And the winner is...

I'm publishing a blog post rerun tonight. Now, I don't normally believe in reruns, in fact I rank them right down there with tick bites and GM corn. But this may be the most exciting thing I've ever written - not for most people, probably, but for the simple fact that it is actually the first bit of writing I've ever made money on. Yes, that's right, this little blog has now been recognized and awarded through the University of Oregon's study abroad program. They asked for an entry of a blog post written about a study abroad trip taken in the last year, and I had a lot posts to choose from. I polished up one I wrote after going on one of my weekend homestays in India, and assumed I'd either pushed my luck too far in submitting an hour before the deadline or they hated it so much they didn't even think it warranted a response. Then, lo and behold, I received an email saying I'd won first place.
So, with no further ado, I give you the first ever re-run and first cash cow of NoTulips.


Spelling Lessons from Krishna

My second weekend homestay is to take place at the home of a farmer-turned-artist who is a friend of Sunita, the woman I’m working and living with during my three-month internship. She makes the arrangements that Friday and, after finding the right bus, I’m only two skull-rattling hours away from a little weekend relaxation. Luckily, I get a seat, and enjoy a stimulating conversation with two young schoolboys who quiz me on my spelling, finding my American method of spelling words like “color” and “favorite” absolutely hilarious.
When I finally get off the bus in the city of Sagar, it’s nearly dark. I approach the row of rickshaw drivers at the bus stop, clutching the piece of paper Sunita gave me with my host’s address and phone number. I tell the nearest driver where I want to go: Radhakrishna’s house in a nearby village called Banghadde. Houses don’t have numbers here, and streets rarely have names, but Sunita told me everyone here knows where this house is. Radhakrishna is an artist of some local fame and one of the prominent landowners in his village.
We take off down the tree-lined avenue, going past a giant shrine featuring lions’ heads, gods, goddesses and various other brightly colored carvings. The streets are packed with vendors, women with baskets on their heads, dirty kids, bicycles, motorbikes, trucks and automobiles. After a few minutes, we pull up in front of a fenced-off building at the outskirts of town. Sunita had told me the village I was headed to is a few kilometers away from Sagar, but I forget that fact for the moment, excited by the fact that I see a sign, written in English, announcing this as the place of Shri Ramakrishna. I pay off the driver, extract my backpack and camera bag from the back of the rickshaw, and head toward the gate.
A bunch of young men are milling around the entrance to Shri Ramakrishna’s. I hang back, uncertain of how to best make my presence known, until one notices me and beckons me into the covered porch. He pulls me up a plastic chair behind a table and urges me to sit down. Then he leans over the table, and the interrogation begins.
“From where do you come? What is your business here? Who are you?” Somehow, this doesn’t feel right. I try to explain that I’m a guest of Radhakrishna for the weekend and if I could just talk to him everything will be ok. Nothing seems to get through.
Finally, I’m ushered into a small office in a room off the porch. Inside, there are two desks; behind one sits a middle-aged man with intense dark brown eyes. Between his eyes there’s a bright red dot, signifying religious faith. He wears a powder-blue shirt with a funny short collar, and his hair and mustache are neatly trimmed. I take a seat across from him. The blue walls lit by fluorescent bulbs glare down at me. Behind the desk is a framed black and white photo of a guru, hung with strands of plastic flowers and beads.

