New Year's in Hanoi!

We really like Hanoi! In just a few days we have seen a million fascinating things. One of my favorite sights was a woman carrying an entire restaurant on her shoulders: a tiny stove, four tiny stools, a small cooler and some baskets of food. Tonight, for New Year's Eve, we are headed out for what promises to be a delicious Vietnamese meal - the menu looks out of this world! Sage let me do some window shopping today. It turns out that Hanoi is very fashionable, and that as well as being a major center of clothing production for the world, it has an exciting boutique and crafty clothing scene. We are staying in a super funky place that is down an alley and among many tiny apartments, with an open patio on the ground floor and a tiny cinema house. To our disappointment the cinema is closed for the holidays - but nonetheless the cool movie posters mixed with the sounds of cooking, cleaning, and informal industry, etc. make for excellent ambiance. Tomorrow we are headed for a tour of two bays, which includes sleeping on a boat, kayaking and riding bikes. We also get to cook with and stay with a local family. The pictures show fried butterfly larva, which makes me a little nervous, but we are here for adventure, and we are up to the challenge! We want to wish you all a wonderful New Year and please remember to keep in touch - we especially love comments to our posts!

Loud enough to hear

Yesterday, as we swooned at the Fijian voices of two choirs celebrating Christmas - one small and the other quite large (see Sage’s posting) - I was reminded of how much gospel music and spirituals have been inspirational to me. Little trace of organized religion runs through my family, and I have listened to this music outside of that context: recorded, at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, and in the gospel choir I joined while at community college back in the day. In some inexplicable way, I identify with gospel music. Most would agree that it can be unbelievable beautiful, but for me it is stronger than that.

Many of my earliest musical inspirations - after Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson (from my mom), and Tom Zé (from my sister) – date to a trip I made with my dad to a music store for my birthday. He let me loose to buy several CDs (the first I owned). This was in one of those stores where you can listen to everything before you purchase it – as I remember it he let me wander and sample for hours. The CDs that I remember buying that day include: Mahalia Jackson’s Greatest Hits; Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong; a sampler of female jazz vocalists from way back; and various hip hop albums. At least 15 years later I still own those albums. Mahalia Jackson is still at the top of my list. Thank you, dad!



I have been very shy about singing for as long as I can remember, though I think my family would tell stories of how much of a little showboat I was in my younger years (Lia loves best the story of me breakdancing in the park in Ashland, dressed up like Michael Jackson). Even as I have gone from a reluctant speaker in classes all the way to a confident professor in front of a class of 90, singing remains both a scary and an enticing prospect for me. I want to sing, I do sing, all the time – but not loud enough for anyone but Sage to hear. When I sing “for real” it is low and when no one is around.



I once got up the nerve, while living in San Francisco, to take voice lessons. The only teacher available within my price range was a tiny elderly opera singer – who only taught opera. I loved her, but she told me that “an alto is a lazy soprano” and so I struggled. At the time I was also working on a film and soundtrack. I wrote a song, very much inspired by Mahalia Jackson, and sang it to my teacher, who shook her head and said “it’s such a waste”. But it was not a waste - it was who I was/am. The music I love to sing is jazz, gospel, spirituals, Motown, and hip-hop. This music moves me, it makes me feel spiritual, without any need for a stronger tie to religion and without much in the way of beliefs: other than the fundamentals such as doing the right thing, working for justice, loving and sharing.

Today, on Christmas, we drank Fijian Kava with some locals and sang Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan and Christmas carols to two ukuleles. When we came home I sang in my “good voice” for Sage while we swam in water that could not have been cooler than 70 degrees. This is my religion. In an attempt to start the next year by singing loud enough to hear, here is the song from my film: Lars the Daydreamer. I am also including some drawings I have done over the past few days. So much love to you all, our dear family and friends.

The Sound of Fiji

The sound I wish I could record is the snap, crackle, pop of the coral underwater and my Darth Vader breathing as we snorkel over the reefs- something we've done nearly every day since we've been here. Second to that, though, the most universal sound in Fiji is the subtle whoosh of the ceiling fan.

