ROAD BLOG AHEAD

I thought, now that we’ve been back a little while, that I’d post some pictures of folks that have been/are being helped by the Medical/Emergency Fund. The contributions have helped so many folks - some of them a little, some of them a lot - and more just keep rolling into our house every week, knowing that, when all else fails, they came come to us and we’ll find some way to help them. Some of that depends on you, kind readers, so please, do keep clicking that donation box on the sidebar and, if you are interested in sponsoring someone to the tune of US $20 per month, please, please, let me know. We found some sponsors while in the U.S. but we got back and discovered lots of folks who had fallen through the cracks or fallen on hard times in our absence. If you offered and didn’t hear back from me, please try again, the journey back and forth between here, Delhi, the U.S. and other points played havoc with some correspondence!

This youngster is Sonam Woser, a student monk from Kinoor who lives at Zigar Monastery. He’s 12 years old, looks 8 and has been struggling ever since he broke his eyeglasses some months ago. He’s one of those people who absolutely needs glasses just to see the world in front of his nose. We took him into Mandi and got him an eye exam (below) and new specs. Because of his age and the seriousness of his vision problems, he’ll have to go back in 3 months for new, stronger lenses. However, the total cost of all of this including the exams, the glasses, future lenses and lunch is around US $20 at local rates. Now he’ll be able to keep up with his classes.

The awe on his face as he beheld the “big city” (Mandi) clearly for the first time was something to see!

Norbu Lhundrup is one of the yogis from the cave community. Many of the Tibetans have difficulties with the Indian summers where temps can get up into the 40’s (that’s centigrade. Translates to the low hundreds Farenheit) with 80-90% humidity before the monsoons. I sympathize totally as I am so not good with hot and humid weather! He ended up going to the emergency hospital for treatment of heat prostration, dehydration and related physical difficulties.

Here we have three nuns from up in the caves at the top of the mountain. Or rather, 2 of them are from the caves and 1 is presently homeless and unsettled. She’s also extremely ill with a variety of problems secondary to her recent escape from occupied Tibet. All 3 have some serious digestive issues related to living in a country with very different climate and foods than the high mountains where they were born. Lena is working with acupuncture, herbs, dietary changes, etc., but also took them in for GI workups at the lab to see what sort of nasties are residing in their guts. Ani Youngchen, on the left, is the one we were most worried about and the one that both Lena and the Mandi hospital doctor is most challenged by. She’s on massive antibiotic therapy for the second time. Ani Tsewang Youngtso, in the middle, has also been pretty danged sick. Lena has had excellent success treating her eye infection and severe allergies (appears to be allergic to India) but we’re still waiting for the endoscopic biopsy results to find out what that thing is in her gut. Ani Nordron, on the right, is one of the strongest women I’ve ever known, a real powerhouse. She, however, has the digestive difficulties that so many of the refugees suffer from even here in the Indian Himalayas. Between the stress of being in exile and the radical change of diet, it’s hard for all of them and we constantly see disabling gastrointestinal problems ranging from stress reactions to infectious gastritis to parasites.

This is Ngari Gepo Drakpa (literally, “Drakpa,a the old guy from Ngari”) He’s always been a trooper but, when we got back here, we were alarmed to see how worn out and skinny he’s become. Turns out that his long-time sponsor has stopped sending money and his son (below) has been seriously ill so the family hasn’t been eating and is on the verge of getting turned out of their rental room. We gave him $20 from the emergency fund for food and shelter and a bottle of decent vitamins. Hopefully something better will turn up for them.

Drakpa’s son, Chime Tsering, is just recovered from a years-long bout of treatment for tuberculosis. As the sole support of his family, he’s found a job washing dishes at a local restaurant for which he gets paid $12 a month, not enough to cover the family’s rent, much less food. TB treatment is grueling, the drugs take everything out of a person. He’s scary skinny and weak. He is also getting some money for proper food, vitamins and dry shelter while the family figures out what to do next.

