Bethany in the Himalayas

You wanna hear an adventure story?

I just got back from a weeklong trip up to the Northern part of India with some friends-- Brendan, Katie, Alyssa, Allie, Britta, and her boyfriend (visiting from the states) Mike.

We started out our trip at 6:00 AM with a taxi to the B-lore airport, whereupon it was quickly discovered that I had forgotten (all too typically) my purse with credit card and passport. After some quick shuffling around of tickets and payments and a bit of begging to security guards, we made it to the gate with 5 minutes to spare. Flight to Delhi, taxi to the train station, several hours sitting on the dirty floor of the station or walking down the dirty street (if we would have wanted a marble statue of any Hindu god, we would have been golden. That's all they sold on this street. Well, statues and signs.) We were supposed to meet Mike there. Time passes, departure approaches, but where is Mike? nowhere to be found. Images flash through all of our heads of a poor American, new to India, wandering lost on the streets of Delhi... and we leave two members of the group behind to find him. The rest of us run fulltilt to the platform and make it just in the nick of time onto our train, only to find that car D6 is apparently a phantom. We walk up and down the length of the train with our big bags squeezing down too-small aisles trying to find the right part of the train. When we do, there's an elderly couple in our seats. Enter train conductor and every passenger in the car, who attempt to oust the very sweet old couple and install us in our rightful seats... in the blur I'm not sure where we found a place to sit, but sit we did. in seats. and we breathed for a while.

We met our friends in Rishikesh the next morning, a very jet-lagged Mike in tow.

Rishikesh was cold mornings, sadhus in orange, pilgrims and beggars with tin cups, prayer beads and music in every shop, nutella pancakes at every meal, cheap ayuravedic massages, white-water rafting the Ganges, sunrise in the foothills of the Himalayas, sparkling sand, sending prayers on little boats downstream, eating a giant grapefruit and street food, plunging into the river at dawn alongside the devout, visiting the Ashram where the Beatles wrote the white album, the yoga-capital of India, dirty-hippies trying to find meaning in the mess of it all. There were a lot of cows, but whats new?

After two days we took a couple of buses up to Musoorie, the queen of the hills. Katie had some friends from Wilderness Canoe Base teaching at an international school there. Small world-- they know almost everyone I know-- camp friends, highschool friends, even a cousin. Nan and Laura squired us around this beautiful little town nestled in the foothills.

Musoorie was good cheese, wool hats and mittens, layered sunset over the hills like a parfait, a ferris wheel powered by a man, climbing around on the inside, hiking up a hill swathed in tibetan prayer flags, views of the snowy peaks, playing silent football, little cafes, eating momos at every meal, visiting a tibetan buddhist temple, incredible vistas around every corner.

This is exactly what vacations are supposed to be: relaxing, refreshing, beautiful, exciting, adventurous, a cultural experience and brimming with happiness.

Nine Months of Rain

This week our group was split into two halves for field visits to different parts of southern India to learn more about 'Globalization and the Ethics of Development', which is the theme of our second unit. I'm representing the half of our group that went to the coastal state of Kerala. We were in it's poorest region, Wyanad, which is situated in the Western Ghat mountains. The week was amazing-- the region is beautiful (green mountains, incredible birds... you get the idea) and we had some awesome experiences getting different perspectives on issues like health, education, and agriculture. We asked the question “What is development? Who does it, for whom, and at what cost?” and found a plethora of interesting new ideas, both about the Indian context and our own.

I (creative soul and hopeless romantic that I am) wrote a poem one early morning, looking out over a hill in Wyanad, listening to the birds and reflecting on our experience. I hope it gives you some idea of what our week was like.

Nine Months of Rain

The language here falls like
water over rocks
skipping and rolling over itself,
a stream from the green mountains.
Words bubble like a spring from
the mouths of people as old as
earth to say 'yes, your gods with
human shape are selfish, so, they
steal the earth they rape the forest.”
coming from mouths that now take rice, take
sugar with their tea when it used
to be wild honey, and now they live
in exile and impotence while the
ancient knowledge leaks away.
They speak in words like bitter
water tainted with poison,
scarce despite nine months of
rain because of the greed of bananas
and the big men who buy them.
And even the neighbors, each with too-too
small land who plant their crops together--
even they sell their coffee their
pepper their tea by prices
decided in New York.

But again the air is full of sounds:
it's birds with long tails, it's birds
who sing like fountains, it's shy-daughters
singing old love-folk-songs after dinner,
and then the drums, and dancing--
wildly! Around and around to music
like water that doesn't stop and
doesn't stop until we can hardly-hardly
breath. It is like this, too, when we
stand on top of a mountain and see:
rice-paddies like patchwork,
mountains behind the mist, forests unrolling
like carpet, and water that glints in the sun.
and here any words that bubble up are whisked
away by the wind, so we are speechless.

And speechless too when we know that
water-that-glints is water-that-rises:
a dam, or the ghost of one,
where water had risen and risen like words,
like a scream so that homes and lives were drowned
in a word from some big man and
none of their words could stop it.
No. the water still rises and rises,
hungry, and when it rains they hide
their children, or the rising water
will be their end.

And now it's a foreign mouth with
words rising and rising like water
to say there is this place where moss
grows like velvet,
and birds sing like fountains,
where there is water;
in streams-resevoirs-floods-rains-wells
or conspicuous by its poison or its absence
or as it is tumbles,
joyous-sad-ancient-rising,
from all of our mouths together.