Kids, Golden Temples & Mud Roads

My flow of life over the last week has largely followed the patterns of the kids at the school and the villages surrounding Kaniyanbadi. The kids begin arriving around 8:30am and typically run to the main play area in between the classrooms. For an hour or so as kids arrive we play a variety of games from naming things in English/Tamil, cricket (I still don't understand the rules - except the basic idea that you hit a ball with a flat stick), tag, and a game where you draw a number of boxes in sand - throw a rock into a box - and proceed to hop in a pattern I'm still figuring out until you pick up the rock again - like all great games if you fall you lose).

The kids take six classes - Tamil, Social Studies, Maths, English, Environmental Science and General Knowledge. They get a mid-morning break to play, lunch (little kids get one scoop of rice and sauce, bigger kids get two or three - usually you can get seconds), and then playtime again at the end of the day before assembly. I've been joining them for classes - English for the 4th and 5th graders - and Anarchy of the two classes (upper and lower) of Kindergarteners.

Before school we walk or bike into the main village, Kaniyanbadi. We have a regular restaurant - open air with a statue of a local God who looks eerily like Hulk Hogan (I'm not the only one to notice). The TV blares Indian music videos - usually a romantic dance off set in all of a beach, Mumbai, and the Himalayas. My favorite breakfast is Idly - a sort of boiled doughy substance to which you apply delicious spicy sauces and coconut chutney. Then we proceed to the tea stand. There are tea stands in every other shop - but we almost always go to the same one. We are loyal. Tea is served in small glasses - sugar is put into the cup - then milk - then hot water is poured over the tea into another glass. The tea maker then mixes the tea, milk and sugar by pouring from one glass into another in a quick arc.

The tree house is almost completed - it is totally amazing. There are a series of walkways to the first floor - then a ladder to the second floor which is at the treetops. You feel like you are on top of the world.

This weekend a bunch of students from the University of Madras came to volunteer. They are planning on building an open air meditation center on the school grounds - with bamboo supports centered around a big tree they will plant in the middle. The area has been covered with concrete - so we spent a day smashing concrete (which is incredibly hot and satisfying) and removing it in wheelbarrows. The students, were mostly from northeast Indian states like Mizoram Sikkim and Nagaland. This part of the country is unlike the rest of Indian in religion (heavily Buddhist, animist or Christian), physical appearance (more like southeast Asia), weather (incredibly lush green and cool and rainy) and language (all local languages - many many of them - not from the same language families as Hindi or Tamil). The area has several active insurgencies including some that have lasted 50 years since right after Indian independence. The students have videos on their cell phones of insurgents marching to revolutionary songs.

After our hard work we went to visit the Golden Temple near Vellore. In contrast with the Temple visited with Santosh in Chennai - which was a wondrous and spiritual place - the Golden Temple is appalling. First of all they are not kidding - the temple is built of gold: 1.5 tons of it. It was not built in some long ago era when kings ruled and the needs of common people were dismissed out of hand - rather it was completed in 2007. In front of the temple there are hundreds of people selling plastic trinkets and noisemakers to survive (including young kids). The temple builders are justifiably defensive. The walkway to the temple (it takes two-three hours standing in line to get inside) is lined with banners in English/Tamil/Hindi stating: "Some say that you could build thousands of hospitals and schools instead of building a temple of gold... but this temple will inspire tens of thousands of hospitals and schools."

I've been driving the motorbike around. I rode yesterday from the school down back roads from the school to the base of the mountains that surround this valley. In contrast to Kaniyanbadi, a modern village of concrete, insane traffic, burning piles of garbage, (along with temples, a million tea stands and people who you've never met that pull over on their motorcycle as you are walking to town and motion you to get on back and drop you off at the very restaurant you eat breakfast at every morning) - the other nearby villages subscribe to a whole different pace of life. When I motorbiked by midday - the buildings are awash in sunlight. Nothing moves fast. There are dogs sleeping in the middle of the street. Orange, pink and purple houses brightened by the midday sun. Old women sitting on their window sills and parades of goats and the occassional cow being lead through the streets. The countryside is full one one lane dirt roads, deeply green rice paddies filled with women in brightly colored saris, mango and tamarind orchards and the occasional home brick factory. As I reached the base of the mountain I found a farmer leading his bull which tilling the land and a road that turned from rutted dirt to pure mud.