Here’s one of the happy stories. I believe I posted a picture of this guy early this year when he first turned up for treatment. He’s another of the escapees who went through absolute hell to get out to freedom in India. Smart, brave, kind, Sangdhen is just an amazing guy. He’s also supposed to be a big, strong Khampa, the kind who can lift a Volkswagen without trying. Except that, after his ordeals, he was skin and bones. We got him started on the right medicines so he could eat, Lena treated him with acupuncture and, over the course of the months, he’s starting to return to his own self again. He’s gained several kilos, has strength to walk around town and, in general, is coming up really well. His lab tests, medicines and followup care would not have been possible without the Emergency Fund.

Sometimes the answer is simple. Ani Sonam Chodron lives in town now that she’s too old to climb up and down the mountain. She’s got weak eyes that give her a lot of pain and are sensitive to wind and sun. We’ve given her some herbal linament from our medicine chest to try for her arthritis, but mostly what she needed was a good pair of dark glasses to protect those aging eyes!

These are a representative few. Some who come to us, like Ani Youngchen, are dire emergencies whose lives are clearly at stake. We try to move fast in those cases. Others, it’s a matter of quality of life. And there are a few that can’t be saved or fixed. We returned to find that one of the local Indian workmen we’d helped in February had taken sick in our absence with something totally unrelated and died during the summer. A youngish guy with a family. All we could do was contribute something towards the funeral and the welfare of his family.

There are other stories, other emergencies, others in need. We try to help whoever turns up whether they are Tibetan refugees, Indian villagers or Westerners passing through. Our friend David is in Delhi undergoing chemotherapy. Our housekeeper, Malka, needs massive dental work that can no longer be put off. We do what we can.

Some bloggers that I know of use this concept of Random Wednesdays to post about all the uncategorizable (is that a word?) things that have come their way over the last week. I thought I’d try it today since, looking at the various photos I’ve accumulated to post here, they are indeed quite random. My thoughts today have also been all over the map without a single obvious theme. So, random Wednesday it is.

I got a new camera when we were in the States this summer. Lena was off traveling with the old one and I wanted to be able to compulsively take pictures of Danika and the other grandkids as well as blog photos. So I bought myself a not terribly expensive one that took my fancy. It’s Kodak Easy Share V610. I’ve used Kodak digital cameras before and been happy with the results and this one is no exception. Nice pictures, good colour, fairly easy to figure out without reading ten thousand pages of manuals. I got great pictures of the grandkids and some decent ones of the world around me.

We were moving around so much back there however, that there wasn’t really a lot of opportunity to explore its potentials until we got back here and I started trying to take pictures of the local scenery. I had no idea what 6.1 megapixels involved or how cool it would be to have this dual lens, 10x optical zoom feature and what that meant in terms of picture taking.

Now, I haven’t spent a lot of time in my recent post delving into the state of my health, but it’s germane to the tangent of picture taking. Bottom line: I’m not getting out and about very much right now. Back in 1987 I was in a pretty serious motorcycle accident that left both my knees badly damaged and a lot of the muscle in my right leg pulverized. The circulation of my lower legs has never really recovered which is why I’m susceptible to infections, chronic swelling and limited range of motion. The infection I contracted right before we left to return to India combined with several days in cramped airplane seats really did a number on me. On top of (or probably because of) that, I managed to tear a muscle in my left hip. So walking is a challenge and I spend most of my time in the house since getting around in Rewalsar is pretty physically demanding. I’m healing slowly, trying not to get too discouraged.

Fortunately, our house is open in the middle with a balcony and a wonderful view of the surrounding countryside. Plenty of sunlight, fresh air and sense of being outdoors without having to clamber down the slippery stone “steps” to town or phone a rickshaw to come and fetch me down from my mountainside perch. A lot of the pictures I’ve posted have been taken from the balcony overlooking Tso Pema, the Lotus Lake.
We are, however, pretty high up and, while the overall view is great, things are fairly far away. I’ve often wondered what this or that building looks like up close, particularly those at the top of steep tracks or up several flights of difficult stairs. The huge Sikh temple complex is one of those. The stairs leading up to it are legendarily challenging around here. People climb up and down them specifically for exercise. Like most of the non-Sikh people around here, I’ve never been to the top of the steps to see the structure itself. Usually I view it like this:

It’s the blue buildings in the distance, pretty much directly across the lake from our house, though at a lower elevation so we look down on it. I was playing with the new camera recently and managed to take this from the same vantage point as the one above:

Wow! There’s people there. I feel like the paparazzi. Britney Spears, watch out!