“Who?” The man behind the desk asks when I tell him my weekend host’s name.
“I’m staying here this weekend,” I insist. When would they stop this rigmarole and take me to my room?
“You can’t stay here, madam,” the man informs me. “Our rooms are for students only.”
Much back and forth arguing ensues. All his words sound like they’re spoken through a large potato lodged at the back of his mouth, and according to him, my English is equally awful. Indians have a way of integrating English words into their native language, and when faced with a foreigner, they simply mash together all the English words they know and leave out or mumble the intervening ones. The result is, at best, difficult to follow. Of course, it doesn’t help that my accent is something they’ve never encountered before – Sagar is not a city that tourists usually find.
Eventually, our semblance of conversation unravels our mutual confusion. It turns out that I am speaking to the director of Shri Ramakrishna Residential School, an ashram for boys. The man whom I’ve utterly befuddled is Thimmappa, the director of the school. Apparently, the rickshaw driver thought Ramakrishna is close enough to Radhakrishna and dumped me here. In my excitement, I hadn’t noticed the difference in spelling either. Maybe those boys on the bus would have. A sense of panic begins to rise in my throat.
Luckily, Thimmappa finds me amusing, if somewhat of an encumbrance. He can’t host me at the ashram, but neither will he hear of my ridiculous schemes to leave, find another rickshaw, and travel to Banghadde at this late hour. It is now about seven in the evening, but according to him, it’s a dangerous trip fraught with unknown danger for a young female traveling alone – the least of which may be tigers and rickshaw accidents.
One cultural trait of urban Indians I’m swiftly discovering is that they have an intense fear of forests, darkness and unknown rural stretches. So no matter how many ways I try to insist, Thimmappa does not believe there exists in this city one rickshaw driver with the courage to take me to my destination, or even somebody with a car I could hire. Tut-tutting at my foolishness, he calls in one of the half-dozen men who are now plastered to the doorway, staring at the alien in their midst, to bring me a cup of coffee. I tell him that I don’t want any (Indian coffee is usually awful, made by boiling instant coffee, milk and tons of sugar) but I’m swiftly realizing I’m not in control of the situation. Thimmappa is already on the phone to the English teacher he’s decided I’ll be spending the night with. We can discuss the possibility of transport to Banghadde in the morning.
Thimmappa seems to think the situation is under control, but I have fears of my own. I’ve traveled before. I’ve been trained to stick to plans, avoid talking to strangers, and to mistrust unknown situations. My mind is made up: I don’t trust this place, I don’t trust Thimmappa, and I certainly don’t trust his English teacher. I need to get out.
I get firm with him, demanding that he call the real Radhakrishna, whose number is on the piece of paper that is suddenly my only lifeline. But when he calls, Radhakrishna is not home, and his daughter doesn’t speak English and is immune to my pleas to be rescued. I try calling Sunita, but she can’t help me at this point. Rickshaw drivers who don’t know their way around and overly hospitable ashram directors were not in our plan. But she seems calm, not understanding my desperation and panic. Why not just wait until the morning?
By the time the coffee arrives, my schedule has been reworked for me. The English teacher has been contacted and will be here in fifteen minutes, but as far as I could tell, no attempts were made to find a driver willing to take me to my homestay. I have now reached the pinnacle of internal rage and have to work to keep the desperation out of my voice. My coffee shakes in my hand. Somehow, the stubborn but placid man behind the desk has elicited a level of frustration in me previously only witnessed by algebra teachers and my parents when I was a teen. I feel like throwing the cup of boiling hot coffee at him. Who was he to tell me I couldn’t pay whoever I want to get me out of this godforsaken place? Why was I so stupid to get myself in this situation in the first place? Why do all Indians have such silly, identical names?

All there is to do now is wait. Thimmappa sits back in his chair and places the tips of his fingers together. He considers me, observes my frustration with slight amusement. I stare back defiantly. It’s awkwardly silent for a moment, but he isn’t gearing up for a fifteen-minute staring contest. He’s preparing a lecture.
He quietly gestures to the picture on the wall above him.
“Do you know who this is?”
“No,” I tell him. Who cares, I think to myself.
“This is Shri Ramakrishna.” Oh. The photo looks about fifty years old and the man pictured is no spring chicken. This guy isn’t having any weekend guests.
“In 1839,” he says, repeating the date for clarity, “he went to Amerika and brought respect to the Hindu religion. He did this with a speech. In which, he call all the Amerikans ‘brothers and sisters’.” He pauses to take a deep breath, overwhelmed by the significance of it all. “Brothers and sisters,” he continues. “With this, he convince the Amerikans.”
I slowly warm up to the story. It turns out this guy Ramakrishna is the one who introduced Hinduism to the US and set up a bunch of ashrams and community centers there. He had many followers, including the Beatles and some of the more influential American yogis.
“You see,” Thimmappa continues, “Hindu religion is like an ocean. All the religions are in it. However, all other religions are only rivers. But all lead to God. Many ways, one God.” He goes on like this for a while, not preaching but explaining.
As he talks, I begin to consider the possibility Thimmappa isn’t so bad after all. I relax slightly, calmed by the chanting prayers of the boys in the next room. The crowd by the door slowly loses interest, and my unshaken coffee develops the smooth skin of boiled milk.

