The other night we were driving home from Ganiyari on the busy main road when a motorcycle going the opposite way and carrying three people wiped out.  The passengers skidded along the road with the cycle, starting their slide at their driving speed of around 30 mph, traveling unprotected in the middle of the road as friction brought them to a halt.  Our driver luckily had time to swerve to avoid running them over, and fortunately none of them were seriously injured.

In this first month of the year we have already seen a number of wrecks on the road.  On New Year's day we saw the smashed remains of two big trucks which had hit head on.  These trucks are not as big as 18-wheelers, but are built like dump trucks, made for hauling cargo.  Based on what was left of the passenger compartments it would have been a miracle if there were no fatalities.

A week or two later an SUV T-boned a passenger van.  The first evening we saw the vehicles on the side of the road, and the debris from the accident marked the intersection for many days.  JSS was involved with those injured in this incident, and in this case there were several fatalities.

I have been told that India has the highest number of deaths per 1000 vehicles. No one wears seat belts.  The roads here are crowded and often in poor condition.  Major routes are often barely two lanes wide, like a rural county road in the US, and these roads are shared by massive trucks, 3 wheel taxis, bicycles and even ox-carts.   When two trucks pass there is room for no one else.  Truck drivers don't appear to be particularly regulated, and the drivers may be drunk/sleep-deprived/who-knows-what.  These rural highways seem to be more dangerous than the city, where it is more crowded, but people are more aware and driving slower.

It is in the back of our minds that we could be victims of a traffic accident.  JSS has good drivers to pilot the vehicles, and we are in sizeable SUV's, so we have reason to hope we make it out OK!

A few weeks ago a friend from the lab organized a day trip to a temple site called Amarkantuk. His friend picked me up early in the morning and we headed on our way, stopping by the JSS clinic to pick up the rest of the people, 11 of us jammed into a van. Shortly after this we stopped for tea.

On the way we made a roadside stop for firewood which we gathered in the woods, and after another 80km, we stopped again for tea.

We wound through the forests for a total of three or four hours and then as we approached a gate, we turned off down a dirt road. I thought we were going around some toll, but we were headed to a lunch spot at an "ashram" (basically a hut in the woods by a stream) where they cooked a lunch of mixed veggie curry, dal, and rice, served as always on leaf plates. Also, they made tea. A short distance from the where we ate was the edge of a cliff at the center of a horseshoe-shaped valley, which gave us nice views.

After lunch, which probably took 2 hours in total, we went to a waterfall, about 120 feet high where there was a path to the bottom and you could walk under and behind it. Most of the men bathed (their daily bath). I went in, not to clean myself, but because it was a chance to get under a waterfall. It was cold water on an already chilly day, but it was an invigorating dip.

By this point it was late in the afternoon, and we visited a few temples. The men are all religious, to varying degrees, and so they acted devout and respectful. Temples are to India as churches are to Europe, and after awhile, you've seen enough of them, and in Amankartuk there are dozens of temples of different sizes. The scenery was very nice, as many of the temples were along the edge of the cliff.

The ride home was long and windy and most of us slept.

Here are some videos posted by Pampi who came to visit at the end of November:

Seven months after landing, I have started Hindi lessons, with an elementary school teacher on our floor. Hopefully this will give my Hindi skills a kick in the butt.

Now I have Hindi lessons three days a week and tabla lessons another three... I feel like I'm back in grade school going from soccer practice to cub scouts to play dates (these days set up by Dolly).

This is the most common way of feeding a large group in India. Make a big pot of rice, a big pot of dal (beans/lentils), and a big pot of sabji (vegetable curry). Sit everybody on the ground on mats, and give them a leaf plate. Serve the food on the plates, and keep coming around until everyone is full. At the end, throw the leaves back into the forest/field.

JSS has three outreach clinics in different villages, and I had been to the closer two. Last week, Dolly and I went out to the most remote one in Bamhni. The Bamhni clinic is in the tiger reserve, and JSS leases the land it is on. They can not buy the land because only tribals can buy land from other tribals. It was built with labor volunteered by the village, and when it was complete, the government filed a lawsuit against JSS for having a health center in a forest area. The people of the villages went and had a sit-in in the government buildings, and the case was dropped.