Here’s a god (I never did find out which one) being taken for a walk. It’s a common phenomenon in the Hindu community. A shrine is put on a litter and carried about with much pomp and ceremony so that everyone can receive the blessing of the deity’s presence. During holy festivals you see quite a few of these, but almost every weekend some temple or other will do this and you’ll see the vivid draperies and tinsel being paraded down the street with a gaggle of worshippers and onlookers in tow.

The traffic in front of our house has been considerable this past week since the monsoon torrents swamped the region. Buses, trucks, jeeps, motorcycles, rickshaws and bicycles in unprecedented numbers lumber (or putter) by from dawn until (gasp!) almost midnight. Sometimes as many as 20 vehicles an hour pass our windows. I thought, at first, it was just everyone making up for being trapped by the rains. Then I learned that ours (as in, our local…) is the only road that is still functioning to get in and out of some of the villages up in the mountains. The buses and trucks are being rerouted up our mountain until the other routes can be repaired. What strikes me as so amazing about that news is that our local road looks like this right now:

Single lane as always, mostly mud and gravel, currently with some remarkable potholes and steeper than usual drop offs at the sides where the verge was washed away. I cringe at the thought of a bus and a lorry meeting head on anywhere along this stretch and yet they do it all the time. The survival rate for passing on the mountain side is remarkably high. Of course most of the buses as well as the goods carriers have little altars to Kali on their dashboards. The drivers light a stick of incense and recite a prayer before beginning any journey. So the traffic here is big because so many of the other roads through the mountains look like this:

or this:

Hopefully the construction crew, shown above, has had a chance to effect most of the repairs by now.

Since I’m spending so much time indoors, I’m trying to organize my life a bit. This is, in India, much more challenging than it sounds. Things like weather, social conventions, power outtages, monkeys and other random (see the theme?) events conspire to prevent order and encourage chaos. Chaos and I have an uneasy relationship, constantly trying to one up each other. This week I may have won:

Look! Stash organizing. I managed to sort all of my spinning fibres (above) and my knitting yarns (below) into a bunch of plastic bags against the damp and get them onto shelves

Shelves that these two

cannot access. Don’t let their temporary unconsciousness and cuteness fool you. This photo was taken after an afternoon of rescuing various bits of fleece and roving from the claws of young Leopard while her mother lay by, egging her on. Miss Leopard fancies herself quite the huntress, catching (and sometimes offering to share) midnight snacks of mice and bugs. This morning I was leaning on the balcony railing, admiring a particularly lovely bright blue butterfly as it flitted along the roadside. “what a pretty creature!” I said to myself. And, in that moment, there was a streak and a pounce as Leopard darted out of the doorway. Chomp! Goodbye pretty blue butterfly!

Below is a shot of my desk as I began to put this post together. I thought it was a perfect example of the kind of odd juxtaposition of old and new that typifies our lives up here in Tso Pema.

Yes, indeed, I am surfing the ‘Net by candlelight. I do this rather often, candles being cheaper than torch batteries around here and the power to the house being off more than on. Today has been especially erratic, the power playing yo yo every hour or so. It’s why we have invested in things like expensive voltage stabilizers and spare laptop batteries which get charged whenever the power is on long enough to do so. Since my mobile phone is also my modem, I also have a battery pack that clips to the phone and runs on rechargeable AA batteries once the phone’s own battery runs down. My mobile printer also has a battery backup and my little sheet fed scanner runs off the usb port for power. So I don’t need constant electricity to function. Frequent power, yes, because the battery supply is not infinite, but I can go for quite a few hours between recharging.

