after a long silence...

Let me tell you a little bit about this past month! I started off September at the farm, beginning a kitchen garden program with schools and visiting different principals to get their approval for the project.  We dug up a patch of land at the farm to use as a demonstration site, but I have now extricated myself from the project a bit as I am on the road for a while.  The farm hosted a very disorganized course called "Soil Not Oil," and I attended one half of one session before going off to do my own thing.  I really could not understand the purpose of the course beyond income generation - there was a group of farmers there for 'training' and a small group of foreigners there for the course itself.  Navdanya decided to combine the two activities and so the sessions were in Hindi and English (read: laboriously slow).  Further, any organic farmer or environmentally conscious person would have already known 90% of what was said!  I couldn't quite believe it...

Beginning of September, I prepared a Rosh Hoshana dinner with some other Navdanya volunteers at the home of a jewish expat named Mona (macrobiotic expert who runs a sunday organic famers market and from whose house help I learned how to make tofu) for her and a small group of her friends.  It was a lovely day, and so satisfying to sit down to a meal I had such a big part in preparing, and sharing a bit of the Jewish culture with a group of Hindus and Christians.  We lit candles, said a prayer, Mona as the eldest blessed everyone, and we partook of a feast... homebaked whole wheat challah bread, tsimmes (carrot prune baked dish), kugel (grated potato onion casserole), falafal and tahini we made from scratch, and homemade apple cake for dessert.  Two of the guests were so smitten with the meal that they demanded I teach bread-making the following Sunday during the market.

From Navdanya, I headed to Rishikesh with four friends to stay at the same ashram we had visited in July, managed by our friend Meera (the same woman whose orphanage we visited in August).  En route to Rishikesh, we experienced a minor collision, which was scary enough but no one was hurt...the very first thing to happen after the crash was that the driver hopped off and bolted down a laneway.  Afraid of being beaten by the passengers? Afraid of the ramifications from the bus company? In any case, he came back after a while, and we all caught another bus going the same direction, feeling slightly frazzled and finally happy to arrive at our destination, do yoga, eat good food (yak cheese sandwiches, tomato ginger soup, even roasted vegetables!), and rest.  Unfortunately, there, both Julia and Nina fell sick - Nina with an amoeba in her gut that required two different hospital trips, and Julia with a severe bout of Delhi Belly, which required antibiotics she had brought with her.  Despite the illness, it was so good to get to Rishikesh, and we even managed to meet up with a former Navdanya volunteer there, an incredibly kind and joyful man from Puerto Rico who is studying ashtanga yoga and writing a novel about love in the time of environmental destruction.

Julia and I spent a few days at the farm before beginning our epic journey to the South, but that was plenty, and we were ready to go when the time came. It feels a shame that the farm has become an unlivable place for us, but I'm so glad that the state of disorganization there allows us the freedom to leave and travel and see more of India than we might have if it had been a more highly scheduled kind of internship.  Being able to travel allows us to carry out research as we integrate visits with many organic farms and organizations along the way, and I have begun plotting to create a small documentary by interviewing some of the amazing folks we have met and are continuing to meet.

We embarked on our journey with a sendoff lunch at Abhyudai's family home in Dehradun.  He is an Indian friend who is acquiring land in the foothills of the Himalayas to become a natural farmer (ever read Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution?).  Until he finalizes the deal on his land, he is interning with Navdanya to study organic and sustainble farming techniques.  At his house, under the direction of Niccolo, an Italian intern, we cooked up a pasta lunch with organic basil, eggplant and fresh tomato, a rosemary potato sodabread, and veggie cutlets (green pepper rings filled with ginger curry coriander potato mash and fried in cinnamon oil).  We stayed the night in Dehradun at a hotel and then took an early bus to the city of Chandigarh in the state of Punjab.  It is incredibly treed, incredibly well planned, incredibly organized compared to the chaos of Dehradun, and we were delighted to be beginning our adventure here.  There we stopped in to see a rock garden made from all recycled stone and bangles and plastics, then to a the biggest rose garden in Asia, a war memorial and a bougainvillea garden that wasn't in season. 

From Chandigarh we took a bus to Amritsar almost at the Pakistani border for the purpose of visiting the Golden Temple, a holy Sikh site to which we ventured at dawn to watch the sunrise.  It was an overwhelmingly beautiful experience - I felt so touched to be at such a sacred place and granted permission to participate and observe the activities within.  We didn't partake in the community meal that is freely offered, but it was amazing to learn that food is served daily to 30,000 people at the temple (a simple meal - dahl and chapati - but nonetheless impressive)!  That evening, we went to the Wagah border ceremony, where momentarily the gates were opened between the two countries and armed guards shook hands and simultaneously lowered their flags.  Ultimately it was a lot of cheering and screaming from both sides and lots of loud music, as well as an interesting breath control exercise by a solider on each side - a competition of who could yell for the longest and loudest.  I smiled to myself, thinking, wow...all those years of breathing exercises in choirs could have led me to do well in this line of employment.

