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.