Lights, however, are not on any kind of backup system so, when the power goes away and I’m stuck in my dark office trying to find my pen, I light a candle. It, in turn, is stuck in a locally-made crude clay candlestick. These objects are so plentiful as to be practically disposeable. They cost the equivalent of 20 cents US. We also have some clay oil lamps of a style that goes back several millenia. Lamps smoke and stink more than candles however so they get used less. And the overhead fans that make the close, damp heat bearable are also electrically operated. I think I miss those the most when the power goes out. I have some Chinese paper folding fans stashed here and there, but it’s just not the same as the big ceiling blades.

There are still plenty of homes in Tso Pema/Rewalsar (the name you call this town depends on whether you’re Indian or Tibetan) that don’t have any electricity, running water or access to plumbing. Some have no other stove than a wood fire in the corner (we’re talking fire pit, not fireplace) nor are the windows glazed. What is often rather striking and weird is that it isn’t at all uncommon for folks who live in a tin shack with a single light bulb, no running water or stove and who use a ditch for a toilet and the town pump for a sink, to own a totally modern mobile phone. One thing that businesses offer is charging stations where customers can plug in their phones. I have a theory that, when history looks back on the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it’s the cellular phone that will turn out to be the invention that most dramatically changes society. More than the computer or television, the instant communication from anywhere to anywhere has drastically affected how human beings interact and what they expect. I can pick up my phone and call a nun living in a cave at the top of the mountain as easily as I can call my daughter in Oregon. Yesterday, I watched an old man in a white shirt and loincloth go by on foot (barefoot I might add,) driving a herd of goats down the mountain. In his left hand he held a stick which he used to keep the goats in line. In his right hand he held his cell phone, pressed to his ear, talking loudly in the local dialect to be heard over the rustle and the bleeting of his herd. I wish I’d had my camera, though that wouldn’t have caught the sound effects which really were something! I did, however, manage to get a shot of a pair of cows standing in the drizzle at dawn under my bedroom window this morning. I’m pretty sure one of them is the cow that almost got a cat tossed on her the other day:

We still do most of the same things we did when we lived back in the U.S.: Lena translates for Wangdor Rimpoche, but she is also the doctor here and has a steady stream of patients. I administer the sponsorships and the Medical Emergency Fund, but I still do readings and astrology charts for my clients in the Americas and Europe and, increasingly, here in Tso Pema as well. Nyondo does web page design, technical assistance and various geekery, both long distance and for the local technophiles and businesses. The difference, the big difference, is how it all works on a practical and financial level.

Mostly, people just drop in. It’s a culture that doesn’t really even have the concept of knocking before entering. If the door is unlocked, they just come on in and sit down. If it’s locked, they rattle it and shout your name. Despite the proliferation of cell phones, very few people actually call before coming by. The idea of an appointment is known, but rarely practiced. In order to get anything of our own done, we’ve done our best to put out to the community that we’re “in” on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings for questions, to translate letters, do medical treatments, sort out sponsorship problems, send an email, etc. Technically we’ve said that our doors open at 10 a.m. This tends to mean that the majority of folks in this extremely early rising town (5 a.m. usual) wait to break down our front gate until a few minutes before 9. However a lot of the nuns and yogis don’t own watches so they take their best guess which generally means they wait until the sun is up to come by. The sun is up by 7 a.m. Usually we are too. The other mornings are when I try to do work in a coherent and consistent manner (hah!) and also be available for my clients in the West where it is late evening. Fortunately, charts I can do almost any time. Same for Nyondo with working on web sites, etc. The only problem there being that our connectivity to the internet is really only good between about 7 and 10 a.m. after which it slows to a deathly crawl.

