Change of Plans

A lot of you probably won't read this until Tuesday or Wednesday since I told you I'd be in the village. I found out Saturday evening that the three day trip was going to be shortened to a day trip on Sunday. I was disappointed, but still eager to go.

The day was still very different than what I had expected. First I'll briefly explain what we were expecting. The plan was that Kristen (non-leader), Rachel and I would meet up with the family, get to the train station, and then take a train out to their village with them. We would spend the day there, and then the three of us would return by train in the evening, leaving the family in their village. Kristin, our leader (Notice that the leader one is "Kristin" and the non-leader one is "Kristen.") had told us that we should pay all of the transportation costs, as well as giving the family money for food.

Now here's what actually happened: Sunday morning we met the family where they live on the streets whenever they are in the city. The father led us to a hired car which we all squeezed into. After a little while, we (Kristen, Rachel, and I) realized that this we weren't headed to the train station like we thought, but rather that the hired car was going to take us all of the way out to the village. We asked how much it would cost and found out that it was likely to be at least 2000 rupees. That's a ridiculous amount of money in India. In terms of buying power, that's probably around $300-$400 (A nice dinner is under 100 rupees. Monthly rent on a modest apartment is 1500 rupees). Needless to say, we didn't have that kind of money on us. We might have had 1000 rupees, but only because I had a 500 rupee note that I needed to break. I'm so glad we figured that out before we got very far.

The driver parked the car and we talked about it with the family through the driver as a translator. We talked about going on the train, or even just paying for the family to go home by train without us, but in the end we all ended up heading back to where we started. I'm very wary about people trying to cheat us since we're foreigners, so I had paid attention to the odometer. The round trip was only 7 kilometers, and the driver had quoted us a price of 8 rupees/kilometer (probably inflated too). The driver asked us for 100 rupees for the ride, just a tad more than the 56 it should have been. I "discussed" this with the driver for bit. He was understandably upset because he had just lost a giant fare, but I wasn't in the mood to compensate him for it. We ended up giving him 60 rupees, the closest we could manage without needing to convince him to make change for us, and then walked away.

The whole thing left me pretty upset, and like everyone was trying to take advantage of us. The family knew that we were going to pay for transportation, so instead of using the reasonable form of transportation they usually would, they chose something expensive and unnecessary. Then the driver tried to charge us about double the price he had quoted us and was upset that we wouldn't pay it. It keeps putting me back to the question of the money barrier and how to overcome it.