We worked in the fields for the first time yesterday. About two acres of the JSS campus are given over to fields, where the mostly practice/experiment with SRI methods. The experiments are around using SRI with direct seeding, SRI with different indigenous varieties, and SRI with different crops, so far wheat and millet.

We spent about half an hour with gardening claws, iron ones on a large stick, scraping up weeds and turning over the soil in one of the dry plots. After that we spent about an hour and a half in one of the flooded unplanted rice paddies pulling up weeds, which were basically grass. It was hard work, but felt good, although I don't know if it would have felt good after doing it all day.

There was an act passed recently in India to guarantee rural employment, 100 days per willing worker. The pay is 100rps for a day of manual labor. I imagine that effectively sets the minimum wage for manual labor - why would anyone work for less if they could work for more. I also imagine that the previous daily rate would have been even lower, or who would take advantage of this type of employment. 100rps is just over $2, so that should give you a sense of the living conditions in some of these villages.

Afterwards, there was a game of volleyball that we joined in. Dolly was the only girl, and everybody called her "madam". There are also two women (med students) from Germany here - they are in the guest house we had been occupying, and they had been scheduled for that house for some time.

Haven't posted for a while... we spent half of last week staying at the guest house trying to get the Internet people to show and fix the connection there. Turned out to be a waste of time because, a) they never got it fixed and b) we got moved out to another location.

We are now staying at the Ganiyari campus in a room above the lab. We no longer have a kitchen and a TV, but we now have no commute, and 3 meals a day prepared for us. Quite a few of the people who work on the campus live here as well, maybe a dozen families, so we're not totally isolated - although no one but Dolly speaks much English.

Other than that, we're trying to figure out our work routine, what promoting SRI entails, and what our role in that is.

Indians are famous for their unwillingness to stand in line. Whether at the train station or market, its not "first-come, first-served" but "push your way to the front". I don't know where this attitude originates from... maybe its a consequence of the sheer quantities and densities of people, maybe its a reaction to limited quantities of goods and services, and maybe its just the system they choose. Either way, it works as the law of the land.

This system is also applied to traffic. Many of the highways are 1.5 lane roads, where you pass when you can. Vehicles go a variety of speeds, from ox-cart slow to normal driving speed, so this works pretty well in utilizing the entire road and getting people where they need to go.

This morning, however, a set of circumstances arose that were entirely unsuitable for this system. It happened at a railroad crossing. The gates came down, and the cars and buses had to wait for them to be raised again. (Bicycles and motorcycles were able to weave their way through.) The problem occurred when people saw the traffic built up and decided to go around. The end result when the gates went up were two lanes of traffic on each side of the tracks facing each other and at a deadlock. What was already a traffic delay became a fairly intractable traffic jam as the traffic has to squeeze down from two lanes into one, with the one lane itself being blocked by the oncoming traffic. I guess this is usually why we take the route that avoids taht intersection.

Bilaspur has, in the words of a schoolteacher we met on the bus, "no activities for adventurous youth." This means no dance clubs, music spots, or even pubs (there are *bars* which we haven't entered, but they seem to be dives catering to working and lower class alcoholics), so one of our leisure time activities is watching Indian TV. At any given time, Bollywood's most popular actor Shahrukh Khan, is probably on TV on 15 of the 70 channels. Imagine Russell Crowe, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Timberlake, Jay-Z, the "Can You Hear Me" guy, and the Geico Gekko wrapped into one omnipresent personality, and you have Shah Rukh. He is primarily a movie star, and is in many of the top movies, and as a movie star, his mere presence makes a movie a top movie. In addition, music videos here don't belong to an artist/album, thet are associated with the movie for which they were produced, and the video stars not the musicians/singers, but the stars of the movie. He also is a very popular pitchman in ads of all kinds, TV and print. The top woman, Karina Kapur, is all over the place, but is not as ubiquitous as Shahrukh. She has been on top for only a few years, and he has been #1 for about 15. Women in Bollywood, as in Hollywood, have a shorter peak than men, and in India they tend to stop acting when they get married, or at least slow way down.