Lena has a pretty steady stream of patients. Some of them need acupuncture. Some of them need inexpensive medicines available from the local chemist shops or from our supply of things brought from the U.S. Many need dietary advice or hygiene instruction. Some need a shoulder to cry on. Some have no money for medicine or food and it is to these that the Emergency Fund funds go. On occasion someone needs extensive testing, a referral to a cardiologist or oncologist, an MRI or CAT scan, etc. Those get referred to either Mandi or, if the situation is serious, to the state-of-the-art hospitals in Chandigarrh, six hours drive away. Sometimes Lena takes them there herself. Tomorrow she is shepherding a monk and several sick nuns to the hospital clinic in Mandi, most for testing, one for minor surgery. We bless each and every person who has contributed something to the medical fund. It’s making a huge difference here, enabling us to treat everyone who comes to us whether they can pay or not.

Now most people attempt to pay something, but it’s done in the manner that is traditional here: by offering. And, since the majority don’t have any money (or very limited money) they offer what they can from what they have or what they can get on their tight budgets. Usually that’s food. Fruit, vegetables, eggs, milk, bread, biscuits both sweet and salt. Folks, we are in absolutely no danger of starving to death here. In fact we seem to give away as much as we eat and still it keeps coming. Some examples: Last week I did a reading for one of the more affluent types around town and was given as my fee two cauliflowers, a cabbage, two tins of cheese and a kilo of fresh peas in the pod, enough groceries, supplemented by rice and dal, to feed our family for several days. Nyondo did a web page for one of the Tibetan restaurants that opened recently and got meals for weeks whenever she went to town. Lena is practically buried in produce and cashew biscuits by the end of office hours. Just for a laugh, I gathered together the food we’ve been given in the last 36 hours and took pictures. At least, what’s left of it. Some was already eaten and some given away to our neighbors, hungry visitors and Malka who works for us.

The above was taken AFTER Nyondo dragged a bag of fruit down the hill to the workers at Rimpoche’s statue project. I think also several cartons of juice and a few packs of biscuits had been offered to visitors. The real “score” today was a big hunk of gyuma, the sausage wrapped in a white scarf at the front of the spread. Handmade by Tennam, former “mayor” of Tashi Jong, who is known for his great sausage skills. He and his wife and daughter stopped by this morning so I could help them straighten out some correspondence glitches. The big jar on the left is full of fresh tsampa, the roasted barley flour that is the staple food of the Tibetan diet. I don’t know who brought that, but since Lena is keeping it, it must be one of the particularly good tsampa makers.

This is the remains of a loaf of Nana’s bread, another typical Tibetan specialty around these parts. It doesn’t last long around here, not because of the climate, but because it’s so good we’re inclined to make meals out of it. The original loaf was about 20 cm in diameter and weighed at least half a kilo. I do believe that, among the offerings somewhere was a half kilo brick of good butter which ended up in the same place as the rest of the loaf of bread!

The pan on the right is full of homemade yoghurt, made from several litres of cow’s milk that people brought us. It’s a good way to use excess milk and we often have excess milk because we get a kilo every evening from our landlord’s cow and that’s plenty for our basic milk needs. When people bring more than we can use it gets turned into paneer (Indian style fresh cheese, much like Mexican queso fresco) or yoghurt which both Indians and Tibetans use liberally. The starter for this batch was also a gift - half a litre of good Tibetan yoghurt send to us by Ani Bumchung. In the bag is a large quantity of chura, Tibetan dried cheese. Sent to me by Lama Wangdor as a thankyou for some work I did for him yesterday. It’s extremely good stuff, used much like dried grated parmesan would be in the U.S., but also eaten by hand as a snack.

Along with the chura, he sent me a bag of kapsas. Special kapsas, made with olive oil rather than the usual rancid vegetable oil that has been hanging around for years. Essentially, they are twists of fried dough, eaten like we would eat cookies. I hadn’t thought to see more kapsas until New Year’s when they are ubiquitous. Apparently his homecoming was a big enough deal that someone made a batch and he wanted to send us a treat by sharing them. These are Khampa (Eastern Tibetan nomad) kapsas and they are huge! I put the Swiss Army knife in the picture just to have a basis for size comparison.
So this is how we get paid by our patients and clients. There are also, in season, bags of herbal incense, blankets down from Nepal or up from somewhere tacky, loads of firewood, spices and oil pressed from apricot kernels used for the skin. There are mantra and songs recited on our behalf, butter lamps lit in temples, prayers for our continued long lives. There is also trade in news and gossip, harder to photograph but often just as valuable to general survival in such a small town. We bring our technical expertise, our intuition, our medical know how. People reciprocate as they are able, offering goods, services and abundant friendship. In a place with very little actual cash money, we are very very rich in the things that really matter.

