The Gender Blog

Earlier this week I went to Anjuna market,  the great retail institution which has taken place in Goa since the very earliest days of the tourist industry here.  It’s located  on a sprawling site which spills down to Anjuna beach and both sellers and buyers travel from far and wide in order to beg, plead, haggle and spend money.  The range of goods available is huge and colourful – mostly textiles (clothing, cushion covers, bedspreads), souvenirs, a myriad of different teas, jewellery in every imaginable style and material.

Sadly,  the market site is also rife with beggars,  very often women holding babies (who never ever seem to cry and in fact are completely dormant and static at all times; a fellow traveller told me that he’d heard that the babies are drugged to make them sleep – what a horrible thought if true).

Here are some of the women at work on their stalls -

And here is one particular seller: proud, fierce and a demon haggler in terms of bargaining with me for a price for having her photograph taken! I think we agreed on about 20p in the end.

El Shaddai,  the charity I support in Goa,  also have a stand at the market,  in order to fund raise and let more people know about their work. I called in to say hello to the team and dropped off my used paperbacks (15!) so that they can sell them on their second hand books stall.

I’ve also now been to Rainbow House and visited Renuka,  the little girl who I sponsor.  More on that to follow – quite a long post, I think,  as it was an amazing and thought provoking experience.

To date,  I have observed the following goods and services for sale on my local beach:

• Jewellery
• Fruit (bananas, mango, pineapple, etc)
• Nuts (cashews, almonds)
• Maps of India
• Ripped off DVDs (specifically, “Slumdog Millionaire”)
• Drums (a particular source of irritation)
• Sarongs
• Towels
• Massage instruments (a sort of metal contraption,  which looks more like a gardening tool to me)
• Sunglasses
• Sponges (bath not cake)
• Joss sticks
• Massages (of your feet,  performed by men, or of the whole body, by women)
• Manicures
• Pedicures

And maybe more …

The beach sellers seem to have acquired some rudimentary Russian, too, for use,  when haggling with the Russian tourists.  As I mentioned previously,  the Russians are very happy to hand over money to both those who are begging and those who are selling;  I sat next to a party of 4 the other day and,  between them,  they bought about 80% of the items offered from the above list over the course of four hours.

One of the beach shack owners told me that the Russians don’t currently require visas to holiday in India,  possibly one of the reasons why they travel in such great numbers – but that this situation is due to change in 2010. The locals are quite worried about this and you can see why,  given that there are fewer western European tourists each year and the ones who are here are more careful with their rupees than the free spending Russians.

“Is the credit crunch in your country madam – British peoples are poor now.”

Apparently.