Sublimity…

When we left for Mayali on April 21st, we had the task of rescouting all the villages in Hilongard watershed, re-selecting 5 communities based on our new criteria, and most importantly – completing microplans (and associated tasks) in two villages. For all this, we had a tentative deadline of May 20th, something that, while certainly not easy, didn’t seem impossible. While we blazed through scouting and selection in only 5 days, by the time May 20th rolled around we hadn’t finished either of the two plans, and even our revised target of May 25th didn’t happen. However, the end is now in sight, we’ve finished work in Makhet (last meeting was today) and tomorrow will wrap up the microplan in Mamani, leaving only a few more days of odd-jobs before we’re done. The new deadline is June 5th (a full 6.5 weeks after we arrived), but it looks like Hiralal and I are going to be heading back on the 2nd to start the documentation/detailed analysis work that has been piling up. Given the way things have been going lately with our work here (not well), and the fact I’ve been completely out of touch with the world for 5 weeks, I’ve long been looking forward to the day when I can escape and go back to Dehradun. With that date now fixed, I’m feeling a lot better and happier.

I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen when I get back to Dehradun, my short terms plans are uncertain at best. As I’ve said, I’m hoping to be able to call it quits at PSI early (June 16th) and go up to Mussoorie to take part in an intriguing workshop being organized by SIDH (the people whose calendar I designed back in November while I was learning Hindi). However, in previous discussions with Debashish, I’d told him I’d stay with PSI until the end of June, and given the amount of work (especially documenting this mess of stuff we’ve done here in the field lately), I don’t think he’s going to be too keen on me skipping out early. In the end though, I’m only a volunteer here at PSI and so have a lot more power to set my own schedule, and the way I’m feeling now, it’d take a miracle/horrid disaster to make me stay with PSI. It’s not the way I’d like to leave the organization after working here for 5 months, but I don’t see anything changing anytime soon, and I’m not going to wait around for them anymore.

However, whatever happens (I leave early or stay til July), I’m pretty sure that this is my last time in Mayali (unless I end up doing the Char Daam, and then perhaps I’ll whizz through on one of those yatri busses – on second thought, knowing the condition of that road & those busses, maybe not). To mark this change in my life, I feel like I should try to sum up my time here in Mayali, what I’ve done, what I’ve felt, what I’ve learned etc., but I know that I can’t do that. This experience has just been so diverse that it can’t be summarized, and as I’ve eluded to at times, I think there are parts of it that I won’t fully absorb/understand until much later.

Read the rest of this entry (987 words) »

In making my decision to come to India for a year, one of the major things that I considered was climate, and the summer in particular. Having lived in the country for 11 months previously, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect, and based on that experience, I knew I didn’t want to spend any more time than necessary in the country during the summer. Even now I remember the day we left India last time (June 2nd it was), driving from Dehradun to Delhi in a beat-up old Ambassador taxi (at the time Ambassador was synonymous with car, as there weren’t any other kinds) in the 45ËšC heat. It was so hot that during the 7 hour journey, we kept all the windows firmly closed as the incoming breeze felt like a blast-furnace and it was in fact cooler to re-breathe our own hot, humid breath. Needless to say, it was not a pleasant experience, and wasn’t something I wanted to repeat. One of the major reasons I haven’t been back to India until now is that up until now, summer (school/university vacation) was the only free time I had, and I knew that it was not the time I wanted to be in the country. However, with educational commitments now out of the way, I had complete freedom in choosing the start/end dates of my trip. By starting in October, I avoided the Indian summer (instead spending it working in the Arctic, making money and having an awesome time) of 2005, and figured that by the time summer 2006 rolled around, I would be at least somewhat acclimatized to India and better able to bear the summer, and that the adaptation process would be easier if I was able to live through the natural, gradual build-up of the heat, rather than suddenly parachuting into Delhi in June like we did last time. It’s like trying to cook a frog (an analogy I remember from from “The Story of B” – read it if you haven’t), if you drop the frog directly into boiling water it will feel the heat and jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly bring it up to a boil, the frog won’t notice until it’s too late. Don’t worry, the analogy only (hopefully!) works so far (I don’t want to get fried/boiled here, though given the possible temperature range, I guess I have to consider it…).