Before I can make a conclusive reassessment of my situation, however, the English teacher arrives. She’s extremely nice and acts like having me stay the night would be the best thing since Ramakrishna went to Amerika. I’m all ready to follow her out the door when the phone on the desk rings. Thimmappa holds up a finger as he talks, so we wait. When he hangs up, he informs me that they’ve drummed up a rickshaw driver who thinks he can manage the scary drive to Banghadde. Apparently, someone had been working behind the scenes.
A minute later, the driver is there, and I’m given the option of staying in Sagar or going off with him. As much as I like the English teacher, I realize I can’t pass up the opportunity to get to Radhakrishna’s, where they’re expecting me. More than that, I’m embarrassed at having mistrusted the ashram people and refused their hospitality. I thank everyone and climb in the rickshaw, a bit sorry to be leaving what was suddenly a safe haven.
As we rumble off toward Banghadde, I get a chance to process the whole experience. It’s one of the many times during my trip to India that I’m forced to admit I have been totally, completely and foolishly wrong about something. While I’d been scoffing at the rickshaw drivers for their forest-phobia, my fear of Indians is just as unfounded. No matter how much I’ve prepared myself for it and expected it, not a single person I’ve encountered here has tried to rob me, abduct me, or even take advantage of my confusion. And the overly cautious, callous exterior I’ve fostered is not only useless, it’s made me extremely impolite in the face of traditional Indian hospitality. While my actions this evening could be completely rationalized by a sensible need to look out for myself, there are lessons here that go beyond spelling words. Mistrusting somebody just because they happen to be male or Indian is as unfair here as it would be back home.
We’re on the highway now, the dark forest whizzing by. I can see the lights of Banghadde ahead of us. Through my weariness and feelings of being completely overwhelmed, one thought shines through: to survive my travels, I must allow myself some naievete, a healthy does of innocence. It’s the one thing people everywhere tend to forget – that although some individuals can’t be trusted, there are even more out there who just want to help. After all, as Ramakrishna would put it, we are all brothers and sisters.

Radhakrisna Banghadde, with some of his mud and plant-based paintings.

A random cultural note: Kanglish

“Kanglish” is what I’ve been calling the interesting Kannada (local language of Karnataka) version of English that many have been using to communicate with me. It’s similar to “Hinglish”, the popular term for Hindi English. The following is a short glossary, which I’ll hopefully be adding to as I hear more.


Kanglish (and some Hinglish)

tank (n.) – A lake. “Behind the trees is a large tank. Many fishes.”

tanks (intj.) – Thanks. (“Tanks for coming.”)

homely (adj.) – Comfortable, at home. “Please make yourself homely.”

foreign (n) – A non-Indian person. (“Foreign! Foreign!”; used as a rallying cry to bring forth a hoard of schoolchildren to watch me walk down the street.)

adjust (v) – What you do when 13 people and two kids need to be transported in an 8-person car, when the scheduled power cuts are extended from 7 am to 2 pm and 7 pm to midnight every day, when there are two cups of rice and ten people, or when you’re holding a meeting in which only half the participants share a common language. (“We’ll adjust”; a common saying.)

suiting shirting (n, v) – Dressy western clothes, or the act of putting them on. (“Silks, saris, suitings shirtings sold here!”)

snap (n) – Photo. (“May we have a snap with you?”; Usually coming from a bold mother of six who will then herd the entire family, including cousins and passers-by into the shot and make her husband take the photo.)

Britisher (n) – Person from the United Kingdom, usually in the historical (colonial) sense. (“The Britishers built a huge fort on that hill.”) However, there are also the upper-class Indians who are more British than the Britishers, speaking with English accents that are simply, well, top-drawer. When they open their mouths, I expect them to excuse themselves for afternoon tea with the Queen before heading off for a jolly hunt.

tube light (n) – Somebody who is a bit slow to catch on, like a fluorescent bulb. (“That George W is a bit of a tube light, isn’t he?”)

Food fights in Bangalore

[This post is from two weeks ago, when I set off for Bangalore for some travels in the area. Bangalore is the capital of Karnataka, home to at minimum 7 million people and growing. It also hosts number of NGOs and other groups working directly and indirectly on sustainable agriculture and development issues. My first stop is a two-day seminar on small-scale agriculture in the city itself.]

