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About Vanastree & a lot more before lunch

“Loss of genetic diversity in agriculture is leading us to a rendezvous with extinction – to the doorstep of hunger on a scale we refuse to imagine. To simplify the environment as we have done with agriculture is to destroy the complex interrelationships that hold the natural world together. Reducing the diversity of life, we narrow our options for the future and render our own survival more precarious.”
– Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney, Shattering: Food, Politics and the Loss of Genetic Diversity


Vanastree, the organization that has taken me on as chief cook and bottle washer (ie, intern), is one of many NGOs tackling this issue of genetic diversity in agriculture. Basically, thanks to the “green revolution” of pesticides and hybrid crops, India’s agricultural land is in danger of becoming a giant, Monsanto-owned rice paddy, susceptible to disease and chaos and not coming near to providing enough food for its constituents. By decentralizing the food supply and reducing the heavy dependence on chemical inputs, food security (both in terms of safety and availability) becomes a much easier task.
Vanastree’s mission is to promote biodiversity in cultivated plants, which means it’s involved in a variety of activities. Documenting the infinite varieties of rice, vegetables, medicinal plants and food-producing trees in the region is a major task. We also organize farmers into seed-exchange groups, and get people started in home-based, conservation-oriented businesses (ie drying bananas for sale or hosting ecology camps).
And who does all this work? Well, there’s the collective of farmers that make up Vanastree’s 80-some member base. They keep the seeds, comprising a regional seed bank that uses the landscape itself instead of some subzero vault in the arctic. Then there’s Sunita, who basically does everything else from the organizational standpoint. Sunita started the organization in 2001, and is probably the most dedicated person I’ve ever met outside of my workaholic family. Burnout is not in her vocabulary. (Luckily, she also has a great sense of humor and knows how to take a break.)

So far, my job as an intern has been to get Vanastree up to date, technology wise (Sunita jokes that she’s the only Indian without computer skills), complete a bunch of background research for myself so I can get some grasp on the issues, and do photodocumentation of farms/home gardens and food processing. This last task has been the most fun and interesting, and not just because I’m out in the field. As a journalism student, I’ll take any excuse I can get to stick a camera in someone’s face.
This Tuesday, I got one of those opportunities – a trip to the coast to tour home gardens with a partner NGO. Except that at six in the morning when Sunita politely asked me to get up already, I was not ready to be a dutiful intern. Neither was I relishing the thought of the 16-hour day ahead. Having been awake half the night under mosquito assault, I wondered if economists had ever tried to calculate the lost GDP due to bloodthirsty insects. It would probably be enough dough to swathe the entire country in mosquito netting.
Nonetheless, here’s a rundown of the day:

Our driver, Mushtaq (the same one who picked me up from the airport), arrives just on time; that is, ten minutes early. I grab my camera and climb in the van with Sunita and Manorama, a Vanastree trustee who not only takes care of her farm and family but also does much of the organization’s documentation work – she probably could identify hundreds of local vegetable varieties by sight, along with their ideal growing conditions, pest management techniques and preparation methods. With her quiet yet inquisitive manner she pulls data out of even the most secretive gardeners.
Mushtaq throws the van into gear and we go bumping off down the road. I’ve been on a few trips now with Mushtaq at the wheel and have gained an appreciation for both his skillful driving and his sense of style. Like many young Indian men, he typically wears clothing flamboyant enough for an American preteen girl: rhinestone-studded jeans embroidered with colorful patterns; tight, brightly colored t-shirts emblazoned with brand names; chunky shoes. His van has just as much personality. A gold plastic tablet with text from the Koran (Mushtaq is part of the large Muslim minority here) hangs from the rearview mirror; on the side mirror, pink text instructs the viewer to SMILE.