Fear not, gentle readers, I am the dummy referred to in the title. I’ve spent the better part of this afternoon trying to upload blog pictures without a great deal of success. You’d think I’d give up after the fifth unsuccessful attempt, but nooooo, I am strangely invested in letting the rest of the world see the mundane images of my life. It’s Sunday here in North India which makes it both the real weekend here and in the West, so internet on both sides of the globe crawls as everyone vies for access. As the lights wink out around Rewalsar signaling that the sane people are all going to bed, I have a sinking feeling that it’ll be sometime Monday before I am able to successfully upload this post/p>

I’ve been feeling more than a little bit lonesome since returning to Tso Pema. Not homesick so much, this is beginning to feel like “home” to me, the place I live and hang my hat. But lonesome… missing friends and the easy communication of being in a place where cultural significators are held in common and go without saying; where I am fluent in the dominant language of the social circles in which I move; where my friends are and my family. Most significantly and painfully, I really miss my daughter and the beautiful, spunky granddaughter I came to adore so much during my 4 months in the U.S.

It made me happy just to be around Danika Rose, I miss that particular happiness very much as well as the conversations and just hanging out with Veronica, who has to be the best daughter any mother could have. Saying goodbye to these for the next bunch of months is hard. That and the companionship of my friends are the hardest to surrender, much harder than not finding a latte on every corner or the lack of a Trader Joe’s anywhere on this continent!

It’s not all melancholia here though. I came home to these:

Nyondo has gone truly and deeply native in the months we’ve been away. She’s a local now, privy to the gossip, the invitations and the routines of this place. She did a truly amazing job of holding down the fort while we were away for four months. This has included a pretty steep learning curve about almost every aspect of daily life, from making cheese to coping with scorpions, giant spiders, feral cats (who tend to eat the spiders) and all the sorts of insect life native to the region. Including this fella who we rescued from trying to get tangled in her dreadlocks. Isn’t he a beauty?

I talked in the last blog about some of the things we dealt with in getting here, including torrential monsoon rains. The need for an ark has subsided, but we’re still pretty damp and the rain comes almost daily, making paths treacherous and laundry drying pretty near impossible. We’re high enough here that we sit *inside* the low-hanging clouds. Our view, which is lovely in most seasons has gone from this:

to this:

The lake, stirred mightily by the storms went from a peaceful little pond at the foot of the mountain:

to mud soup

Many of the roads are washed out and I’d show you a picture of that too, but my computer (or the powers that be) apparently ate it.

The monsoons have also had an effect on the already-unreliable electrical power. It winks in and out throughout the day and stays out anywhere from five minutes to six hours at a stretch. Usually just when it’s gotten muggiest and we desperately want the ceiling fans to work. What always amazes us is how *any* of the electricity works at all, given the creative methods of wiring common in the region. Most places where wiring and circuits intersect look like something left behind by a tribe of over-caffeinated kittens:

Theoretically there are building codes here, especially in the larger metropolitan areas (the above pictures were taken in Delhi and Mandi,) but you have to wonder if those codes have any intersection with anyone’s reality!

I continue to be impressed by the power of damp. You can see in the picture of the muddy lake above just how lush and green the vegetation has become in our region. Anything that can grow is growing rapidly. The cows wander the roads looking ecstatic, positively stoned on fresh food until the rain starts again and they get cranky and look for shelter. Nyondo had an oops moment the other night when she went to take the young cat out (still trying to get her well housebroken) and, in the pitch dark at the bottom of the stairs, nearly tripped over and dropped Leopard onto a large cow who had decided that our doorway looked like a nice warm, dry place to spend the night. Both cow and cat were highly indignant!