Follow up on the last post... maybe it was a one day flurry of activity, and its a coincidence, but Dolly's grotesque wax monument of mangled ants seems to have done the trick. Except for a small area of activity in the kitchen, the ants in our house are now few and far between.

Today we ate lunch with Jacob's agricultural assistant, Homprakash, who was going to be showing us how they do the direct seeding (weather permitting). Weather did not permit, but we learned that he had worked with Binayak Sen before coming to JSS to work with Jacob. Coincidentally, as we were waiting for the Jeeps to leave, we started speaking to a woman who was also waiting for a ride, and found out that she was writing a book and preparing on film a documentary about Dr. Sen.

For those who don't know, Dr. Binayak Sen was just recently released from jail after being held without bail or trial (or even proper charges) for just over two years. The offical pretense was that he was aiding Naxalite rebels, but the real reason is that he was speaking out against human rights violations comitted by government sponsored militias fighting the Naxalites. Both sides are engaged in guerilla warfare, mass killings and other atrocities. Dr. Sen served as an advisor to JSS (not sure the whole story), and I believe he was a classmate of some of the JSS doctors as well.

Totally unrelated, Dolly has suddenly transformed into an excellent cook. She has always been good, though generally reluctant, and her bhindi and eggplant on consecutive nights were both among the best dishes she has ever prepared. I don't know if the vegetables are tastier, the spices are fresher or better mixed, or if its just a matter of an Indian girl being possessed by the spirits of her native lands, but I am willing to surrender cooking duties and stick to washing the dishes.

In the last few days we have been at war with nature...

The first incident occurred at the hotel, when Dolly came out of the shower. She opened her suitcase to get her clothes, and then screamed and jumped on the bed. She had seen a mouse. I dragged the suitcase into the hallway, and started emptying it, and when it was mostly open a small mouse jumped out and scurried into the room next to ours.

Later that evening we were playing cards on the bed, when Dolly screamed again. She had seen the mouse run under the bed. I looked under the bed and at first didn't see it, but after looking closely, I found it was hiding between the bedpost and the wall. I went to the other end of the bed and gave it a sharp shove... then called the front desk to get rid of the dead mouse.

Yesterday we had two chipaki incidents. The first happened when we got home and Dolly found a small one on the bathroom bucket. I lifted up to the bathroom window, where it jumped out. Later that evening another chipkali went running on the wall in the living room. I went to chase it out the front door with a broom, but it ran all over the house until eventually I got it out the back door.

Today brought a plague of ants. We had seen some in the apartment, but not enough to really worry about. Today, however, they appeared in great numbers from their holes by the door frames. We tried killing them with detergent and bathroom cleaners, and that got rid of them for a while. Then they came back. We tried killing them by thwacking them with the stiff broom. That killed many of them... but soon they were back. Right now Dolly is buring them with a candle and dripping wax on them. It started as an attempt to seal off their holes, but that didn't quite work and it turned into just killing them out of spite. Tomorrow someone from the office will come look, and/or we'll get some proper pesticides, never mind that we're trying to promote organic farming and save the world from the dangers of those same pesticides. We can't live in an anthill.

We aren't in our permanent home yet, but we made a big step into more comfortable circumstances. Until we find an apartment we are staying in a guest apartment in the same colony as the doctors. This means, among other things, that we now have a kitchen and we can leave for work half an hour later.

This first morning we left for work, however, the jeep got stuck in the mud less than a km down the road. A crowd gathered and offered advice on how to get it out. We placed stones under the tires, people helped push, but the jeep just sunk deeper and deeper. Eventually, we gave it up and the doctors hopped on a bus and Dolly and I walked home to work from there (and try to get the internet working).

