ROAD BLOG AHEAD

The cat got the yak

‘Til Nyondo put it back

Now everything is covered

With dust from Ladakh

It’s been crazy here. Will try to actually explain the crazy in the next few days.

Today’s highlight was the arrival of the fabulous Dr. Mel (Cabezalana) replete with yummy alpaca fiber from a strawberry blond named Madeline. I intend to roll around naked with Madeline when no one is looking! Mel is here to spend a couple of fun-filled weeks removing the gonads from the feral dog population in our region. Monkeys next Mel? Please?

Continuing on my quest to share with you some of the sights I see around me each day. There are so many colours, so many moods and so many different types of people. Wherever you go in this town, you see life lived on the streets, in full view of all and everything.
There are the young:

This very young woman in her bridal finery does not seem as happy as one would expect on her wedding day. Arranged marriages are absolutely the norm here in traditional Indian families
And the not-so-young but just as beautiful:

There is unashamed grief:

Old friends meeting in the bazaar comfort each other as they share sad news from home
And laughter:

This is one of my favourite pictures of Lena, catching her laughing with abandon!
There are people at work:

And those at play:

A carnival in Mandi, the district capitol brings people from all over the region

The local gambling den is actually on a rooftop

And disreputable-looking characters that could be hanging out on the street corner of just about any city on the planet

You find people doing the absolutely ordinary tasks of daily life:

Then turn a corner and see something utterly inexplicable:

Why is my next door neighbor up a tree?

A wandering holy man dances in the street and flagellates himself with a braided whip while his wife (behind him, carrying a Hindu shrine tied to the top of her head) beats a rhythmic call on her drum.

Perhaps the most inexplicable thing of all - WHY does the electrical system work even part of the time when the wiring, above street level, looks like this?

I really like the idea, that a few people I know use, of Wednesday blog entries being about whatever sort of floats to the top of the idea pile. Or the picture pile. Now that may mean more if everything that seems to arise in my head when I sit down to write didn’t seem so random already, but at least it gives me a good excuse.

What I’m going to do is open my blog pictures file and post some images from around town. People, things, views, whatever seems randomly appropriate. I’ve got tons of shots of the interesting characters who spend the winter in this place or come for melas and festivals or to sell something, beg something, see someone. For people-watching, winter is by far the best time of year in Rewalsar.

People come to make prostrations around the holy lake

They carry their gods around town to visit and bestow a blessing

You never know what’s going to come to town

or what they’ll do - that’s Nyondo on the camel!

They come from far away: Bhutan

and newly out of Tibet

Down from remote Kinnour in groups

and from the high altitude deserts of Ladakh in trios

up from the Punjab

or from college in Dehi

Yesterday’s prettiest knitter popped out from behind a tree

Yesterday’s cutest kid in a hood and vest knit by grandma

And me, in my new hat, befuddling the Kinouris who whisper “where’s she from” among themselves when they see me. Actually, I know for a fact that a lot of them whisper WHAT is it? when they see me. I wonder that myself some days.

Well, no rain so far, but it has gotten colder again so there’s hope that the winter might still happen. Since I much prefer cold weather to hot, I’m happy with winter sticking around awhile. Plus it’s good weather for checking out the sweaters and shawls people are wearing as well as the hand knitted goods for sale on the street.

The above shots were actually taken in Dharamsala last time we were there. It seems like every vendor has at least a few items knit or crocheted by mom or grandma for sale next to the prayer wheels, bags of yak cheese, blankets, hair ties and hot sauce. The quality varies a lot along with the quantity, but the styles tend to be pretty consistent as people don’t work from written patterns, but from traditional styles and motifs they learned from others and keep in their heads. No two socks or hats are identical as they vary colours, designs and repeats on each new item, but there is no mistaking the distinctive Himalayan regional style of construction and colour use.

I wish I had a better picture of the sweater this woman is wearing.

Unfortunately, it’s cropped out of a crowd scene and any attempt to enlarge it just makes it more blurry. It’s a good example of the colour choices and sweater pattern designs used up in Ladakh. The colours are bright, but not as screamingly psychedelic as those used by the Indian knitters around here. A lot of that has to do with the yarns available - wool and wool blend yarns have dyed colours that are more subtle and relatively more “natural” (very relatively) than the bright acrylic yarns than are what we can get in our local shops in Rewalsar. According to my sources (waving at Tracy and Rinchen) you can find yarn up in Ladakh that is actually related to a sheep! More usual, is the yarn I used to make this hat in a moment of deranged whimsy:

I saw this glitzy, sparkly, plastic yarn in the shop and decided that I absolutely HAD to have some of it with which to knit a watermelon hat.

Now, around here, that’s not odd at all. Okay, well the watermelon motif might be a tad unusual, but not the use of the sparkly yarn nor the colour combinations. In fact I’ve probably got enough of this left over to knit some kid a sweater to match the hat. You might remember this sweater from pictures of the Christmas party:

Jyoti is our landlord’s younger son and this yarn used (probably by Grandma) to knit his eye-stabbing pullover in this particularly vivid shade of light purple, is the rage this year in Rewalsar! When I discovered this fact - and because I am a magpie at heart - I went to the various yarn shops in town (we have 3 in this tiny village - that’s how popular knitting is in the region!) And found that it was all sold out. Every scrap of the purple and the bright sky blue had been snapped up early in the season so that every fashionable young boy could have a new sweater designed to make them visible a night, to a car half a kilometer away even in the densest possible fog cover! Among young girls, who are less likely to combine it with a bandaged scalp wound as an accessory, the preferred shade is a white so pure and so sparkly that a group of schoolkids can cause snow blindness on a sunny cold day. What I find surprising however is that, for a yarn that really does look like nothing so much as that crinkly plastic fake grass used in the West to line children’s Easter baskets, it’s surprisingly soft to the touch.