Anyway, after climbing up and down hills for nearly two hours, we arrive at the coast. Our guide to the home gardens today is Rekha, a woman from the NGO Sneha Kunja. Sneha Kunja is a health organization that runs a hospital combining traditional (Ayurvedic, naturopathic, etc) and conventional (Western) medical practices. They also have several outreach programs, and promoting good nutrition through home gardens is one of them. We meet up Rekha for a quick breakfast of chai and dosas – thin pancakes made from rice flour –and head out to the first garden.
This part of the coast is home to the Hallaki Vokkal tribe, a unique but swiftly diminishing group that has farmed and fished here for thousands of years. Although they never had the bureaucratic clout to gain official tribal status from the government (a process that takes time, negotiating skills and money), the Hallaki Vokkal maintain their distinct appearance and way of life. The women traditionally wear a backless sari topped with thick layers of beaded necklaces, and men perform work according to their caste – the family we visited specializes in carpentry.
After admiring the patch of tall white okra plants and a thorny cow fence, we head down to the house where the vegetables for home consumption are grown. The greenery is flourishing despite what seem like impossible conditions – a whopping 13 feet of rainfall per year (most of it in the last three months) and soil that resembles reddish gravel. We stop inside the house for a few minutes to eat some surplus bananas; with different varieties ripening all year round, it’s a tough job in these parts, but somebody’s got to do it. We also get our foreheads dusted with red and yellow powders, a ritual performed on all guests to traditional households. Then we head back to the van, wake Mushtaq from his nap, and hit the potholes to the next garden.
On the way, we make a tender coconut stop. Tender coconuts are a fleshy, green cousin of the usual brown-husked coconut, mostly prized for their juice. Not only does they contain salts to replenish your ever-depleted sweat glands, but tender coconuts are also a guaranteed pathogen-free source of hydration. The roadside vendor sells them for about eight rupees (20 cents) each, and uses his machete to lop off the top. Then you pour the cool, slightly tangy juice down your throat and hand the empty coconut back to him. He makes a series of cuts to slice it in half and fashion a spoon out of the hull, which you can then use to scrape out the thin layer of gooey innards. That part is a bit too mucousy for me but the liquid was refreshing. We toss our coconut shells onto the large mound next to the vendor’s stand. They’ll dry there and be used to fuel someone’s fire. Because the coast is so densely populated, wood is hard to come by – the forests are as free of leaf litter as a well maintained city park – and any burnable scrap is valuable property.
While Sunita and I were getting coconuts, Rekha had made a few phone calls and discovered that there weren’t any more gardens for us to visit that day. We decide instead to take a look at Rekha’s house and then go to an island hosting a sustainable fishing village.
At Rekha’s house, I pet a cute calf and get more powder rubbed on my forehead. From there, it’s a short distance down the road to the river.
The river is the Aghanashini, one of four main rivers in this district. It’s one of the few rivers that hasn’t been dammed in India and as a result still feeds a huge estuary, rich with birds, fish and other wildlife. The island we’re visiting, Aigalkurve, is in one of these backwater reaches.
When we get out of the van, the boatman is waiting to ferry us to the island. He pushes the wood canoe across the estuary using a long stick – this is shallow, completely still water. I stick my hand in and half wish for a swim. The rains have been receding and I’m discovering how hot the sun here can get, even when behind a layer of clouds. The high humidity makes even a trace of heat magnified a thousand times. But the lush jungle on either side of the river promises shade and it’s a short ride. I still have no idea what’s on the island, but I have a feeling it will be interesting, if only because it looks like I’m entering the set of Lost.
I check my watch. It's 11 am. I don't remember the last time I've seen so many different things before lunchtime.

To be continued...

Blood donation in the jungle

During my first weekend in India, I took a little jungle expedition between rain showers. When I got back home and kicked off my sandals, I noticed what looked like a tiny stick stuck to the top of my foot. Except it wouldn’t brush off. I reached down to pick it off. It wouldn’t be picked. When I dug in with my nails, it squirmed.
It was burrowing into my skin.
Freaking out commenced.
While in full panic mode, I somehow got it off my foot and onto my fingers. The little bastard was like glue, though, and only through an elaborate combination of shaking, scraping, and cursing did I finally fling it onto the ground.
It scrunched up sadly on the dirt, to maybe a centimeter in length. Its hateful little body was full of blood. MY blood! I reached out with my sandal to squish it, but it sensed me with its leech-sense and stretched out like a hungry baby bird, suddenly a full two inches long. (I realize these are not impressive figures, but two inches of anything that wants to suck your blood is two too many, in my opinion.)
Opting not to kill it, I spent the next half hour compulsively checking my ankles, feet and toes for more black sticks. Then I declared personal jihad on leeches.

