Worlds Touch

Not a Cloud in the Sky

Not a Cloud in the Sky, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

This is the mountain that has been behind the monsoon rain clouds. This is what I saw from my balcony this morning. Now I know what I'm doing here...besides learning Nepali, helping out with the Hayden Hall web site, and making wonderful Rotary friends. I'm here to feel the power of this mountain.

Contribute to a Health Camp!

We have collected almost enough for a Health Camp in a remote village in the Darjeeling district. Generous donors who read my personal blog have contributed or pledged $480 of the $555 needed for a full day of free medical care, including checkups with doctors in various disciplines, lab work and medicines.

There is a Donate button on the right-hand side of the page which will take you to Worlds Touch's account with PayPal. Your credit cards are accepted, and your U.S. contributions are tax-deductible since World's Touch is a 501(c)3 registered charity.

The Darjeeling Rotary needs 25,000 Rupees ($555 USD) to conduct one of these all-day doctor blitzes in a remote area, far from the health facilities that all of us take for granted.

The doctors involved--usually a gynecologist, an eye doc, a dentist, an internist or general practitioner-- donate their services for the day. The Rotarians and other organizations that conduct these camps provide their food and transportation out to the boonies. If the place is so remote they have to spend the night, this donation pays for their lodging for the night as well.

Most of the money, the Rotarians told me, is spent on laboratory facilities and medicine. They bring a mobile lab with them and pay the technicians who work analyzing blood, sputum, etc.

The total in American dollars needed for one of these camps is about $555. The doctors can see about 400 patients in that day. These are people who simply can't afford doctors, even at what we would consider the low cost of medical care here.

We're close to having enough for one camp. I'd love to hand that money over to the Rotarians here in the next week. I've pledged to match the largest donation, and contribute my share to the Read Darjeeling program, buying books for children who are at risk for dropping out of their village school. The Read Darjeeling program provides both books and reading tutors for three villages in the district in a pilot project that has worked well in other parts of India.

If you'd prefer your PayPal donation go for books, or any of the Hayden Hall (www.haydenhall.org) projects, please just shoot me an email!

Mid July Rotary Update

One of the things I appreciate about this part of the world is the way one's helping contributions can go a long, long way to making a difference in the lives of those who need it the most.

Today I went with the Rotary Club to the "official opening" of a village library. There's an India-wide program that is aimed at bringing the reading level of the country's children up. Indian children aren't really tested for achievement level in reading and writing until they are in Grade 5. That's when many of those who've been passed along and passed along come up against the realization that they can't read. And they give up.

One of the reasons for child labor in India, said the Read Darjeeling Program coordinator, is they have left school and are sitting around the house. Their parents see them getting into trouble, and push them out to at least start contributing to the family income.

That may be, said one of the Rotarians, but it's the parents' responsibility to make sure they ARE achieving in school.

Well, between the desirable and the reality, there is a big gap. Into that gap steps Read Darjeeling. The program is doing an area-wide survey of village schools and school achievement. Do the schools have lights? Do they have a functioning water tap? What is the reading level of the children?

Once they have collected this information, says the coordinator, local people can use this information to pressure municipalities to provide more service, better reading programs in the schools, and better school facilities. As it is, no one really knows what the state of these far-flung village schools is.

The program sees itself as grass-roots advocacy and community organizing for better schools, better education, and above all, young people who can read. It hires local young people who have completed Grade 10 (what around here is considered the end of high school), trains them to man the library and to provide reading instruction and reading readiness games for their younger brothers, sisters and neighbors. Then the program scrimps and squeaks to stock the library with as many books as it can get. Apparently books in English are plentiful, but finding books in Nepali for school age children is much more difficult. The reading program is having to translate the English books into Nepali and then have the new books in the local language printed. 

The Darjeeling Rotary Club serves as a conduit for the funding that comes up from Calcutta and the India-wide reading program, as well as moral support and, in the case of Takdah in the Tinchuli province, program oversight.

Doing our duty in this responsibility, at 8:30 this morning, about 12 of us, including two Rotarian Annes, piled into two jeep-like vehicles and headed out over some of the worst roads I've ever traveled to visit the reading program, meet the various program directors, coordinators and local trainers, and inaugurate the library.

I don't know what it is about electrical lighting and this part of the world, but I found the same situation in Nepal. Here we are inaugurating a LIBRARY, and there isn't any light in the room. The building is built of very sloppy brick construction and corrugated tin with small wooden windows. There is one bare bulb dangling from the ceiling but it isn't switched on. I know the electricity situation is spotty at best, especially in the areas away from the cities. But then make the WINDOWS bigger, for heaven's sake. How can you teach children to read in the dark???