Not everyone wants bling. Fortunately. There are plenty of other mind-bogglingly bright colours of knitting yarn in these shops and even more subtle pastel shades favoured by older ladies, gentlemen in government service and some very young babies. Yellow and beige are quite popular with this set and one even sees a tasteful off white from time to time. If you go far enough afield you might even find yarn that would please the boring tastes of Westerners like me. Lena scored on one of her trips into Mandi, when she found a high quality yarn store that carried a small quantity of really nice wool blend knitting yarns in heathery colours.

At $20 US per kilo, it was really really pricey for the average Indian knitter who is accustomed to paying less than half that amount for the best of the acrylic stuff. But I had no objection to paying that amount, nor did the handful of Indian knitter friends I contacted in places like Bangalore and Mumbai with higher-end economies and absolutely no way to get their eager hands on real wool. We pretty much bought up his stock at that price and I spent a week packaging, weighing and shipping off courier packages to my South Indian friends. I did keep enough to do some knitting myself once I’ve finished the other projects at the head of my queue. I’ve let myself swatch

in order to choose a pattern and a colour, but have vowed not to cast on for the Winter Branches sweater until I’ve got a few more finished objects under my belt!

I’ve notice that, around here, knitters are very production oriented - they are knitting garments, not as a hobby, but as either a necessity for themselves and their families or for money. So what gets started has a purpose and the individual works steadily on a single garment or item until it’s finished. No basket of UFOs (that’s UnFinished Objects in knitterspeak.) No casting on, deciding halfway that you don’t really like that lace patter and ripping it out and trying a few more before deciding to complete it. You knit and you keep knitting until you have a sweater or a scarf or a hat. Then you knit something else. It’s what your hands do throughout the winter, if you’re the family knitter. It’s not at all uncommon to see groups of women walking along the path talking and knitting as they go. Or sitting and waiting for something or someone with their knitting in their lap stitching along.

I went to town yesterday for lunch and to get out of the house. I took my own knitting in progress:

along for the ride. Part of any trip to town involves sitting and drinking tea - at least once and usually several times per afternoon. Drinking tea is the warp which gives the social fabric of life in Asia it’s structure and cohesiveness. News, gossip, money, goods, letters, sympathy, advice and much much more all change hands during the ritual of sitting outdoors (even in iffy weather) drinking a tiny glass of nuclear hot, insanely sweet spiced chai. It’s the perfect time to pull out the knitting and let one’s hands do productive work while the mouth, eyes and ears are otherwise occupied. The project above is perfect for social knitting: nowhere near done yet, but no pressure to complete; a pattern that has enough variation to avoid boredom and yet repetitive enough that an experienced knitter can easily memorize the pattern and execute it without looking at every stitch. Plus it’s pretty, bright yarn that changes constantly and that’s always fun to watch unfolding.

As usual, knitters have an instant bond. I’ve knitted my way around the world now and I’ve found that needlework, the process of creating something useful/beautiful/fun out of sticks and string, is a practice that transcends language, culture and even age differences. I’ve had old ladies in the plazas and mercados of Mexico examine my stitches and give me advice and critique. I’ve had knitters in almost every country ask me (with gestures as often as words) if it’s as complicated as it looks to knit socks in the round on tiny double-pointed needles (it isn’t.) I once taught an impromptu class on simple lace knitting during a layover in the Singapore airport when one of my fellow passengers - who had watched me during the flight - asked me to show her how to work the old shale pattern I was doing. We ended up gathering a small crowd of knitters from several different countries who saw what was happening and came over to watch and ask questions. And I’ve had a few who have seen my knitting style, forcibly try to take my knitting away and show me the “right” way to do it! I’m a “thrower” - taught many many years ago by my mom who had severe arthritis and hand deformity which permitted her to do that particular method only and then again, in my mid-twenties, by an old gentleman from Hong Kong living and teaching in San Francisco. I “pick” only when doing two-handed colourwork, otherwise it just slows me down. Anyway, as usual, I wasn’t the only knitter out on the street. I took this picture seated at the Kora Cafe (best real coffee in Rewalsar) of a woman who had found a nice sunny spot on a cold day:

She’s wearing a hand knit sweater in a stitch pattern I see a lot locally. It was getting threadbare at the elbows though and I couldn’t help but wonder if the one she was working on now is for her or for some other married lady. The fact that she’s Indian and the bright red colour of the yarn she’s using means that, if it is a sweater, it’s almost surely for a married woman in her childbearing years as red is a colour almost exclusively worn by such. Oh, babies can wear it too, so it might have been a baby garment, I couldn’t get close enough to tell, though we did nod and exchange smiles more than once.

