A rambling update, (once a year literary burst)

Life here in Garo Hills has started taking on a sort of a routine. After two weeks we have started making significant progress in spite of short work days other complications. Our upstairs small third of the triplex we will be temporarily staying in when it is finished is located third from the end. The top floor is two dwellings meant for only a couple. It has a small entry big enough for a small couch or a few chairs and coffee table. The next room behind a full height barrier wall is the bedroom. A king bed is out, the whole room is just larger than a king bed. Then another full height wall and the bathroom/shower, has the only door inside the house. Last, the kitchen. Out the back door is a shared balcony with the dwelling on the other half of the house.

That will be home as soon as we have a toilet and running water. For now we live in a room about the size of the guest room Gina and I stayed in at your house, approximately 12'x16'. That includes bathroom, a table with a propane stove on it we call the kitchen, fridge, small table that we have to clear off for every meal, and a bed I am guessing is the size of a full, just larger than a twin and I think the locals call it a queen, we are still figuring out the names for miniature beds.

I have finally given the engineers in the states the information they need to complete the septic design. The seemingly simple tasks of 1) asking people with any certainty how much water each person will flush down the drain for each building, 2) Make a relative elevation (topo) map of the construction site so the engineers know up from down and can make the water flow downhill, 3) take a picture of local water plants that fit the description of reeds, cat-tails, or bulrushes so the engineers know we are actually planting the right plant, and 4) take a soil percolation test to find the water absorption rate, takes a really long time.

Now I am on to designing the water distribution for the campus. There is already one 400 foot well and we will be digging another one on the other side of the campus in light of a water tower for redundant water supply. Digging wells is about 1/3rd the price of installing a tower. Once that is done Gina and I will probably head down to the next school site and start designing the next septic system. I am quickly feeling more like a civil engineer every day and will probably be able to write a book on "waste water management out-side the United States" by the time I am done here. The interesting thing is that Maranatha will probably have me write the standard procedures manual before too long.

Gina and I are hanging in here. The living quarters are a little tight and if anyone wanted a nice QUIET corner to call their own... well India is not the place. We look forward to having our own apartment soon. Until then, we are calling it full immersion as we live in the old bank with about 10 others and we take long walks along the peaceful village roads lined with fireflies at night and in the morning the clouds hang low over the lush green hills and flooded rice patties.

I am including a picture I was thrilled to have captured. In the middle of a 2 hour conversation the three others in the car were having I heard a few English words that threw me into action. "There's an elephant", I looked up just in time to see the rear end of an elephant that looked about the same size and shape as the trucks we had been dodging at 70 km/hr. Already equipped with the camera and zoom lens, I whirled around and snapped the photo out the back window. It made my day.

Lest I give the false impression that life is all frustration and horror, it is not. The people are very hospitable and love taking us on trips to new places and seeing new people. Visiting the 5000 year old Hindu temple was a real treat. The food is good, it will take a long time for us to get used to the amount of oil and hot peppers that are in use. Sometimes, it seems like we are going so many places and doing so many things we cannot get the work done that we need to. This, of course, is frustrating. I have had to learn that shaking my head to say "no" looks strangely like tilting my head to the locals, which means "yes". I am still feeling a little weak as my body recovers from jet-lag. My ears are starting to adjust so I can now understand when people speak to me in English. Hindi is on the list of languages to learn.

Moms and Dads, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends, I love and miss you all,

David

The Conquest of Green

I saw it. You won't believe that I saw it, but I did see it. David saw it too. It was buzzing around me and my book while I tried to fight off a headache with some dense George Eldon Ladd theology. I only allow myself the privilege of reading my book if something (like a headache) is preventing any other productive activity. I felt guilty about it for sure. But the computer was giving me fits and making writing impossible (Note reason number two for not writing. One you will recall was a headache). The mutant insect must have been sent to torment me for my indulgence. It was a bee. A bee of unusual size, but only a bee. We have seen them two inches long out here. The most unusual aspect of the particular bee in question was not size, but color. It's stripes were not yellow, they were green! It was too big, too near for me to have made a mistake. David saw it too. The bee was black and green. It was then that I began to suspect a conspiracy of magnificent proportions. I checked the basketful of lemons that I had bought the day before. Sure enough, they too were green. Not a hint of yellow. Have I seen a yellow banana since I arrived? ? ? ? No, I don't think so. Green? yes. Black? yes. Yellow? no. In fact, green is everywhere. The housetops are covered with a green slime. Green plants have carpeted every available inch of ground. The trunks of the palm trees are covered by the green leaves of climbing plants, air ferns, and orchids. Green is completely out of control. I pondered the green back of a kingfisher hunting in the irrigation ditches of the rice paddies this morning and wondered, what is to become of yellow?

Unlike any place on earth

The sun does shine in the land where the clouds come home. We had a clear night last night after a late return from a shopping trip in the city two hours away. We were on a mission to buy all the supplies we would need for our guest house when it is finally finished. We are guests now in the home of a church elder and we are looking forward very much to having our own place. The idea is that we will go far down south to Cuddapah at the end of the week and when we return our house will be finished.

The Garo people are actually the Achik people. I have not been able to discover the story of how the Garo title was imposed upon them, probably by a British explorer with a need to name something, but it seems that for millennia they have known of themselves as the Achik and that is how I will henceforth refer to them. The Achik speak Achiku, a very simple language with verbal forms that vary with the tense but not the person or number. The sentence structure closely resembles Central Asian languages with many verbal suffixes. They say I can learn it in a couple months. So far my vocabulary is restricted to namingima – hello.