The other women and former naval officer Commander Niyogy went down the hill with some of the young lady volunteers to conduct some reading tests. It turns out that this particular village, Takdah, has been adopted by the World Wildlife Fund and they are doing all sorts of good works in the area. Several groups of villagers are organized into different income producing schemes. WWF waste baskets are placed at strategic intervals and the whole place feels quite clean.

The other Rotarians and I stopped in at a local guesthouse where several of the members were teachers of the family's children. In spite of being a part of the world where children who misbehave in school are regularly beaten, caned and otherwise taken a stick to, there is here a very deep respect for teachers, and deep ties between teachers and their former students. So the fact that the Gurung children were students of our Rotarian teachers immediately gave rise to lots of discussion.

It's funny trying to describe the sort of interaction that takes place here. There was an almost constant stream of discussion, but other than the answers to the questions that I asked about the program, I can't actually reproduce any of the exchange. But it was friendly, and in the end, there was some resolution. I think. The program guy from Calcutta wanted more oversight from the Rotarians, and his passionate district young woman wants the school survey done with Rotarian volunteers.

We also had a copious and delicious lunch at the guest house, which is apparently housing the Calcutta guy and feeding the volunteers. That was one of those situations where the hostess comes around repeated and tries to force you to put food on your plate and you have to find a way, without looking her in the face and telling her that forcing people to eat is one of the major causes of obesity so just quit, why don't you...you have to find a way to prevent more food from being piled on your plate.

Prolad, one of my favorite Rotarians because he has systematically undertaken my education in all things Nepali culture, from Day One, called it a "dance." And he's quite right. I just wish I could get better at it. It's 8 p.m. and I'm still stuffed. One innovation is that everybody, by mutual agreement, decided to eat with their fingers. This is a first in my Rotarian experience. Saturday night was a board meeting and Rotarian dinner, and some of the Annes discretely broke off a piece of bread and used it to pick up some vegetables on their plates.

The truth is that all agree that food tastes better when it is taken with the fingers. It is not only accepted to lick one's fingers at the end of the meal; it is considered the height of appreciation and a compliment to the chef. I'd suspected the guys ate with spoons and forks because they wanted to appear "civilized" to me, and I ate with spoons and forks because I didn't want to be odd-person-out. Out there in the country, we could all dig in with our fingers and enjoy our meal.

I also got lessons in the onomatopoeia of the Nepali language today from Prolad. He gave me four or five different words for different sounds of water.

This morning, before we arrived at the village, we stopped off at the Mother Teresa Sisters of Mercy home for severely handicapped folks. One of the Rotarians told me of a case there of a man who was found, abandoned in the forest. He had managed to survive, but he doesn't walk upright and has never recovered mentally.

We dropped off bags of clothes and some donated food for the home. Rotarian Dibanker has made this place his special project, and he comes often with donations.

Another case of a little goes a long way. But also a strange situation. Dibanker and some others wanted to build a shed for the nuns, so they could dry their clothes under shelter. In this rainy season, clothes just don't get dry. You put them out in the sun and three minutes later they are wrapped in mist and a few minutes after that it could be pouring down rain. But the shed project was rejected by the powers that be. Go figure.

Photos from the day as well as other miscellaneous mid-July pix can be found on my photo/audio/video blog:
http://thetraveler.typepad.com/travelertrish

Photos and other Darjeeling Miscellany

Remember, you can always click on over to the photo blog to see my India photo albums, or indeed all the photos from this trip.

There are some audio and video files on that blog as well.

Here's the URL:
http://thetraveler.typepad.com/travelertrish

World Cup And Other Darjeeling Adventures

As I reach the midway point in my Cultural Ambassadorial Scholarship, life here in Darjeeling has begun to have its comfortable routines.

Mornings, our young man about the house, Santosh, brings me what they call here "bed tea." It's milky sweet tea in a great big mug, and it has replaced coffee in my heart as the way to wake up in the morning.

I usually check my email then, as breakfast won't be served for another couple of hours. My laptop computer is set up in my room next to the window, all the better to capture the wireless vibrations from down the hill. You see, Miss Giri, my landlady, has the phone line that dials into the internet. My room is in another building altogether--without phone line. So I get my internet over a wireless connection between my house and Miss Giri's.

If this sounds complicated, don't despair. Everything about making technology work here is convoluted, complicated, and fraught with downtime. Take the water situation. We get water about once a week. We have water taps in the kitchen, the bathroom and the toilet. But they aren't actually running with water unless they've turned the water on up at Water Central, wherever that is.

The electricity is a bit more reliable, but we never know when it will wink out, leaving us groping for our candles. Fairly soon, though, it comes back on...though that email message I was writing doesn't necessarily automatically come back to the screen!

Some of the fascinating quirks of living in Darjeeling end up with thoroughly satisfactory solutions! For instance, since it's the rainy season, one's clothes have a tendency to take the better part of a week to get dry. You hang them on the line the minute there's a ray of sunshine, and then, when it starts raining five minutes later, you run out and yank them off the line. After a week or so of this back and forth action, you've got clothes dry enough to iron the rest of the way dry.