Later, I learned that leeches have no eyes but they actually can detect body heat. Also, they don’t burrow into your skin, they just bite and hang on with amazing strength. And now, a couple of weeks after that incident, I’ve begun to accept leeches as a part of life in the tropics, at least until monsoons end (two more weeks, two more weeks...) You go outside, you get a leech, you pick it off and bleed a bit. Then you put on more mosquito repellant before they, too, follow the blood scent and want a piece of the action.
I’ve also discovered new ways of dealing with my friends the leeches, the best of which was taught to me by Sunita’s farmhand, Manju. Upon returning from a walk one day, I was doing the leech dance on her porch (fingers stuck under my velcro sandal strap, one foot off the ground, hopping, cursing under my breath). He happened to walk by just as I’d removed it and looked at me curiously. “Leech,” I said, pointing to the ground (our communication is rather limited due to the language barrier). He nodded, went into the house, and came back with a lighter. Then he proceeded to roast the little sucker with a satisfying sizzling noise, while his four-year-old son and I looked on in equal awe and fascination.

Incredibly, I’d actually planned on coming here in June, when the monsoons start. I was crushed when I was told I would have to wait until fall because Sunita had fallen ill. Now I realize that while it’s good to have the experience of living with monsoons, had I come in summer I would have been eaten by fungus, bugs, spiders and lecherous foot-mongers before I could even hop on a plane back home. In September, it still rains off and on throughout the day, but according to Sunita, this is just a drizzle. In a couple of weeks, the puddles will dry up, my clothes will dry out and lose the rotting smell, and the leeches will greatly diminish.

Then, tick season starts.

Photos!

I've finally got some uploaded. Don't miss your chance to see the Bridge of Death, my bloody foot, and more!
http://picasaweb.google.com/tuula11/ArrivalMattigatta

Mathigatta

Two days after arriving at Sunita’s, she has guests in town and so I’m off to my first homestay.
First, we cross the paddy fields to the bus stop, where we nab a fast-moving private bus headed to Sirsi, the nearest city. Personal transportation is not commonplace here, and the bus is reliable – well, reliable enough – for the daily commute. In Sirsi, we stop by Vanastree’s office. I meet one of the trustees of the organization, a woman named Manorama. Her son, Vivek, is with her and offers to take me to the bus station on his motorbike. Thankful for the opportunity to skip a walk in the muggy weather, I accept. Sunita gives me a piece of paper with my host’s name, phone number, and address, and advises me not to talk to strange men on the bus. Then we’re off.
Dodging cows, street vendors, schoolchildren and auto-rickshaws, Vivek gets us to the bus station in one piece. This place handles busses traveling all over the district, and to say it is a zoo would be a gross understatement.
Inside the walled parking lot, ramshackle, exhaust-belching busses careen in and out without warning and with no regard for who might be in their way. Before they’ve even stopped, crowds of people swarm begin shoving their way through the doors – some getting off, some trying to get on. Once bodies are practically bursting out the windows of the bus, the driver takes off again.
There’s no schedule. Instead, those who aren’t sure which bus to take interrogate every person they bump into until they get some semi-consistent answers. Using this strategy, Vivek and I wander around for a few minutes, him shouting at people in busses and me gathering enough stares to wonder if I should offer to sign autographs (foreigners aren’t a common sighting here). Finally, he finds the right bus, wishes me luck, and disappears into the crowd. As soon as my fellow passengers realize my strange appearance and lack of Kannada doesn’t mean I won’t take up a seat, they’re pushing me out of their way just as if I were one of the gang. It’s great to be accepted.

The ride to Mattigatta, the village where I will be spending the weekend, is actually quite nice, once I get over the bumps and the suffocating crowd of people. As the bus strains up the hills, the air cools off, the traffic dissipates, and the jungle takes over.