I would now like to purge my system by venting about Hotel Sharda. First, when we first arrived, it was nice. Clean and air-conditioned, and more than what I expected for 650 rupees (about $13) a night, and some of my frustrations were undoubtably a result of the total of about 2 weeks of hotel living. But the small things do stop being small and start growing in size. The doorbell for the room made an absolutely horribly buzzing sound, a noise appropriate to be used as additional negative reinforcement during electroshock therapy. Every time we ordered something from room service, it was rang probably four times... once to deliver the food, once to pick up the dishes, once to bring the bill, and finally one last time to bring the change. Many of these times were in the later evenings or early mornings, when those kinds of noises are especially unwelcome. And sometimes they would ring it just to see if we wanted anything... but at least they mostly stopped that after a few days and us explaining that if we wanted anything we would call.

The food at the hotel was the most convienient dinner option, as we could call them up and they would bring it to the room. Often we would get home at 7 or 8, and were tired and preferred to stay in. The problem was that the food was pretty mediocre and only vegetarian, so every night it was a question of whether to go out and get something better, or stay in the room and relax while we waited for the food to come.

But now, thats all over, and we're getting settled nicely. We can once again eat home cooked food, and make our tea and coffee the way we like it. And now, our doorbell is a pleasant sound of birds chirping.

The monsoon which has been late in coming has finally arrived. Since our first week here there have been scattered showers, but they have not brought much water. Rainfall, which is essential for the crops, is off 40% or more all over India, but it is possible for that shortage to be made up if the rest of the season brings heavy rains.

We got heavy rains yesterday, starting with some short but furious thunderstorms overnight. We went to work in a torrential downpour, and had to lift a fallen low-tension pole to allow the jeep to get through. The afternoon brought some sun, and then in the evening, it poured even harder. On the ride home, the streets were flooded. When we got into the city, the motorcyles parked on the side of the road were submerged 3/4 of the way up their wheels. We saw a woman walking through the puddles on the side of the street fall into what appeared to be a waist-deep pothole. Many parts of the road had water deep enough to come up to the bottom of vehicles. Still, people rode about on their bicycles and motorcycles, and the some of rickshaw operators kept pedaling, getting soaked to the bone.

Evening rains are a part of the monsoon pattern, we are told. The doctors run some clinics in remote regions, and some people will leave early because they must cross rivers before they flood from the evening rain. As it is, the doctors will sometimes have to cross a river by foot with the gear on their heads and walk the last 2km... sometimes the last 8km if

Side note: one of the passengers making the ride back to the city with us was a man with severly elevated blood pressure (220/150) in the beginning stages of having a stroke. He was from another part of the country, and in the area for a wedding. The condition may have been caused by not taking his medecines, alcohol use, and/or chronic malnutrition - either way he was being taken to the emergency room. You could see the veins bulging in his head and the start of some asymmetries in his face. Most of the work the doctors do is done behind closed doors where we don't go, and we are only left to see the patients calmly waiting, but sometimes we get sobering reminders like this about what kind of work is being done JSS and what the doctors face daily.

I have never been the best dresser and I tend to wear casual clothes that I don't have to think much about, and in America, I rarely felt self-consious due to my attire. Here, even beggars are often better dressed than I am. I think part of it is just cultural norms, part of it is the quailty of fabrics available, and part of it is the availability of cheap labor for tailoring and emroidery. All but the poorest of the poor, who literally wear rags, wear nicer clothes (though they may only have one outfit). I am speaking about the men here... all women here dress even nicer, in colorful salwar kameez and sarees, even the women who live in the medians under the flyovers (again, it is probably their only outfit).

We had one last day of meetings in Bubaneshwar, and once again we found ourselves unexpectedly in front of a large crowd. We had been given the contact info for CWS, an organization involved in SRI in Orissa. They were having a meeting with some other organizations across the street from where we were staying, so we made plans to stop by to talk to them. The meeting turned out to be more of a conference, and we barged into a meeting room in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation. After the
presentation we were invited up front to talk, but ended up just speaking with two people at the front of the room, and we left to scattered and unneccessary applause after holding up the proceeding for about half an hour.