So many images and things I still have to show. I have quite a backlog in my photo gallery and there is something new to look at every day. As I try to get back in the habit of regular blogging, I find that I am often surprised by whatever tangent my writing hies off on that day. I’ll think, “oh, let me show you the interesting jewelry worn by the women from Kinnour” and, next thing I know, I’m writing about food and farming. Or I’ll want to do a pictorial on cheese-making and instead it will be watermelon hats and random knitting thoughts. So it goes. There’s no lack of interesting visuals here, that’s for sure. But right now I need to go and bake some bread and maybe even make a pizza for supper tonight. Around here, the domestic arts that I had so little patience with as a child growing up in a major city, are necessities rather than options and hobbies. Things like baking a good loaf of bread or knitting your kid a warm sweater for winter have to be done by someone. I’m glad now I learned these skills, they are just more enjoyable when the end result actually makes a difference between some and none.

I haven’t missed the fact that most of the comments on this blog come from my friends in various fiber arts communities. I do know that spinners, knitters, weavers and others who work with string, sticks, fabric and colour tend to be a chatty lot, nonetheless, I really love reading comments and I want to encourage them. This is going to be a blog about stuff like fur and spindles, string and what it can become in skilled hands here in the Himalayas. There’s so very very much I want to show you, but it’ll take a little time to show it all and tell you all about what I see around me up here.

Today’s blog was inspired by this Tibetan woman on the street this morning, doing what women in developing nations have done since the dawn of time - working (she sells odds and ends from a street stall) while keeping one eye on her child and the other on the drop spindle in her hands:

She is the skill sister of the women who spun these two huge balls of yarn for me over the summer:

That’s yak wool and the open sack behind the two half kilo balls is full of more yak down prepared for spinning. A friend from Spiti, in the high Himalayas at the borderlands, brought these down to me along with three other sacks full of hand-sheared, washed fleece - one white, one grey and one nearly black. These fleece are from the sheep that graze the valleys up in Lahoul and Spiti and they’re dual purpose sheep - they give both fleece and, eventually, after a fairly long life, meat for the stew pot. In places like this it’s a compromise; the meat is not particularly tender and the wool is not particularly soft, but both will do for survival.

The fleece have been machine carded into roving. In their spare time, spinners will turn it into a strong singles yarn.

Generally the spun yarn is used to weave these:

Traditional plaid shepherd’s blankets/shawls. What you can’t see in this picture is that the shawl is made from two strips of wool cloth woven on a backstrap loom and then stitched together to make a wider piece that serves the people who live outdoors as all kinds of warmth and shelter. The one above is a finer version than many, woven as a gift for me. The pattern is more intricate than in the other, more primative version I own, also a gift. That first one is much coarser, but it is also warmer and felted from use into an almost waterproof blanket. The fancy piece is edged in red and orange, also traditional, but the yarn is commercial. The older one has a simple band of madder-dyed colour at either end.
The first year we were here, I saw a few old shepherds and goatherds wandering down out of the hills with their flocks wrapped in these plaid shawls, barefoot, with tattered lunghis (cotton sarongs) around their waists. This gentleman came by on the road selling lengths of cotton cloth. I bought some of his yardage, but also tried to buy the shawl he was wearing, in hopes the money would entice him to part with a traditional garment I’d never actually seen for sale anywhere. He laughed at me. You don’t sell the warmest garment you own when you plan to spend the winter in the mountains. These are made by a family member for the one who needs it. I still haven’t seen any for sale which is one reason why I so treasure the ones I’ve been given as gifts. And they are warm in winter!

A last thing for this post and more another day. Around here, soap grows on trees:

These are “soap nuts” also called Ritha or, in the local dialect, ohkra. They are the seed pods of a very common tree and, in September they drop their golden nuts which are gathered, dried and have the hard pit removed. The casing that is left is almost 100% pure saponin. Around here, people pulverize them and use the powder for washing clothes, hair, bodies and, most especially, woolens. The soap is known to be particuarly good for cleaning animal fiber and has the added virtue of repelling moths and other insects. Plus it’s hypoallergenic. Apparently they are now being imported and sold in the west in natural food and housewares stores at a premium price. Here they are what the old women use who don’t want to spend the money on, or don’t see the point of using, commercial washing powders. Soap on trees that’s good for your sweaters and your hair. What will Mother Nature think of next?

The longer we’re here and the more we get integrated into this community, the more we are making connections with other people, groups and resources who share our goal of providing basic medical care to those who would not otherwise be able to get it. Just as in the West, there’s various reasons for this, from ignorance of the (limited) existing systems to being refugees to being too poor to afford even the very cheapest medicines. Some people, particularly those newly escaped from Tibet, have emotional and psychological traumas that complicate their physical issues. Others live in such isolation in remotive villages that just getting to our little town of Rewalsar is a monumental occasion - there’s no way they are going to find their way to a government-funded hospital or clinic in a “big city” like Mandi.

Both the Himachali government and the offices of H.H. the Dalai Lama recognize this problem to some extent. That’s the positive news. On the downside, like bureaucracies everywhere, there is a limitation on both what they can do as well as how they choose to act on their awareness. In addition, there are individual medical providers, like Dr. Vanayak, the eye surgeon, who choose to use a portion of their skills are resources without recompense to help people who otherwise would fall through the cracks. There is Dr. Malhotra in Mandi, part of a highly trained team of oral and cosmetic surgeons who have agreed to donate cleft palate reconstruction for babies and children of poor families. Slowly, but surely, we are developing a network of like-minded people who care that vital services be available to everyone, whether rural farmers, refugees or tribespeople down from the high mountain places. People such as our neighbor, Ankush, who turns out to be a skillful emergency medic, one young enough to cheerfully get out of bed at midnight and put stitches in a kid’s head. Ankush’s family run a small pharmacy in town and he has also helped us get the most of every dollar the Emergency Fund spends on the medicines and supplies they can get. His willingness to put people above profit has expanded the number of people we can help with your donations!