The hills the bus is working so hard to overcome are part of the Western Ghats mountain range, which runs down almost the entire Western side of India. The district I’m in (and will stay in for the length of my internship) is known as Uttara Kannada, and it is almost entirely composed of these foothills, right up to the Arabian Sea to the West. This area is known locally as the “Malnad”, and it’s part of a biodiversity “hotspot” comprising the Western Ghats and Sri Lanka. This designation means two things – that the region has a high number of species found nowhere else in the world, and that many of those species are endangered.
The Western Ghats are volcanic mountains, created back when India was still part of Pangea. That means the range is older than the geologically young Himalayas. In the Malnad region, the combination of warm temperatures and high annual rainfall (13 feet at the coast and 8 inland at Sirsi) means that most of the area is forested. But those forests are threatened in several ways – just a few decades ago, the settlers were trying hard to convert the whole area into plantations. Still today, the growing human population and huge land-eating government projects are splitting up the forest into biologically useless chunks, where invasive species can easily take over.
Now, I’m on my way to meet a man who hopes to improve that dynamic, a horticulturalist who maintains his plantation using traditional agroforestry methods, which produce crops for humans using an intercropping structure that mimics native habitats. His name is P.P. Hegde, and he and his wife, Savitri, are part of Vanastree’s seed collective (more on that in a future post). Their house in the village of Mattigatta is where I’m headed.

Mattigatta is the last stop on the bus route and the literal end of the road, which winds 40 km west of Sirsi. Feeling guilty for my earlier savagery in obtaining a seat, I let the other passengers out before me and get off the bus last.
It’s early evening and a thick fog obscures much beyond the pavement and a few small huts. As I pay the fare collector (76 rupees, or about $1.75), a spry old man hurries out of the fog toward me. After introducing himself, P.P. beckons me to follow him across the road and down a rocky hill.
At the bottom, we come to small river. Here we have two options – climb up a narrow path to a hanging footbridge (which looks like an exact replica of Monty Python’s Bridge of Death), or wade across the stream. My feet are hot and tired from the ride, and the bridge is swinging ever so slightly in the breeze, so I roll up my jeans and follow him across the slippery rocks.
We’re on the other side in no time, where another rocky hillside faces us. Taking a deep breath (estimated vaporized water content – 80%), I begin trudging slowly upwards as my host scampers ahead.
A few minutes later, me panting and soaked in the particularly useless variety of sweat that one attains in the tropics, we’re on the jungle path to P.P.’s cottage. Butterflies and songbirds fill the air, reminding me that I really do love this place.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness inside the house, the first thing I notice is the open fire. Actually, there are three open fires in the large room. Over one, in the center of the upper part of the room, the a woman is cooking chapaathis, a tortilla-like wheat bread.
The other surprising part about the house is the cows. As in much of rural India, the cows hang out under the same roof as the rest of the family. Having them close at hand makes it much more convenient to milk, feed and clean up after the animals. And, not having a separate cowshed maximizes the amount of land available for cultivation.
The cows are tied up to the feeding trough, which separates their area from ours. The trough, the wood-fired stove, and most of the floor and walls are made of hardened mud. The rest of the dwelling is built of wood, thatch and a few bricks, with red roofing tiles to keep the rain out overhead.
P.P. gives me a brief tour, which includes my room near the entrance, the outhouse at the edge of the arecanut orchard behind his house, and the bathroom for washing up.
After the tour, we go into the living quarters, where things are suddenly modern. A TV hooks up to the satellite dish outside, a phone sits on a table by the window, and a few electric bulbs keep things cozily lit.

Over the weekend, P.P. shows me around his plantation. He grows arecanut, bananas, coconuts, vanilla and a variety of fruit and spice trees. All are raised organically, with a liberal contribution of compost, supplemented by the cows, added each growing season.
Savitri had to leave town, so I don’t get a cooking lesson, but I doubt I would have had any luck replicating the superb food anyway. She uses only the spices and vegetables grown in the area, creating authentic South Indian cuisine that probably isn’t duplicated many other places. As in most rural homes, all meals are served on stainless steel plates placed on the floor, and the man of the house and guests eat first. The person or people who prepare the food eat last, a practice that I’m not going to change in this lifetime so I keep my mouth shut except to shove in delicious rice and curry. Instead of using silverware – which, I’m beginning to realize, is a cold, unnecessary intermediary between you and your food – we eat with our hands for the full experience. Right hand only, though. The left hand is for cleaning mud off feet, performing bathroom duties (water replaces toilet paper here) and other unsavory tasks.