Our trip back was pretty uneventful. A professor of English was able to tell Dolly was from AP by her pattern of stresses in the English language, and I was cursed by a hijjra (eunuch/transvestite) who was demanding money and was upset that I had already given away my small change. A young girl, about three years old saw me and started crying and screaming as if she had seen a monster. Many adults stare, sometimes turning to watch as I go past, but they seldom do more. The most interesting reactions to my foreignness are from children. One boy in a temple came up and with hand extended, and introduced himself with good English. Later, his friend came to do the same. One boy in a village was coming up the road, and when he saw me, he turned tail and ran until he was out of sight, not looking back once.

But anyway, we are back at Hotel Sharda until accomodations are found.

Click here to view these pictures larger

Click here to view these pictures larger

I recommend the larger pictures.

These pictures were taken to show the incredible ecological diversity at Sambhav. They were all taken on one day (July 5th), and there were several more types I noticed later that I did not get a chance to photograph. Only one picture of each type of flower is in this gallery (actually there IS one duplicate...), and every flower photographed was included, even if the picture was not of the highest quality.

What is amazing is that when I commented on all the different types of flowers, Sabarmatee told me that there aren't that many flowers right now.

We have been staying in Bhubanehswar at the Xiaver Institute of Management, where our main contact has been Dr. Shambu Prasad who teaches the Rural Management and who wrote a series of booklets describing the state of SRI in Orissa. As I have previously mentioned, our trip to Orissa has been to find out what worked here and to figure out what to do in Chattisgargh. Dr. Prasad reccommended identifying the actors relating to SRI in the state - NGOs, goverment, research agencies, farmers - and learning about their activities to assess the state of things before deciding on what action to take.

During the course of the meeting, he got excited when he found out we had heard of JSS through AID, and called up two of his students to organize and informal discussion about AID, JSS, SRI, and what we were doing. We talked with them for a short time, and they said they would send out an email, and we set a time for 8PM. When we met them a few minutes before 8, we were told this "informal meeting" was going to be attended by 60 students, or about half of the entire Rural Management program. We did the best we could to be informative and accurate, but there was some confusion about our relations to the organizations. Though we have worked with AID and attended their meetings and events, we are not members, and not incredibly informed about the details of their activities. We faced questions like "what is meant by development" and "what is your definition of social justice" (Dolly's answer about community got the only applause of the night). We asked after the meeting if they had somehow implied it was required, but were told that the students were just curious.

The next morning, we attended one of Dr. Prasad's classes, on Environmental Management, and they were applying the same type of analysis (identifying actors, creating a timeline), and it was beneficial to get a little more information and depth on how to conduct those analyses.

We spent part of the afternoon as tourists, going to a market described as having authentic tribal crafts. Many of the shops were the same, and it felt a little touristy. There are other sights here that we would have liked to see but didn't have time, especially Dhauli, which dates to the 3rd century BC, and contains the edicts of the legendary emporer Ashoka, who was instrumental in spreading Bhuddism across Asia. There are also some caves that date back to the same era that have some carvings. We will probably be back this way again, so we will have a chance to see them.

If you are curious about the books of Dr. Prasads, they are available online: http://www.wassan.org/sri/ - search for "Shambu" and you should find the appropriate ones. They are the most informative literature we have found on the state and growth of SRI.

For two of the days here, a group of about 30 farmers were here for training in organic farming methods. The first day we didn't observe much, as the materials were mostly lectures and in Oriya, a language neither Dolly nor I understood. The second day invovled field practicals, and we watched them learn to make liquid manure (a type of compost) in earthern pots and prepare vegetable seeds in a mixture of dung, ash, and soil from under a mango tree. Speaking to their team leader, we learned that all the people were from the same village and were making a commitment to switch to organic farming. Through the non-profit, they had already built a farm pond (a simple water storage structure) for nearly every family.