This presents a problem to the traveler who has exactly three outfits to her name. I decided about a week ago that the solution was quite simple: More Clothes! I went into the local government shop and found some gorgeous cotton  material, hand-woven, and then Miss Giri and I had a long talk with a tailor she knows (while he measured me from head to toe and all the way around), and presto! I'll have three new outfits in less than a week now.

This means that while one set is drying, I can be wearing the other set!

But thank goodness for the internet. My old leather EarthShoes from Wal-Mart have given up the ghost. They are ratty, tattered and thoroughly disreputable, and the monsoon rains are not helping. One of my blog readers suggested these funny new plastic shoes, Crocs, and I went online to check them out. Then I emailed my friend Susan in Bangkok and a week later they were in the mail to me. Imagine the old days, when a letter to the states took the better part of three weeks. I'd be barefoot today!

Well, the World Cup Soccer Tournament is finally over, but I got to see it out in STYLE! The Darjeeling Rotary Club had a special Fellowship Evening to watch the game, and I added my name to the list when it went around. It took a bit of special arranging, since there would be dinner at Hotel 7-17 (the fine establishment owned by Rotarian Tashi where I stayed my first week in Darjeeling) and then the game wouldn't start until 11 p.m.

I wouldn't be home before the wee hours of the morning. I made arrangements with the Rotarians for someone to see me as far as the train station, and then with Santosh to walk up to meet me, so I'd have an escort all the way to my door.

When I arrived last Sunday night, the Rotarians were all sitting around a big square table playing cards. The proverbial men's club, smoking cigarettes and drinking whisky (scotch to us), and dealing out the pasteboards. What were they playing? Why, gin rummy!

How totally cool! I have played so many hours of gin rummy in the rain on vacations in Florida with my family that I am practically a rummy card shark. I know the odds, I know what to save and what to throw and about how long to keep a king or an ace if it doesn't already go into a set. My father and I played gin rummy all my life. I adore gin rummy.

These folks have got a few wrinkles. They're playing many hands, several decks, and with one wild card per round. Their aces, if you're left holding an orphaned one, only count ten points against you, not 15 the way they do for us.

I watched a couple of rounds before I threw my hat in the ring. And played two hands before I ...uh...handed the guy next to me the one card he needed to gin and thus ended the round, game and match. I paid up my 50 Rupees, about a buck...though they call a Rupee a "Buck" here. It's so funny to hear someone say, "You owe me fifty bucks," and realize they mean rupees.

We adjourned to the dining room for dinner in a half-lit and empty restaurant. Mr. Tashi, the owner of the hotel, wanted to make sure his staff had plenty of time to get the dishes done before the start of the game. Contrary to the way I eat at Miss Giri's house, I did NOT eat with my fingers. Someone asked me if I do eat with my "hand," is the way they put it. I said, "Of course, everyone knows food is tastier when you eat with your hand." So why aren't you? they asked. I looked sheepish. "Nobody else is."

Then we gathered round the table for the final World Cup in soccer. The monthlong buildup to this evening was intense in Daj. Flags for favored countries flew. Bets were made. We had a points pool whereby the total number of points scored at the 90-minute mark would, if your number matched, win the pool. The day after the game, there was a big commotion down on the lane as the bookmaker made the rounds, paying those who had won money.

What was interesting was that all the "help" from the hotel gathered behind us, at a respectful distance. So the Rotary Club was in the front row and the servants and kitchen help were back in the shadows, silent but intent.

Being the only lady in the room reminded me of my days on the staff of a daily newspaper in western Massachusetts. In those days, there were very few women who were elected officials, so many of the meetings I covered were all men...and me. I thoroughly enjoyed my unofficial status as "honorary fellow." Gopal asked me about four times if I'd like something stronger to drink than fresh squeezed lime and soda, and I declined, knowing full well that "ladies" always decline strong drink and cigarettes. Finally, though, I broke down, I admit. I had one drink, well drowned, and a cigarette.

Some of my friends in the states found the game boring, but not me. Football is a puzzle that is constantly shifting as one side or the other tries to get close enough to make a shot. Someone is forever on the ground writhing in pain. And in this game, the beloved French team captain, who was planning to retire from the game in a few minutes anyway, lost his cool entirely and, seemingly without provocation, head-butted one of the Italians. My French mother-in-law has it on good authority that the Italian insulted Zidane's mother.

Still, the Rotarians were shocked by his bad-sportsmanlike behavior. They felt that it cast a pall over the rest of the game.

Newly inducted Rotarian Arun, the banker, had his car and servant present, so I had a 3 a.m. ride as far as the lane, and Santosh, groggy with sleep, stumbled up to accompany me the rest of the way.