Overall, it was a relaxing, informative visit, in more ways than one. While mud construction and outhouses may seem primitive to westerners, P.P. is a plantation owner and is well off compared to others in the village. He gets a fair price for most of his goods at the market. And his presence on the land is legal – he’s not one of the tens of thousands displaced by “development” projects, including a naval base, a dam and a nuclear power plant in this district alone. Those that have been displaced move on to what is supposed to be preserved forest land, and many of them earn cents on the pound for what they produce. Next week, I’ll get to see the implications of this first hand.

Sunita's house

After two hours on bumpy, dusty roads, I arrive at a modestly sized dwelling built on a forested hill. If Mushtaq has brought me to the right place, this is the homestead of Sunita Rao, one of the founding trustees of Vanastree who will be my job supervisor, cultural coach and teacher during the course of the internship. I’m the only intern at this site, and she’s the only member of the organization who works full time in the office. She’s built her home as a learning center and a comfortable place for Westerners to live, so it will serve as my home base for the next twelve weeks.
Luckily, I take a liking to Sunita – and her farm – immediately. With its traditional mud-and-tile construction and the terraced garden below, the house first looks like a trendily rustic eco-resort. A woman calls from inside over the sound of excited barking.
“Tuula! You must be exhausted!” Her head passes by the kitchen window and I hear undecipherable words addressed to the dog. Looking a bit ruffled, she emerges from the kitchen. “You and Scrabble will become friends eventually,” she informs me. From the back of the house, Scrabble agrees vociferously. Other than that, no introductions are necessary; we’ve been emailing each other for months working out the logistics of my stay.

The first item of business is the tour. Sunita acquired this piece of land seven years ago to create an ecologically sound homestead, where she would build the collective that would eventually become Vanastree while running an outdoor-based learning center for students. The house is simple but comfortable, featuring western and Indian-style toilets, a dining room table (another western invention), a stove that runs off biogas and potable water pumped from a well. Above her desk in the small living room hangs a scroll with a poem by the Dalai Lama, entitled “The Paradox of our Age”. It sums up the philosophy behind her home and work quite nicely:

We have bigger houses, but smaller families:
more conveniences, but less time...
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods,
but slow digestion...
It is a time
when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.

[There’s more, I recommend Googling it.]

In the case of my living quarters, there is much jungle in the large windows and nothing but a king-sized bed and a writing table in the room. Which couldn’t have been more perfect.

Next, we take a short walk around the homestead, starting with the forest home garden. A home garden, basically, is just what it sounds like – a large or small vegetable patch that provides produce for a family and, on a larger scale, food security for much of rural Southeast Asia. Agroforestry is the orchard side of a home garden, in which the owner grows crops and trees for harvest under the jungle canopy, maintaining forest habitats while providing a side source of income and sustenance. Agroforestry can also be practiced on a larger scale, with crop trees forming both the canopy and the undergrowth.
Sunita’s plot of land is still in the process of recovery from India’s shoddy forestry management over the last few decades. As we walk the path around the property in the fading light, she points out the invasive eupatorium plants and other non-native shrubs. Teak and eucalyptus are among the cash crops grown in this region, and when those trees are harvested, leaving the ground bare, invasives swiftly move in. Sunita has nearly eradicated all the undesirables, but as any gardener knows, the process of weeding is neverending.
She also shows me the young trees she’s planted to make the acre of land she’s actively managing not just a forest but a forest garden – cinnamon, mango, various medicinal trees I’ve yet to remember the names of. The last stop is the cowshed, which no good Indian home (outside of the city, anyway) is complete without. With two cows, Sunita has enough milk, cheese, butter and yogurt for herself, her farmhand, his family, and some to spare. In addition, they provide the biogas that runs the stove in her house, through a relatively simple system that collects methane from the manure in an underground tank before piping the slurry into her compost pit.
After dinner of traditional dhal and rice – hungrily scooped up with our fingers in Indian style – I have one more thing to take care of before sleeping. Borrowing Sunita’s cell phone, I hike back up the hill to a spot she’s informally named “cell phone point”. It’s the only place on her land where she gets a signal. Squinting to see the numbers through the monsoon rain that is now falling, I dial my mom, who hadn’t heard from me since I left three days ago. Even after having come so far to escape the madcap world at large, or perhaps because I felt so removed, I am incredibly grateful for the technological convenience and the relived voice on the other end of the line.