Another way we have been able to expand outreach and effectiveness has been working with the little “clinic” set up by the Tibetan Government in exile. A space has been donated by one of the monasteries in town.

The resources are stretched verrrry thin, but there is a doctor who comes (or tries to - his territory is pretty huge) for one day a month. The rest of the time, the clinic is staffed by Chokyi Lhamo, a Tibetan woman who has been taught some basic nursing skills - she can take a person’s temperature and blood pressure, explain contraception and simple hygiene, bandage a minor wound and - most important - recognize when something is potentially serious and refer the individual to further care. Mostly she oversees the dispensation of the clinic’s dismally limited supply of simple medicines: Tylenol, Ibuprophen, some cough medicines and decongestants, pills for nausea, antacids for gastric reflux and a handful of asthma inhalers. These are frequently used up by mid month, particularly in the winter when the elderly have greater aches and pains and everyone catches cold, pneumonia or things even more dire. Chokyi Lhamo also checks on people known to be sick and the elderly who have trouble getting around - a great help in a town with many of these.

We’re well aware that the doctor assigned to the clinic is stretched too thin. Like the government he serves, he has a lot of responsibility and not enough resources or time. Just getting from one settlement to another in these mountains is a day’s hard journey. Whatever supplies he might need, he must bring with him since the clinic is most minimally equipped: a blood pressure cuff, a stethoscope, thermometer and maybe a handful of vinyl exam gloves. There’s a room the size of a closet with a cot for doing examinations and a front office with desk, shelves and chairs. I’ve seen inner city schools with more supplies in their first aid kit than these people have to work with on a regular basis. And they are truly doing their best with it, they are helping the refugees, both the new and those who have been here awhile, to the extent possible with limited resources. Still, people were making the trek up the hill to our house several times a week to ask for medical assistance, advice, treatment. A lot of what people here need - and can’t afford -are services or medicines the clinic doesn’t have - and can’t afford.

We’re still here and people are still making that trek. But it’s not an easy track for an old or sick person and many of the Tibetans don’t know or trust or can’t afford the few rupees for the public bus that will trundle them up the mountain several times a day. It got so that, every time Lena went down to town for something - to see a friend, to buy vegetables or have a cup of tea, she ended up surrounded by people who wanted her to come and take a look at their bedridden mom or check the swollen place on their neck or advise them what medicine was needed for arthritis. People who were too shy to come up here and people whose ailments wouldn’t let them come, wouldn’t let them climb our steep stairs. Almost all houses here in India have awful, steep stairs. She’d end up doctoring at the side of the road or in a tea shop. It’s really hard to do a physical examination or check someone’s blood pressure in a tea shop. And she wouldn’t have her equipment with her because she was expecting to buy some bananas and a bunch of cilantro and come right home on the next bus. So she’d take them down to the clinic building which is more or less at street level and at the back end of town. There she already knew Chokyi Lhamo and could use their blood pressure cuff, buy the person the meds they needed and ask Chokyi to look in on them in a couple of days. Well…

So now she spends one scheduled day a week at the clinic seeing people whose conditions are beyond Chokyi’s basic ability to hand out headache remedies and cold pills and who can’t or won’t wait for the day a month when they might get to see the visiting doctor.

Truly serious cases get home follow up or end up in our back bedroom/dispensary during the week or get sent to the hospital in Mandi for the kinds of testing and treatment that is beyond our means in this town. We still see whoever turns up at the door, which is quite a few people in addition to the Tibetans who go to the clinic building. Ankush is terrific backup and will go out at night if necessary on his motorscooter. The network of resources in the larger towns around here keeps expanding for those times when an emergency ultrasound exam is needed or the broken leg needs more than a simple x-ray.

We’re not the only ones trying to pull resources together. Our friend Harish has started an NGO (non-profit organization) to help get assistance for the more severely disabled - mostly children.

Last year they were able to distribute a number of little red wheelchairs to crippled kids. They have the equipment and the training in their office (a former weaving loft above the blacksmith’s shop) to do basic hearing tests and connections to refer people on for further testing and hearing aids if necessary. We recently arranged for Harish to test one of our elderly Tibetan patient’s hearing. It was really good not to have to try to drive the somewhat unsteady old fellow through the mountains to Sundernagar as we’d feared would be necessary.

What our patient didn’t tell us is that he already has a hearing aid, prescribed for him years ago in Dharmsala and which works just fine (when it has batteries in it.) He was hoping, in the way the old and innocent sometimes do, that we could somehow take him in for an operation to get (and this is pretty much a quote) his ears replaced with ones that worked since “they” can do so much these days! No matter how carefully we ask questions, people still manage to surprise us sometimes! This is a backwater in a lot of ways. That’s what makes it so interesting. Where else can you look out of the clinic door and see a few sheep following what appears to be a bush with legs heading up the street past you?