So far things have been going well, the October weather in Delhi when I arrived was warmer than I would have liked, but soon enough I was up in Mussoorie and back in reasonable temperatures. November was nice (days warm, nights cool) and December nights in Mussoorie were actually cold. However, before it got too bad I was off on my Western Adventure and back down into the plains/desert where it was again warm days and cool nights. Coming back to Dehradun in January and then out into the Himalaya, I got to experience a bit more cold weather, but nothing I wasn’t accustomed/prepared for. February was quite similar, a little warmer but still nice (hiking in the mountains and not sweating too much), but by March things started warming up. Coming back to Dehradun for reporting in early March, the weather got really ugly – blazing sunshine and burning heat. Walking the 1km flat road from the guesthouse to the office (and visa-versa) became a real endurance test and finding the energy/motivation to get up after lunch and go back to work was a real challenge. At this point I started to get a little scared about summer, here in India the holiday of Holi marks the cultural start of summer (and usually the climate agrees) so I was feeling the heat even before it really started. A two week tour in the mountains helped cool me off (though even there things were warming up, not uncomfortable, but not too far off) and then it was off to Thailand. The weather there was even hotter (and importantly humid making a bad combination), but since I spent most of my time near the ocean (or in the air-conditioned malls/skytrain of Bangkok), it wasn’t too bad, and in the end, I think it really helped me get used to the heat so that when I came back to India at the beginning of April, the weather here didn’t feel so bad any more. I survived two weeks in Dehradun without too much trouble (seemed like there was a bit of a cool spell that helped), and then it was out into the mountains for May – summer at its peak. I’m now 2/3rds of the way through May, and here in the mountains, am in the middle of a struggle to survive the Indian summer. In typical Indian style I tried to have as few expectations as possible, but even still this country has managed to completely blow me away.

Read the rest of this entry (994 words) »

As I’ve written before, I’ve been here in Mayali long enough that I’m starting to feel like this is home. I know what can be bought at each of the different stores (quite a feat when every little hole-in-the-wall sells the most random (huge) selection of items), how much rice costs (and should cost), which jeeps go to which villages, when the line at the spring is usually shortest and can navigate around the room in the dark (necessary due to the recent weather pattern of huge thunderstorms every-other evening, bringing dark clouds and power outages). It’s a very different life than what I’m used to back home, and while I wouldn’t want to live here permanently, it’s kinda nice for awhile.

Today marks a change in the routine here, we (the boys & the kitchen) have moved out of our old room and into 2 smaller rooms next to the girls in the adjacent building. Ever since we took the large room I called home, we’ve never been completely satisfied and have been constantly looking for alternatives. With summer now upon us and the accompanying water shortages requiring constantly tripping down to the source below, we’ve been even more eager to find a better place to live. The fact that Hiralal has now joined our team (bringing us to 6 total), even the big room isn’t big enough for us anymore. When we arrived in Mayali this time, we noticed that the two little rooms adjacent to the girls’ were free, and it didn’t take long for us to decide to move. The rooms are all the same size (small – made for 2) and identical to the ones we passed on initially in January (saying they were too small then), but it’s OK now as we have 3 rooms for the 6 of us instead of 2 rooms for 5. The girls have kept their room as it was, Hiralal and I have moved into one of the new ones, and Bendari has the other (which now doubles as our kitchen). When Sunil returns from holiday next week we’ll have to find a place for him (likely bringing my room up to 3 occupants – something I’d rather not do due to lack of space, but can handle), but all in all I think it’s going to work out. The rooms are a little cleaner (the wall paint is more resistant here and takes a good rubbing to come off) and now that the water source is outside the rooms, we should be able to keep the floors dry and clean. The additional benefit for me is that I am no longer living in the kitchen, so don’t have to put up with the horrendous roaring of the kerosene stove every morning and evening, and I now have a place to retreat to if I want a little time to myself. Our room is likely to remain the office though (and Bendari is using the excuses that since he has to put up with the kitchen and now that there is actually space to sit on the (almost) clean floor, we’re not going to be allowed to hang out & eat on his bed anymore) so it’s not going to be the completely quiet, empty retreat that I would ideally like. Otherwise the rooms are nicer than the old one, there are screens on the windows (meaning I can open them bringing in cool breezes all day & night, and bringing in real daylight – a rare thing in our old room), they’re smaller (cozy), clean, and though there’s no tap in the room, the tap down the hall works all the time so water is no longer an issue. Though I’d become quite used to it and was almost starting to enjoy it, I’m not too sad that I’ll no longer have to go and fetch buckets of water from the source anymore.

Long-term plans are still in limbo (a little more so now), but it looks like I’ll only be spending one month in the new home. Basically, I’m starting to get sick of work (all the confusion, lack of vision, pointless work, bossiness from superiors, trekking 4km every day in the blazing heat of summer at midday, feeling like I’m not contributing anything valuable to the project, and the fact that I’ve been here long enough that I don’t feel like I’m learning anything more) and so am starting to consider calling it quits at the end of May rather than the end of June. We’ll see how the next few days go.

After an extended stay in Dehradun (trying to again figure out what it is we are supposed to be doing in this project, and which villages we are going to work in), I’m back in Mayali. As always, there’s a lot of uncertainty about everything here so I don’t really know how long I’ll be here for, but odds point to the trip lasting for at least 3 if not 4 weeks. I’ve come to realize that although there are certain things I like about being in Dehradun (being able to connect with the rest of the world, being able to take decent baths without too much trouble – though they are still bucket ones unfortunately, getting a change in cuisine and being able to go to the bazaar and find almost anything I need), I don’t really like the work I do there (mostly report writing/editing, summarizing points about our previous field trip or just sitting around with nothing to do) and the work environment at the PSI office isn’t what I would choose, so I have started looking forward to going back out to the field.