The train from Amritsar to Delhi was uneventful, but so much more comfortable than the buses we had been previously taking, and we met up with two of my good friends from UPeace in Delhi, who graciously hosted us and toured us around the city.  We were able to visit the JNU campus, a left of centre politically chargedpostgrad university of 4,000 students housed on over 100 acres of green campus.  We saw Qutb Minar, an ancient Islamic stone tower and surrounding ruins, drove by India Gate and the government buildings, wandered through the National Gallery of Modern Art, and wound up at an organic wellness centre (that sources food from Navdanya!) called the Global Arts Village.  I am hoping to go back to meet and chat further with the owner of the establishment, as he commented a bit on the disorganization of Navdanya he has also experienced, but ultimately seems a supporter of their work.

This week, we are in Goa, staying with a man who collects traditional mango varieties.  He has some pretty phenomenal grafts, where some trees produce 8 or 9 different kinds of mango, and as a 'fruit guy,' he is also collecting mamei, chickoo, custard apple, cashew, coconut, and tamarind.  His day to day employment is actually as a professional mariner (he sails under a merchant company from Vancouver and has been there many times) and so he works four months on and four months off throughout the year.  Right now he is on vacation and has been able to host and tour us around a bit, showing off his beautiful corner of the world.  Last night he took four of us out for natural ice cream and we tried the following local flavours: jackfruit, custard apple, young coconut, fig, and chickoo.  The first night we arrived here, he had just caught a big grouper and we had a roast out over a fire on a quiet beach under the full moon.  Pretty surreal.  Tomorrow, we will head to an organic spice plantation hopefully, and in a few days we will be making our way to a farm near Bangalore that we found through WWOOF to volunteer our labour and learn a bit about organic agriculture in the South.

Julia and I have booked a slew of railway tickets that will take us through to her departure at the end of November, and the Indian Adventure is suddenly seeming very close to an end!  I hope to make it last and really soak it all up until then...still four more weeks of travel in the south, 3 organic farms to visit, and one two week course through Navdanya on Gandhi and Globalization.  Until then, I hope to update here a bit more frequently, and if you are reading this, please let me know! I crave news from home, from the food movement, from near and from far.

shanti!

Tehri part 3 and Navdanya Intern Departure

To conclude my series on Tehri, I should write a bit more about it.  The purpose of the journey was to visit a group of women farmers and hear their stories about their experiences with climate change.  After a beautiful welcome folksong, delicious chai and snacks, the women talked one at a time about how they have been experiencing "climate chaos," in the words of Dr. Shiva.  Either there is too much or too little rain.  Instead of saving 5kg of seed each year, they are now trying to save 25kg in order to have enough to eat and to replenish when seeds get washed out or dried during draught.  Negiji and Dr. Shiva tried to give them women suggestions of healthy intercropping strategies in order to protect their plants; however, mostly they just listened and after only a few short hours, we got back in the car to make the long trek down the mountain toward Dehradun.  More photos!

Dr. Shiva being embraced (the warmest embrace I've experienced in my life) upon departure

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The many faces of the farmers:

Talking about seeds:

In the car, descending.  Notice the incredibly kind gentlemen on the left - he made me switch seats with him so I could sit in the middle of the car in order to feel less carsick, saying "I'm rough and tough. Let me sit in the back."

Our first glimpse of the dam itself, which has submerged an entire community and is causing major soil erosion and terrace destruction.  Tehri dam is one of the largest in Asia (I hear different numbers) and supplies Delhi with its hydroelectric power.

The Shiva household and Navdanya office in Dehradun:

The bustling city of Dehradun:

A new variety of millet we found while up in the mountain:

Hanuman, the monkey god, who hung out on our back window of the car throughout the journey:

On another note, when we got back from our journey, we had to say goodbye to three of our longterm interns, and so decided to send them off with, what else, food.  Here is the cinnamon banana cake we baked:

And the treasure hunt we created for them:

Dr. T, dressed up as captain geography (as a challenge, they had to find and wear something from each person on the farm... the map is my contribution):

All three, in all their gear, with bean, the dog:

Blowing out the candles on their cake:

Last supper in the kitchen:

Satyaji, dishing out upper. Kamal, in the background, also left the farm that day to go back to cooking at Navdanya's Delhi location.  No more flowers or airplanes made from vegetables to garnish our salads!

Finally, we just said goodbye to this beautiful soul not long ago as well.

So much has happened in this past week alone that I hope to post another couple of blog entries soon before I forget all that has happened!  Until then, be well...

what is the word for the opposite of being lonely?

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be alone - alone with oneself, alone in the world, alone amid a group of people.  Here, in a communal living situation, it is not possible to ever be really alone. The walls have ears. The walls separating the bathrooms don't reach the ceiling, and so even showers are not alone times if someone is bathing or doing their laundry in the one next to you.  These days, I go to bed in a dorm of six people, and sneak out quietly in the morning if I am the first one up to grab a moment of solitude.  We eat the same meal with the same people three times a day, every day.  We travel together.  We undergo the same experiences and talk about them (probably too much).  We teach each other, learn from one another, together, together, together.  And I love it.  But...
Someone sent me this beautiful youtube poem/video, How to Be Alone, which makes me crave some time alone.  I've needed alone time so much recently that I pretty close to hibernated one day behind a building at the farm and devoured an entire novel.  And so, on Monday, I'm heading out from the farm to an ashram for five days.  Yes, I will be venturing out on the road with three others, but I can't wait for the solace in a good yoga practice, the divine comfort of finding new hideaways, and a room with just one other wonderful person.