Or have to detour because the walkway to your house is clogged with a herd of goats heading to winter pasture:

Now someone in the government of Himachal Pradesh, the state we are in, is at least peripherally aware that a huge number of its citizens live in isolated farming villages in the mountains, far from access to health care of any sort. They also know it’s fairly impossible to bring health care providers to each and every tiny community and hamlet - even more than the Tibetan clinic, the result is a system that would be spread too thin for effectiveness. So they are trying to create opportunities for as many people to go TO the health care providers by allocating funding for events - medical “fairs” or “camps” where a large number of medical services - physical exams, basic lab tests, chest x-rays, dental exams, eye and ear testing, blood pressure readings, women’s health and contraceptive information and services, come together in one place for several days and people can come from all over the district and get their problems looked at, their kids immunized, their medicines adjusted, their teeth filled, all these quality of life services, free and under one roof. We’d been talking with our eye surgeon friend about doing such an event specifically for eye care when the call went out for interested providers and NGOs that would be willing to do the work of putting it all together.

So Lena called Harish and Harish called his circle of providers and our circle of providers, including the oral surgeons, dentists, optometrists and opthalmologists and his NGO is sponsoring the application for funding for one of these “camps.” It doesn’t take the place of any of the services being provided by the clinic or Ankush or the Emergency Fund. This isn’t a day-to-day healthcare or emergency care situation. It won’t even take place all that near to here, just in the same governmental district. But it will reach the villages where no doctor ever goes. It will get kids seen who might have been written off as stupid when in reality they’re deaf or have poor vision. It’s going to get some people on necessary blood pressure medication, prevent some unwanted pregnancies, save some people a lot of pain and grief. Hopefully, it will help prevent some emergencies we’d otherwise have seen later on. This can only be a good thing. And it’s really wonderful knowing that we’ve helped connect people up so it can happen, that we’ve been able to work together and meet some of these terrific doctors and medics and administrators who genuinely care about helping people - because of the Emergency Fund and the many people who have contributed to it over the past two years. All those gifts are part of an unbroken circle of connections that just keeps growing and doing more and more good in this world. I’m amazed and awed and very, very grateful.

A last comment to another blog post that isn’t what I’d sat down expecting to write: What we really need to add to the circle is some mental health expertise: PTSD, abuse, adolescent issues including anorexia, grief counseling, culture shock, knowledge of psychopharmaceutical treatments. There is nobody locally qualified in these areas; we’ve looked. Anybody out there want to volunteer by phone?

We’re having a very strange winter this year. Generally, it starts getting cold in November and stays that way into mid-late February. Somewhere near the beginning of January comes several weeks of precipitation that manifests as rains in the lower reaches and sheltered valleys and snow at the higher altitudes. I’ve been told that a generation ago the snows fell more deeply, at lower altitudes and lasted much longer, but that the climate has gradually gotten just enough warmer that it has affected farming. Farmers, of course, prefer rain to snow.

This year, however, they’d happily accept any indication of precipitation in this season just as they wish the monsoons had ended a month earlier, rather than extending into October and drowning out the summer corn crop. The cold came as expected in November, giving us virtually no autumn and now Spring appears to be trying to bust in two months early. Since this is a region whose economy is based in farming and a small amount of winter recreational visitors, a warm, dry spell in late January has everybody alarmed. Even more important than summer corn is the winter wheat and it’s stunted and dry on the terraced fields of the mountains. Last week I wore five layers of warmth and woke up in the morning to the smell of wood smoke as people lit fires before dawn to keep from freezing. This week there are not only no fires, but I’m wearing a single sweater and, despite vaguely overcast skies, the ground is dry and the wind coming from the Southeast instead of the frigid North, is positively balmy. My neighbors in this mountainside village are getting worried. Many of them count on small family fields to feed themselves, their livestock and perhaps make a bit of cash to buy things they can’t grow. If the winter rains don’t come, not only won’t they be able to grow what their families need to eat, but the price of wheat, a necessary staple, will do what corn has already done and double.

I’m city born and raised (Chicago, San Francisco) and, although my father came from farm country, his family was business people - stockbrokers and lawyers - rather than folks who worked the land. Still, I spent just enough time in DeKalb and in rural Wisconsin in my childhood to have some clue about how close to the edge most farm families live and how important the seasons and the elements are to survival and sustenance. I can at least say I’ve grown vegetables, milked a cow and fished an egg out from under an annoyed hen. Heck, I’ve cleaned and plucked chickens, ducks, geese and turned four-legged critters into steaks and rump roasts. I truly appreciate how much work goes into making the food humans eat, which in turn gets transformed into energy by which we perform other essential labor. I watch the farm wives around here cutting and hauling piles of grass as big as a Volkswagen to feed the cows and water buffalo and bending over planting rice seedlings while ankle deep in squishy mud. They deserve a high return from their labours. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to plow and plant a field of wheat (oxen as still used to pull plows around here as many fields are inaccessible to vehicles) and then have to wait for a vital season of rain that doesn’t come. I buy my wheat, my rice, my corn, from these people. I’m one of the privileged class - if the price increases, I’ll manage anyway, unlike some of them, but I want them to succeed, I want them to celebrate rather than dread the wheat harvest this spring!

Farms at the edge of town

Even before we left the States to wander around and eventually land here in Himachal, our household had begun to embrace the beginnings of what has become the “Locavore” movement - supporting one’s local agriculture and economy (as well as improving overall nutrition) by eating as much of one’s diet from local sources as possible. In the Bay Area that wasn’t as difficult as it might sound - we had access to excellent farmer’s markets and small, regional producers of everything from milk and cheese to fruits, vegetables of every description and freshly baked breads. In Mexico, we also bought from local farmers whenever possible, figuring that it was good for us and a way of being environmentally responsible. Basically, the less distance things have to be trucked, the less they are processed and package, the smaller the “carbon footprint” is left in the doing and the consuming. That can only be a good thing all around.