The crabs here are nearly translucent and have very tall eyes. They bury themselves in the sand, so that as you look down towards the water you see little stalks of eyes peering out at you over the beach. We flew over from the main island on a plane with 12 seats and all of our luggage in a compartment in the nose under the pilots. Also on the plane with us was a native Fijian fellow and his American wife. They have a landscaping business in Oakland and run kayaking tours here a few months of the year. He grew up on a little island off the coast of Taveuni with his parents and 11 other siblings. He remembers the first time he saw white people. Two German tourists came over to the island on a boat and he and his brothers and sisters ran into the woods- they were so terrified. The man who opened the door to the plane when we landed was a cousin of his. So were the two taxi drivers who met the flight. So was the man who had come to the airport to hang out for the afternoon. I wanted to ask why and how he had come to leave this place, but the plane was too loud, and it seemed an impertinent question. Later in the conversation he told me: “We don’t have elections in Fiji, we have coups.”

Of course, Fiji also has gorgeous white sand beaches, coconut palms for miles, and incredibly beautiful people.The women wear their hair in short afros and the men are thick and muscular with long eyelashes and ready smiles. I think our friend Travis would have an easier time buying pants here.

Many Indians were brought here by the British as indentured servants to work the sugar plantations, and four or five generations later they are still a big part of the population. There seems to be an interesting, but fairly uneasy relationship between the native Fijians and the Indo-Fijians. Only native Fijians can own land, which leaves the Indo-Fijians to operate many of the businesses. It’s all Patel’s Hardware, Bhimla’s Curry Shop, and Vinod’s Milk Bar everywhere you look. Kacy understands much of the Hindi spoken, and the curry spices are reminiscent of what we’re used to. Of course, so much else is different. After a few days in Delhi, we were very ready to leave India. The pollution and the chaos and the people everywhere… India is a remarkable country and we both look forward to going back, but for now, sitting on the beach eating papayas and coconuts in a place that’s clean and warm and relatively simple to negotiate, feels just about right.

One of the women who works at this place has an Indian boyfriend. She jokes that he's very ugly, but she's lucky because he's a Christian, not a Hindu. She took us to the Catholic church with her last night for the Christmas Eve midnight mass. There were so many people, they had moved the ceremony to a giant barn with a loudspeaker amplifying the priest's blessings and sermon. We sat on the floor- and stood, and sat, and knelt, and stood- and smiled at everyone around us and listened to the incredible choir. The priest was barefoot. There were pigeons in the rafters.

Earlier in the afternoon, a group of Methodists had come caroling. They stood on the beach in a semi-circle and sang familiar Christmas carols transposed into Fijian. This is certainly a whole other way to imagine the holiday season- with the sound of warm waves underneath.

I’m sitting on the beach as I write this, under a little thatched hut in front of the place we’re staying. Kacy is peeling sugar cane to eat.

A woman just walked down the beach and came up to ask me: “Ma’am, just one small question. Have you seen a little grey goat?” I laughed and told her that I had not seen a goat on the beach, but assured her I would keep an eye out.

Happy Holidays

... from Fiji!

Rhesus Factor

One last post about India.... Here's a little radio story.

Double Day? More like a Quadruple Day

I spent the past week out with three of our students in one of the most picturesque villages I have ever seen. I was facilitating and interpreting interviews for these students on topics related to women (pregnancy/childbirth/gendered differences/sex rations/training programs), and thus got to hear stories and interact with many incredible women from roughly 18 to 80+ years of age (though we spent time with lots of small children as well).

We met a young woman who is an orphan and a scholarship recipient who sang us a stunning rendition of the title song of a Bollywood film (Kal ho naa ho). We met an older unmarried preschool teacher with a physical handicap, who told us that she became a teacher because she had always loved children and had none of her own. We met women who proudly told us they had had ‘love marriages’. We met a woman who had an arranged marriage and lamented her terrible luck with a bad husband as well as a very bad-natured mother in-law.

One woman told of how she wakes up at 4am to cook food for everyone in her home, to wash clothes, and to collect fodder from the forest for the fire and for the animals before heading off for a full day’s work at a local NGO. When she returns home, hopefully before dark, she once again goes out into the forest to collect fodder, she cooks and cleans and spends a moment with her young daughter.

We met women who told of the pressures they face to have boys, and the disappointment and grief they experience if they give birth to a second girl. “Having a minimum of one boy is required”, several young women told us. They told of the secrecy around the illegal use of ultrasounds to determine sex and around the practice of sex-selective abortions.