Unfortunately, it’s not just the trees and grasses that like the warm, wet climate. Vegetables grow so fast that they swell and bolt the instant they’re ripe. And the molds and fungus grow just as fast and are insidious. We came back to find abundant mildew in two of the back rooms that are built into the side of the mountain. The rock walls of the guest room and my office had seeped huge amounts of water. This is part of the new house in India syndrome where you have to wait for the first heavy monsoons to see what leaks and then wait for the dry season to do anything about them. They’ll be patched and sealed once it’s been thoroughly dry for a few weeks. In the meantime we’re learning about how to mildew-proof what it’s possible to protect and simply not own things that can’t survive monsoon. Air circulation is essential and, unlike most of the folks in this village, we have extremely powerful ceiling fans. So we keep them going most of the time in all rooms at low power just to make sure that the air circulates to keep the damp moving out. In the two worst places, we have electric heaters going as well. Dry heat plus air circulation is making it dry out more quickly and evenly than just waiting for the good weather. We have a bunch of guests coming in mid to late September and later and we want that back guest room to be pleasant and inviting. There’s nothing we can do about the essential dimness of the light back there, but we have the means to improve the dampness of the season and to make sure everything is clean and aired. I’m allergic to mildew myself and am finding it a bit difficult. Thank whatever for Lena’s acupuncture skills which are making a big difference to me!

As I guessed, it’s Monday morning here as I write this. I’m going to go ahead and upload it while I can. I’ve got some more pictures, more and different stories, but this is what I can manage before the power goes wonky. More later as possible. I’ll simply conclude with a pic that makes me laugh, something given to me by a nameless stranger in the Portland Airport when I laughed aloud at one of the many buttons she had affixed to her handbag:

After a few emails inquiring if we’d made it safely back to India, I thought I’d better post something as a reassurance. We did, indeed, manage the journey home. It wasn’t easy, not by a long shot. More than 25 hours actually stuck in too-small airplane seats combined with many more hours in airports saw us arrive in Delhi feeling cramped and out of sorts. We spent a couple days there trying to get our bearings and then were driven back to Tso Pema in the monastery cars. Therein lies a tale - we ended up in a fairly serious car crash on the road from Delhi to Chandigarrh. We’re okay and the people our car hit are pretty much okay, but it was quite an adventure and quite a mess all around. The vehicles were totalled, leaving us in rather a state in the middle of the steaming plains of India. We all crammed into the remaining jeep and continued up into the mountains. Into a monsoon downpour of epic proportions. The road was all but washed away in places and flooded out in others. We bounced and jounced and careened our way on the perilous track up into the Himalayan foothills for another eight hours, finally arriving home about 15 hours after leaving Delhi.

Okay, so we were home. It’s monsoon season and this year, unlike last, it is raining … oh hell, raining does not even begin to describe it. We have been trapped in our house by a veritable deluge for the past 8 days as the heavens opened up and drowned the region. Even the locals who have lived here all their lives are talking about how wet it is this year. Our lovely little lake is a mud puddle as the mountainside is washing down into it.

This is the quick and dirty version. I don’t have much internet yet to post pictures, but have been taking them right along and will post more details and images as soon as I’m able. Right now, just needed to report that we’re alive and sort of functioning.

We leave today for Delhi then on to Tso Pema. Expect to be in transit for about a week of hard travel. It has been… interesting… the past several weeks. No time to post. Barely time to breath. Eventually I’ll manage to catch up. Been very sick, better now. Been different places, ready to go home now.  Been… busy doesn’t begin to cover it. The idea of cloning myself sounds terribly appealing if I could clone the original without the various physical and mental dings and dents.

I have no idea how the internet will be doing back in Tso Pema. Nyondo’s connection hasn’t worked in about a week. It may be specific to her connection, no way to know ’til we return and try it. Bear with me friends and watch this space - something will happen here eventually. It might even be worth the wait, at least in pictures.