But here… here we can really truly practice a philosophy of supporting the local farmers in every possible way. And we do. I can actually tell you who grew the wheat that I baked into bread last night and who grew the amazing fresh greens that we’ll eat for lunch tomorrow along with paneer - cheese that we make ourselves from milk given by a very sweet cow who lives in a shed several doors down from us. We don’t eat a lot of meat, nobody here does, but what we do consume probably has passed by our front door on its way down to market - walking down the road on four feet. Everything has a direct relationship - the animals, the people, the earth, the soil and all it produces.

Greens picked fresh in the morning reach our table for lunchtime

Two types of fresh cheeses are hung to drain. The whey from a previous batch was used to make the batch of homemade bread.
So, although this mild, dry weather is really pleasant for general living, we’re all pulling for a return of the winter before it’s too late. I’m hoping to wake up in the morning and see the haze of my breath on the way to the latrine and wheeze a little at the smoky dawn air. I’m hoping I have to wait an extra day or two for laundry to dry on the roof because it was hung right before a rain storm made us scurry upstairs to collect it quickly from the lines. My friends and community are counting on that rain and the cold, sometimes uncomfortable weather that goes with it! Certainly there are times I really really miss Trader Joe’s and Monterey Market and the abundance of exotic goodies, the sheer variety that they offer. I miss those giant pound plus bars of Belgian chocolate and the cheeses (oh how we dream of Gruyere and Camembert, of Port Salud and Roquefort!) and we inevitably return from our visits West with a stash of chocolate, dried cherries and a few hunks of Gjetost. But most of the time we are dependent for our sustenance on this place where we make our home. What is good for the farmers and craftsmen and merchants of Tso Pema is going to be beneficial to our lives. So right now, we’re hoping for the cold and the rain to come and do it’s seasonal thing.

Funny. This is not the blog post I intended to write. When I sat down this evening, I planned to write about all the visitors who come to Rewalsar/Tso Pema in this winter season and to describe them, first in words and then in some pictures I’ve taken of the winter residents and pilgrims who are beginning to actually crowd the path around the lake. No joke, there are folks down from the higher mountain regions where it truly is freezing cold at midday, places like Ladakh and Kinnour and Spiti and valleys tucked away on the Tibetan border. They have their own traditions and customs and manner of dress and most of them have their own language too. Devout Buddhists and often very sensible people too, they come down here to what they think of as a warm, but accessible location and spend their days circumnambulating the sacred lake, attending pujas, chanting, praying - and staring at all the strange townie folks and the odd Western tourists - who stare right back at these odd follk in their different costumes, elaborate jewelry and incomprehensible speech. They’ll stay many to a single rented room, sleeping close together for warmth, making tea over tiny wood fires and reconnecting with friends who they haven’t seen all year. From now until Losar (Tibetan New Year) they’ll continue to flock into town, many of them older people, retired from a lifetime of hard work, seeking the relative comfort of our mild winter afternoons. It’s like a festival or fair some days as you go along the streets. Vendors follow the pilgrims, setting up stalls to sell everything from tea to noodles to prayer flags and incense. It’s a marvelous time for people watching, and I wanted to share some of that with my blog readers. That’s what I was planning to write about before I got side tracked by farming issues and carbon footprints. I’ll go ahead and end with a few pictures - a few portraits of the different characters in my environment. As much as possible, I’ll try and post at least a picture or two every day, even if I don’t have a chance to write much. It’s just too interesting not to show what can be seen here through the camera’s lens!

A musician entertains pilgrims sitting on the grass near the sacred lake

I love this picture of two elderly Tibetan nuns waiting for their afternoon tea. These two are, as they appear, a pair of very feisty old birds. Do not mess with them!

Young girls from up near Ladakh. The headscarves are very traditional, even if their jackets are second hand Adidas.

It’s been a bittersweet season for us, for Rimpoche, for our extended Dharma community. We’ve made new friends here, people have come into our lives in some good ways, fine people. But we have also had to say goodbye to others and that is sad, that is hard, even if they are strong practitioners, even if they are ready to move forward unafraid. So I wanted one last chance to say goodbye to three people who made a big difference in their world.

Sarah passed on October 13, 2008 following a long battle with cancer. She was young, much too young to have to say goodbye. When I went to write this, I realized that I didn’t actually know her last name, she was just “Sarah” or half of “Sarah and Laura” or “Sarah from Julie’s”. THAT Sarah. When I last saw her, sometime in July, she seemed too full of life to be so close to the end of her life. When I hugged her goodbye, it didn’t occur to me that it might be the only chance I got. So I’ll say goodbye one more time on this page. Goodbye Sarah, you were loved more than most people I’ve met in my life. You mattered to a lot of folks, you touched the hearts and souls of many friends. I’m glad I had a few moments to know you.

We knew David Broman  for quite a few years. He lived and worked as a psychologist in California when we lived there and used to come to Lama Wangdor’s teachings. When he retired and was looking for a way to pursue his dharmic path to the fullest, he took Lama Lena’s advice and moved to Tso Pema. Thus, when we arrived back here in early 2006, David was already established as a “local”. He’d been battling cancer for a couple of years when he finally succumbed in November, while traveling for teachings in Taiwan. Our community is not only smaller for his passing, but quieter too without his laughter. Thanks David for all you did to make this a better world!