A few women told of how, despite not having had a boy, they would not have more children. They told of how they intend to resist societal pressures to have boys, "come what may".

I found myself thinking about the idea of the ‘double day’ – an explanation for what happens when women are expected to do all of the work within the home, in addition to waged work outside the home (productive and reproductive labor). This idea shows how women’s labor comes to be seen as elastic. This idea is taken to another level in an area where there are increasing opportunities for women to work outside of the home, without change to household dynamics and, in particular, the expectations upon women as wives and daughter’s in law. Forget the double day, here we are talking about something like a quadruple day.

Needlesstosay this has been a powerful week. The three young women (perhaps 21, 24 and 28) from Chirag that worked with us (made the work possible, really) are incredibly strong, affectionate, intelligent and dynamic women. On the last day, I found myself on a rooftop overlooking this village, with hay stacks behind me, and the Himalayas ahead of me, dancing to Bollywood songs on someone’s cellphone with lovely young Indian women and my wonderful students – it just felt right.

I don’t want to leave, I am fascinated and delighted by this place. I have so much to learn and there is so much that I would like to do, but since Sage has agreed that we will come back, whether next summer or further down the road, I am saying only "phir milenge" (see you soon).

Chicu and Keith's house

The Home Stretch (part 2)

The same students (Morgan Gard, Victoria Evert, Shira Stern, Erin Slomski-Pritz) reflecting back on the first week of their homestay experiences.

I Laugh With Them

I’ve just done our laundry in a bucket and hung it up to dry on chairs placed strategically out in the sun. These days are luminous. There is no wisp of cloud. The mountains rise up out of the horizon like great, snow-covered beasts. Although the shade is very cold throughout the day, the sun is unbelievably hot. For the first time in my life, I feel like I understand the pure heat of our star, piercing the frigid atmospheres of outer space, traveling millions of miles to warm my fair skin. To remain at a comfortable temperature during the day requires a delicate balance of clothing layers. Of course, in the evening, we simply wear everything we have, for when the sun goes down, it is magnificently cold and clear. The milky way is a smudge across the sky.

Yesterday I walked down from our hilltop retreat. Down, down, endlessly down to the river far below us. There is an old Shiva temple in a village down there- crooked and leaning. The gods carved into stone long since worn down to vague outlines – elephant trunk, dancing limbs, fire. The river was a little slice of pristine wild. One could almost imagine one was hiking far into the Cascades or Sierra Nevada, preparing to set up camp by a remote mountain stream. And then the man comes by with his three ponies, carrying bags of rice to the village down the way. And a troupe of women in brightly colored saris pass by with bags of gravel on their heads, laughing.

They seem to be building a road to the temple, and these women are the hardy labor force. They try to speak to me and laugh again at my incomprehension. I think they ask me where I came from, so I name the village up the hill. They seem to be inviting me back to the village to eat with them, but I can’t be sure, and I have a long, long path back up the hillside. So I laugh with them: at myself; at the absurdity and beauty of languages, and cultures, and all the things that keep us from understanding one another.

Last weekend we had a magnificent Thanksgiving feast with the students and Ashish and Deepa and family. We spent all day in the kitchen making chicken and mashed potatoes and greens and pumpkin pie and coleslaw. It was nice just to get a chance to cook again. I went to sleep feeling thankful that my hands smelled like garlic (I remember when I was living in the co-op Synergy in college and Jordan woke me up one morning freaked out that his hands smelled weird. He wondered if there was some lingering poison from the darkroom infecting him. I told him it was just the garlic he had chopped last night on the cooking crew.).

The evening lacked nothing for being a half a world away from its traditional context. In fact, I think it felt richer for being realigned with our present reality. The students were all joking that we were celebrating Thanksgiving with real Indians.

Out of my hands

I am nearing the end of a long list of job applications. I won’t say how many I have applied for – Sage is teaching me how to keep some things to myself. Before this all started I received a lot of different advice on what to apply for, what not to apply for, and where to focus my energy. One recently hired first time faculty advised that I do as he did: put all of my energy and time into applying for only a couple of jobs (he was offered the two positions he applied for). In the end I decided to cast my net wide: whether this was out of an on-going case of the imposter syndrome, or because of uncertainty about the kind of position I truly want, I am not sure. I should mention, that a piece of this decision is also based on the fact that there are quite a few exciting positions open this year. Now we are entering a nerve-racking period of waiting to hear back. I am truly thankful that Sage and I will be on the move, as of two weeks from yesterday, so that I will not be able to focus all of my energy on whether or not I am being contacted for interviews. For the first time in a long, long time the future seems truly out of my hands. I have to be confident and patient and hope that my applications not only get noticed, but that the people reading them see me as a good fit for the department and as someone they want to work with for years to come. I feel confident that I have sent off materials that reflect who I am, what I have accomplished, and what I have to offer – it is this that I will have to rely upon for the next weeks/months of anxious waiting.