At dinner, they did a local dance and invited us to join. The dance was basically stepping forward and stepping back while moving in a circle with arms around each other. I don't know if its traditional, or if it was made up on the spot. There was a young man who sang very well and played the drums, and clearly had a crush on Dolly. He was always looking at her, and as they were leaving, he even asked for her cell phone number. We were invited to come see the village.

We left with a better sense of what we need to do to help Jacob successfully get SRI spread through Chattisgargh. We took an early bus - at 5, they said they would be at Sambhav at 5:20, and they didn't show up until 6:15. We stood for the first hour of the ride until we found seats. We got off just short of town to get a ride the rest of the way with Prof. Rashamohan, Sabarmatee's father, who just happened to have a morning meeting across the street from where we were going, the Xiaver Management Institute, where we meeting with Dr. Prasad who had written extensively about the spread of SRI in Orissa while it was happening.

The reaon we came to Orissa was to visit an NGO called Sambhav, which consists of 8 full-time members living in an Ashram. An Ashram is a society that exists for a religious and social purpose, The original purpose of this Ashram is to take care of the land by natural methods, and they have since taken on tasks like gender violence and sanitation. They have several paddies being farmed under SRI and run seminars to teach it to other organizations. We are here to see what they have done to spread SRI successfully, and bring those lessons back to Chattisgargh.

We found this description in a booklet about SRI in Orissa which explains their history:
This NGO is the brainchild of Prof. Rashamohan who undertook the ardent task of planning out cultivation of trees and crops in its campus which was considered to be absolutely unfit and infertile. So much so that the agriculture scientists and foresters told him that his plan is Asambhav (impossible). Today the sprawling diversity all over the palce of flora and fauna is the result of the determination to turn the Asambhav into Sambhav (possible).

Today the place is very, very green, pretty much jungle. It feels a lot like a forest, but they have monkeys, palm trees, lizards and even elephant visits, which upgrade the status to "jungle". Our host is Sabarmatee, who has been here since the early 90's. She is the most knowledgeable about the day to day operations. There are plants and flowers and lizards and insects everywhere, though Sabarmatee says that there are not many flowers around now. I started taking pictures of individual varieties and captured 29, and I know I missed a few.

The atmosphere here is amazing. Our time here is spent talking and learning about their activities, resting and reading, walking through the properties fields and forests and jungles, and eating delicious organic meals. My stomach has been settled by an Ayurvedic cure of nutmeg and rest, and my subsequent gas was alleviated by another Ayurvedic remedy, chewing on ginger. Our room is simple and aqdequate - beds, mosquito nets, and a table, with the bathroom facilities in an enclosed back yard. There is a meeting room, near the kitchen, a library, a cattle pen, and a dormotory which can host 60 or so people overnight. Most of all, it is the caring nature of the people of Sambhav who make it special.

The journey here was certainly worth the effort.

Our trip to Orissa began with leaving work early. Everyone else was staying until the normal time, so we took the bus back instead of the usual Jeep. The bus was much more crowded, and Dolly and I sat across from a man with ears so hairy, it looked like he had taped a mustache to his earlobes. We were right behind the driver, whose horn played a grating four note jingle very loudly. The horns here are operated by switch, so the driver can just turn it on and leave it on.

We check out of the hotel, and hired two autos to take us an our luggage to the JSS office, where we were leaving everything except for what we needed on our trip. The auto drivers did not know exactly where the address was, so we drove around the neighborhood for a little while, and during this time, a large cow came charging at us, irritated by something, the first time we had seen this happen.

Eventually we made it to the station with Jacob, who we have learned does not just travel with a simple bag (on our first meeting, his travel bag had been in the hotel by (in?) the train station - we had misinterpreted what he meant by "staying at the train station"). He bought us some sweet-lime juices and I started to drink mine, as Dolly hestitated. After questioning its freshness and origins, we found out it was fresh squeezed juice, some salt, and some ice, which carries all the dangers of the local water. Being a gentleman, and not scared of a little ice, I drank mine and Dolly's.

