While researching about working at the State Department, I found out that there are four languages that they consider critical. With Hindi being one of them, I signed up for one month of one-on-one Hindi lessons in Jaipur, the capital of the state of Rajasthan in India.
After quite a long travel day, I stayed one night in New Delhi before catching a ride to Jaipur. On the drive in, I got a taste of some of the sites around town.
I arrived at my lodgings, which is called ‘camp’. Here I sleep, shower, and eat breakfast and dinner. I had a roommate, Daniel, from New York, and other rooms in the camp had people from Finland, Germany, Austria and Canada. The camp was pretty basic but was in a nice neighborhood away from the hustle and bustle of the city center of Jaipur.
The best part about this arrangement is the fellow campers. We eat together, hang out in the commons area and roof and hit the town together. I was the only one here for Hindi lessons and most of the others were here to teach in the slums or internships. Some were here for one year, while others for two weeks. This gave the camp a long term hostel feel.
On my second day in Jaipur, I signed seven of us up for a nighttime city tour. Since this was run by the government, it was comically mismanaged. However, we had a great time together and the end of the tour had us eating a very delicious Indian dinner in Nagargarh, an old fort overlooking the city.
The tour even brought us to a jewelry shop where the attendants attempted a hard sell on us tourists. This was the same jewelry shop I was taken to by my ride from New Delhi – man, these guys are good!
My Hindi lessons and accommodations were arranged through a company called Idex. With the whole trip behind me now, I can’t recommend using them. My program was very good (remember I was the only one there for Hindi lessons) but the other people were there for a more volunteer-oriented experience. Having become close friends with many of them, their biggest complaints about Idex were a lack of organization and an egregious overhead with concern to costs. These volunteers paid thousands of dollars for their program, and were bunked four to a room and just placed in a bare bones classroom to ‘teach’ in a school. I would estimate that Idex kept about 80% of the money collected (i.e. their actual costs were only 20 cents for every dollar received). The fact that the schools that these teachers went to were incredibly lacking in any materials, furniture, books, etc. makes this disproportionate allocation of funds all the more appalling.
I arranged my own transport to the camp, but the other travelers had some terrible stories about their experience with Idex arranging their travel. One girl was left at a random bus stop for hours and another girl had to balance a fairly large piece of luggage on a motorbike. Jaipur is a city of over 3,000,000 people and traffic is absurdly chaotic and dangerous.