The Home Stretch

A few of the students, thinking about their upcoming homestay experiences.
(Morgan Gard, Victoria Evert, Shira Stern, Erin Slomski-Pritz)

We Can See Tibet From Our House

It’s Thanksgiving today. The students are off in their homestays now, so life at Sonapani is relatively quiet. We're going to try to throw together some sort of Thanksgiving meal for the students when they return on Saturday. I was threatening to go out and hunt a pheasant if someone would only give me a gun. No one believed me, so we're just going to have chicken. I think we'll be able to make mashed potatoes and stuffing, and also a pumpkin pie of sorts. I've been asking around to see if there are any sour fruits with which I could approximate cranberry relish. The closest answer I've gotten is tamarind. hmmm. I think not.

As the fall turns to winter here, the crisp, cold air reveals the distant peaks of the Himalayas in all their glory. Every morning we can see the details of new snowfall, and make out new mountains on the horizon. Yesterday we spent some time naming the summits within our view and realized that a few of them are actually in Tibet.

The seasons are funny here. Even though it’s getting quite chilly, and the leaves are falling from many of the trees, all of the animals are giving birth as though it were spring. There are baby goats and cows everywhere. And one particular tree (a variety of wild cherry) is actually in bloom- pink petals coating the ground all over.

It’s also wedding season. Every time I go out walking in the villages, Bollywood dance songs are echoing through the valleys. Yesterday, some of the students called Keith in a tizzy. They had gone out to do some work at the NGO field office, and the staff there were not letting them walk back to their homestay because there was a wedding celebration going on in the village center. The staff were worried for the students' safety. They were worried for their own safety too. They were all women, and there were no men on hand to escort them- all the men were getting drunk and rowdy at the wedding celebration. Keith told them to have some chai and wait for the men of their homestay families to come get them. It’s only safe for me to go out walking alone because everyone assumes I’m a man- dressed as I am in pants, a hat, and a heavy wool vest I bought from the men’s shelf of the locally made clothing shop. This is a constant refrain of life in the rural villages here- the women are often left to do all the work as many of the men spend their days drunk and gambling.

Yesterday I was talking with Deepa (Deepa and Ashish own and operate Sonapani) about books (naturally). We ended up discussing Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. We both had sort of hated the author for putting us through all that misery when we first read the book. Every character is so blighted, there’s no ray of hope in their lives at all. Mistry is an incredible writer, but that book is a miserable experience to read. Deepa told me, though, that she’s come to appreciate the book more and more in the time that she’s lived here in the foothills. She and Ashish have started a sewing cooperative for some of the local women. They come for a few hours each day to an open building in the back of Sonapani with several sewing machines to make laundry bags which are sold to hotels in Delhi. With this money they’re able to buy propane for their stoves, so they don’t have to spend time foraging for wood and cutting down the oak trees in the surrounding forest. Deepa said that as they work, they talk about their lives. And every one of their stories has something of A Fine Balance in it. She says she’s come to appreciate that Mistry was telling us something important: the unvarnished truth.

For Our Friends in Seattle

AND, A mix FOR YOU TO DOWNLOAD, IF YOU LIKE.

Cutie pies!

Also, the sound of a water buffalo in heat:

The good news is you don’t have worms.

Basically, the cutest thing ever: I am in bed putting the final touches on a job application (for the amazing job in Oakland!) and out the door a beautiful cow trots by with Sage in close pursuit making the calls that local folks use to move them along “haat, haat!” - so that all the flowers in front of our place don’t get eaten.

This morning it’s foggy. We’re beginning to see what winter is like here. It feels like a mix of the seasons as we know them: some changing leaves, blossoming fruit trees, cooler weather, more morning fog, tons of birds and butterflies (and fewer caterpillars), clearer views of the Himalayas late morning when the fog burns off.