The Journey

My internship experience starts at the departure gate at Newark International Airport the evening of September 1st. I hurry toward the area marked 34B a couple of minutes after boarding was scheduled to begin, having taken a short detour to buy a South India guidebook at the last minute. The gate is spare. No chairs; just a desk, a roped off area in front of the door, and a crowd of a couple hundred people standing around in no particular order. Nobody seems to know what is going on, and neither do I.

I’m on my way to a site in rural south India to work as an intern for an environmental NGO called Vanastree. Life in Oregon, where I’m in my last year of studies, had gotten a bit too comfortable, and I needed some practical learning credit anyway. I spent last winter break combing through internship and volunteer opportunities in developing nations and eventually settled on this one. Combined with my love for travel and the thought of ditching textbooks, midterms and apartment life for three months, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to stretch my wings one last time before graduation.

Back at the airport gate, a couple of Continental Airlines representatives finally show up. The ticket-taker encourages everyone to form an orderly, single-file line to facilitate the boarding process. Everyone ignores him completely. I shove my way on.

Non-Indians boarding the plane: Three.

I hope this episode is somehow indicative of what I should expect over the next three months. I’m having fun already.

Ten hours later: Still on the plane. Have been watching nonstop Bollywood films and Ellen Degeneres on my personal video screen. Just dozed off when, for some inexplicable reason, somebody made the following announcement: “Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It is time to wake up.” According to the screen, there are five hours of flight time remaining. This announcement is followed by nothing happening and no passengers except for me actually waking up.

Eight hours later: “No female guests.” That’s the first of a long list of rules posted above the reception desk at the dingy Hotel Satellite in Mumbai. Perhaps because it’s midnight, or perhaps due to the three or four increasingly peeved phone calls I made to the hotel asking them to send a driver to pick me up from the airport, the receptionist, a kindly old man, ignores my unintentional breaking of the first rule. I sign the log book, get a bottle of water, and bolt myself into the tiny room.

Eventually, I doze off, listening through one ear for intruders. I’d received plenty of warnings about traveling alone as a woman to India’s biggest city. I needn’t have worried about falling into too deep a sleep: a couple hours later, the marching and firecracker explosions begin.

It’s the week of the celebration of the Hindu god Ganesh, the elephant-headed deity of wisdom and good luck. Hindus will party for Ganesh for up to two weeks, leading small parades through the streets with clay Ganesh figurines, throwing colored powder, pounding drums, dancing and generally carrying on. Finally, about 6 am, one of the processions comes down the street right outside my room and I see no better option than to grab my camera and head outside. It is a small but enthusiastic group, and everyone in the area comes out to watch the brightly colored spectacle in the otherwise grey and drab street.

Nine hours later: After flying out of Mumbai, I’m sitting outside the tiny, deserted Hubli airport, about 200 km from my internship site. A warm breeze gently sways the coconut trees lining one side of the empty parking lot. Birds sing cheerfully and the sun is blinding.

It’s a nice spot, but there’s a problem: All the suited executives on my flight have taken off in taxis. Nobody seems to work inside the terminal. Corralled inside my circle of bags, I’m saying the first of many prayers I’ll say India that things will work out: Please send the driver soon. I have no idea what to do if the driver doesn’t come. Please send him soon.

I re-check the email I’d printed off with the name of the driver and my expected arrival time. Then I look at my watch and realize that I’ve arrived early. According to the piece of paper in my hand, I should have just touched down thirty seconds ago. Relaxing a bit, I lean back onto my suitcase. Five minutes later, a tiny van pulls up and Mushtaq, who will become a familiar, quite punctual, face in the next several weeks, hops out. Willing to go anywhere he might take me, I pile my stuff inside the van and get in the front seat, noticing a pink sticker on the side mirror reading “smile”. It’s an order I can’t resist following.