The seven states which make up North East India bear very little resemblance to the people or landscape of the Indian subcontinent and there are a number of underground militant groups dedicated to the freeing of the northeast from Indian supremacy. For that reason, I try to watch my tongue and not refer to the North East as a part of India. If you want to really understand North East India, you must forget that you are in India at all and look for the characteristics that make this region so unique. Among the many peculiarities of the northeast people are their round faces and slanted eyes. The Achik claim to have come all the way from Mongolia and they certainly resemble Mongolian people.

Many of the northeast tribes are matrilineal. I’ve been watching family dynamics trying to learn how a matrilineal culture operates. I was curious to know whether I would find the gender roles reversed from patrilineal traditions. To my surprise, women still do much of the cooking and cleaning. A foreigner entering this society would not suspect that this is an example of one of the rarest societal structures on earth. One reason for that may be the long standing Christian influence. Christian missionaries entered this place long ago and taught the tribal people about the humble Jesus, denominational division, the male priesthood, and God’s plan for female submission. Despite the Christian influence, of which I have observed very little positive to write, women are still treated with respect, and daughters inherit the family wealth. There is no walking ten paces behind a man here but neither is there husband abuse. My initial impression is that gender relations in North East India are marked by an extraordinary equality and mutual respect. The great experiment the world was afraid to try, has, in my estimation, proven successful.

getting our feet wet

I'm writing from a temporary bamboo hut on the building site of the future Garo Hills Adventist Boarding School. Internet is delivered via satelite but it's been touchy because of atmospheric disturbance. The rain clouds are laying low over the hills and it has been pouring rain since we arrived yesterday around noon. We asked how long it would rain and they replied two more months. This is really complicating construction but the crews are still out there shoveling gravel into baskets and then carrying them on their heads to the place where concrete is being prepared or pounding boards into forms. Yesterday they tried pouring the second floor of one building but had to stop when the rain got to heavy. Monsoon is really putting a cramp in this construction project. We don't know where we are staying yet but we hope to find out before evening. Yesterday we had to sit all day while people fed us but the camera crew has just arrived and there are promised of hiking up the hill to get some good shots of the campus. I'm looking forward to that.

One week in Gurgaon

I’m up at four in the morning and grateful because it’s an improvement from my first night when I was awake at midnight after crashing at four in the afternoon. Jet lag, it will make a philosopher out of anyone. After I have thought about everything I can imagine thinking about, listened to the air conditioner banging and roaring, and cuddled with David spitefully hoping he’ll wake up, there’s nothing left to do but give up the fight, turn on the computer, and write a long overdue update.

Let me tell you about the air conditioner in our room – it’s set at 30 c. I understand that’s about 92 f. I’ve never tried to measure the air outside but it’s well over 100 f in the morning when the sun comes up and only gets warmer from there. We are grateful for our air conditioner. The air is not only hot, it’s humid. David is dry when we leave our apartment in the morning and looks like he just stepped out of a shower for the second time when we arrive at the office ten minutes later. We waste no time getting inside the air conditioned office. It feels like we are living in a greenhouse. If only we could have brought our orchids with us! They would have been so happy here.

India is extravagant. There is marble everywhere. All the stairways, floors, and countertops in our neighborhood are marble. Even the courtyards and driveways are paved in it. The floors are cut with various colors of stone skillfully laid out in geometric patterns. The women are works of art in their intricately decorated saris. Little green birds dart among blooming balcony gardens and flowering trees. Stately Brahmin bulls amble along the roads blessing everyone they pass with their somber brown eyes. Marigold wreaths decorate curbside shrines or grace lighted nooks in homes and businesses. Vendors stack huge purple pyramids of eggplant in various shapes and sizes. There is a seemingly endless supply of variety.

India is friendly. I have not yet met one unfriendly creature in India, unless, perhaps, you count the monkey that darted at the heels of one of the Indian men who works at the office. I had walked past it just in front of him and it had just sat on its haunches questioningly. Maybe my pink skin confused the fight picking primate. Large brown dogs litter every corner of the city but they whine submissively and follow behind tails wagging expectantly when you speak kindly to them. One puppy rolled around on the dusty road in pure ecstasy when David rubbed its belly. Even the birds and chipmunks do not seem to fear people. Every restaurant sports a vegetarian menu. Nature and humanity appear to have reached a blissful harmony here.

We have had one week to settle in before we travel on Thursday to our more permanent home in Garo Hills. We have spent most of it sleeping through dinner, watching the sun rise in the morning, and trying to figure out how to buy food. I have an appointment on Wednesday morning with an orthodontist. David is settling in well at the office but I’m still trying to figure out how to be useful. With such an ambiguous job description I don’t expect that to change any time soon. I’ve begun making an ambitious effort to learn Hindi but they don’t speak Hindi in Garo Hills they speak a tribal language. When we leave Garo Hills we will go south where they speak Tellegu. It’s enough to discourage the most dedicated language student. We are just going to have to come to grips with the language barrier. I have not, however, given up entirely. I bought a Hindi grammar book and Hindi English dictionary yesterday on our shopping excursion.

David's fotojournalism

David's, yes that is me, posts will take on more of a photojournalism taste as I believe pictures are best described in pictures.

The first morning we arrived there was the most wonderful birds chirping outside our room. We figured out how the open the door to the balcony and found cute little green birds. Our view was extraordinary as we live on the upper most floor of a 3 story house. Counting in the local method it is the second floor, ground first second.

After only two days at work Gina and I headed to the park on Friday for a company fun day. Our first task was to make it past the monkeys. We started out playing cricket and then later went on to soccer, that is 'football' to the rest of the world.

Off to another exciting day in the construction department.

Thanks for the Picasa tip everyone.