We took a student with stomach problems to the doctor’s office a few days ago and I thought I would get myself checked out as well. The lab technician is totally hilarious; he could easily be a comedian. When the student was unable to provide a urine sample he suggested a catheter. The look on the student’s face was priceless, until he started cackling and she realized it was a joke.

Then it was my turn. I had brought along a sample of my own and the doctor called me in after the technician had looked at it under the microscope: “Well, the good news” he said, “is that you don’t have worms. On the other hand you do have amoebas”.

As has often been the case for me, upon hearing that news I began to feel more ill. A few days later, thinking I was back in the swing of things (after getting part way through my antibiotic or “amoebacide” treatment) Sage, Keith and I went to do an interview with a farmer about agricultural innovations. A few minutes into it I had to focus to not let nausea overwhelm me. Near the end I had to excuse myself to be sick, and it was all down hill from there. It has been a few days now and I am getting stronger but I have a date with the comedian-lab technician tomorrow just in case.

When the Bee Stings

Pisou (fleas)

He wonders if I have bug bites, pointing to my arm. My freckles look like wounds to a child who is used to smooth brown skin.

Think Of It As Soup

A note about the food: it is delicious. We eat rice and daal (a soupy, spicy dish made from different legumes- often lentils, chick peas, kidney beans, or peas) at every meal, along with some sabzi (vegetables, usually steamed or stir fried and always well spiced). None of the kitchens here have ovens, so everything is cooked on either a gas flame or an open fire- including the chapattis, or roti, which are another staple of every meal. Chapatis are whole wheat tortillas, made by hand, cooked on a hot grill and finished over flame. They are used instead of utensils, and when they run out, everything is eaten by hand.

We are rarely served meat, as many Hindus are ‘veg’. If there is a meat dish, it’s often chicken or mutton (which here refers to goat (I was told by one person that goat is the only reliably free-range meat as it’s impossible to force feed goats and keep them in confinement)) The chickens are raised in large confinement operations in the bigger towns, then shipped alive in cages to small, road-side shops in villages. There you can buy them either live or butchered while you wait. I’m told the confinement operations are fairly humane- involving not more than 1,000 or so birds free ranging inside dirt-floor warehouses.

This last weekend, Keith, Chicu, Kacy and I escaped the students for a night’s rest at a wildlife sanctuary called Binsar about 3 hours drive north. We stayed at an ‘Eco-resort,’ which seemed to mean that they had no heating, warmed water for showers in a wood-fired stove, and cooked local delicacies. The food was especially good there and we had the world’s thinnest Aloo Paratha (potato stuffed fried chapattis) for breakfast. These had caraway in the dough, which we were told helps to prevent flatulence. Good luck with that!

The sanctuary itself was a thickly forested mountaintop looking north to the looming Himalayas. The oak, fir, and juniper forest was thickly hung with moss and lichen and reminded Kacy and I both of the walk down to Shell beach (except of course for the giant rhododendron trees- often as big as a small oak!).

On the way back, we stopped at a Tibetan restaurant for lunch. We had Thupka soup, and Tibetan tea, which is green tea with a lot of milk and a lot of butter and a little salt. Keith said “if you think of it as soup, it makes it more palatable.” Indeed, it’s a strong, fatty, and wonderful flavor. Almost like drinking a glass full of straight melted butter. It would certainly give DiAnn’s butter coffee a run for her money!

The soup thick with noodles and vegetables and a hearty broth notably lacking in corn starch. All the soups we’re served here at Sonapani are viscous in the manner of Chinese soups, a tradition which seems to have crossed the border this far north in India. It was refreshing to have a thin, clear broth for once.

Our last stop on the return trip was to pick up some traditional sweets for the Nepali workers who are living in plastic covered huts nearby us, building the road to Sonapani. For now, it is a dirt path about 2km to the main road. We all walk to and from and our food and luggage comes in on the back of a donkey named Lakshmi. Every day we pass the Nepali families carrying rocks on their heads and moving dirt with shovels. They build incredible and sturdy walls with the flat stone they dig from the earth around here. The road should be finished before monsoon season next year. We thought they deserved something special.

What Would a White-Eye Look Like After a Saturday Night?

