What A Difference A 'Fro Makes

Today I decided to let my ‘fro breathe. I have been wearing my hair in a ponytail for three weeks and I thought it was time to do my real ‘do. This afternoon I headed to one of the sites outside of Delhi proper to use the GPS to track points of a site. Two of the staff members, another intern, and I got out of the car and grabbed my GPS and while I was fiddling with it, a crowd of over thirty children had surrounded us. I am used to standing out, and Ignacio gets some looks too, but today the commotion was about my big curly afro. The kids were going nuts and screaming and jumping around and cheering. “They are quite intrigued with your hair,” my supervisor says. So as we navigated alleys, corners and recycling areas, we were accompanied by a band of youngsters. Every time I stopped to write something down, some of the kids behind ran into each other. Two guys would lead me through the alleys (+ the crowd) and then we would all stop when one would say, “point!” Everyone would run into each other, I would press down on the GPS button and Ignacio would record the coordinates. I felt a few little hands in the bottom of my hair, and one little girl stopped to shake our hands. There were a few goat sightings, and a couple chickens. What’s funny is that when we stepped out onto the road, I realized that I was on the same road that I wrote about earlier in the “Rickshaw Adventures,” where we were lost and everyone was staring at us.