Until tonight, I didn’t have a picture of Alison Sullivan. She was younger than my own daughter and yet it seemed that we had known her and her family - Father Michael, Mom Diana and younger sis Mia - for many many years. I know it was something like 7 years ago that I had the privilege of doing a Soul Retrieval with Allison when I was in their Milwaukee, WI home with my lamas. Allison suffered most of her young life with a degenerative neurological condition that rendered her less and less able to interact with and respond to the world around her. And yet, somehow, she was able to be a vibrant, vital force who affected everyone who knew her. She had a really intense connection with Wangdor Rimpoche and Lama Lena. Allison was, for all her outward immobility, a strong meditator, a Dharma practitioner. She died a practitioner’s calm, gradual and peaceful death on January 9th.  Halfway around the world, we could hear her go “Wheeee!” as she went clear and free, no longer bound by needy flesh or the limits of a damaged nervous system. She went clear, clean as any yogi I’ve ever known, a little Boddhisatva. Sky Dancing. Thank you for knowing us!Edited to add: I received this from Alison’s parents tonight. Thank you Michael and Diana - we love you so much and I’m so happy to have this picture of sweet Alison.

here is a (picture) of Alison holding the Medicine Buddha rupa Rimpoche gave her long ago.  The picture is from this Spring 2008.

Dec. 26 1982    –   Jan. 9 2009    she made it to her golden birthday!

We are having a memorial for her on Sunday Jan 25. 

Wow. It has been a month! A little over actually and I could apologize but that’s getting old, so I’m just gonna say Wow how time flies when you’re having fun!

Most of it has been fun actually. Well, okay, there was that gallbladder attack and the emergency run into Mandi for medicine at 2 a.m. and that wasn’t so delightful really, but it did allow Yab and Nyondo to encounter and scare off an enormous snow leopard on the road down the mountain, something you don’t see every day. And there were other passings which I shall give due respect to in a later post, but, for the most part, the last 5 weeks have been pretty jolly here in old Tso Pema.

Our family appears to have inaugurated a local tradition the year we first arrived, by deciding to throw a party in late December that would add some of our Western holiday traditions into the mix of Hindu (Diwali) and Buddhist (Losar) celebrations that break up the winter cold and monotony.  We hadn’t actually thought to do any serious Christmasolstikwanzahanuukafestivus whoop-de-do this year. All of us were kind of tired as December rolled around and both Nyondo and I have been sick a lot this year so we rather just assumed we could skip noticing the day(s) leading up to secular New Years. But no. As the month progressed, our friends in the various communities began asking us when the party would be. Not “if”, but “when”. It does seem that, up here where the days are pretty short and the need for entertainment pretty great, once you do something two years in a row, taking a third year off is not an option.  When the yogis from the caves at the top of the mountain began saying, “oh don’t worry about cooking, we’ll just turn up with food on Injie Losar” we KNEW we were in trouble and there was going to be no backing out. Because the monks and nuns and other practitioners up there really have no clear idea of which day “Injie Losar” falls on (small wonder since there isn’t actually any such holiday.) Which meant that people would be turning up randomly bearing food, drink and good cheer - usually just about the time one of us was getting out of the shower around daybreak. Which meant lots of little parties - before coffee in the morning - instead of one planned and expected event. We quickly got motivated and started planning.

Now remember, if you’ve been following this blog for any time, that we’re living up in Himachal Pradesh, in the Indian Himalayas. This tiny town, called Tso Pema by the Tibetans and Rewalsar on the Indian Maps, is built around the five block circumferance of Lotus Lake, a place sacred to Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists alike. Because of that, it’s a place of pilgrimage and, although out of the way in the extreme, becomes a crossroads of sorts, a meeting point for the many diverse cultures that occupy these mountains whose highest peaks are known as The Roof of the World. Some of those people have very little interaction with outsiders, especially those from far away places. There are tribal people from Kinnour and Lahoul and little crevasses in the mountains without names. There are Indians - some who have been to or through the cities of the south and the plains and speak broadcast Hindi and others whose families have farmed the same tiny plots of monkey-infested hillside for thousands of years and speak a dialect that resembles Hindi the way modern Italian resembles Liturgical Latin. Those are my neighbors, up here in Doh, the farming village where our house stands. Then there are the bright-eyed, free-spirited Ladakhis from the northern borders, people whose country was an independent kingdom until within my lifetime. Tibetans from all over the Land of Snows have come here in their exile. Their dialects are as varied as the Indians, though Khamkye is the most common in this town (and the one I speak.) The Tibetan refugees, many of whom are nuns and monks and yogis, make up a large minority of Rewalsar’s changing population. And there are always a few travelers from the west, come to see the sacred lake and/or learn from the various lamas, scholars, pundits and saddhus who live and teach on the mountainside.

It’s a diverse bunch and, largely, each group keeps mostly to themselves. Part of that is language, part of it is culture and there is always the combination of habit and fear of strangers to keep neighbors from really getting to know each other. Even among the Indians, the old, (now illegal) division of castes still divides people and neighborhoods. The younger Indians, even from the villages, pay less heed to the caste system than their elders, but, while people may do business together, they don’t always socialize outside their own caste or their own race, religion, customary ways of doing things.