The journey from Sirsi to Bangalore – despite taking ten hours over bumpy roads – was actually quite comfortable thanks to the wonder of sleeper busses. Like sleeper cars in trains, these public transportation marvels feature narrow bunks surrounded by thick curtains, behind which the traveler may pass out for the duration of the trip. Within an hour of boarding, the financial news (which I have a sick fascination with, like a car accident) coming through my ipod lulled me into dreams of credit default swaps and naked short sellers.

The only unnerving part of the trip was the “rest stop” at 2 AM– most of the travelers were men, forcing me and my full bladder to dash across the darkened highway alone, flashlight in hand, to find a bush, all the time trying not to imagine the many ways I might die or, worse, miss the bus as it pulled away. In record time, I took care of business and climbed back into my bunk, none the worse for the wear.

When we reach Bangalore, it’s the tail end of a ten-day long holiday, so traffic isn’t bad. It’s raining, though, making the sight of the abject poverty – families living under tarps, mothers with young babies begging for change, streetside vendor after vendor selling the same unwanted wares – all the more depressing. It’s my first real encounter with a major Indian city, and the Malnad region where I work is by comparison very well off. I’ve come across probably two beggars in Sirsi. To the best of my ability, I put up a mental wall and worried instead about how I would locate Sunita in this enormous place.

Luckily, the conductor had assumed correctly that I would not recognize my stop name when he called it out, and jabs a finger in my direction when I am to get off. I stumble down the aisle with my overstuffed backpack and Sunita is waiting just outside, as promised (she’s already been here in Bangalore a couple of days). We get in the rick and zoom off to the NIAS campus.

On the way, Sunita explains that NIAS stands for the National Institute of Advanced Studies, one of the more prestigious universities in the country. It was actually founded by the same man who created the Tata empire, India’s largest corporation. Tata is similar to GE in the states, with holdings in auto manufacturing, housing, media and just about anything else they can think of. The seminar Sunita and I are attending is entitled “Farmers, Livelihood and Trade” and is focused primarily on increasing the market share of small organic farmers. It’s actually being put on by GREEN (Genetic Resource Ecology Energy Nutrition) Foundation, one of the major agricultural NGOs in the area.

On arrival, we are given one of the guest rooms that NAIS has set aside for conferences such as these. In the walled-off campus with security guards at the gates, I can almost pretend I’m back in Sirsi. The biggest difference is nobody stares at me here – they’re all used to foreigners.

At the elaborate breakfast provided, I meet Dr. Vanaja Ramprasad, the surprisingly approachable and grandmotherly director of Green Foundation, who has been dedicated to improving the livelihoods of farmers for decades. An hour later (only half an hour behind schedule!) the conference kicks off with a lecture by Devinda Sharma, a journalist and expert on genetically modified crops and agro-politics. I’ve been given the intern’s honor of taking notes for the next two days, but I would have been riveted anyway: this guy is pretty incensed about the state of agriculture and India’s farmers.

Most of Sharma’s talk relates to the WTO and its liberalization of international markets. Pre-WTO, India’s GDP was 25% of the world total. It was a net exporter of food, meaning it shipped out more spices, grains and produce than it bought from other nations, and it didn’t rely on any of them to feed its population. 80% of Indians were employed in the agricultural sector.

Under the WTO, however, the balance began to shift. Heavily subsidized grains from the US began flooding the market, and all the nations who couldn’t compete were told to focus their agricultural production on exports to keep up.

The result was predictable. As Sharma put it, “Importing food is importing unemployment.” Today, India is headed down a path to attain a similar socioeconomic profile to the US, where less than 1% of the population (and dropping) grow agricultural products and a farmer living in Iowa would starve if his local grocery store suddenly ran out of supplies (due to, say, a fuel shortage) because he’s surrounded by a thousand miles of inedible corn and soybeans. The only difference is, there are simply too many people and not enough land for this system to work in India. Somewhere, something or somebody has to give, and I saw those somebodies outside my bus window on the way here. Most of those millions of homeless people are refugees from villages, where they’ve given up on the agricultural life because they can’t afford it (and because it doesn’t provide the glitzy lifestyle they’ve been watching on TV). People in the cities prefer cheap white rice and imported wheat, and crops grown for export must meet standards only attained through chemical inputs (large size, consistent color and texture, perfect skins). Farming using chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides requires economies of scale unattainable by the average small land owner.

