother.” Santa Clause wrote back, “Send me your mother.”