The clinic is about 70km outside of Bilaspur, and it took about an hour and half to reach from Ganiyari. On the way, we went through a few gates marking the edge of the forest area. The village itself is "rather large" for a forest village - about 300 people. When they have the clinics, people come from even further in the forest, sometimes walking for hours even if they are sick.





The building which houses the clinic is built in the traditional manner, from mud and straw. It is horse-shoe shaped, with two examining rooms and a storeroom on one side, a long open room in the back, and a pharmacy and kitchen on the other side. There is also a laboratory area near the back, under the roof, but otherwise outside. When the weekly clinics are held, at least one lab tech goes with a microscope and an array of chemicals and tests, allowing them to examine blood and other fluids for parisites and other problems.





White people are infrequent visitors to Bamhni, and I got a lot of stares. At one point around sunset, I took a walk with two of the workers to find the one spot in the village where you get cellphone reception, and we ended up standing for a while in front of a house, messing with the phones. A little boy, maybe 7, and his younger sister stood at the wooden front gate staring at us. After a short time the little boy went to the back and came back a few minutes later with an axe. He made some slow and deliberate chops on the gate while staring at us, as best I could tell threatening us, and specifically me. It might have been menacing if he weren't so small. After about 30 seconds his mom yelled at him, and he moved onto staring at us from some shadows, still holding the axe.

The morning we were there, the doctor was waiting for her tea, and explained that she had asked them not to make it "like syrup". When the tea came, it was clear what she meant. My black tea could have passed for warm, flat Coke.

We used to leave our trash can outside in front of our door every morning. The watchman would come and dump it into his big can, and then take it out to its appropriate place.

Now that we have no watchman, we have to take care of the trash ourselves, and we have learned what that "appropriate place" is... its behind the building. You take the trash out and throw it into the open lot. Pigs and cows and dogs will eat the organic stuff, and the plastic stuff is just gonna pile up.

The first picture is of some young girls in a creche (nursery) run by JSS. The other of a man washing in a stream in Bahmni. The river is almost empty now, but in rainy season, it floods and makes the river crossing impossible by vehicle and dangerous on foot.

(I meant to post this last week, but somehow it didn't make it up)

The other night, Dolly got left behind at the JSS campus. Most nights, two cars come back, and on this night Dolly stayed to play volleyball, intending to catch the second vehicle. The driver knew she was coming on that car, but had fallen asleep and was startled awake by the doctor who had stayed behind. In his sleepy confusion, he forgot about Dolly until they were about 20 minutes away. They called Dolly to see if they should come back, and she told them she would just stay the night.

She hung out talking with friends until about 1 in the morning, when she went back to the guest room, which shares and entrance/front room with the living quarters of one of the doctors. She isn't a nun, but her last position was at a mission. During an earlier conversation about eating habits and ghee (clarified butter), someone noticed that she ate a lot of it and remained thin. They wondered where it went - "Rightous Indignation" was someone's accurrate answer.

This doctor was still awake and about when Dolly came back, and started questioning her about where she had been. Had she been out doing work? (no). Was she out with girls or boys? (both). Give me their names! Dolly didn't tell her who she was out with, and she "banned" Dolly from the guest room. We found out later she has been on a bit of a rampage of late, harassing people (working adults) for staying out/up late.

Many of the women especially are intimidated by this type of behavior, and for the young women telling the threat of having their parents told these things is legitimately scary. For Dolly, it was an annoyance, but for staff, getting on the wrong side of a "sir" can mean the loss of a job. Fortunately, the rest of the doctors are more reasonable, and the doctor who's staff was most harassed told her that this isn't her ashram.

Our cook, Choti, left at the end of last month. She went back to her village with her brother. Since then we have been cooking for ourselves, except for one day where we had a new woman come so we could try her food. While her food wasn't amazing, it was very good, and she left the kitchen clean. (Dolly managed to make some eggplant the other night that was excellent, despite having no confidence in her process of cooking)

We will start having her come daily soon, and she will come when we are at work, so when we get home there will be dinner ready. This will be very nice, as we often get back hungry and unsure of when the cook would show up, and when she did it would be another 45 minutes of babysitting before we would eat. Its sad that she had to leave the way she did, but we had been talking about finding a different cook from about the first month after we hired her.