As Sharma and the other speakers at the seminar explained, organic farming is supposed to be the antidote to all this mess, but it lacks the government backing to really make it work. Commercial, “conventional” agriculture (using chemical inputs) is, of course, subsidized ever since the WTO arrived, which makes it very competitive in domestic and international markets. Organic farmers receive no such help. In fact, they have to pay for organic certification by often-sketchy certification boards, who in classic Indian style create a tangled network of bureaucratic procedures and paperwork. The farmers, on the other hand, are usually not the corporate-world dropouts who usually take up organic farming in the States. They’re simply trying to sell produce that has been grown the only way they’ve known how for centuries – without outside inputs and with minimal impact on the land.

Although I’ve been studying this stuff for a while, hearing it again and talking to the people who are running against these problems in real life left me feeling disheartened. The second day involved more group discussions with farmers and other interested parties, including one incident that was sort of the highlight for me: an organic farmers vs. biochemical company representative throwdown. This fellow actually had the gall to get up in front of the entire room of 100-some organic farmers and declare that organic food doesn’t taste as good as conventional. In true Indian fashion, he was quite straightforwardly told to shove it. We didn’t see him the rest of the conference.

Despite that happy episode, I left the conference feeling frustrated and a bit hopeless, not only because of what I’d heard, but also because of what I hadn’t heard – an actual solution or at least a plan. Sure, in our air-conditioned haven with meals provided every four hours, we’d come up with a list of “policy recommendations” for the Indian government. But after witnessing during the last few weeks the clumsiness of India’s bureaucracy and the ease with which it is ignored by most citizens, I have my doubts that policy recommendations will have any impact at all. In fact, many of the policies we’d recommended – like setting up farmer-owned organic brands and providing subsidies to organic farmers – already exist, they just aren’t working. While it’s nice to have neat summations of the problems, their solutions, I suspect, are hiding somewhere else.

Next stop: Navadarshanam, a collective just outside Bangalore that’s too natural for organics, where I’ll learn how to find the best ants for eating and become part of the best International Team since the Special Olympics.

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...

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.

Passage to India, part 1

Record fuel and food prices.
Forest fires raging across the West (including one near my hometown).
Foreclosed-upon homes being looted by scrap metal profiteers.
Paris Hilton running for President.

Sounds like a good time to leave. Actually, with all the moaning and groaning going on in this country, it sounds like like a good time to leave for a country that has dealt with these problems (minus bratty heiresses, although I'm sure there are a few) for as long as it has existed yet whose citizens remain, for the most part, amazingly upbeat.
Of course, I didn't really take all of this into consideration when I decided to go abroad for a term. Mostly, I was feeling the travel itch, seeing the end of my college career looming ahead, and realizing I would need some internship credit to get there. So, over winter break, I found one that is sure to provide me with new and interesting situations and surroundings, while applying to my Environmental Studies degree and providing me with material for my senior thesis. That's at least three birds with one stone.
The organization I'm interning with is focused on promoting community-based agriculture movement in India, attempting to undo some of the damage done by the "green revolution" through public education, collaboration and research into traditional food practices. Since it's relatively small, I will get to participate in all of the above and more, I'm sure. For a more comprehensive description, go here, or visit Vanastree, the host organization's website.
One author I have been reading a lot of lately, Vandana Shiva, also does a good job of explaining the problem of biopiracy (agricultural corporations taking indigenous crops and patenting them, turning them into private property) and how grassroots organizations can counteract it. So check out her stuff for more information.

Anyway, my original plan was to go this summer. Then I learned about a little issue called Monsoon Season, and also realized that I could take fall term off and still graduate next spring (yippie - real world, here I come). So my scheduled departure date is now Sept 1st, arriving in Mumbai on the 2nd and flying into Hubbali, India on the 3rd. Then a driver named Mushtaq will pick me up and take me to the village of Sirsi, about 88 km southwest of there. Sirsi is in the state of Karnataka, in South India. (Map.) After twelve weeks of internship, I'll be traveling around the country for three weeks before returning home just in time for Christmas.
My internship supervisor's name is Sunita. I'll be staying on her farm and traveling to nearby cities about once per month to conduct research. I'll also go to other collective members' farms to work as needed.

So that's the context. In the meantime, I'm keeping busy, partly by reading up on India and agricultural issues and partly by answering the question "So, what are you up to this summer?" The answer to that question, incidentally, has been varied and highly entertaining (well, to me), so I'll probably get a couple blog posts out of it. When I actually get to India, though, I hope to keep updating about once a week. If you don't hear from me, call tech support...