We’ve been really fortunate to be able to step outside every one of those divisions in a way that most of the ex-patriots and dharma students passing through never have an opportunity to do. We have good, close, well-loved friends in every corner of this town, from the beggars and drunks to the scholars and lama, from the working-class Brahmins who maintain strict dietary standards to the nouveau riche lower caste merchants, we’ve made friends with people - nice, decent, interesting, funny, warm, huggable, vulnerable, vital people. And we invite them all to our house so, of course we invite them all to our parties.  Somehow we get away with it. I’ve got various kinds of speculation as to why, but I’ve also got all these pictures I want to post and the pictures win over pontification. I’ll just say that all our friends came and partied with us and with each other, broke bread, raised glasses, laughed, sang and danced together in our home. One of the proudest moments came at the end, as people were saying goodbye. Not just one, but several of the Indian businessmen and women took us aside and thanked us for our hospitality and said quietly, “you don’t know what you’ve pulled off here. This never happens here, it just doesn’t. Not only the different racial and religious groups - sometimes we do civic things because we have to, but the different classes and castes. You don’t know what a big deal it is that everybody came together and it worked. It actually worked.”  Huh. Why wouldn’t our friends all get along? Sometimes we are so used to coming from a melting pot that we’re positively dense. But it worked. It really did. I guess that’s why we had to have the party. We’ve got to keep up the tradition because it works.

Having a “Western-style” party means serving western-style food. Which definitely means preparing it ourselves as there is no place to purchase most of what we wanted to serve. We learned our lesson last year about what kinds of food work for this crowd and what is just too strange or too unpalatable to Asian tastes and farmer’s mental concepts to be enjoyed. However, even keeping it fairly simple and sticking to those foods which we were pretty sure would be enjoyed, was a LOT of work. Because, not only isn’t there a nearby Safeway or Tesco’s from which to buy things like hummus and pitas, cream cheese onion dip, pizza or even peanut butter and jelly - in this Himalayan town a day’s drive from anywhere, you pretty much have to make the basic ingredients from scratch. I did not expect this year to be unable to find peanut butter locally and thus to spend an afternoon cleaning, roasting and seasoning raw peanuts and then grinding them to make our own peanut butter. Bread I was prepared to bake and pizza dough. And brownies, cookies, banana nut breads, all the western leavened goodies that I’m particularly skillful at concocting. But hummus has to be made from raw chickpeas and sesame seed, from cloves of garlic and the juice of local lemons. Grilled polenta is a fairly easy dish, always well-received once people here try it. But I have to take the dried corn kernals I got from the neighbors and grind them before stirring the meal into boiling water. Someone has to chop the herbs and the chilies and the garlic that seasons each slice. We have to make the cheese from the buffalo milk we get each day and hang it and season it. Oh yeah. I had to make the mayo for the deviled eggs.  All these things in order to create a buffet that would take about an hour to whip up after running through a local supermarket. Which is one very good reason why I haven’t posted in so long. I was cooking. For rather a lot of days. And then, once the party was over, we were cleaning up and resting up. We just got the last of the decorations down off the ceiling fan yesterday as a matter of fact!

However the food turned out great. The main thing was… pizza. Real pizza. My first ever job back in high school was in a family owned Italian restaurant in Chicago. I know how to make pizza. And I made 16 of them for this party:

baked in my little electric oven:

and lined up to be reheated and recrisped before serving:

But it was hardly the only food we served:

Asi Dolma is somewhere in her 80’s by now. She walked out of Tibet in her 60’s and this was her first pizza. She really got into it. I mean really. Six pieces of “that flat stuff. It’s really good!” I wonder if getting a nun addicted to Italian food is bad karma?

Our friends came:

They ate and drank and schmoozed with each other.  They came from all over, even the ex-pat crowd was a United Nations crew. The pretty girl seated on the far right  of the bench won this year’s prize for coming from the most unusual place: her name is Lena (the “other” Lena in this town) and she is from Estonia.

There were all the things that make a good holiday party in addition to too much food and drink.There were decorations:

Pretty girls:

Eligible bachelors:

Cute kids passed from hand to hand for huggles:

Or trying, as our young friend Jyoti did, to sneak as much sugar as possible - which is hard when you’ve already won the prize for the loudest, sparliest handknit sweater AND the most stitches for a head wound in a single week:

There was dancing to the latest Bollywood tunes:

Since I can’t dance, I played DJ.

And managed cleverly not to get a single picture of myself taken since I retained custody of the camera.

Good times. Now can I sleep until Losar?

How quickly we get used to real technology. Our DSL wiring is down. Physically - we have no landline phone either. And it’s the weekend. So… All the great pictures I planned to upload will have to wait until we’re up and running again. As will the long, rhapsodic descriptions. Instead, a synopsis and the couple of pics I’d already uploaded before a monkey did a backflip on the lines out front. Sonam can see out of both eyes. Yay! Rigdzin, our monk with leukemia, is in a bad way and we’re worried, not yay. It’s December in the Himlayas. Cold here. But NOT as cold as here:

That’s a view across the border into Tibet itself. See all that snow? It be frrrrrreeeeeezing up there!

Down at lower elevations, we manage to keep our good humor. Sight’s like this help. Lena encountered this Tibetan nun in town and had to take her picture. The nun was happy to comply. Indeed she’s just a happy person generally, even though she has no idea what her t-shirt actually says:

Hope all you girls (and boys) have a fun weekend!