When I got home, I sent all the members with email addresses  a funny eThank You Card. And wrote what I hope was a funny paper letter to the group.

"Being a Cultural Ambassadorial Scholar is a difficult job," I told them. "All those late nights, those dangerous wagers, those cut-throat card games. A hard job but somebody has to do it, and I bow before the responsibility."

And I told them that they were contributing to the experience of a lifetime, one I would never ever forget.

The next day, my eyes were all watery, my head all stuffy and I kept sneezing. I claimed all day it was an allergy attack, but Miss Giri was convinced my lack of sleep and the damp of the middle of the night did me in. She sent hot salty water to soak my feet before bed that night. And fed me cold-fighting supper, this yummy soup called Gunduk with a slightly bitter taste that you just KNOW is healthy.

As for the Nepali lessons, we are still making record progress. This week I had my first dream in the language. I dreamed of drilling verb conjugations, but it is always a sign of real progress when the new language begins to inhabit your dreams. The last week, I've been learning days, times, and all the little words that allow you to qualify what you're declaring: sometimes, often, usually, anything, everything.

And I now know how to say: "The Prime Minister made a speech on the occasion of His Majesty the King's Auspicious Birthday."

Now THAT is progress!

Golden Jubilee Installation

New President Deepak Sharma

Saturday night was the gala Installation of New Officers and Induction of New Members for Darjeeling's Rotary Club, and my landlady and teacher, Miss Giri, and I were both invited.

We were like two schoolgirls before our first dance, the pair of us. We looked critically at my handbag and decided it wouldn't do. She ironed my Ay Zow, a Vietnamese pink silk outfit, and we fussed over which shawl might go with it. She brought perfume for a last minute touch. We even took a taxi over to the Elgin Hotel, one of the historic landmark places in town.

We arrived in time for tea and cookies in the lounge and began our socializing in earnest. Several of the Rotary members, notably Mr. Diwaker Thapa and Mr. Prolab Roka, have started speaking to me in Nepali, and they continued the practice that night. With my teacher at hand, I was just a bit shy about getting my verb tenses right. In fact, at one point I was stumbling along, trying to say, "I have three Nepali teachers," when one of the members tried to correct me, until he realized that I was actually conjugating the verb!

I had just a few minutes to circulate, meeting Mr. John West's' very accomplished and genial wife Neena again, before we had to adjourn for the meeting. This meeting marks the 50th anniversary of the Rotary Club in Darjeeling, so the whole affair had a sort of momentous and historic feeling. They sing the National Anthem of India at the beginning of each meeting, the first club to do that in my Rotary travels. At home, we say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing some song, but I think our national anthem has too many high notes for the average warbler.

Deepak Sharma, the outgoing secretary who is also incoming president, read off a list of the club's accomplishments that year. They're working this summer on restoring a beautiful historic monument in the center of town, the clocktower, and the fund raising efforts for that are in full swing. Each member has been asked to take a book of 10 tickets at 500 Rupees each and come back with the whole lot sold. I was happy to make a contribution to the effort.

The club conducts health camps in various villages in the surrounding Himalayan hills. A health camp is like Doctor's Day in Town-- and is a well-established custom in this part of the world. International foundations and companies support the camps, and people get free check-ups, eye and dental exams and medicines. The club participated in the polio activities of the region, sponsored a career fair for young people, and provided schools with water filters to provide safe drinking water for the children. Rather than a Christmas celebration for underprivileged children, Darjeeling's club celebrates Dashain, a ten-day Hindu festival that occurs in October. Like our Christmas celebrations, the kids get a day of fun and games, a good meal, and take home a new outfit of clothes. The club in association with another nonprofit has started a reading program in Takdah village, and is working with a Rotary Club in Austria to renovate and upgrade a Tibetan school.

I'd met several of the incoming new members at Rotary Club meetings, but I was also pleased to get a chance to talk to them again after the formal ceremony was finished. "Fellowship" times at the Rotary Club, I've learned, are a very interesting time. The ladies...the Rotarians here call their wives "Annes," make a circle and sit in their lovely saris all together. There are usually one or two who don't join the group, but it is still a definitely "boys on one side, girls on the other" social arrangement. The gentlemen are served something quite a bit more potent than the soft drinks the ladies accept. They always offer me a whisky, but I always decline. There's something just a bit Victorian about this separation of church and state, as it were, but it also appeals to me. Maybe it's my Southern roots.

I had some lovely discussions, about my work in technology and nonprofits, about Daj history, about my language courses, about the food Miss Giri serves me, about living in Daj, with many of the folks in attendance. And Miss Giri enjoyed some very good conversations as well. At home, I'm not much for large, gala social occasions, preferring my office and my reading chair to most social events, and small gatherings of friends. But this is a very cordial group of people, and I take away from the evening the impression of having enjoyed a congenial atmosphere in urbane and friendly company.