The scene from the area where we eat each morning. Now it has gotten too cold to eat dinner outside but in the morning the birds, butterflies and bees are out of control.
Our home. It is a little bigger than it appears here, but not much. My only complaint of late is that our hot water hasn't been working. But Sage has just called one of the guys to look at it, and perhaps I will get my morning bucket shower after all!
This is the view, as I remember it, from Chicu and Keith's new place. Chicu requested a painting of their house, but I need to go there to do it - I want it to be more accurate than my memory will allow.

We saw a leopard! At night, on a long drive back from town, with one of the slowest drivers on earth, a leopard crossed in front of us and we got to see it cross through our headlights not once but twice! What a coat on that big cat! What a long sexy tail! We felt so blessed, and the driver just kept saying, "you are so lucky, we are so very lucky". The student in the backseat with the partial tear in her ACL said, "it has all been worth it for this!"

--


We've been trying to take pictures of them, but it's difficult to get a good shot of a bird. So, an incomplete list of some of the birds we've seen (this is for you, Steve):

Great Barbet
Scimitar Babbler
Vivid Niltava
Himalayan Bulbul
Spotted Forktail
Red-Billed Blue Magpie
Slaty-Headed Parakeet
Greater Yellownape
Himalayan Flameback
Speckled Piculet
Great Slaty Woodpecker
Fulvous-Breasted Woodpecker
Crimson Sunbird
Kalij Pheasant
Blood Pheasant

You Have to Crawl Through That Hole

The other day I went on a walk to the nearest post office in the town of Mukteshwar. It's approximately a 3 hour walk up a steep hill through a lovely oak, rhododendron, and fir forest. As you climb up out of the forest, Mukteshwar is perched on top of a small ridge, looking over the valleys below and the peaks of the Himalayas in the distance. At the very top of the town is a temple to Shiva. The ancient temple was apparently plastered over some time ago, and the present structure is less than remarkable, but the collection of bells strung up all about certainly makes up for it.



Just below the temple is a rock outcropping called Chauli ki Jali. The rocks thrust out at an angle from the ground, hanging over the valley thousands of feet below. Visitors have carved their names in the rocks in Hindi and English and who knows what other languages. The view is the definition of panoramic.
Legend has it that women who have been having trouble having children will be blessed if they are able to crawl through a hole in the rock ledge that hangs out over the valley. The locals told us there's a ceremony held here every year in which women come from all around the region to try their luck at squeezing through the precarious hole. I just took a picture.

The Things We Left Behind

This week we celebrate both Diwali and Halloween. Tonight we'll carve green pumpkins, bob for apples, and dress up in whatever costumes we can scrounge from the limited materials around us: travel clothes, pens and paper, the surrounding forest. Keith, who in addition to co-directing this program for the last 7 years, is also a professional baker, is making apple crisp and pumpkin pie.

Keith and Chicu

Kacy and I will dress up as each other. Several years ago, when I was at Terra Madre during Halloween, Kacy went to a party dressed up as herself in 40 years. She wore all my clothes. I didn't take that as a compliment. Now's my chance to return the favor, I suppose.

Every Hindu I've asked about Diwali has a different story about the origins off the holiday. To Southerners it celebrates Ram's defeat of Ravan, when he brought his wife Sita back home from Sri Lanka. To Northerners it's a time to honor the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi. Everyone can agree, though, that Diwali is a family holiday. A time for gathering together with the ones you love, exchanging presents, and eating sweets. It's also a holiday about light. As the nights turn cold, and the darkness falls earlier, we light candles and set off fireworks to celebrate the glory of the sun. A festival a Seattlite could surely enjoy. Here at Sonapani, the staff cooked us an amazing dinner and set off fireworks right over our heads. We also watched the city of Almora on the hills in the distance as it lit up with explosions of color throughout the night.

We've been gone for only a little over a month, and already we have a community of people here whom we care for dearly. Nearly every day we congratulate ourselves on ending up in such a beautiful place, and choosing to start our trip this way- resting in one place for a while, learning a little something about a community, and hopefully giving something back. When we were planning this year, we spent a lot of time dreaming about where we'd like to go. Imagining Fiji and Vietnam and South Africa. But we didn't really think too much about India. It was a given. It was a job.

Now, already, it's much more than a job.