I'll stay here for three more weeks - tomorrow my bicycle will finally be fixed!

Ryan

P.S. New pictures of kids, cows, and chameleons at right.

Buddha Smiles & Bamboo Tree Houses

In 1974 India detonated a nuclear bomb in the desert in the north of India. The code phrase for the successful test by the Indian security establishment: "Buddha is smiling". Hundred's of thousands of Indians (Ramu included) protested the country's expensive entry into the nuclear arms race in the face of great human need across the country.

Decades later the phrase stuck with Ramu - he wanted to take it back. Thus the name for this overall project centered around the Ghandi-Mandela-King school: Buddha Smiles. The project, a couple of miles outside the village of Kaniyanbadi in the northern part of Tamil Nadu,. features the school for 150 students (now grades k-5 and soon 6-8 as well). It also doubles as a retreat center for social movement activists, includes a diary and vegetable farm called Garden of Peace (which partially feeds the kids), and hosts workshops on natural building (the open air lunchroom and a couple other buildings were built in a clay/straw brick traditional Tamil style).

The latest natural building workshop: how to build a giant tree house out of bamboo. Five Khasi speaking builders have journeyed from the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya (the hills above Bangladesh) to build it. The first step: procuring the bamboo. On Saturday ten of us crammed into the 1970 Indian jeep the school owns and made the dusty drive to the City of Velore to set about getting bamboo. I mean a lot of bamboo. Really its helpful to stop picturing pandas at the National Zoo at this point. I'm talking about 240 pieces of two story high bamboo wood.

We made our way to the bamboo district of the Velore industrial market. I'm not kidding. This place exists. Amidst the innumerable concrete and paint stores there are eight or so competing bamboo shops with thousands of two-three story high pieces of bamboo leaned against their (concrete) walls. The builders caged each shop and inspected the quality of various lengths of bamboo. Three shops had the right stuff.

After about three hours of my pacing up and down the street inspecting the various shops one of the shop owners showed up with tea in plastic cups. When we finished we looked around blindly for some sort of receptacle to place our used cups. The owner made a show of tossing his plastic cup in the middle of the street and crushing it with his foot. The Khasis noted through translation that their village of 100 families had a communal garbage pick up scheme and placed their cups one inside the other against the man's building. Negotiation's ensued in a windowless back room. The Khasis experienced sticker shock. They said they could pay five rupees (10-15 cents) for a two story high piece of bamboo if they felt too lazy to wander out in the forests to cut it down themselves. The price in Velore is 90 rupees a piece, almost 20 times as much. The English word "insult" floated out of the Tamil during price negotiations. Finally a bargain was reached including the procurement of a truck to take the bamboo from Velore to the school.

During the loading process my job was to count pieces of bamboo to make sure we didn't get shafted on the long end of the deal. Note to future bamboo counters: when someone asks you to count bamboo they mean you should count while the bamboo is being loaded. It is extremely difficult to count pieces of bamboo after they have been placed inside the truck. (By inside here I mean mostly inside - about 1/3 of the bamboo stuck pecariously out the back end of the truck).

When I first got to India Elizabeth asked if I had seen the India's Deadliest Truckers yet. Now I can safely say I've ridden shotgun inside one of their trucks. And I was lucky. The Khasi's decided to ride in the back on top of the bamboo. This trucker was just as wild as the rest of India traffic - except that if he accelerated quickly one ton of bamboo might have been inadvertantly unloaded on the motorcycle behind him. This trucker did have a picture of the Last Supper on the dashboard so that was comforting. We arrived intact and unloaded the bamboo at the school late into the night. The Khasis have made quick work of it - building one floor in the last 24 hours. I can't wait to sleep up there in a couple of days.

I think I'll stay at this school for a couple of weeks longer. They've got me subbing in some English classes and the kids are a joy. And the night watchman has a bicycle that I can take into the village to repair and then ride around while I'm here.

To clean myself up a bit after a couple of weeks of not shaving I walked into the barbershop in the village. After a twenty minutes or so someone got the barber. I've always wanted a real shave. Warm shaving lotion and a simple blade. This blade might have been a bit too simple - maybe even dull. I could feel the skin being peeled away as he shaved. Really frightening when he hit my neck. Tools notwithstanding this man knew his stuff. He got every single hair out - perfect execution. Except that my hand singles for "shave my beard" seemed not to have included "and my mustache too". Mirza says I could be the American villain in a Tamil movie. He also says that Indian soldiers get a special stipend if they have a mustache. I asked "for maintenance"? "No, no" he said. "For oils to make it as magnificent as possible". I'm signing up.

This week features the Indian holiday of "Republic Day". The children have been marching "left, right, left, right" around the school grounds since I first arrived. Half the girls already have  flowers tying up their hair. Looking forward to the parade.

Ryan



  

My first pictures

Hey all after a long long excercise (it turns out Help sometimes really does) I just posted my first pictures - I think I've figured out the system now. Heading to the village tonight on the train. There is a crew of people who build structures with bamboo from Assam in the northeast who will be there the next couple of days at the school building and conducting a workshop. Peace,

Ryan

Trains & Temples: Bulls & Barbed Wire

I am writing again in Chennai after returning yesterday with Mirza on the train (my first in India) from the village. Last night I stayed with Santosh, a graduate student in politics here at the University, in his dorm room. Santosh's dorm faces the Bay of Bengal. You can stand on the roof and watch the sunrise over the water - and then walk down to the beach where there are tons of rickety old wooden boats the locals take into the sea to fish. With no visible means to propel themselves I asked Santosh how the boats manuver in the ocean. He said that they buy old honda dirt bikes - rip out the motors - and then attach them to small propellers. This evidently is also how they would move Tamil refugees from the Jaffna Penninsual in northern Sri Lanka during the war.

Spending time with Santosh has been an introduction to religious India. Last night we walked from his dorm on the beach into the Triplicane neighborhood of Chennai. Parts of Triplicane were built hundreds of years ago before the arrival of the British and there are warrens of small streets and alleys filled with people, bikes, motorcycles, auto-ricksaws and cars (at least the buses don't attempt travel there). At the center of the neighborhood is a 400 year old temple that Santosh visits every evening for his prayers. As we neared the temple there was a procession making its way through the streets with a band and Brahmins in white robes carring one of the idols from the temple. The temple is massive, taking up a giant city block, with room after room with priests and idols and flowers and incense and stone carvings. We moved from room to room and Santosh said his prayers to each God - I could enter everywhere except for the chamber with the main God.

Before returning to Chennai we celebrated the Pongol (harvest) holiday at the school. Ramu's mom brought us (Ramu and a contingent of 8 students and me) one of the most delicious meals I have ever eaten. Pickeled coriander sauce and sweet rice with cardomom and one million other dishes eaten on bannana leaves. Before we ate Ramu's mom conducted a service setting up a small fire on a pathway on the school grounds and making an offering of flowers, coconut and other fruits for Pongol. Each of knelt and passed our hand other the flame dabbing our forehead with the ashes in turn.

On that same day we hiked to the top of a hill near the school to survey the landscape. On the trail up I got caught up in some vicious thorns that are everywhere in this part of the interior of Tamil Nadu that penetrate your clothes (and then body) at an angle so that when you tear away it will cause maximum damage. After carefully extricating myself we hiked to the top of the hill. On one side the school and a modern Indian village in the distance with the haze of fires, loudspeakers alternately blasting Hindu devotional music, Bollywood style numbers, and what seems to be Tamil language hip hop, along with concrete and paved (albeit mightily potholed) roads and powerlines. On the other side was a green jungle of thorn bushes, palm trees, and a smaller village of mud brick houses with straw roofs and rice fields.

That night we obtained fish from the village and walked back to the school and made a bonfire. Because the school is vegetarian we walked to a neighboring pasture after dark to eat our fish by moonlight surrounded by a chorus of frogs and grasshoppers and wild dogs ready to move in to consume our scraps after we left.

On Monday, the last day of the Pongol festival, I was walking back to the school from drinking tea in the village in the late morning when I saw twenty boys and men leading a bull with huge painted horns through the streets by a pair of ropes. I followed them to a dirt lot in front of a Hindu shrine where hundreds of villagers had gathered and there were more groups of people with their own bulls with painted horns and other decorations. The men were on the street and most women were watching from fenced gardens or doorways or rooftops. I soon discovered why when one group and then another released their bulls to freedom and general pandemonium. In one terrifying instance I was standing in the middle of the street and bull charged right at me after I thought it was going to go a different way. Everyone else had cleared out into side streets. I ran (losing one sandal in the process) towards the nearest doorway along a barbed wire fence. About halfway there I realized I couldn't possibly make it to the doorway in time and my choices were the bull or the barbed wire fence that someone had helpfully constructed around an unused garbage strewn lot. I glanced over my shoulder and realized that the bull had caught up with me but that he had no interest in impaling me and instead was running alongside to the cleared street and freedom.

Tomorrow I will give a lecture at the University of Madras entitled "The Politics of Mobilization" by Mr. Ryan Patrick Greenwood - at least that is what it said on the flyers Ramu printed up. Then we will return to the village where a group of people from Assam will conduct a workshop on building with bamboo. From there who knows. After attending various guest lectures and classes yesterday at the University and making plans with the other students to return to the village, Ramu told me, "you are no longer just a guest - you are now part of our system here!" I'll embrace that wherever it leads.

Ryan 

Vegetarian food does not = healthy

In describing the latest Sufjan Stevens album and tour, Brent and Gena found a post that said it was like eating Thanksgiving dinner and then an hour later eating a steak. The food of Tamil Nadu is somewhat similar - most restaurants are 100% vegetarian - but eating here is like going to the Steele County Free Fair - consuming a blooming onion, then a basket of onion rings, then some deep fried mushrooms and topping it off with a funnel cake. If all of the above were served with the most delicious flavorful sauces you could imagine. Also I beleive my tea consumption will reach addict levels here.

I am writing right now on the grounds of an elementary school in a rural area of tumeric, rice and vegetable farms about half way beteween Chennai and Bangalore in Tamil Nadu. The nearest city, Velore, is about 10 miles away - and I'm about a one-two mile walk from the nearest village. Velore is like Rochester Minnesota, it has one of the best hospitals in India, if Rochester had more neon than you can imagine, cows and autorickshaws in the streets, and an impressive decibel level.

This school, the Ghandi-Mandela-King school was started seven years ago by Ramu, who grew up near here, and a troop of social movement activists and local farmers. It is one of the most wonderful places I have ever been. It is incredibly peaceful, lots of vegetation, surrounded by hills, with cool nights where the fog always takes over the land - and then very hot days.

The children - there are about 150 of them - are wonderful. They start to arrive at 8:30 - sometimes running to see their friends before school starts at nine. The three basic things we all say are 1) Good morning! 2) How are you? Then usually providing the answer "fine!' before I can respond and 3) what is your name? I play with them during lunch - and then again after school while the ones who live in farthering flung villages wait for their turn on the small school buses which drive back and forth. The amazing thing is how quickly they can move from complete discipline to utter anarchy. One minute they are marching parade style in preparation for the national holiday of Pongol this weekend - and the next 10 of them are simultaneously playing a game of trying to put each of their notebooks on my head like a hat. (Which I need - oh the sun here.) Everyone eats with their hands here. And my favorite incident  was being mirthlessly imitated by a five year old about  the way I evidently open my mouth wide and stick out my tongue to capture food from my mouth when I eat. There was much laughter at all that.

I taught 9-10 year olds English yesterday. I told them about Minnesota, how cold it was, how many lakes there are and found out about their brothers and sisters, their favorite foods and favorite colors (universally red and blue). Mad props at this point should be issued here to all teachers in the world. Martha, Mary Cathryn (and children's librarians like Jane Boss) - I am impressed that you survive each day. It was a totally joyful experience - but the possibility for chaos to develop at any moment is impressive. You have to track all of them all the time - when one of them does something - all will follow quickly.

Perhaps the coolest Tamil cultural rite is that every morning many Tamils will create a public art display, now with chalk, immediately in front of their house. This is much more prevelant in the villages and rural areas, and almost everyone does it for holidays like Pongol. It's an incredibly beautiful tradition. That at 5 in the morning, before getting up in the morning to milk the cows or go to the fields people will take the time to make a new intricate symbol to greet people walking by their house.

