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:

Keith and Chicu's new place

Keith (the co-director of this program, with Kacy) and his wife Chicu have rented an old farm house nearby with 10 acres of terraced hillside. They'll move in after the program and start cultivating the land. Yesterday Chicu and I walked over there to plant beans.

Their house is the white one in the middle of the photo 2/3 of the way up the hill.
Here's the stream at the bottom of their hill- there's a dusty patch of flat ground just beyond where the village boys play cricket in the afternoons.Here's their neighbor's land- cultivated with cabbage for the winter. The haystack on the left is a common way of storing fodder for the animals for the winter. They cut grass and stack it around a central vertical pole.

Turpentine

One source of extra income for farmers around here is to collect sap from the pine trees which is later made into turpentine in government factories.

a little more of Sonapani

new home and new friend

Arrival in India

I arrived in India a week ago, after a very long journey. One 12 hour plane ride to Seoul
(4 movies!), some awesome soft tofu kimchi soup, a 6 hour plane flight
to Delhi, several hours to rest in a chair at the airport, a long
crazy taxi ride at 4am through Delhi to the train station, a 6 hour
train ride up into the foothills, a 3 hour car ride over some very
curvy and often not paved roads, and a 20 minute walk on a dirt
path.... and I arrived. whew.
It is completely and wonderfully gorgeous here. The complex we're
staying at has 10 little bungalow's nestled on the side of a hill
looking north towards the Himalayas. All of the hills around us are
terraced or have pine forests on them. There is a dining hall area
where we are fed three delicious meals a day and afternoon tea. The
area around the bungalows is landscaped with beautiful flowers-
cosmos, dahlias, marigolds- and herbs. There are cows wandering about
with bells around their necks and goats and chickens as well. They
grow all the food we eat here. The students and Kacy walk and catch a
jeep every morning into the nearest village to hold their classes at
the NGO that this program is partnered with. I will probably be doing
some work with them as well, at some point, but for the last week the students have been on a trek further up the Himalayas to an ashram and a glacier. I was supposed to go with them, but one of the students got sick (pneumonia) and another forgot his passport, so Kacy and I had to bring them back to explore the vagaries of the Indian health care system.
The other students came back yesterday, dirty and exhausted. One of them has injured her knee pretty badly and we may have to take her all the way into Delhi to get an MRI.
Nothing's ever easy here, but it sure is beautiful in our little corner of India.
Internet access is slow, but we just got new modems and are finally able to get Kacy's computer online, so I should have more regular contact and will try to load photos and audio asap.
I can read emails though, so let me know how things have been!

Dominic and Elisa's wedding

Irish, Australians, Scots, and Italians at a Latvian summer camp in Shelton, Washington....square dancing.
Here' the pig we ate: Margaret Thatcher.




What a beautiful wedding and what an incredible group of people. Thanks for the great send-off everyone. Tomorrow I fly to New Delhi.

sage.