We had a free afternoon yesterday as we ended up being driven out to Mayali in the PSI jeep rather than having to take the bus. This meant that the trip took only 7 hours instead of 9, and since the driver wanted to get back to Dehradun on the same day, we left at 6:00am and reached Mayali at 1:30. As early as this was, it was too late to do any field work, so we had the afternoon off – a nice break after a long, uncomfortable, early-starting journey. Supna and Hiralal both went immediately to sleep, but I sat around for awhile, exploring some of my old writing on my computer, and going back and reading things I’d written for this website previously. It was kinda neat (and a little strange) seeing all that stuff again, and made me re-realize how much things have changed over the past few months and years. Going from university life to assembling seismic monitoring stations in the Canadian Arctic to India seems about as big a series of changes as you can get, and even here India my life has gone from studying Hindi in peaceful Landour to backpacking around Western India and now to doing community level social-research in remote villages in the Himalaya. Talk about diversity. Even looking at my life here in Mayali and comparing it to when I first arrived, while some things are surprisingly consistent, there have been changes.

The biggest change in my life here in Mayali (compared with the daily routine I wrote back in February when we first settled in here) has been that ever since the beginning of summer (beginning of March – this is India), the one benefit of our room (attached bathroom with running water) has gone because the tap now only gives air. Apparently Mayali only has 2 year-round water sources and though thankfully we are very close to one, our tap water apparently comes from another place (makes me wonder where, but it’s probably better not to think about that..). However, the adjacent building (where the girls’ room is) has a pump down at the spring which provides water to their building year-round, and so we occasionally sneak a bucket or two from there and justify it by saying that if they were on their own, they’d use at least that much water. The building owner’s mother (Dadi-ji as they say here) is a sweet-heart and doesn’t mind, but the owner yells at us when he catches us taking water from his building to our room/kitchen in the other building, saying that since our kitchen isn’t in his building, we can’t use his water there (I he’s still a little miffed that we took only one room in his building). With the tap dry and the easy water next-door “off-limits”, we’ve been forced to act like most Indian villagers and bring all our water up from the spring in buckets.

Read the rest of this entry (785 words) »

20 years ago today was a special day in our family – my brother Evan was born. Between my traveling and his busy schedule at SFU, we hadn’t talked in a long time, so I figured that a birthday was the perfect time to try to get a hold of him. I also had just found out that my phone company had dropped its international phone rates 53% as of April 1 (no joke, they don’t do April Fools here), so calling people back home has suddenly become much more viable (though still not cheap). However, with Evan living in Vancouver (GMT-7:00) and myself being here in India (GMT+5:30), a whopping 12.5 hours of time change made it a little hard to find a time to call. Thankfully, Evan’s not known for going to bed early, so I figured that my best chance to catch him would be for me to call over my lunch break. However, work was pretty slow and dull today (doing data entry of poorly completed and therefore confusing household surveys we did in our villages), so by 1:00PM I was ready for a break (lunch doesn’t usually happen until at least 1:30 if not 2:00 here) so I told Supna I needed a break to go call my brother as it was his birthday.

I walked out onto the front step of the office, pressed a couple buttons on my cell phone and suddenly was listening to the SFU Residence Automated phone system, almost exactly half way around the world. Technology is pretty amazing, our world is so small these days. However, Evan wasn’t in his room (likely still out working or having fun with his friends – midnight is still very early for university students), and unlike here in India (and Canada for that matter), I’m the only person in my family with a cell phone, so I had to settle for leaving a happy birthday message on his answering machine (something that I realized Indians don’t have/use).

I went back to work (not having gotten the break I wanted), but lunch time came soon enough so we all packed up to head back to the guesthouse. While waiting for Supna, everyone else was hanging out in the office entry room just chatting. I was tired and hot and so not completely following the (Hindi) conversations, but at one point I tuned in to hear Hiralal questioning Sunil about when his younger brothers’ birthday. Hiralal seemed to think that it was today, but Sunil was quite confused and told him that wasn’t true. After some back and forth, I realized that Hiralal must have gotten confused and so I told him (and everyone else assembled there) that it was in fact my brothers’ birthday. They all laughed at the miscommunication and passed on congratulations to Evan. Then Hiralal asked me about the birthday party… I was confused for a second, and then replied that since Evan was back in Vancouver, the party was there. They all laughed again, but then Hiralal asked, “but what about our party?” and everyone became quiet and looked at me curiously.

Read the rest of this entry (1265 words) »