There are Hindu shrines everywhere. Multiple in this one smalll village. Very complex and beautiful. A more questionable practice associated with these shrines and temples is the blasting of Hindu devotional music from sunset to sunrise. I sleep on the floor in the classrooms miles from the village and all night you hear it - loud but also comforting in a way.

Staying with me here, one of the co-conspirators who put togetherr this school - is a student from Assam named Mirza. Ramu has returned back to Chennai and so Mirza has showed me around this place. He is incredibly interested in social movement politics and especially in the insurgencies in the northeast where he is from. (Note to brother: you have got to meet Mirza - he speaks Naga and five other languages up there - has met with different insuurgent and civil society leaders - and has written articles on the complicated social political issues in the northeast). Mirza is very warm - likes to laugh and talk politics - and appreciates the craziness of the traffic system here in India. Yesterday we took a motorcycle/dirt bike thing into Velore 10 miles away. It was terrifying - thousands of small motorcycles and bikes and huge buses with air horns all within centimeters of you. Luckily Mirza is a good driver with no death wish - but holy s*&t I am impressed that anyone stays alive here. Really though after a first couple of minutes of terror - you realize that there is nothing you can do about it - so you just hold on to the driver and feel very calm. (Maybe with some visualizations...)

This internet connection  is pretty rickety (pretty impressive that it is here at all - electicity only came out here four years ago - and the road was fixed up last year - but is pretty beat up) - so I may wait on email replies until I get back to Chennai next week. Will write more then. Hope all is well with you. Happy Pongol! Peace,

Ryan

Everything is Possible

Hi all. I've landed in India. After a long flight from New York City to Brussels and then Brussels to Chennai I'm finally here. I got out of the plane at 1am Chennai time on Tuesday after about 10 hours in the air from Belgium. The door was open on the jetway and the densest air I have ever encountered came into my lungs. This city is like New Orleans on steroids. Lush vegetation everywhere. A treescape that covers everything. Their branches blocking out a sun that is intense in even this the "coolest" time of year.

The customs process was smooth. I followed some Dutch activists I met on the plane who had a connection in customs and entered through the expedited diplomat line. My new friend Ramu Manivannan picked me up at the airport and (Thanks to Mel Duncan for the introduction!) we drove through the dark city - with cars and people out even at 2:30 in the morning.

The setup of the city and traffic are amazing. Numerous dogs and cows some with giant horns snuffling around for food on the street. A million motorcycles and old buses and new Asian cars. Lots of foot traffic and bicycles. Food stalls and clothing stores and banks all crammed together. We rode the bus into the University where Ramu teaches this morning. The University is a bit of a respite from the surrounding anarchy of the city - only a block from the Bay of Bengal. As I write in Ramu's office, with pictures of Aung San Suu Kyi, and the Dalai Lama on the walls I can smell the sea (the windows are never closed in this city) and look out onto an old university building that looks like an elaborate Eastern Orthodox church.

I've already checked my tea goal off the list. We had tea in the morning with breakfast, tea at a stall on the walk from the bus to the university - served in glasses that are then washed out for the next customer - and then a man came into Ramu's office and just gave me a shot of tea unbidden- later Ramu says we will go out to grad some tea. Tea will not be a problem here. The food is fabulous as well. Had a delicious breakfast with lentils cooked by Shelia - Ramu's wife. We just returned from lunch at a neighborhood cafe with a standard meal of rice mixed with four different sauces all eaten with your hands - some like soup, some spicy, and then closing with a yogurt and then a shot of some sweet cardomom cashew drink.

In addition to being an incredibly warm human being and gracious host Ramu is a wealth of knowledge on social movements in India from a career as an activist from displaced Tamil's from Sri Lanka to Burmese and Tibetan activsts in exile. I've atteneded two of his classes at the University so far - one on Indian foreign policy and the other on the development of Indian environmental movements. Tomorrow we will go to his home village a couple hours outside of Chennai.

In response to an email I wrote him Ramu replied with the optimistic and somewhat mysterious line (caps are all his): EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE. A good mantra for this trip and beyond.

Will update in a couple of days with some pictures.