The next morning this proved to be bad idea. We were travelling "sleeper class" which is the coach of India's railways. Un-air conditioned, 3 tier sleeper compartments, cheap prices, and dirty cars. Luckily the bathrooms were not as filthy as I had feared, and I was able to find some relief from the bacteria carried by the ice, which had taken up lodging in my intestines.

We had fruit for breakfast, a banana and a local variety of mango. Jacob showed us how to eat this small mango by squishing it to a pulp inside its own skin, and then biting off the end and drinking down the juice inside. The countryside was green and lush with fresh rain, and we saw people bathing in rivers and ponds, and farmers and their bullocks plowing fields before the sun got too high.

The train, which was due to arrive at 6:30 AM arrived at 1:30 in the PM. The priority on the rails is the large freight trains carrying minerals for multinational corporations. Whether officially or unofficially, the money invovled ensures smoothest operation. The second priortiy goes to local trains, as they stop at all the small stations, and we are told that if they get too delayed, the locals will beat up the stationmaster. That leaves us, the long-distance passenger rail getting stuck sitting motionless on the tracks for hours at a time.

After lunch, we took an auto from the train station to the bus station. The train station is never next to the bus station. We were in the capital of Orissa, Bhubaneshwar, and as drove, we noticed an order that we had not seen before in India. Roads were wide and intersections well marked. There was almost no honking. Trashbins lined the roads. We were told that this was a planned city, and had recently been made the capital. This seemed like a great idea, until Jacob explained that the great expense undertaken to plan such a city could have been better used to address the poverty and malnutrion in a state with a large rural and tribal population.

As it had recently rained, the bus station parking lot was a bug puddle of mud. This bus was not as comfortable as the last bus we had been on, and on top of that it was packed even more full. Luckily, this was not an overnight bus, though we had a 4 hour ride scheduled. Dolly and I sat next to each other, and Jacob was to be sitting behind us, but there was a fuss over the window seat with a slow moving gentleman who had already sat down, and Jacob took a window seat on the other side of the bus.

The bus did not have AC, and my stomach still felt ill. We stopped several times to pick up more passangers, to get gas, so the driver could eat, and we were further delayed by a festival during which a 12-year old boy was crushed and killed under a large ceremonial cart (we later found out), and the combination of celebration and tragedy created a human roadblock.

We got off the still-crowded bus in apparently the middle of nowhere, where we were greeted by three members Sambhav, the Ashram where we will be staying. One of them was Sabarmatee, who is the leader. I'm not sure what kind of organizational structure there is, and if that is her proper title. Though we expected to arrive around lunchtime, we arrived in time for a late dinner. We were taken to a guest room, where we spent a few minutes before taking an excellent dinner at the main gathering area of the Ashram, and we talked a little but until we went to bed and slept very soundly.

The first look I had of Bilaspur was the train station, never the most flattering part of a city. At the end of the platform, a few shabbily dressed men appeared to be gambling by candlelight, and I was worried as to what kind of place we were going to. As we pulled into the central part of the station, it started looking more normal, though definitely smaller and less affluent than the larger station in Nagpur. However, this meant there were no coolies harassing us.

As we drove into the city, I noticed that the auto rickshaws of Hyderabad had been replaced by bicycle rickshaws. The center of town is more like the outlying neighborhoods of Hyderabad, and it lacks the higher end shops, but we never shopped at those anyway. The major intersections are all large rotaries with a monument of some kind in the center, usually a statue or fountain, and I'm sure I'll soon recognize as navigational landmarks.

The city has about 500,000 people, so it is of decent size, but it is in a very rural part of the country. Just across the railroad tracks is village life, with mud buildings, farmers' fields and animals wandering. There doesn't seem to be a lot of money in Bilaspur, and the largest industry is steel, as a result of some kind of arrangement mutually beneficial to the mill owners and politicians.

The neighborhood where the doctors live, and we will hopefully be living, is nice. We are told that it is a neighborhood "popular among the middle class - people with jobs" and so it is hard to find a flat. I think we will be able to make a nice home here once we have a more permanent place to stay.