Even with all the things we have here, one thing we're lacking is a comfortable place to sit. We nixed bringing a travel hammock along on this trip. It just didn't seem worth the space and weight for the next 9 months. Clearly we were wrong. Every day when I try to find a good chair to read in, or when Kacy is grading papers hunched over the computer on the bed, we wonder what on earth we could have been thinking.

I suspect we'll learn a lot in the next year about what’s really necessary to us, and what we most want.... from ourselves, from life, from our possessions and surroundings, and from each other.

Alice was the first student to have a birthday party here. The other students made up a song to sing for her.

Tomorrow is Ashley's birthday. I'm sure they'll find something to rhyme with Ashley. Kacy's birthday also happens while we're here. I've told the students they ought to sing something to the tune of Cee-Lo's "Forget You," which was Kacy's Dissertation-finishing song. Though by the time we get to December 11th, Kacy will have been finished with her Dissertation for nearly 6 months. And Dr. McKinney and I will be nearly on our way to Fiji.

Sock Coffee

Every single day I wake up and look for the Himalayas in the distance, when I can’t quite make them out through the haze I still know just where they are. I cannot get over how many butterflies there are right outside: some have wings that look like stained glass, some have stripes, and some are the classic monarchs. As most of you know super sweet milky tea is the thing here, but Seattle made an unrepentant coffee addict out of me. For a while I was drinking the instant coffee, but there is something kind of evil, not to mention unsatisfying about Nescafé. So I had a student get me some real coffee from the regional products store on a recent walk and now I am making filter coffee with a sock in my very own room – they all think it is hilarious and I think it is extremely satisfying.

It is fascinating to live with one’s undergraduate students. I feel certain it is making a better teacher out of me to have such exposure to their needs, interests, emotions, creativity, humor, etc. I find myself thinking about how wonderful it will be to hear from these students in the coming years, and to see how this time in rural India will impact the rest of their lives. Then I get to thinking about how it will impact our lives (Sage and I), and I try not to get ahead of myself, but there are very exciting possibilities for us both to get involved over the coming years (Building a radio station? Making videos on local agricultural innovations?).

The Sound of India

In the morning, the ravens caw like old men clearing their throats, harrumphing at the world.

They break the seal on the silence of the night. Soon a twitter or a chirp comes from every oak and apricot tree. The goldenrod grows higher than your head, and is so loud with the buzzing of the bees you might imagine a small engine is hidden somewhere within. The butterflies turn the marigolds into a living mosaic, alive with movement and color. In the distance, the neighbor’s cows mark the progress of their digestion with a gentle clanging of the bells hung around their necks.

Only the small brown bird that lives behind the mirror over the sink outside the dining room remains quiet. He intends to hide there, even as you come up to wash your right hand after a meal. But he is easily scared, and flits from behind your reflection. Aiming for the tree. Sometimes hitting your head.

When you leave Sonapani, you amble along a dirt path for a while through the pine trees along the ridge. There is only one sound there. The steady drone of the locusts is so loud you feel as though you are moving through it. A heavy, thick, viscous sound you can wade through.

Past the neighbors farms, past the fancy vacation houses of Delhi folk, past the Ashram gate… and finally you emerge onto the main road. Here you begin to hear what I think of as the sound of India: honking. Except that here, in the rural areas, you're likely to only hear one car horn at a time. The road is a only a little wider than the width of a truck, and climbs up and down the steep sides of the foothills. Sometimes it is paved. Sometimes not. As you head towards CHIRAG to work on the farm, or to teach class for the day, you walk in the middle of the road. If you hear a horn, you scramble to the side of the road before a car comes around the bend. Sometimes you walk along with a group of local children in uniform headed toward the school. They love to say "Namaste" to the foreigners. Sometimes they will also say "how are you?" and shake your hand. Many of the children are headed to the school at CHIRAG. If you like, you can visit the school. You can watch when they put on performances, singing songs from different regions of India.

As you walk back home to Sonapani, you'll pass by a tiny village. In the shop there you can by potato chips, candies, toiletries, or bulk grains. Or you can sit to have some chai. If you need anything larger, you'll have to find someone locally who can make it for you, or you'll have to drive for 3 hours to Haldwani, Almora, or Nainital. There, in the bustling big town, amongst the people and the cars and the bikes and the cows and the smog... you'll hear the real sound of India.

Hummingbird Moth

also, the spiders are flat here: