Staying Connected to Home

So far, I’ve had no problems in keeping in touch with home. Skype works perfectly for lengthy, free or cheap calls to home when wireless in my guesthouse is up, and when it’s not, I’ve had no problem using the datacard to stay in touch via email or IM chats.  And when neither of these options is available, I stay in touch with friends and family using my mobile. My method when I call is to say “hey, call me right back!” to keep from using up my entire balance on one personal call in the course of 30 or 40 minutes.  Sure, they have to pay, but they don’t mind and it lets me keep my balance in case I need to make longer mobile calls when traveling without my laptop or datacard.

Calling and texting on my mobile has been invaluable on more than one occasion for getting in contact with friends and family back in the States when I needed help getting out of sticky situations. Once trapped on a bus that was taking me seemingly to who-knows-where, a quick call home to family helped me to navigate and map out my route as I read out signs along the road from the bus window for over an hour. With one of my sisters cracking jokes along the way to keep me calm, I was glad to hear familiar voices coming from my mobile as I tried to figure out my location.

Keeping in touch via postal mail has also been an easy process that has worked out well up to this point. I always have my mail sent to DCSE and have yet to have any problems receiving it – in all cases it has arrived within 10 – 14 days of its shipping, a little battered and bruised, but with the contents intact and accounted for. Once I was even pleasantly surprised to have a manager personally pickup 2 large packages from the DCSE office and hand-deliver them to my desk at the NGO at the time. It was a nice gesture and much appreciated since I wasn’t expecting anything for a few more weeks and was unaware they’d even arrived.

I tend to like my deliveries to be functional – stuff I need that I can’t get while in Hubli – but without fail my care packages always have a little bit of something in them that keep me connected to home – for the Thanksgiving holiday, all the ingredients for potato salad and peach cobbler, including huge cans of peaches; in memory of Michael Jackson, the special edition of Ebony magazine, and of course the typical requests from friends and family  to go shopping and send lovely gifts of fabric, jewelry, music, and statues so that they too can get a little taste of my India trip.

I have also been fortunate enough to meetup and travel through India with some of my friends and family, each of whom brought a touch of their New York, Chicago, and LA personalities that I know so well. So I haven’t felt all that disconnected from / out of touch with home.