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!"

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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.