Skin whitening?!?!

This entire week at my internship, the girls have been studying for their midterm exams. Since mostly all of their exams are in Marathi (a language spoken in Maharashtra, the state where I'm living), I can't help them study at all....which proves to be a very boring week. After the boring week that I had at the orphanage, I was really looking forward to being with the older girls on Saturday. Usually, we'll take a walk around the orphanage, play games, dance around and just have fun. Much to my surprise though, the older girls were studying when I walked up to the cottage where the older girls were. I saw some girls sitting outside on the steps reading and studying material for one of the exams that they would have this next week. When I gave a nice big “good morning”, they told me to keep my voice down because the sister was inside. If the sister heard voices coming from the classroom or outside, she would assume that the girls were not studying. This left me in an awkward state of “what should I do now?”

Throughout the morning though, I was able to have a conversation here and there with some of the girls. I wasn’t able to have a long conversation because they were always afraid of getting punished by the sister if she found out they were studying, but it was still a conversation. I wanted to make use of my time while I was there and wanted to get to know the girls better.

One conversation that we had kept replaying in my mind for the rest of the afternoon and weekend though. When they asked me if I liked Bombay, I replied, “I love it here! There are no big department stores, big grocery stores or lines at the grocery store. Everyone buys their fruits and vegetables every day or few days rather than buying a huge cart full of food every week. I love this lifestyle that Mumbai has.” When I told them this though, they didn’t understand why I didn’t like the big stores. They wanted the big stores, big malls, etc. Even after trying to explain why I liked Mumbai’s lifestyle rather than the American one, it still got us no where. I would love to live in a world without Walmart and JCPenney, but at the same time, they crave that world.

The theme for this day and possibly the theme for my whole time in Mumbai is, we all want what we can’t have. When I watch the news every night, almost every section of commercials has an ad for a skin whitening cream.

That's right, not a skin tanning cream but a skin whitening cream. At first I thought they meant a whitening cream for their teeth or something, but nope! Many Indians do not like their skin tone and instead want a lighter skin tone. Back in the U.S. though, you will constantly see shelves and shelves of self-tanner in the store, tanning shops set up all over town, and girls around town constantly trying to change their white skin tone to a darker one.

This brings me back to the conversation that I had with the girls at Sneangelie. Since they had a lifestyle where people go to the market once a day instead of once a week, they wanted a lifestyle that would give them time to go to the market once a week instead of once a day. They didn’t like having specialty shops that only carried meats and cheeses, or vendors carts that only sold fruit. They wanted a life full of big department stores and grocery stores where they could get their milk, meat and cookies all in one place. I guess the saying is true then, the grass is greener on the other side. Who would've thought that I learned this lesson from a bunch of 13 year olds though?!